Manmade Global Warming -- Just as Real As Malthus/DDT/Take Your Pick

  

What happens when you use the scientific method on the "science" of anthropomorphic global warming (i.e., it's all our fault!)?  Why, you discover that manmade global warming has just as much chance of being right as all the other scare stories of the past.  Remember how DDT was supposed to cause cancer and be harmful to animals, so we needed to ban it worldwide?  Well, Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring was based on ludicrous speculations with no scientific basis, and resulted in DDT being banned around the world.  To date, no studies have linked DDT to cancer, but on the bright side millions have died from malaria.

Scholars Kesten Green (International Graduate School of Business, University of South Australia) and J. Scott Armstrong (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) studied forecasts of human-caused environmental disasters (e.g., Malthus, timber famine, ozone hole, salmonella in eggs, etc.).  They found 26 forecasts analogous to today's manmade global warming hysteria, and concluded:

None of the 26 alarming forecasts that we examined was accurate. Based on analyses to date, 19 of the forecasts were categorically wrong (the direction of the effect was opposite to the alarming forecast), and the remaining 7 of the forecast effects were wrong in degree (no effect or only minor effects actually occurred).

Not only that, but:

For example, the Administrator of the EPA banned DDT in the U.S. in 1972. The U.N. and W.H.O. withheld financial aid from developing countries to force them to stop using DDT. There has been no evidence found of any link between DDT and cancer in people but—without DDT and with substitute insecticides being more toxic and less effective—insect-borne diseases have increased leading to millions of additional deaths and widespread sickness. Government policies have, as a consequence, been very expensive without any benefits accruing. Some restrictions and bans on DDT-use continue to this day (Persistence = 1). This description draws heavily on Edwards (2004).

The calls for action were followed by the implementation of government policies intended to address the alarm in 23 of the analogous situations. Among the analogous situations in which government action was taken, our initial assessment is that harm was caused by the government policies in 20 (as with DDT, the cost of the policies exceeded benefits) or policies were ineffective or the net effect was uncertain in 3. In none of the analogous situations were the policies clearly effective.

Both Green and Armstrong have begged for peer review of their work--thus far no takers. Wonder why that is?

The problem is, people want to save the world.  They want to feel like they are contributing something beyond their daily lives.  Unfortunately, too many of them are sanctimonious twits who think they know better than the rest of us how to run our lives and are morally superior to the rest of us because they're saving the planet!

If it's not DDT it's global warming, or it's being forced to use CFL lightbulbs instead of incandescent lights, or giving up oil as an energy source (or not using nuclear) because, damn it, they ARE morally superior to us proles and must use the power of government to force us to act the way THEY think we should.  So what does it matter that their idiotic crusades cost us billions in money and millions in lost lives, or that scientists fake their data or apply 'corrections' to get the results they want, or ignore scientific studies that prove the sun controls the Earth's climate and not man. It's the intent that's important.  After all, it's for the children, right?

Hat tip:  doubleplusundead

Doing The Job The Mainstream Media Won't Do

Unless you read blogs to the right of the mainstream media, you probably don't know that the Department of Justice raided the Gibson guitar making company last Wednesday (24 August).  Why, pray tell, did a DOJ SWAT team raid the Gibson factory with automatic weapons and confiscate over half million dollars worth of guitar making materials?  Because they claimed the company was violating Indian environmental law (for which Gibson has documentation that it hasn't, and the Indian government said there was no violation).

Funny thing--C.F. Martin Guitar uses the same materials but wasn't raided.  The only difference between the two companies is that the CEO of Gibson contributes to Republican candidates while the Martin CEO contributes big to Democratic candidates (and especially Barack Obama).  This appears to be another case of this Administration using the power of the federal government against political opponents. (Remember all of the Chrysler and GM dealerships which were forced to shut down after the Administration used taxpayer money to bail out said companies?  Funny thing there, too--the majority of the dealerships shut down were owned by people who contributed to Republican candidates.)

This personally sucks for me as I love and play C.F. Martin guitars, but also love Gibsons.  And now I have to think hard about purchasing GE products because their CEO is such a butt snorkler of Obama.  I hate it when politics intertwines with commerce--but when a particular political party uses the power of government to reward contributors by attacking their competitors, it goes beyond the benefits of lobbying that all organizations engage in.  It's sending the message that, if you contribute to our political adversaries, we will come for you and crush you--so think twice about donating to the Republican Party.

So that's why a guitar company was raided by machine gun toting law enforcement personnel from the Department of Justice... it was sending a message to all other companies out there that donating money to the Republicans will be hazardous to your health.

Hat tip: Big Government

Rotating Blades -- Meet Guano

The lid may be about to come off the European debt crisis.  Angela Merkel no longer has the votes in the Bundestag to back the rescue packages for the Euro.  Thus, Germany may be heading to a Constitutional crisis, and the Euro may be headed for a fall.

