Being a citizen is a full-time job. If we wish to reclaim our rights, we first must begin by reclaiming our responsibilities. Rights and responsibilities are inextricably linked and cannot be separated.
Quick lesson, in less than two short years we have learned the Democrat party is no better than the old Soviet Union at the command and control economy.
Big-government, command-and-control technocrats believe that when central planning fails, the solution is a better plan and smarter planners. They never step back and look at whether planning makes sense in the first place. This was true of the Soviet Union, with tragic five-year plan after five-year plan. It was true of Communist China, with Mao’s revolutionary upheavals. And today, here in the United States, it is true of government energy policy.
The failures are legion.
U.S. dependence on imported energy continues to reach record levels while no commercially viable biofuels have been produced. At the same time, the government-subsidized burning of our food supply to create ethanol has both increased carbon dioxide emissions and driven up food prices at a startling rate. This must end.
As I pointed out repeatedly, there is no difference in the CO2 from ethanol or gasoline, it's only the increased production costs(energy), the wasted water and land deforestation that is lost in the shuffle. Did you know for instance, it takes 3-6 gallons of water to produce each gallon of ethanol? Deforestation is going on worldwide in the stampede to grow higher profit crops, at the expense of food.
Read the rest here. Millions have died for the DDT hoax, we are now on our way to sacrificing more millions at the alter of Gaia.
Name one thing ever done by liberals which has actually benefitted mankind. Just one.
It turns out, that Reverend Wright is indeed a crank and a demagogue. Despite Obama's best efforts, Rev Wright has now supplied the allegedly missing "context" in which Wright is best understood. Hugh Hewitt has the wrap here.
After sitting in the Reverends pews for 20+ years, Barrack Hussein Obama knew that, or he should have. In exchange for the street cred Obama needed, Obama got hosed.
Dinosaurs died when a comet, so they say, hit the world off of Mexico. The print news business died when they went hard leftists all the time, and people were turned off in large numbers. When your revenue tanks, like it is for modern newspapers, so goes your business. Local 'ad sheets' will be the only survivors.
Average paid weekday circulation of the nation's 20 largest newspapers for the six-month period ending in March, as reported Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations went down, all except two, the WSJ and USA Today -- Two papers that at least try to keep it down the middle.
You can tell how bad the hoax is going by watching the players. All the alarmists can do is censor the opposition, since the science has gone all bad for them.
By Dennis T. Avery (Dennis T. Avery is director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute and co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years").
The Earth's warming since 1850 totals about 0.7 degrees C. Most of this occurred before 1940. The cause: a long, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle first discovered in the Greenland ice cores in 1983. The cycle abruptly raises our temperature 1 to 3 degrees C above the mean for centuries at a time--as it did during the Roman Warming (200 BC to 600 AD) and Medieval Warming (950 to 1300 AD).
Between warmings, Earth's temperatures shift abruptly lower by 1 to 3 degrees C--as they did during the 550 years of the Little Ice Age, which ended in 1850. The ice cores and seabed fossils show 600 of these 1,500-year cycles, extending back at least 1 million years.
CO2 Increases Lag Temperature Increases
In Al Gore's movie, the ice record from the Antarctic shows temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels tracking closely together through the radical ups and downs of four Ice Ages. The movie implies that more CO2 in the air produces higher temperatures. But we've recently done more refined ice studies, which show the temperatures changed about 800 years before the CO2 levels. More CO2 did not produce higher temperatures; instead, higher temperatures released more CO2 from the oceans into the atmosphere.
If the climate models' original greenhouse predictions had been valid, the Earth's temperatures would have risen several degrees more by now than they have. The Earth's net warming since 1940 is a barely noticeable 0.2 degrees C, over 70 years.
For the sake of argument, let's give the alarmists credit for half of this, or 0.1 degree C. Moreover, the Earth has experienced no discernible temperature increase since 1998, nearly nine years ago. Remember, too, that the atmosphere is approaching CO2 saturation-- after which more CO2 will have no added climate forcing power.
Temperatures, Sunspots, Cosmic Rays
There is a 95 percent correlation between Earth's temperatures and sunspots since 1860. There is virtually no correlation between our temperatures and CO2 in the atmosphere. The sunspot number has recently dropped to zero. In the past, when sunspot numbers and our temperatures have diverged, the sunspots have been the leading indicator. The temperatures have soon shifted to follow.
Does this mean that Earth's temperatures will soon decline? History says yes. How long will the global warming alarmists be able to sustain the public hysteria without strongly rising temperatures? This will be a key factor in the short-term future of climate warming legislation. Henrik Svensmark of the Danish Space Research Institute says cosmic rays are the link between the sun's variability and Earth's temperatures. More or fewer cosmic rays, depending on the strength of the solar wind, seed more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that cool the Earth. Further experiments to document this impact are planned in Europe.
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing, or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate". That statement comes from a petition signed by more than 19,000 American scientists, available online at a site hosted by the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine at .
Warming Cycles Are the Norm
The Earth has had eight warming cycles since the last Ice Age. Several of these were apparently warmer than today, based on the evidence of fossils and isotopes. The Medieval Warming until recently was known as the little climate optimum. Human numbers increased with the long, stable growing seasons; there were fewer and milder storms; and there were fewer deadly disease epidemics. Bubonic plague attacked Europe during both the Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age.
No wild species have gone extinct due to higher temperatures during the unprecedented warming of the past century. All of the existing species have been through even stronger warmings in the past. We have not examined their coping strategies, preferring to demand instead that somehow the climate cycle be stopped.
Arctic ice area has hit a modern low in recent months, but this cannot be due to global warming because the Antarctic simultaneously has the most ice in modern times. The polar regions have their own climate cycles, which operate within the longer 1,500-year cycle. Earth also has the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the El Nino cycle, and a 22.5-year sunspot-related cycle in Southern Hemisphere rainfall.
The new book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years cites hundreds of peer-reviewed studies by more than 500 fully qualified scientists who found evidence that: 1) a natural, moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced several global warmings similar to ours since the last Ice Age and/or 2) our Modern Warming is linked strongly to variations in the sun's irradiance; 3) sea levels are failing to rise importantly; 4) our storms and droughts are becoming fewer and milder with this warming as they did during previous global warmings; 5) human deaths will be reduced with warming because cold kills far more people than heat; and 6) corals, trees, birds, mammals, and butterflies are adapting well to the routine reality of changing climate.
Despite being published in such journals such as Science, Nature, and Geophysical Review Letters, these scientists have gotten little media attention.
Sun Microsystems is in talks with two more Linux projects to ensure its open source software and tools are delivered straight into the hands of developers.
The company is speaking to representatives of the Debian and OpenSuSE projects, having already engaged with Ubuntu and Fedora over bundling its software.
The goal is for distros to come with Sun's open source Java Enterprise Edition project Glassfish, the NetBeans development framework, and the Java Standard Edition project OpenJDK.
Sun's strategy is becoming obvious.
If you haven't gotten your latest Ubuntu, click the link on the side bar. 8.04 is great and is going to make strides in placing Linux on the desktop.
