I read this article before I found this web posting (scroll down to the about the 4^th posting or so) that thoroughly deconstructed it. I was preparing to tear it apart myself for the obvious and ridiculous inaccuracy of the headline and the dishonest attempt by AP to make a statement (war no good, surge no good, Bush idea no good) despite the preponderance of statements in the article that obviously contradict the AP’s preconceived point of view.

I am certain I could write about new examples of misleading, agenda driven news articles like this every single day, but the fact of the matter is that there are others out there like Accuracy in Media, Pajamas Media, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, and Pattericos Pontifications (www.patterico.com) who do much better jobs at this than I could ever hope to do.

Once you begin to pay attention to the blatant bias and inaccuracies inherent in the reports of your daily newspapers and mainstream TV news organizations you come to the realization that they think very little of your ability to discern the truth from propaganda. It’s really a very sorry state of affairs and it’s insulting.

I finally finished reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “A Team of Rivals”. It is the best historical book I have ever read and may be simply the best book, period, that I have ever read.

I was astonished by the amazingly regular discoveries of facts, extraordinary stories, and vivid perspective of historical events contained in this masterpiece. Of course, it is all real, which is what makes reading nonfiction so enthralling and fulfilling. It wasn’t imagined – it happened! Here is an excerpt relating Leo Tolstoy’s encounter with a tribal chieftain from the remote Caucuses region of southern Russia:

In 1908, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was a guest of a tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains”. Gathering his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for hours with tales of Alexander the Great, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as a rock…His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man!”

Abraham Lincoln was truly one of the world’s greatest leaders of all time. Read the book. It is big and long but it is magnificent!

Essential Questions to get Answers to About Global Warming

As you can tell from my most recent posting, I am not inclined to jump on the Al Gore Chicken Little global warming bandwagon anytime soon. Quite frankly I have never been impressed with the typical response a child or adolescent sometimes gives to their parents challenge or admonishment: it goes something like “because everyone is else is doing or wearing it” as the sole rationale justifying a youngsters desires to take a particular action.

Similarly, Gore claims that his position enjoys the strength of “scientific consensuses” and he simply refuses to debate challengers on that basis. He essentially is saying that basically, everyone else believes his global warming position is correct so you should too. In other words, it is conventional wisdom and you are unwise to be out of the mainstream. Just like Einstein, Copernicus, and Newton and thousands of other thinkers, inventers, and entrepreneurs were so admonished when they were agitating for acceptance of their “unconventional” beliefs.

Here are some of the questions that should be answered in your mind before you accept the conclusions generated by the global warming Chicken Littles:

1. Is the earth in a warming trend, or a cooling trend?
2. Is the answer to #1 due to naturally occurring repetitive cycles (10 in the last million years – roughly 90,000 years of cold and glaciation punctuated by roughly 10,000 years of warming and melting) or is it due to human causation?
3. If you contend it is due to human causation, how can you separate the human caused effect from the naturally occurring effect that is certainly occurring?
4. With less than 150 years of global temperature data collected from thermometers, how can scientist make strong statements that the last century has been the warmest on record for the last 1000 years when we have less than 2 centuries of such data?
5. Knowing that scientists rely on tree ring analysis, ice and sediment core samples to piece together estimates of global temperature prior to the 1800’s, how accurate are these temperature extrapolations compared to actual thermometer derived temperatures over the last 150 years.
6. Geologist know through fossil records and core samples, that at times in prehistory, Siberia and Alaska supported tropical like plant life, sea levels were over 60 meters higher than they are now, and that the earths climate has experienced drastic swings between periods of extreme glaciation and extreme warmth. Geologists and other scientist know that the earths climate last began warming up and glaciers began melting roughly 15,000 years ago at the end of the most recent ice age – way way before any human caused carbon footprint. Questions: Is the current warming trend simply a continuation of this most recent warming trend or has human activity somehow altered and worsened it?
7. If the current warming trend is not related to human activity but instead is simply the result of natural phenomenon, should humans still attempt to alter the climate of the earth to suit their desires or wishes?
8. If the current warming trend is related to human activity, what is the rationale for attempting to alter our climate? What is the desired end point or objective we would be striving to accomplish? (Average mean temp of? sea level increases limited to no more than 1 meter? A polar bear on every ice floe? What?)
9. Knowing that earths clouds comprises 96% of all greenhouses gases, and that cloud formation is highly correlate to cyclical solar activity and galactic radiation, and that a 1% increase in cloud cover would totally neutralize even a doubling of the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide, doesn’t if make sense to better study and model these phenomenon before launching into economy crippling and totally unproven carbon reduction measures?
10. How much should each of the world’s citizens be willing to pay to alter the climate?
11. Instead of paying to alter the climate, should we instead pay to be better able to adapt to the results of global warming? (levees, flood walls, irrigation systems, etc). In other words, where will we get the most useful benefits from our payments? Attempting to change the climate of the earth (never done before) or building better means to adapt to changing climate conditions (like we have successfully done throughout history up to this point in time)?
12. Why did the Clinton/Gore White House, refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol? Why did the US Senate unanimously pass a resolution (95-0) in 1999 urging non passage of the Kyoto Protocols?
13. Considering the fact that enormously costly carbon reduction policies would be put into place and be totally reliant on predictions generated from computer generated models, how are these models validated and rated in terms of their reliability and accuracy?
14. Finally, how can we be sure that carbon is the primary cause of global warming and not the well known scientifically accepted cyclical patterns of cooling and warming that the earth has experienced almost forever?