Mrs Merkel has cancelled a high-profile trip to Russia on September 7, the crucial day when the package goes to the Bundestag and the country's constitutional court rules on the legality of the EU's bail-out machinery.

If the court rules that the €440bn rescue fund (EFSF) breaches Treaty law or undermines German fiscal sovereignty, it risks setting off an instant brushfire across monetary union.

The seething discontent in Germany over Europe's debt crisis has spread to all the key institutions of the state. "Hysteria is sweeping Germany " said Klaus Regling, the EFSF's director.

Europe is about a month away from it all coming apart and the Euro being reduced to a few specific countries (if it survives at all).  This should have the effect of driving investors to the US dollar as a safe haven--unless our Chinese creditors convince the world that the yuan is the new international currency (which, considering their overheating economy, may be their plan all along to obtain the investments required to keep the lid on their own bubbling pot).

As I noted earlier, it's time to harden up and batten down the hatches, because our current Administration will not have clue one in how to deal with the coming storm.

Hat tip: Reuters, the Telegraph

Dirt Nap

Upper management positions in Al-Qaida continue to be hazardous to the occupants (as well as being in Pakistan).  And, once again, it looks like we have the U.S. Air Force to thank:

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says al-Rahman was killed Aug. 22 in the Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan. That's the same day a US drone strike in Waziristan.

So why is it critical to keep taking out senior leadership in terrorist groups?  Becuase they are the ones most capable of planning and directing terrorist events.  Sadly, there is no lack of morons who will wear explosives and kill themselves for the cause--it's the ones who are capable of planning the operations and logistics to carry out such attacks that are more difficult to come by.  Hence, every time Hell welcomes a new member, it makes Al-Qaida's (and every other gathering of terrorist  ass clowns) attempts to kill Americans and our Allies that much more difficult.

It still doesn't get to the root cause of Islamic extremism, but it does blunt the effect. Remember, unless there is a Reformation in Islam, it will not end well for anyone--there are over 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, and if only 10% of them are extremists, that means there are 130 million people who want to enslave or kill the rest of us. (A Pew poll on Islam conducted in June 2010 found that, depending on the country surveyed, between 11% to 59% of Muslims surveyed identified with fundamentalists.)

Al-Qaida? We have an express lane set up just for you!

Apologies Again

As usual, work has kept me on the road and away from posting.  Expect blog entries over the next couple months to be light and sporadic as I will be racking up humongous amounts of frequent traveler air miles.  So, apologies now and for the future.  To compensate, here's a beautiful woman to gaze upon:

What can I say: I'm a bear, I'm male, and I'm straight.

So Easy A Caveman Can Do It

A recent scientific study indicates that human sexual encounters with Neanderthals resulted in  increased genetic abilities to fight off disease and illness.  This addition to our genetic structure occurred thousands of years ago.

Neanderthals died off about 30,000 years ago. They and the Denisovans shared a common ancestor with modern humans about 400,000 years ago.

Modern humans eclipsed these ancient cousins when our contemporaries began expanding into Asia and Europe from Africa about 65,000 years ago.

The human body has undergone many changes and modifications in response to environmental pressures (people born today still bear the antibodies of the survivors of the plagues which decimated Europe in the 1300s).  The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this study is to engage in sex as often as possible and with as many different people as possible.  Your future progeny surviving medical apocalypses depends upon it.

Who knew that science could be so much fun.

Difficult Times Are Coming

Unemployment is still up, housing values are still decreasing, union thugs are shooting non-unionized business owners, The State Department is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (as well as Egypt), rioters destroy parts of London and other English cities, black flash mobs are stealing from stores and attacking whites with impunity, Mexican drug cartels moving into the US... the next few years are going to test our resolve, and will not be kind to the weak.

The Riots WIll Continue Until Morale Improves

UK Prime Minister David Cameron is reportedly coonsulting with former LAPD Chief William Bratton on how to handle the riot situation in England.  What was one of Bratton's suggestions?  That the British police practice racial diversity in hiring police officers.


Chief Bratton has reportedly done excellent work in the past in cities he's policed, but the idea that you have to be "diverse" to me continues to drive a wedge between people by implying that they are incapable of understanding what is legal and what isn't unless someone of their color/race/ethnicity/religion/etc. tells them so.  Thus we resort to the cop-out of having someone of the same color/ethnicity/religion/etc. arrest them so no one can claim we're being racist for hauling someone's ass to jail for committing a crime. 

In an ideal world, it shouldn't matter what color you are, if you're breaking the law you should be arrested and subjected to the judicial process.  A brick thrown through a storefront window to commit a robbery is still a crime whether you are white, black, brown, yellow, green Christian, Muslim, Hindu, whatever.