Sun Microsystems also released the latest "Indiana RC build" it is available here. Their regular Solaris 10 release build is available here. Indiana can be thought of as the OpenSolaris kernel with the Ubuntu user space. Yeah, I know it's a little confusing, but should clear up soon.
You would think with all the talk about Hussein Obama and his flag pin that I was talking about all the jive talking over that mysterious flag lapel pin.
The company said its Dilly Creek lands in the Horn River Basin in northeastern British Columbia could contain as much as six trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
"We estimate our Dilly Creek lands contain between 3 and 6 trillion cubic feet of recoverable contingent resources," Nexen said in a release. "Further appraisal activity is required before these estimates can be finalized and commerciality established."
Other players in the region have also reported big gas finds on their properties. Indeed, EOG Resources Inc said earlier this year its Horn River holdings could yield as much as 6 trillion cubic feet of gas, while EnCana Corp and Apache Corp have also reported good results.
Far from running out of fuels, we are running out of food because of our own doing, there seems to be plenty of new fuel finds to go around. We could always convert coal to liquid fuel like Nazi Germany did in the 1920s. BTW - Nazi means National Socialism, key word socialism, and oh yeah, Hitler was elected.
If we could only drill off the coasts of the US, never know what we might find. For starters, there is trillions of cubic feet of clean burning gas locked up in the Destin Dome a hundred miles off of Destin Florida, just for the taking -- But, there is always a but, the environmental whacka-doodles won't allow it. Maybe the whacka-doodles prefer Red China drilling 45 miles off Florida with all their advanced Communist technology would be safer for our beaches. Frankly, and I live on the beaches they talk about, I wish they would allow drilling every where, say 20 miles from shore. It would be good for the environment and help with the food supply of the planet. Good for fishing as well.
What with catastrophic global warming proceeding at such an alarming rate, regular updates are required for people to stay up to date on our planet's sweltering doom. From Science Daily:
The Antarctic deep sea is getting colder, which might stimulate the circulation of the oceanic water masses. This is the first result of the Polarstern expedition of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in the Helmholtz Association that has just ended in Punta Arenas/Chile. At the same time satellite images from the Antarctic summer have shown the largest sea-ice extent on record.
Ninety percent of the ice currently on this planet is in the Antarctic region. If ice is growing there, that means we can forget about the rising seas scenario Al Gore and the environmental whacka-doodles have used to frighten money out of the gullible.
So far the only tangible symptom of the global warming crisis is rising food prices caused by the biofuels boondoggle and rising fuel prices because the very same whacka-doodles won't allow any more drilling and refining — Unless you count global warming having killed the Loch Ness Monster.
This Rev Wright sermon was given on April 13, 2003. Notice the audience reaction..
Cherry picked? It wasn't. This is the whole sermon. You pick the context.
Remember the church sold these as DVDs of great sermons from the church pulpit. Notice the nice native African dress, part of the whole Black Liberation Theology get up I would guess. Why would Barrack Hussein Obama sit there for over 20 years and listen to a preacher that spews this kind of loony hate. -- Anyone have a decent answer for that?
This is interesting, the church is so focused on race and Black Liberation Theology that even the Bible characters are all black at Trinity United Church.
Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ focuses on Black Liberation Theology. The windows of the church display different characters of the Bible. Above is what appears to be the black Moses.
And, here is what appears to be the black Jesus turning water into wine.
It was fun while it lasted, all that empty change and hope nonsense. In the end, an old fashioned worn out campaign about race politics, bitterness and Marxism, it always ends the same way. Even President Daniel Ortega, who led the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua, says Barack Obama's presidential bid is a "revolutionary" phenomenon in the United States -- Was this Marxist feeling the tingle down his leg too.
But then the inevitable, a campaign about race politics always leads to the same place
The rally at Sharpton's office was followed by a 20-block march down Malcolm X Boulevard and then across 125th Street, Harlem's main business thoroughfare, where some bystanders yelled out "Kill the police!"
Fifty of the marchers carried white placards bearing big black numbers for each of the police bullets fired at Bell and his friends.
Sharpton urged people to return for a meeting this coming week "to plan the day that we will close this city down" with the kind of "massive civil disobedience" once led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"They never accused Sean Bell of doing anything. Then why is he dead?" Sharpton asked, his voice roaring with anger. Authorities "have shown now that they will not hold police accountable. Well, guess what? If you won't, we will!"
"Shut it down! Shut it down!" the crowd chanted, standing up and applauding wildly.
I lived in the South in the late 50s, and I can tell you from first hand knowledge, well I was a young teen but still aware enough to be scared s**tless by the antics of the KKK, and Democrat race politics has always been bad news.
As the Clintons know, and their long time mentor undoubtedly told them, you do remember Clinton's mentor don't you -- The segregationist Sen Fulbright -- Race politics leads to the same place, the streets, hatred and blame, followed by the inevitable grievances and their accompanying reparations and remediations.
Bonus question, why do Democrats love Marxists and Marxists love Democrats?
Predictions of environmental doom have been with us for a long long time, as the Washington Policy Center reminds us:
•“...civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind,” biologist George Wald, Harvard University, April 19, 1970.
• By 1995, “...somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.” Sen. Gaylord Nelson, quoting Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, Look magazine, April 1970.
• Because of increased dust, cloud cover and water vapor “...the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born,” Newsweek magazine, January 26, 1970.
• The world will be “...eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age,” Kenneth Watt, speaking at Swarthmore University, April 19, 1970.
• “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” biologist Barry Commoner, University of Washington, writing in the journal Environment, April 1970.
• “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from the intolerable deteriorations and possible extinction,” The New York Times editorial, April 20, 1970.
• “By 1985, air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half...” Life magazine, January 1970.
• “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.
• “...air pollution...is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone,” Paul Ehrlich, interview in Mademoiselle magazine, April 1970.
• Ehrlich also predicted that in 1973, 200,000 Americans would die from air pollution, and that by 1980 the life expectancy of Americans would be 42 years.
• “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” Earth Day organizer Denis Hayes, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.
• “By the year 2000...the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America and Australia, will be in famine,” Peter Gunter, North Texas State University, The Living Wilderness, Spring 1970.
When I was in College in the 70s, we were all going to die because of global cooling. Then it started getting warmer and we are all going to die because of global warming. See a pattern? When it was getting cooler, we were all going to freeze into little itty bitty ice cubes. Then it got warmer and we were all going to toast brown on all side because of global warming. Then we finally recognized that we had to change the lingo and call it climate change, because we couldn't tell if we were going to die because we were all going to freeze, or toast.
Learning from our missteps ...
Now we call it climate change, run around like our hair is on fire, and try and convince people that whatever the natural forces effecting planet does, we are all going to die. Easier this way, since you just have to yell 'we are all going to die' and not worry about the details.
As the endless winter drags on, don't you feel better that it's covered by climate change?
And coming up with some pretty harsh conclusions. Operation Chaos has flushed the Democrats from their shelter. TimesOnline America Editor Gerard Baker has an excellent piece on the Democratic primary race in which he nails the reason it's gone on so long; both Obama and Clinton: two cynical losers
The longer the Democratic race goes on, the more obvious it appears that each is deeply, perhaps ineradicably flawed.
Until about a month ago Barack Obama had done a brilliant job of presenting himself as a transcendent figure, the mixed-race candidate with bipartisan appeal who promised to heal the historic and modern rifts in American life.