These are a few questions that one should ponder and require answers to before getting behind ridiculously expensive (and totally unproven in terms of altering the climate) carbon reduction policies and interventions.

I close with my mantra: The USA needs to aggressively and rapidly run towards alternative energy and away from fossil fuels but not because of the junk that Al Gore and others peddle. We need to do so to escape the clutches of unfriendly oil producing nations that threaten our long term national interests.

Global Warming: Politics and Conflict of Interest Obscure the Facts

As you read in my recent posting on this subject, I point out that the earth has been warming and cooling seemingly forever. To assume that this time around it’s different and that the warming trend is due to the greed and rapacious capitalist sins of industrialized, fossil fuel burning Westerners is simply irrational.

Enemies of the West, ecozealots, radical environmentalists, and the sort, regularly employ computer modeled worst case scenarios and irrational thinking to drive their anti-America political agendas. But shouting out misinformation repeatedly, over and over and over, and getting Americas newspapers to act as megaphones to parrot such tripe, doesn’t make it true. It just makes it highly visible but it doesn’t make it true.

Why, one might ask, do our enemies and detractors want America to behave according to Kyoto Protocol standards? The simple answer is that adherence to the Kyoto Protocol requirements would damage our economy and ultimately weaken our nation. And to what purpose or end would America and the rest of the world (except for India and China which is about 1/3 of the rest of the world that is exempt!) willingly subject itself to the controls and economic constraints inherent in the treaty?

Get this! If all of the carbon reduction targets identified in the Kyoto Protocol were actually met, the overall reduction in average global temperature would be 0.2 degrees C! Or, said another way, the temperature change that we would have experienced in 2094 would instead be experienced in 2100. We get 6 years of delayed impact!

By the way, aren’t you just a little skeptical when so called global climate experts piously justify the establishment of carbon reduction public policy decisions on the basis of computer generated models purporting to show deleterious climatic changes 100 years from now but, the weather 30 days from now remains notoriously inaccurately forecasted? This is essentially the same body of experts who spectacularly wrongly predicted that 2006 was going to be the “mother of all hurricane years” in the US. In reality it was one of the quietest hurricane seasons in many decades. For crying out loud! Will someone please explain to me how we are to believe that this crowd of scientists can accurately and confidently model global climatic changes 100 years out but somehow an accurate and dependable 30 day forecast remains an elusive and mystifying challenge?

Scientist like Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D, Ph. D.Sc., believe that global warming is caused by fluctuations in solar activity, other solar phenomenon associated with changes in the earths tilt that occur over tens of thousands of year cycles, and variations in cloud cover (water vapor is 96% of all earths greenhouse gases) caused by cosmic radiation from far away galaxies. This article is long but it is fascinating, factual, and really lays out the entire issue for the uninitiated or the person who would like to get up to speed quickly and through a trustworthy source.

Consider the fact that water vapor comprises anywhere from 96% to 99% of all greenhouse gases thus leaving “public enemy #1”,carbon dioxide, a measly 3% at most. Consider the fact that of that 3%, human caused carbon emissions account for no more than 0.5% at most. One article stated that a 1% increase in earths cloud cover would completely overwhelm any possible greenhouse warming effect up to even a doubling of the earths current carbon dioxide greenhouse gases.

There is nothing worse in business than to have observed a problem and then, in the rush to solve the problem, employ a costly, resource draining fix only to discover that it was not really the cause of the problem. Time and money is wasted on the wrong thing and to add salt to the wound, the problem still exists! Quality Improvement experts see this all the time and thus have developed specific disciplines and structures to avoid this particular, and often time’s, fatal mistake.

We seem to be lurching in a lemming like trance, toward the devouring abyss of feel good (save the planet!), wrongheaded thinking. Leading the way to the precipice are traditional media megaphones, political buffoons like Al Gore and certain politically correct, and financially conflicted academicians ($5 billion in research grants to loose) who have locked arms in a collective pied piper like, self delusional embrace.

If their thinking and policies are empowered through legislation and treaty, a large part of the world will find themselves to be involuntarily enrolled in their foolish but damaging experiment to manage the earth’s climate, only to find that the ever changing climate of the globe is subject to far greater and more powerful initial conditions than fossil fuel emissions. And by then, say in 2100 or so, we might very well be back on the Music Man like bandwagon of the 1970’s global cooling wannabe Nostradamus’s, singing through clenched and shivering jaws “we got trouble, yes we got trouble, with a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for COLD with a whole lot of ice coming at us”.

Beware the carbon stoked rage of ecozeolet Chicken Littles that torment us now with their incessantly shrill warnings of impending climatic cataclysm. The Dr. Kevorkian like cure they have in mind for our global economy is deadly serious business. Pay attention to the debate and pray for reason to prevail.