Unfortunately, western society curls up into a fetal position when someone plays the race card and claims you're violating their rights when you arrest them for brick throwing because of their color/ethnicity/religion/etc.  No one ever seems to play the card back to them, and asks, "Why do we have to bend our society to your beliefs and culture when you have so little respect for ours?" 

Sadly for Great Britain, hiring more 'Asians' on the police force is not going to solve their riot problems;  dealing with their welfare problem would go a lot further.

As in the United States, perhaps people would be less likely to engage in random violence if they were too busy working for a living.

The New Pravda

In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party's propaganda organ was called "Pravda."  Pravda is Russian for 'truth.'  (In fact, Pravda is still published even today.)  Why do I bring up this old relic of the Evil Empire?  Because the majority of the mainstream media behaves as if it is the propaganda organ of today's Democrat Party.  Rather than dig for the pravda, they see it as their task to protect the Party and it's leader, Barack Obama.  For example, after adding trillions in debt, refusing to cut government spending, and taking our nation to the brink of insolvency, who does the Democrat Party blame?  Why, the very people who have been demanding that the spending stop and the nation's financial house be put in order. 

From David Axelrod to John Kerry (who served in Viet Nam, by the way), the new mind virus being propagated through the mainstream media is that the Tea Party is responsible for the Standard and Poor's downgrade of the United States' credit rating.  Not the demented assclowns like Barney Frank and Christopher Dodd who passed legislation forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make loans to people who couldn't pay them back (and which lending practices George W. Bush and the Republicans in Congress tried to halt--but were stopped by the Democrats because it's racist to not give money to poor people who can't pay it back), nor Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid who passed Obamacare and the near trillion dollar 'stimulus' package which failed to keep the unemployment rate from rising as promised, nor Barack Obama whose administration has added almost $4 trillion dollars to our national debt, more than all of the administrations before his combined... no, it's the people who demanded that the insanity stop and the credit cards be cut up.


And how has all of that government spending worked out for us in the past?  Take the "War on Poverty" begun by Democrat President Lyndon Johnson:

Since the beginning of the War on Poverty, government has spent $15.9 trillion (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dol­lars) on means-tested welfare. In comparison, the cost of all other wars in U.S. history was $6.4 trillion (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars).

Nice gesture on the government's part--no one wants to see people suffer.  You would think we had won by now.  Too bad that, after spending almost $16 trillion dollars, the poverty rate in the United States hasn't changed.

Blaming the Tea Party for the credit rating downgrade is like the rapist blaming the rape victim for what happened.  And instead of reminding people as to who really got them into this mess in the first place, the mainstream media does its best to bury the truth and and then turn its shovels to spreading manure.  It's those damned Republicans driven by Tea Party extremists demanding that spending be cut rather than raising taxes to keep feeding the vote-buying machine built by the Democrat Party. 

So what's next?  Will the Washington Post or New York Times start engaging in airbrushing inconvenient people out of photographs once they're no longer useful, like the Soviets did to failed cosmonauts in their space program?

 

Will we see Tim Geithner disappear from the cover of Newsweak?   At least Pravda was honest about its purpose, and didn't hide behind the veil of 'impartiality' and 'unbiased' reporting.

Photo Hat Tip: Wired

Arab Spring - More Unintended Consequences

Turkey's senior military leadership resigned en masse last week in protest of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's policies.  Turkey's military, the second largest military force in NATO, has long been the protector of the secular state created by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923.  It has conducted three coups since 1960, and pressured an Islamist-led government to resign in 1997.

Having learned from these prior examples, Erdogan took on the military early in his term, jailing many senior officers for plotting against the civilian, Islamist government (over 250 senior officers have been indicted and are awaiting trial).  This tactic put the military on the defensive and inhibited their ability to keep Islamic extremists in check.

As with Egypt and other Islamic countries in turmoil this past year, the rise of fundamentalist Islam will significantly change the Middle East--and not for the better.  The difference with Turkey is that we now have a nation with a capable modern military which will become increasingly more hostile to western beliefs and values.  Elections do not necessarily equate to freedom--as we will discover in Egypt later this year.

Most. Ethical. Administration. Evah!

It appears that the United States government is responsible for providing the means of murdering a yet unknown number of people in Mexico.  The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) Operation Fast and Furious was so out of control by November 2009 that it was singlehandedly arming the Sinaloa Cartel.

At one point, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives say guns sold under the program took just 24 hours to travel from a gun store in Phoenix to a crime scene in Mexico. ATF agents there pleaded for help but were told nothing about Fast and Furious, which was intended to let guns "walk" in order to track them to higher-profile traffickers.