But the mask has slipped. Under pressure in a Democratic primary, Mr Obama has sounded just like any other tax-raising, government-loving Democratic politician. Worse, he has revealed himself to be a member of that special subset of the party's liberal elite - a well-educated man with a serious superiority complex.
.......
Mr Obama's missteps with the working class of Pennsylvania have thus transformed Mrs Clinton from the bluestocking Wellesley graduate into the good old girl, hanging out there with the straw-chewing rednecks, embracing their values, their worldview and even their lifestyle.
Obliterate Iran! Here comes Osama bin Laden! I love duck hunting! I can do shots and beer at the same time! It's hard to know what's worse - expressing condescending views about the working class or pretending to be one of them. The Democratic campaign is simply disappearing in the enveloping vapidity of the candidates' making.
The Democrats insist on trotting out two liberals, which should make McGovern cringe, who offer nothing new, only repeating the tired, Marxism and class warfare rhetoric that has been a staple of liberalism since the 1960's.
You should read the whole brilliant linked article to see the depth of effectiveness of Operation Chaos. How will it end, party hacks, picking the Democrat candidate, selected not elected, how cool is that.
By now it should be obvious to everyone, Democrats don't trust people owning guns. I wonder why that is? If they don't rust citizens with guns, what is it they do trust citizens with. What rights do they want to take out of the US Constitution? I think we deserve to know before the elcetion.
Like Pelosi's magic plan to reduce gasoline prices before the election, it turns out was just pure BS, we want to know before we vote what rights we are throwing in the pile of "you don't trust citizens with".
Newt Gingrich seems to have signed on to "doing the right thing" by preserving the environment, but no actual program to do anything that would make a difference as opposed to making Al Gore richer.
At the moment the entire Global Warming crisis seems largely intended to keep Al Gore rich. It may or may not do something else. It does seem to be good at creating famine.
We can't use nuclear and now Obama says we can't use coal. We can't drill offshore. There is no proof that Global Warming is real, lots of proof that we don't know enough and before we spend a lot on a "remedy" we need to get more data on what the problem is; and accepting Pelosi's premise that we need to be involved in this "debate" on "what to do about Global Warming" is already to concede that which ought not be conceded.
Apparently Newt has stopped reading me. I'll have to see if I can fix that.
We should not be spending a nickel on doing something about Global Warming. We should be spending a good bit on gathering data about just what is happening to the climate; and until we are certain what the problem is, "doing something" is silly.
---
What we know you could write a book, what we don't know would fill a library. As technology advances we will know more. Evryone in the technology field understands that, it's only ignorance of the general population that remains the problem.
It's now fall, pushing into winter, in the southern hemisphere and the 'fall crops' should be coming in ... But. Winter has come early and with a vengeance since March, which would be the northern hemisphere equivalent of September.
Climate change continues to wreck havoc in Peru’s southern altiplano, where the arrival of freezing temperatures since March — almost three months earlier than usual — have killed more than a dozen people.
The extreme cold has claimed the lives of 16 people so far in Puno, and 5,053 others are suffering from respiratory ailments, most of them children under 5, Elsa Paredes, of Puno’s Regional Health Institute, told Enlace Nacional.
Moderate hail storms are predicted over the next several days over a wide area of the southern department of Puno, according to Senamhi, the national weather bureau, and temperatures are expected to drop in June, July and August to as low as -27º C (-16º F) in areas that lie above 4,000m (13,000 ft). The cold is also affecting the departments of Cusco and Arequipa.
There are reports of alpacas and guanacos, which are not protected in barns or sheds, dying in the higher areas of the altiplano.
Climate change is the 'new word' after it became obvious to the UN that global warming wasn't going to survive the northern hemisphere winter. we now have worldwide crop failures starting in the southern hemisphere.
Of course the climate change they are talking about is caused by the quite sun, which is still resting from the last sunspot cycle and shows no signs of initiating the next cycle. This is the exact reasons behind the last mini-ice age.
Quinua is a cereal like crop grown for it's seeds and leaves and is a primary human food crop of the Andean region of South America.
The young have the advantage of not knowing, or caring about the past. If you were around for Democrat president Jimmy Carter, then you remember the gas rationing, long lines to get your allotment, and the high prices. If not, you should read about the misery caused by Jimmy Carter. Skip Wikipedia. real history has been papered over by the leftists ... News sources may be reliable, but hate to say it, but a good high quality encyclopedia might be the best source of facts.
Police said the woman parked her car on Aldrin Road Monday night with about three-quarters of a tank of gas.
The tank was empty when she returned to the car about 1 p.m. Tuesday. When she filled it up again, the gas ran out through three holes drilled into the tank, police said.
“This is like back in the gas crisis in the ’70s,” Plymouth Capt. Michael Belmont said. “Only then they used siphons.”
And that's how it was, you garaged your car at night, lest the night stalkers would come through the neighborhood and empty every tank in sight. Not pretty to get up in the morning and expect your five gallon ration would still be there and the tank was empty. Civilized society takes ages to build up, the norms of behavior take a while to get established -- But civilized society fails spectacularly fast. The essence of civilized society, teaching 'civics' in school, which has now for the most part been replcaed by teaching the propaganda of global warming.
I am no better at predicting the future than the UN IPCC dopey computer models, but I am unencumbered with an agenda. The cold winter of 2006 and now 2007 has left farm lands reeling under the pressure. You can find out what is going on with the google news search string "+late +crop +planting +2008". When you do that, you find a long list of news stories pertaining to crops and the late planting in spring 2008 -- That's right now. Here is one such news story from Saskatchewan Canada.
According to Bedard, one of the biggest concerns for farmers right now is the current cold snap.
"Besides getting the land warmed up for seeding, the hay and pasture lands really need that warm weather. If they don't get growing in late April or early May, they just don't do as well," she said.
If you pay attention to the weather, we live in hurricane country so it becomes a natural for us, you find the steady stream of late season cold front to be an interesting anomaly. They just keep coming, as old man winter refuses to go away this year. The northern hemisphere growing areas of North America, and presumably the rest of the world, are simply not warm enough and not dry enough for crop plantings. The season is delayed. How long can it go before trouble? It varies with latitude so it depends. We may not know until the fall when the crops come in how it went. Then it will likely be too late.
But early indicators are it's not going to be all that good of a growing season. The futures markets are reacting by bidding up commodity prices for food staples, and of course we have the nutty ethanol craze siphoning off food for fuel. Food panic is slowly creeping into the news worldwide as shortages begin to show in many third world countries and now some in the US. Rice, a world staple crop, is becoming in short supply worldwide. Wheat and corn prices are sky-rocketing as supplies tighten.
A word to the wise with all the nuttiness about the global warming hoax going around, cold is much much worse than warm. It effects crop yields and eventually the world the food supply for one thing. Crops don't grow well under glaciers or in cold wet ground. So stay tuned, it's going to be interesting.
The above example might be a good search term to keep an eye on in the coming months. The final results should come in around election time --- HeHeHe ....
Subfreezing temperatures overnight in the Mother Lode and some areas of the San Joaquin Valley damaged vineyards with tender growing shoots and flowering buds, growers and farm officials reported Monday.