Climate Change Baloney

Man, I wish I had written this article. This has been on my mind for years and Mr. Kohlmayer absolutely hits the nail on the head.

Like Kohlmayer, I have never bought into all of this junk talk about humankind being the most significant cause for the latest cycle of global climate change.  I learned about the precession of the earth’s axis many years ago and have known about ice ages since I was a child, as I’m sure most of you have.

Wait a minute! I just wrote the phrase ice ages using the plural ages. That’s because there have been 10 periods of massive glaciations on the earth over the last 1 million years or so (and many more before that stretching back for eons of time). That means of course, that over the same time period there have been 10 periods of global warming on the earth as well. And everyone knows that humankinds carbon footprint has only left it’s historical impression over the last few thousand years. Giving the “Al Gore” alarmist the benefit of the doubt by assuming humans have something to do with this last warming period, how does one explain all of the preceding warming periods where humans were essentially completely uninvolved? Hmmmmm…

We once lived in a town in Minnesota where you could easily see the results of where the edge of one of the last ice age glaciers had been. The line of hills and string of lakes were like a roadmap tracing the outline of the ice sheet edge. It just so happens that the edge of this last ice sheet, or moraine, is thousands of miles south of the current polar ice sheets southern edge. It makes you realize that earth must have been warming and melting ice for a long time for the last glacier to have retreated that far! Actually scientists think the last global warming trend began about 15,000 years ago. Hmmmmm….

The current hysteria over global warming is now reaching the realm of the absurd. Al Gore and his like minded ecozealots personify perhaps humankind’s most bizarre and extreme manifestation of conceit and hubris ever seen in history. What they talk about doing makes the Tower of Babel look like child’s play.

Now, certain humans immodestly believe that they can change the weather of the entire earth to suit our wishes and desires! How do they say we do that? It’s simple. Stop burning fossil fuel; meaning, stop driving, flying, heating, making, producing, developing, competing, etc. This cure seems to be outrageously impractical at best and just plain nutty at worst?

And here’s what makes it even nuttier – there is no firm evidence to prove that the cure will do anything at all to change the warming and cooling cycles induced by the fluctuations in the tilt of the earths axis that have been a part of the earths history forever! The theoretical, and computer modeled cure, is likely to kill the patient, the worldwide global economy, and then what? The earth will eventually get real cold and ice up as it has always done and then it will get real warm and flood as it has always done and then… it will happen again.

Now, make no mistake about it. I am a strong believer in moving aggressively away from our current reliance on fossil fuels and toward embracing alternative energy. But my attitude has nothing at all to do with global warming and everything to do with concerns for the geopolitical strength and security of the nation. The sooner we stop transferring wealth to despotic Middle Eastern nations that finance and support our Islamic Fascist enemies, the better off our noble nation will be.  

By virtue of the recent elections and the constant alarmist propaganda from the global warming chicken littles, we have unleashed aggressively foolish political simpletons like Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, to push legislation intended to protect us from ourselves (that’s what Democrats like to do, protect us from ourselves!). Just as medieval Europeans prayed to God for protection from the ravages of the feared Mongol Hordes, I think it is now about time to begin asking for Gods protection from the stridently wrongheaded plans of the global warming nuts.  

Get educated on the facts. The people driving the global warming hysterics have highly politicized agendas that, by and large, are not friendly to the West or of practical help to the world. Despite Al Gore’s claim to the contrary, the question is not settled and scores of prominent dissident scientists are publishing works that debunk many of the global warming crowds’ basic assumptions. Google search, global warming or climate change or precession of the axis for starters and educate yourself.

The stakes are enormous because if the global warming ecozealots gain the upper hand in the legislative arena we are in for big trouble. What will add salt to the wound is that the earth will still get cold and warm up like it has always done. Our modern day “Tower of Babel”, the looming global warming cure, will be manifested in shattered economies and result in the retreat of civilization.

Humans have, through history, convincingly demonstrated their profound abilities to adapt to the inevitable and inexorable fluctuations in global climate. However, our history of escaping the clutches of irrational and corrupt thinking (communism, fascism, Nazism, monarchism, Islamic fascism, and socialism) is quite dismal. Don’t let it happen. Push back and educate yourself.

American Military: A Few Facts

The next time you hear Al Sharpton, John Kerry, or others make misleading claims about the American Military remember just a few facts. 1. The American Military is an all volunteer force that is consistently meeting its recruiting goals in terms of numbers of new recruits. 2. Reenlistment remains extraordinarily high. 3. Despite fabrications from the antimilitary types, the fact is that military recruiting numbers are disproportionately higher from the wealthier component of American society and disproportionately lower from the least wealthy component of our society – exactly the opposite of what people like Sharpton claim.

Read this well researched article by Russell Beland and Curtis Gilroy. An Excerpt is below.

Far from being concentrated among the poorly educated and economically disadvantaged, military recruits, the data show, represent the best of America's youth. More than 90 percent of recruits have high school diplomas, compared with 80 percent of American youth overall. About two-thirds of today's recruits score in the upper half of standardized aptitude tests. Military recruits are also more physically fit than American youth in general, and they are subject to strict character screening.