Manufacturing a Consensus on Climate

(This blog was partly excerpted from the Wall Street Journal of 18 December 2009, page A25)
In 1985 I was listening to a speech at a Michigan State University graduation by the then president of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. Frank Press. Dr. Press’s main point was that the greatest challenge to useful science in the coming decades was plagiarism and falsification of data by “scientists” trying to justify the conclusions of their research. (fhttp://tinyurl.com/y8wo4kp)

Today, we are faced with so-called scientific data justifying the idea that CO2 is causing the warming of the earth to the great detriment of all earth’s inhabitants. These “scientists” are mainly located at the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit in Great Britain, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. Many scientists scattered all over the earth are vested in propagating the idea of global warming and it’s supposed cause, greenhouse gasses.

They have organized a systematic cover-up of data that indicates that the earth was actually warmer in the Medieval period than it is now. Furthermore, they fail to point out that there has been absolutely no evidence for surface or atmospheric warming in the last ten years. They also do not emphasize that the temperature on Mars and Jupiter’s moon, Europa have been rising in recent years.

The scientists are calling CO2 a pollutant. It is well known that market gardeners pump extra CO2 into their greenhouses to increase their crop yield. That hardly sounds like CO2 is a pollutant—rather, it is acting as a fertilizer!

We need to look carefully at “scientific” justification for global warming and the dangers of greenhouse gasses. Some of this data is just not good science.

Pay Benefits for Congressmen

Did you ever wonder what your Congressmen and Senators are paid? The answer is $165,200/ year, four times the median household income in the United States.

Another perk is that their pension benefits are out of this world. Last summer Congress passed a new Pension “Protection” Act, a bill that undermined the funding rules for pensions which significantly limits pension benefits. However, Congressional pensions were specifically exempt from these limitations.

After only five years on the job, Congressmen and Senators are entitled to a regular pension, bigger than almost all other federal workers' at the same pay and twice what a midlevel executive would expect. Their pensions rise regularly with the cost of living and can never be taken away — short of a conviction for espionage or treason-related offenses.

Health care benefits are also a generous perk for our Congressmen. Congressmen enjoy more than a dozen options in health insurance, including the prized indemnity plans only 3% of workers with coverage receive. On top of that, for an annual fee of $480, they can get just about all the medical attention they want at the Capitol Office of the Attending Physician, which has five doctors and a dozen assistants on call for routine checkups, tests, prescriptions, emergency care and mental health services. Who's paying for all this above the $420 each Congressman pays? Taxpayers, naturally, to the tune of at least $2.5 million this year alone.

This litany of fringe benefits goes on and on; and I recommend that you look at http://tinyurl.com/y8vyyy7 for more information on this subject.

A Venezuelan Nuclear Threat?

Remember Cuba 1962? Who would have thought that that little country could possibly be a serious threat to the United States? Double-speaking diplomats convinced the JFK administration that there was no danger—until a U-2 fly-over revealed soviet rocket silos being built on the island nation in abundance. The U.S. was caught unprepared for that situation; and heavy-handed government means had to be used to get the soviets to tear down the silos and ship them back to the U.S.S.R.

A very similar situation is building up in Venezuela today. Covert Iranian government operations are going on there according to intercepted memoranda. The memoranda are passing between the science and technology ministers of the two countries. The memoranda say that “the two parties agreed to cooperate in the field of nuclear technology.” The leaders of these two countries, Ahmadinijad and Hugo Chavez, have met eleven times recently. I wonder what they are talking about.

An Iranian “tractor factory” has been established in Ciudad Bolivar. A shipment of 22containers of “tractor parts” was intercepted in Turkey and officials report that the containers contained equipment and materials for setting up an explosives lab.

An Iranian “gold mine” has been established on the border of Venezuela and Guyana where one of the world’s richest supplies of uranium awaits excavation. Regular flights of an Airbus 340 travel to Damascus and Tehran. What do you think might be in those flights?

Americans had better wake up. There is trouble brewing in our next-door neighbor, Venezuela.

This article was excerpted from the Wall Street Journal 15 Dec 2009, page A19.

American Are Soft On War

Despite all the dangers in the world today, Americans are dragging their feet when it comes to defending our way of life with the sword. Unfortunately, war will always be a necessary fact of life—as long as human nature remains as it has since the beginning of recorded history. We seem eager to use Theodore Roosevelt’s admonition of 1903 in that we always want to “speak softly,” but for several reasons, we are reluctant to “carry a big stick” (or, we are, at least, reluctant to use it).

Western nations join America in this reluctance to fight for the things we value. The West cannot even get together to agree on sanctions against Iran when everyone knows that once Iran obtains nuclear weapons it will seriously threaten Israel and soon it will aim its rockets at Munich, Frankfurt, and Paris.

Why this reluctance? I think the main reason is that we, at home, eating pizza and sitting before our TV sets do not feel seriously threatened. A country will only fight for its way of life if it is being invaded, as America did during our revolution and after 9/11. But the fact that we do not actually have any foreign invader (yet) does not lessen our ultimate danger.

We, Westerners, need to realize that we are facing an enemy who does not value the lives of its fighters as we do. We cringe at reading about war casualties, and very rightly so. But our enemies think nothing about sending women and children into market places with suicide bombs strapped to their bodies. They think they can assure themselves a place in heaven by dying in a jihad for Allah. Our enemies’ philosophy of war, whether we like it or not, makes for effective tactics.

In asymmetric wars, such as we fight today, the ultimate winner is not the one who wins big battles—it is the side that remains in the field the longest and who is able to avoid losing its soldiers in pitched battles on a conventional battle field. That kind of tactic is exactly what the Taliban is using today in Afghanistan.

Despite our American distaste for war, we must realize that no war is won without paying attention to the old principle of warfare: It is impossible to win a war without putting foot soldiers on the enemies’ soil. American foot soldiers are in danger. We, as Americans, desiring to protect the freedoms we enjoy and desiring to spread those freedoms to other nations not so fortunate as we, must support those troops and believe in what they are doing for us!