There's no way to tell immediately how extensive or costly the overall damage might be, experts said.
But potentially heavy damage was reported in foothill vineyards in areas where overnight temperatures dropped into the mid-20s and even as low as the high teens, by some reports.
Stephen Kautz, president of Ironstone Vineyards outside Murphys, said he saw damage in all grape varieties on 30 to 40 acres of grapevines he had examined, except perhaps cabernet sauvignon vines, whose buds had not yet fully emerged.
"I'm seeing from anywhere between 60 and 75 and up to 80 percent damage, and I'm hearing the same reports from numerous other vineyards in the area," said Kautz, who is also president of the Calaveras Winegrape Alliance.
Maybe this will get some attention. If it weren't that the current left's cause-du-jour were warming, this would be front page news. Liberals got to have their wine. Hey, at least they won't starve.
Nature has it's ways, and pine beetles have been around for a long time, enjoying their lifestyle, caring little what they are doing to the planet. They also don't seem to care a wit about Canada's CO2 budget.
VANCOUVER -- The tiny mountain pine beetle has transformed British Columbia's vast pine forests into a major source of greenhouse gases, federal scientists say.
By the time the unprecedented infestation ends, the rice-sized beetles will have killed so many trees an extra billion tonnes of carbon dioxide will be wafting through the atmosphere, researchers from the Canadian Forest Service report in the journal Nature on Thursday.
That is five times the annual emissions from all the cars, trucks, trains and planes in Canada, says lead author Werner Kurz, who warns the beetle's impact goes far beyond the B.C. border.
Of course, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, and not a major contributor of anything except photosynthesis. Photosynthesis, in case you don't know, is the process by which plants take in CO2 and water add sunlight they then produce growth and give off oxygen. Mmmmm oxygen, animals love oxygen, plants love CO2. The cycle of life for carbon lifeforms.
You can read the rest here, but I caution you it is full of global warming drivel.
Operation chaos continues ... You go girl. The chorus, hit it now ...
Whether youre a brother or whether youre a mother, Youre stayin alive, stayin alive.
Meanwhile, without lifting a finger, McCain vaults to the front as the uncivil war in the Democrat primary, the racists vs the feminist, continues unabated.
Republican John McCain's presidential campaign is content to let Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fight on.
The prospect for an even longer Democratic battle resulted from Clinton's defeat of Obama in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, meaning the contest is likely to last at least another two weeks until May 6, when North Carolina and Indiana vote.
As top McCain adviser Mark Salter said, Democrats should "take their time -- don't rush."
Republican strategists believe McCain has benefited from having won his party's nomination in March, giving him time to raise much-needed cash and lay the groundwork for his general election campaign, even though the Democratic battle has dominated U.S. headlines.
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
Hey, don't you like fun in your life NYTimes? How's the profit, I hear you been wheezing lately. Tired old Democrat parrot are we.
No political progress in Iraq, then what is this all about? As a direct result of the offensive against the Mahdi army in Basra, the Sunnis are rejoining the al-Maliki government, after nine months of absence.
Iraq's main Sunni Muslim political bloc has agreed in principle to return to the Shiite-led government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki nearly nine months after quitting the Cabinet, lawmakers from the group said Thursday.
A return of the Sunnis would be a boost to al-Maliki, who has struggled to keep together the disparate factions of his government and attempt to reconcile Iraq's feuding Shiite and Sunni politicians.
Salim Abdullah, a lawmaker and chief spokesman for the Sunni Accordance Front, said that after "positive negotiations" with al-Maliki's government, a deal in principle was reached under which the Front would hold five Cabinet posts, in addition to a deputy prime minister position.
Progress in Iraq is being made, and all the Democrats can do is preach surrender.
It's simply supply and demand, as Jimmy Carter found out, much to the displeasure of Americans. All the Gaia worship on the planet will not bring prices down until supplies increase. That includes "no matter how many starve" for the biofuel stupidity being pushed by the US Democrat Congressional loons and their EU buddies.
Didn't Pelosi say she would bring gas prices down before the 2006 election? Why yes, I do believe she did ...
Democrat President Jimmy Carter stated repeatedly that by the year 2,000 all the oil on Earth would be used up and we needed to invest in sweaters now and prepare ourselves for the inevitable. Misery and malaise spread across the USA, we even invented a "misery index" to show how bad things were. Jimmy conducted fireside chats to help people adjust. Most people just laughed at the fool, but since he ran the government, he could do real damage to the economy and the economic well being of the country.
During the Presidential campaign of 1976, Democratic candidate, Jimmy Carter, made frequent references to the Misery Index, which by the summer of 1976 was at 13.57%. Carter stated that no man responsible for giving a country a misery index that high, had a right to even ask to be President. Carter won the 1976 election. However, by 1980, when President Carter was running for re-election against Ronald Reagan, the Misery Index had reached an all-time high of 21.98%. Carter lost the 1980 election to Reagan in a landslide -- People had had enough of fireside chats to last them the rest of their lives.
Carter was a false prophet and turned out to be the problem, not the solution. There are a lot of Carter parallels to the current crop of Presidential wanna-bees.
Meanwhile ...
Here we have the biggest head in sand that has ever infected our political leadership in the USA. Not since Democrat President Jimmy Carter did his one man wrecking ball act on the US economy has there been so much ineptitude in Washington. In the mad dash to return the US economy to the pre-civil war days, the politician's ignore the obvious. The US economy runs on oil, and will for the foreseeable future -- Period. Nothing is going to change that.
All in the name of an obvious hoax, science education being what it is these days ...
Do you know how the hoaxers draw those scary looking graphs? Do you know what positive feedback is? No, then it's how you draw the scary graphs. It's not science it's fear mongering.
As for CO2 as a greenhouse gas, CO2 is a minuscule part (0.038%) of the Earth’s atmosphere, but the politicians don’t want anyone to know that. Why? Are they afraid that even stupid people will put one and one together and come up with two, that the hoax is based on a minor insignificant part of the atmosphere, a part that allows our carbon based lifeforms to thrive? Without CO2, plants would die, ever heard of photosynthesis? Photosynthesis is the process by which plants convert sunlight, light energy, into chemical energy by living organisms. The raw materials are carbon dioxide and water; the energy source is sunlight; and the end-products are oxygen and (energy rich) carbohydrates, for example sucrose, glucose and starch. This process is arguably the most important biochemical process, since nearly all life on Earth either directly or indirectly depends on it. It is a complex process occurring in higher plants, phytoplankton, algae, as well as bacteria.
In other words, our very life depends on the conversion of CO2 and water to plant material and oxygen, which we and other animals then eat and breath. Read that again before you condemn CO2.
I wonder, is education in government run schools this bad that processes like photosynthesis are not taught in school these days? Doesn't anyone in the general population understand physics and chemistry anymore?