 According to the Congressional Report, 

In late 2009, ATF officials stationed in Mexico began to notice a large volume of guns appearing there that were traced to the ATF’s Phoenix Field Division. These weapons were increasingly recovered in great numbers from violent crime scenes. ATF intelligence analysts alerted Darren Gil, Attaché to Mexico, and Carlos Canino, Deputy Attaché, about the abnormal number of weapons. Gil and Canino communicated their worries to leadership in Phoenix and Washington, D.C., only to be brushed aside. Furthermore, ATF personnel in Arizona denied ATF personnel in Mexico access to crucial information about the case, even though the operation directly involved their job duties and affected their host country.

Rather than share information, senior leadership within both ATF and the Department of Justice (DOJ) assured their representatives in Mexico that everything was “under control.” The growing number of weapons recovered in Mexico, however, indicated otherwise. Two recoveries of large numbers of weapons in November and December 2009 definitively demonstrated that Operation Fast and Furious weapons were heading to Mexico. In fact, to date, there have been 48 different recoveries of weapons in Mexico linked to Operation Fast and Furious.

ATF officials in Mexico continued to raise the alarm over the burgeoning number of weapons. By October 2010, the amount of seized and recovered weapons had “maxed out” space in the Phoenix Field Division evidence vault.1 Nevertheless, ATF and DOJ failed to share crucial details of Operation Fast and Furious with either their own employees stationed in Mexico or representatives of the Government of Mexico. ATF senior leadership allegedly feared that any such disclosure would compromise their investigation. Instead, ATF and DOJ leadership’s reluctance to share information may have only prolonged the flow of weapons from this straw purchasing ring into Mexico.

ATF leadership finally informed the Mexican office that the investigation would be shut down as early as July 2010. Operation Fast and Furious, however, continued through the rest of 2010. It ended only after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in December 2010 with weapons linked to this investigation. Only then did the ATF officials in Mexico discover the true nature of Operation Fast and Furious. Unfortunately, Mexico and the United States will have to live with the consequences of this program for years to come.

According to Fox News, ATF officials confirmed the murder of Mario Gonzales Rodriguez, brother of the Chihuahua attorney general, was with a gun obtained through the Fast and Furious program. (Thank goodness for that biased, right-wing, fascist, news organization Fox, as no other main stream media is covering this story. Makes you wonder what else they're not covering in the defense of their chosen one.  Remember this when you ask yourself how we could have gotten to the point of the economic disaster we're still experiencing--maybe if we had a media that actually worked instead of planting its lips fully around the sexual organs of the Democratic Party we might have been able to do something beforehand. But that's grist for another rant at another time.)

One of the ATF agents lied to during the operation by his ATF and DOJ superiors termed it "... the perfect storm of idiocy."  I call it just one more piece of evidence for the eventual impeachment trial--if this were a just world.

Hat tip:  Ace of Spades

Best. Foreign. Policy. Ever!

Syrian tanks continue to murder protesters in the city of Hama; the Muslim Brotherhood and extreme right Salafists have relegated the young, liberal democratic leaders of the revolt in Egypt to the sidelines; the Mexican military is engaged in open combat operations against Los Zetas drug traffickers/narcoterrorists in Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from the Texas city of Laredo; China downgrades U.S. credit rating; Iran continues its nuclear weapons program; the war in Libya continues, both in operations by the U.S. military and coverage blackout by the main stream media....

Ya know, we'd likely be better off if he just stayed on the golf course for the next year and a half.

Once More, With Feeling

Greetings, earthlings.  Yes, once again I was off on a trip and unable to blog.  I know this gets annoying, but look at it from my perspective--my outlet for insanity is blocked.

Lots of interesting things have been happening while I've been gone:  Military officers are defecting in Syria and siding with the protesters; we're still fighting in Libya for no reason whatsoever, but, because it's a Democrat-initiated war, not a peep from the main stream media; the cheese eating surrender monkeys inhabiting our Congress have once again refused to take their snouts out of the public trough and ignored the majority's cry to stop the spending; and so it goes.

Even though it hasn't gone into full effect yet, Obamacare continues its stranglehold on our economy.  The Heritage Foundation produced a sobering graphic demonstrating Obamacare's effect on employment:

You think it's bad now?  Just wait until the full force of Obamacare kicks in in 2013 (conveniently after his re-election bid) and the cheese eating surrender monkeys refuse to extend the Bush tax cuts... because the deficit is just so big, you know, we have to do something to raise money to pay it.

And for those of you who think it's only fair the 'rich' pay their 'fair share,' the top 1% of income earners already pay 39% of all income taxes...  the top 25% of income earners pay 86% of all income taxes... the top 50% of income earners pay over 97% of all income taxes. 

You know what I think is unfair?  That half of our country is just fine with living off of the other half.