So why ignore oil, and drilling and refining new oil. Simple, for 60 years politicians have searched for ways to control people in the USA. They are too free, they use too much they produce too much, was the cry. So now, they have developed a scare monger's approach to the whole affair, scare people by claiming the planet is doomed, unless we act now. The fight is coming in June, when the McCain-Lieberaman "cap and trade" fiasco is coming up for a Senate vote in June. Oh yeah, I forgot, it is now called Warner-Lieberman, since McCain is running for President and doesn't want you to know he was the original sponsor. This stupid bill will cap the CO2 emissions and make many people very rich. Power companies stand to gain from this farcical piece of legislation. Many other companies will try and get filthy rich of this scheme. Companies like Al Gore's, stand to profit enormously from this climate hoax. How someone goes out as a public speaker for a policy that then stands to gain from the policy is beyond me.
In the UK the high court has labeled his movie fiction, and cannot be shown in schools without so noting and showing other views which correctly portray the Earth's Climate.
There is plenty of oil, 95% of the US shoreline is off limits to new drilling. Other wastelands are now called wildlife refuges and declared off limits, like ANWR. ANWR was called the WASTELAND OF THE NORTH, nothing is there but a few people who go there to see that nothing is there a few months out of the year, when it thaws out.
So the task that has been accep[ted by Liberals, like Jimmy Carter before them, is to destroy US capitalism. Liberals hate it, it empowers people, listen to what Obama and Hillary say, not what you think they say, they are MARXISTS in every definition of the term. MARXISTS seek control over over people. Here is a dictionary definition ...
... the political, economic, and social principles and policies advocated by Karl Marx; notably a theory and practice of socialism including the 'labor theory of value', dialectical materialism(A Marxian term, look it up), the class struggle, and dictatorship of the proletariat until the establishment of a classless society
Karl Marx's most famous writings, the "Communist Manifesto". The people must be ruled, fairness is the methodology, and the end result, which never seems to show up, is a classless society.
Class warfare, which party exposes class warfare? Democrats, they use the language of we need to make Walmart pay, we need to "tax the rich" for the public good. Class warfare is all they are preaching and Karl Marx handed down the doctrine of their religion.
Obama when asked about lowering the capital gains tax, specifically that it had produced higher revenues to the treasury, he said "It's not about the money, it's about the fairness". You should stencil that on your forehead if you are an Obama voter. Wear it proudly, they will probably make up some song you can sing.
I have one that I am saving for the occasion ... a short verse goes like this ...
Hey Hey Ho Ho Where do my job go
Sing it you will need it. Jimmy Carter would be proud.
Meanwhile, if you want something to watch that should give you a chuckle, here is the 1970s version of global warming, global cooling. Yes that's right, the first try was we are all going to die because the ice age is coming and we are causing it. some of the cures, like spreading carbon black over the poles might seem a little humorous but it was real. Note some of the people named in the video are the very same who are now pushing the global warming hoax -- Yes same ones. They just hope you are young enough to not know.
Nuclear power is the obvious answer to the world's electrical needs, it's clean safe and low cost. when I stumbled across this blogger he made some points that I decided to reflect on my little blog...
I'm increasingly coming over to the nuclear argument. When you look past the hysteria and at the facts, it seems the only safe and viable long-term solution to spiralling energy costs and the risks of climate change. Coal is dirty, oil and gas require us to cuddle up to grubby dictators, solar is a long way off, wind is a complete joke, tidal is unproven, and hydroelectric needs what we don't have.
A concise look of the energy choices facing mankind, regardless what feeling you harbor about the hoax of global warming. There really are only two options, nuclear and coal -- Else we freeze.
Students for Concealed Carry on Campus is holding an Empty Holster Protest that this week. For the week of Monday, April 21 through Friday, April 25, participants in the protest will wear empty gun holsters around campus and to all their classes. SCCC is a national organization that was created after April 16, 2007. Tech`s chapter is home to several dozen of the more than 3,600 SCCC members from over 600 campuses participating in the protest this year, according to the organization`s Web site.
More here and here. I wonder when the drive by media is going to notice that gun free zones attract mass murders?
Two Latin American leaders have issued warnings about the effects of biofuel production on food supplies.
Speaking at the UN in New York, Bolivian President Evo Morales said the development of biofuels harmed the world's most impoverished people.
And President Alan Garcia of Peru said using land for biofuels was putting food out of reach for the poor.
Meanwhile UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is hosting a meeting to discuss European policy encouraging biofuels.
Ahead of the meeting, Mr Brown said that the UK should be "more selective in our support" for biofuels, which convert cereals into fuel.
Campaigners say providing a renewable alternative for conventional fuels could help stop global warming.
But as food prices climb worldwide, there is a fear that development of biofuels could reduce the production of badly-needed basic foodstuffs.
Ethanol production is on course to account for some 30% of the US maize crop by 2010, dramatically curtailing the amount of land available for food crops.
The EU has meanwhile come under criticism for its target of getting 10% of road transport fuel from crops by 2020.
The head of the UN World Food Programme and the chief of the African Development Bank chief are among those attending the London meeting.
Bio-ethanol project
Opening a UN forum on the global impact of climate change on indigenous peoples, Mr Morales said that capitalism should be scrapped if the planet is to be saved from the effects of climate change.
"If we want to save our planet earth, we have a duty to put an end to the capitalist system," he said.
And what would we replace freedom, captilism and liberty with? MARXISM, like that being preached by Mrs Clinton and ever deft Barrack (no middle name) Obama.
Hmm this sounds familiar, I wonder what Bolivia's President did recently, oh yeah, I remember ...
Bolivian President Evo Morales seized control of the country's natural gas industry Monday, sending soldiers to occupy fields that he contends private companies have plundered for years.
Morales said that unless foreign energy firms agreed to give Bolivia's state oil company oversight of production and a majority of their revenue generated in Bolivia, the government would evict them from the fields.
It’s becoming a very open question whether or not Bill Clinton would have won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, much less the presidency, had information technology been so widespread then as it is now and had transcripts, audio, and video been so accessible as a result.
The parrot media is wheezing and is unable to contain and focus the desired Democrat storyline anymore. In 1992, it was near impossible to break through the drive by media. Today, as 'OPERATION CHAOS' is proving, the drive by media is at a loss to do anything constructive except ride the wave created by talk radio, Conservative voters and the Internet.
Have fun, it's going to be quite a ride, old parrot.
There are clearly some glaring problems with the data, how the data is taken and how the data is massaged. Go to WhatsUpWithThat for more information and to surfacestations.org for how the volunteer survey is progressing.
Why exactly are volunteers having to do the survey and quantify the quality of the USHCN stations? The USHCN plays a major role in determining the historical temperature record for land surface temperatures. Europe is the other area which contributes the second largest data set.
Lenin's prodigy, Stalin was one of the first to use politicized science for the benefit of the state -- For all the good the faking did. In the end, the Soviet Union just imploded under Ronald Reagan's military spending economic assault.
Newsbusters has the story right here. Is anyone surprised? Yes I am, shocked that ABC would expose it. This comes after the UK High court issued the printed record of the items in the film which was in fact false. The story about the ruling was run on October 7, 2007, but then there were virtually no stories in the US media about the lies Al Gore told.
Is it OK to use computer generated movie scenes to try and make a fact that you cannot find in nature to try and fool the public?
And rightly so, computer models are not reality and even the UN IPCC has acknowledged that their 'predictions' are not to be viewed as 'predictions' anymore, just scenarios. Scenarios of what? Ignorance is your enemy, science and the truth is brings will set you free. Al Gore, a failed politician and charlatan getting rich off the hoax has no credential to talk about anything science. In fact, he bars all press from his high cost talks.
Is it any wonder that the polls show that Americans are educated enough to realize the hoax when they see it.
A new Gallup Poll shows a high level of awareness among Americans about global warming, but a far lesser degree of worry about the phenomenon.
The survey released Monday reported that while 80 percent of Americans said they understood the issue, only 40 percent believed it would become a serious threat in their lifetimes.
About a decade ago, a poll showed that 25 percent feared climate change would be a serious problem in their lifetimes.
Two-thirds of Americans say they worry a great deal or a fair amount about global warming. Only 17 percent said the issue doesn't worry them at all.
"The trend data suggest that despite the growing attention to and emphasis on global warming in recent years, there has been no consistent increase in worry about it since Gallup began asking the question way back in 1989," Gallup said in a written statement.
using the Saul Alinsky model, it's time to pick another subject, because you have failed with the global warming panic play.
The telephone survey was conducted March 6-9 and surveyed 1,012 Americans 18 years or older. The margin of error was plus or minus three percentage points.
Environmentalism is the lefty's new Communism, on the war on capitalism.
All people think that we should balance our actions, endless strip malls lining the roads, maybe the planning commissions should just say no to some of this. But the nonsense spewed by the left is just, well, it's just nonsense.
Real science tests their models, if the models are so accurate run a simple demonstration, set the initial conditions for 1979 data and predict the climate in 2007. Why these end dates, 1979 is the first year where reliable satellite data is available and 2007 is the last year that the record is complete. May the best model win ... LOL.
Why the 'LOL', they have done this, hence the scenario designation. It doesn't work.
Thursday is the day -- Ubuntu 8.04 LTS desktop edition will be available for free download later this week, says Canonical. The organization has also announced the upcoming release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server edition.
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS promises to provide a stable platform for software and hardware vendors, developers, and users. Canonical claims 8.04 LTS is a good choice for large-scale deployment. This is the eighth desktop release of Ubuntu.
Get a copy of Iain Murray's timely new book. The New York Post had a glowing review yesterday.
Tuesday is Earth Day, the calendar's High Holy Day of Green theology. With each passing year, environmentalism more clearly assumes the trappings of a secular religion. Now, along comes Iain Murray to assert that the Green God is dead.
Murray's new book, "The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don't Want You to Know About - Because They Helped Cause Them," clarifies the difference between caring for the environment - a reasonable and virtuous belief that people rightly harbor - and the modern-day movement known as environmentalism. The latter, Murray notes, has amassed a shameful legacy over a half century that has killed millions of people and consigned billions of others to backbreaking poverty. "Environmentalism deserves to be as discredited as Marxism," Murray argues. His book does a superb job of doing just that.
Murray, an energy expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, lives a low-carbon lifestyle. He loves nature and the outdoors. He's practically a tree-hugger. Nevertheless, he makes clear, "I am not an environmentalist."
Why? Because, as he explains, environmentalism has become a socio-political movement exploiting people's genuine regard for nature as a smokescreen for expanding government and exercising power. And the results have been disastrous for both humanity and the environment.
Murray chronicles seven environmental catastrophes, and shows the hand of the professional environmental movement in each one.
Thanks to the efforts of Green patron saint Rachel Carson, environmentalists have succeeded in curbing the use of DDT, which, Murray writes, is "highly effective in controlling malaria and thereby lifting millions out of poverty." While it's unclear if banning the pesticide has had much in the way of environmental benefits, it has been unquestionably harmful to humankind. Unchecked malaria has killed tens of millions of people, particularly in Africa, and continues to cost people their lives each year. "In 2005 alone, across Uganda, 50,000 children died from malaria," Murray notes. "That is the true Silent Spring."
Environmentalism, the new home of modern Communism.
No real news here, Democrats will say and do anything to get elected, but one lie is getting particularly galling, gas prices. And what have the Democrats done, well they have drove up food prices and done nothing to bring down gas prices. They lie to get elected, then raise taxes, fund socialism and gun control. It's all they know.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot, Democrats scuttled the free trade agreement with Columbia because their union bases told them to.
Are sunspots that are too small to be seen with age old monitoring equipment polluting the data built up over the eons, to the point where it's meaningless. In the last years we have witnessed the "Tiny Tim" effect with tropical storms, where every little wave in the atmosphere is assigned a name.
Both effects make meaningless the whole historical record, which is far more voluminous than the modern record. Solar Science has some more here. Drawing conclusions from the new "Tiny Tim" records to try and make a point that say hurricanes are more numerous, makes the whole worthless. I say we use 1800 century techniques and technology as a means of continuing the historical records.
I am not willing to call the start of sunspot cycle 24 until there is an unambiguous showing of major spots of the property polarity.
Did you know that if everything recommended in the UN IPCC AR4 report were done, that it would have virtually no effect on global warming? Yes that's right, the expenditure of trillions will do virtually nothing. But if we started building nuclear power plants today, CO2 would be reduced with every nuclear power plant built and cheaper electrical energy would be provided. It is also true that most CO2 is due to fixed power plants, not automobiles.
Technology will advance, and when cheaper, better, lower polluting, more effecient forms of energy become available, they will be used. The market will speak. For now, nuclear power is the option that needs to be used where ever possible.
Rachel Carson, name ring a bell? Do you know who she is, what she did? She died in 1964 and has become a goddess to the environmental leftists -- Showing them the way of Gaia. Her book Silent Spring was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962. The book caused the panic, started the whole process of lies about how DDT was destroying the world, hence the title "Silent Spring" -- When all things are dead. The book is a fairy-tale, not based on science, but fiction -- "Silent Spring" was not even close to scientifically accurate. All Rachel Carson did was what modern day leftists are doing today, they demonize an industry, in the case of DDT it was the chemical industry, accusing them of spreading mis-information, when in fact the chemical companies were trying to get the truth out. It took over thirty years to expose this hoax and get the truth out. Even today, the leftists are holding conferences and meeting to try and put the DDT genie back in the bottle, but no one is listening to them this time.
DDT is just one of many scares and silly wars perpetrated against objects, thoughts and diseases by leftist that are designed to panic the people into taking actions they would have otherwise avoided. In this case, banning of an insecticide based on no scientific data. In case you are wondering, WHO, yes that UN group, has removed the ban on DDT September 15, 2006. After over thirty years and millions of dead African children, the ban has been lifted and DDT has gone back into production to fight malaria. Yeah, they say it's only for indoor use, but who thinks that will stand the test of time. Why did millions have to die for a leftists fairy tale? There motives were clear, DDT allowed the pushing back of man's habitable boundaries and the leftists want to contain humanity to preserves of their choosing.
... And now we come to Al Gore, his fictitious movie "Inconvenient Truth" and global warming, just the latest in the long line of leftists scares and their sycophant perpetrators who are trying to tell us we can control the sun if we will only pay enough taxes and live like they want us to live. You figure that one out for yourselves.
OK, I'll provide my answer ...
The scam never changes, only the targets. Yes, the "Silent Spring" hysteria WAS similar to the present "global warming" hysteria -- as the real process of science was perverted by a social/political movement.
Remember what Saul Alinsky said ... and you will understand the current state of continuous panic being spewed by the left.
Disastrous stupid policy in the first place, to lead the world in showing they support the hoax
The European commission is backing away from its insistence on imposing a compulsory 10% quota of biofuels in all petrol and diesel by 2020, a central plank of its programme to lead the world in combating climate change.
Burning food is a dumb idea, the last to figure that out will be the leftists in the US Congress.
... they invent phony wars on objects, conditions, institutions, thought, diseases, and all manner of silly things. These are not wars. These are challenges and tasks. Assuming they are even real, and not merely political inventions. ..... Pat Dollard
For decades after the Civil War, the Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist wing of the Democratic Party. Klansmen murdered hundreds of Republican activists and office-holders, including U.S. Representative James Hinds (R-Arkansas).
On this day in 1871, the Republican-controlled 42nd Congress passed and the Republican President, Ulysses Grant, signed into law the Ku Klux Klan Act. The law banned the KKK and other Democrat terrorist organizations. President Grant then deployed federal troops to crush a Klan uprising in South Carolina.
Eleven years later, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned most provisions of the Act. Though legalized, this original version of the Ku Klux Klan faded. Why? Because as Democrats regained control over southern state governments, they could oppress African-Americans openly, without need of white sheets.
There was a filibuster, it was led by Senator Byrd
June 10, 1964 Civil Rights Filibuster Ended
At 9:51 on the morning of June 10, 1964, Senator Robert C. Byrd completed an address that he had begun 14 hours and 13 minutes earlier. The subject was the pending Civil Rights Act of 1964, a measure that occupied the Senate for 57 working days, including six Saturdays. A day earlier, Democratic Whip Hubert Humphrey, the bill's manager, concluded he had the 67 votes required at that time to end the debate.
Truth, stranger than fiction. Yes, I lived in the south when the KKK was still around, and yes they were Democrats who came to our door making sure my parents voted the right way. No they didn't wear sheets, just call it a friendly voter outreach program.
Why not point out the fact that man burns the old crops and forests to plant crops, especially in third world countries? Is there something wrong with acknowledging the obvious -- That this simple act adds more pollution and CO2 to the atmosphere than many other so-called bad actors?
Some recent examples here, here and here. I wonder why this is never talked about when it comes to curbing CO2? I think you know the answer. These are just some of the images around the northern hemisphere as the crop growing season heats up.
Liberals are driven by pure emotion. We have to act now, panic people, don't let anything get in their way. OK, they got their way with biofuels so now what? If we wanted energy independence, why would burning food and deforesting the planet be the path you would choose. Why not just drill for oil in areas we have yet to do so. To think mankind will replace oil in the next 100 years is foolish, absurd to the end. The answer is because they are liberals, and liberals cannot think things through.
Like with DDT before, this has the potential to be another bad decision, resulting in many deaths worldwide. I doubt it will top the 30 million who died for lack of DDT, but it could. What if the cold winters cause crop failures?
Global food price rises are leading to "silent mass murder" and commodities markets have brought "horror" to the world, the United Nations' food envoy told an Austrian newspaper on Sunday.
Jean Ziegler, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food, told Kurier am Sonntag that growth in biofuels, speculation on commodities markets and European Union export subsidies mean the West is responsible for mass starvation in poorer countries.
Ziegler said he was bound to highlight the "madness" of people who think that hunger is down to fate.
"Hunger has not been down to fate for a long time -- just as (Karl) Marx thought. It is rather that a murder is behind every victim. This is silent mass murder," he said in an interview.
Ziegler blamed globalisation for "monopolising the riches of the earth" and said multinationals were responsible for a type of "structural violence".
"And we have a herd of market traders, speculators and financial bandits who have turned wild and constructed a world of inequality and horror. We have to put a stop to this," he said.
Ziegler said he believed that one day starving people could rise up against their persecutors. "It's just as possible as the French Revolution was," he said.
There is only so much food available on Planet Earth, and the population has grown to the point where the amount of food roughly equals the amount of people needing it. Change that balance and disaster awaits.
Gallup's tracking poll shows Mrs Clinton taking the lead. She still is in an impossible position with delegates, but this is getting funny. As a card carrying foot soldier in operation chaos, it's a great sight to see. In the words of the great Howard Dean -- Yeeearghhhh !!!!
Right down the middle for me. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, a minor player, water vapor is by far the biggest contributor. The notion that CO2 drives climate is not true. Deforestation is also a bit contributor to global cooling. And man can do both and can effect the climate, somewhat. What we don't know is far greater than what we do know.
Things we do know about contaminating the atmosphere, but don't want to talk about, agricultural burning that is used for dead crop clearing in third world countries is a major problem. Modern farming techniques solves that problem. Massive deforestation, now going on in third world countries, especially ones that use wood for cooking and heat, is a major problem. Both made worse by the mad dash to biofuels, along with the inhumanity of mass starvation. All you have to do is browse the MODIS image library on the AQUA satellite to see the problem.
We don't know -- We can't even tell whether the Earth is now cooling or warming and how or why. We simple do not have the historical data for a long enough time, with proper instruments, to measure climate on a meaningful time scale. It's clear that since the last mini-ice age, about 1700 AD - the Maunder minimum, the Earth has been warming. What we know about ice ages is they last about 100,000 years and the interglacial period which we are now in last 10,000 - 15,000 years -- The current interglacial period is about 10-12,000 years long.
Global cooling is much worse than warming, and the next ice age will happen in approximately the next 5,000 years, regardless what we do.
Why damage the economies of Western nations? The only reason I can see is to control the Western nations. What the socialists want, control over people. Should we try and prevent or stop volcanic eruptions?
Using food for fuel is a terrible idea regardless the advantages or disadvantages. Does anybody think that just because the CO2 comes from corn that makes it better than CO2 that comes from oil?
If CO2 is your problem nuclear power is your solution. Why not use it? Because ...
Tonight is the 233rd anniversary of Paul Revere's ride.
Listen my children and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march By land or sea from the town to-night, Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch Of the North Church tower as a signal light,-- One if by land, and two if by sea; And I on the opposite shore will be, Ready to ride and spread the alarm Through every Middlesex village and farm, For the country folk to be up and to arm."
Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore, Just as the moon rose over the bay, Where swinging wide at her moorings lay The Somerset, British man-of-war; A phantom ship, with each mast and spar Across the moon like a prison bar, And a huge black hulk, that was magnified By its own reflection in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street Wanders and watches, with eager ears, Till in the silence around him he hears The muster of men at the barrack door, The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet, And the measured tread of the grenadiers, Marching down to their boats on the shore.
Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church, By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread, To the belfry chamber overhead, And startled the pigeons from their perch On the sombre rafters, that round him made Masses and moving shapes of shade,-- By the trembling ladder, steep and tall, To the highest window in the wall, Where he paused to listen and look down A moment on the roofs of the town And the moonlight flowing over all.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead, In their night encampment on the hill, Wrapped in silence so deep and still That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread, The watchful night-wind, as it went Creeping along from tent to tent, And seeming to whisper, "All is well!" A moment only he feels the spell Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread Of the lonely belfry and the dead; For suddenly all his thoughts are bent On a shadowy something far away, Where the river widens to meet the bay,-- A line of black that bends and floats On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride, Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere. Now he patted his horse's side, Now he gazed at the landscape far and near, Then, impetuous, stamped the earth, And turned and tightened his saddle girth; But mostly he watched with eager search The belfry tower of the Old North Church, As it rose above the graves on the hill, Lonely and spectral and sombre and still. And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height A glimmer, and then a gleam of light! He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns, But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight A second lamp in the belfry burns.
A hurry of hoofs in a village street, A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark, And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet; That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light, The fate of a nation was riding that night; And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight, Kindled the land into flame with its heat. He has left the village and mounted the steep, And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep, Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides; And under the alders that skirt its edge, Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge, Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.
It was twelve by the village clock When he crossed the bridge into Medford town. He heard the crowing of the cock, And the barking of the farmer's dog, And felt the damp of the river fog, That rises after the sun goes down.
It was one by the village clock, When he galloped into Lexington. He saw the gilded weathercock Swim in the moonlight as he passed, And the meeting-house windows, black and bare, Gaze at him with a spectral glare, As if they already stood aghast At the bloody work they would look upon.
It was two by the village clock, When he came to the bridge in Concord town. He heard the bleating of the flock, And the twitter of birds among the trees, And felt the breath of the morning breeze Blowing over the meadow brown. And one was safe and asleep in his bed Who at the bridge would be first to fall, Who that day would be lying dead, Pierced by a British musket ball.
You know the rest. In the books you have read How the British Regulars fired and fled,--- How the farmers gave them ball for ball, >From behind each fence and farmyard wall, Chasing the redcoats down the lane, Then crossing the fields to emerge again Under the trees at the turn of the road, And only pausing to fire and load.
So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went his cry of alarm To every Middlesex village and farm,--- A cry of defiance, and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo for evermore! For, borne on the night-wind of the Past, Through all our history, to the last, In the hour of darkness and peril and need, The people will waken and listen to hear The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed, And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
It turns out, not very reliable. Anthony Watts at WattsUpWithThat has an ongoing project to find the truth. The results so far are not encouraging. If you want to visit some stations in your area, say while on a driving vacation this summer, and do a photo essay on what you find, look at surfacestations.org for USHCN sites that still needs surveying.
Why you might ask, is this not a matter of record? Good question, maybe the USHCN did not want to know the answer?
It's an all volunteer effort but the results are eye opening. Approximately 4% of the USHCN temperature monitoring stations surveyed so far meet the letter of the USHCN book for monitoring and accurately reporting on the surface temperature records. Most stations surveyed so far have siting problems which for the most part, bias the temperature readings upward.
If you use only stations that have correct siting, you get no temprature increase for the last years of 0.0 degrees C. Yes that's right, no change in surface temperature.
Running the numbers you get this distribution ...
CRN1 & 2: +0°C CRN3: +1°C CRN4: +2°C CRN5: +5°C
The grand total is an average warm bias of 1.95°C per station.
CRN1 and CRN2 are the stations with the least problems, with CRN1 having met the siting specification.
"I applaud the President for outlining a bold alternative climate initiative that rejects the concept that the United States must adopt economically ruinous cap-and-trade legislation such as the Lieberman-Warner bill that would significantly drive up the already skyrocketing cost of energy on the American public," Senator Inhofe said. "Today, as American families and American workers are faced with an economic downturn, the slumping housing market, and rising gas prices, they are unlikely to tolerate a `de-stimulus’ climate bill that will not have the sponsors’ purported impact on temperatures but will further exacerbate economic pain.
If the trace gas CO2 is the problem (CO2 is o.o32% of the total atmosphere) which it's not, then nuclear power is the answer. Nuclear power produces clean energy at one third the cost of coal and one fourth the cost of natural gas.
“Among all the deniers I have profiled,” Solomon writes, “I have never encountered one who disputes that there is such a thing as a greenhouse effect, or that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.... The arguments are all about how powerful the effect is, especially when considered in combination with other factors, various feedback mechanisms both negative and positive, and other influences that might or might not overwhelm the effect of CO2.” In other words, Solomon found that the “deniers” are, in fact, not in denial at all. They are merely dissidents from the political orthodoxy of climate catastrophism.
Sign me up, I can agree with this. The greenhouse effect is well understood, and water vapor is by far the biggest contributor to the Earth's greenhouse effect -- Without which the Earth would be a very unpleasant place indeed. CO2 grows really big plants and trees, any gardener will tell you that. CO2 is a minor player in the greenhouse effect, and is surly not a major factor. The only way the unverified computer models produce the scary temperature graphs, is by using positive feedback, which if it existed the Earth would have already "railed the climate system" most likely Earth would be a permanent snowball.
With all the press fawning of former Democrat President Jimmy Carter, which I refer to as Jimmy "The dumb" Carter, people may forget the part he played in installing the ruthless Marxist dictator Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, You see, not only is Jimmy Carter responsible for modern terrorism as we know it, he is also at least partly responsible for Zimbabwe's Mugabe and his reign of terror.
What is it with leftists and their buds, Marxists, Communists and all manner of dictators? You can see the effect in modern times by watching the left fawn over Hugo Chavez and the destruction he is causing in Venezuela and of course their old favorite dictator Fidel Castro.
But for the fawning drive by media, and the leftists who cleanse Wikipedia of anything negative about Democrat Jimmy Carter, you might not know what Democrat President Jimmy "the dumb" Carter did and the misery he caused people around the world with his totally inept foreign policy. Jimmy's UN ambassador was the worldly former mayor of Atlanta, who knew virtually nothing about world affairs -- Hey it looks so easy doesn't it? Especially if you have no core principles to guide your policy. You can screw up things really bad in a miraculously short period of time.
Jimmy was a talker, he just wasn't very worldly. Sort of like Obama, who is so naive about the world it is truly frightening. The problem was Jimmy wasn't very smart, which shows today with his meddling and attempts to recover his pitiful reputation -- Which he buried with the American people in the deserts of Iran after 444 days of ineptness during the Iranian hostage crisis. You see Jimmy never could muster a credible threat towards Iran, and they played him like a fiddle for it. The Iranian mullahs were smart, Jimmy gave them Iran and they were using it already to their advantage.
When Reagan took office, apparently he had told the Iranians before hand, you will release the hostages immediately, or else ... The Iranians knew Reagan meant it and the game was over. The hostages came home as Reagan was sworn in. Jimmy never lived it down, yet he and drive by media keep trying.
Jimmy Carter still has a lot to answer for. -- The Weekly Standard had an article about this "How Tyranny Came to Zimbabwe" by James Kirchick 06/18/2007. It is a short recap of how this all came about in 1979. And Jimmy Carter was right there in the thick of the wheeling and dealing. It's a long and detailed article of the Carter involvement in creating Mugabe and the horrors he brought to Zimbabwe. The lessons there are hard to find in the drive by press, but they are well worth considering when you think about voting for Obama who is Jimmy Carter II if there ever will be one.
Well worth the time to read.
Now that democratic Zimbabweans have spoken again, I wonder what will President Bush do? Brian Maloney at his Radio Equalizer blog has the latest.
