I Like Guns - Steve Lee

HT: TigerHawk

A license to sell your home

Cap and Trade: A License Required for your Home

Thinking about selling your house - A look at H.R. 2454 (Cap and trade bill) This is unbelievable!


Only the beginning from this administration! Home owners take note & tell your friends and relatives who are home owners!

Beginning 1 year after enactment of the Cap and Trade Act, you won't be able to sell your home unless you retrofit it to comply with the energy and water efficiency standards of this Act. H.R. 2454, the "Cap & Trade" bill passed by the House of Representatives, if also passed by the Senate, will be the largest tax increase any of us has ever experienced.

The Congressional Budget Office (supposedly non-partisan) estimates that in just a few years the average cost to every family of four will be $6,800 per year.

* No one is excluded.

However, once the lower classes feel the pinch in their wallets, you can be sure these voters get a tax refund (even if they pay no taxes at all) to offset this new cost. Thus, you Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class America will have to pay even more since additional tax dollars will be needed to bail out everyone else.


But wait. This awful bill (that no one in Congress has actually read) has many more surprises in it. Probably the worst one is this:

* A year from now you won't be able to sell your house. Yes, you read that right.

The caveat is (there always is a caveat) that if you have enough money to make required major upgrades to your home, then you can sell it. But, if not, then forget it. Even pre-fabricated homes ("mobile homes") are included.

* In effect, this bill prevents you from selling your home without the permission of the EPA administrator.
* To get this permission, you will have to have the energy efficiency of your home measured.
* Then the government will tell you what your new energy efficiency requirement is and you will be forced to make modifications to your home under the retrofit provisions of this Act to comply with the new energy and water efficiency requirements.
* Then you will have to get your home measured again and get a license (called a "label" in the Act) that must be posted on your property to show what your efficiency rating is; sort of like the Energy Star efficiency rating label on your refrigerator or air conditioner.
* If you don't get a high enough rating, you can't sell. And, the EPA administrator is authorized to raise the standards every year, even above the automatic energy efficiency increases built into the Act.

The EPA administrator, appointed by the President, will run the Cap & Trade program (AKA the "American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009") and is authorized to make any future changes to the regulations and standards he alone determines to be in the government's best interest. Requirements are set low initial y so the bill will pass Congress; then the Administrator can set much tougher new standards every year.

* The Act itself contains annual required increases in energy efficiency for private and commercial residences and buildings.
* However, the EPA administrator can set higher standards at any time.

First seen here: GREENIE WATCH

Howard Bloom: Climate Change Is Nature's Way - WSJ.com

Well explained ...

Howard Bloom: Climate Change Is Nature's Way - WSJ.com

Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet's climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?

Climate change is not the fault of man. It's Mother Nature's way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

We've been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

The stroke of luck that's misled us? The sheets of ice in whose shadow we made a living for two million years peeled back 12,000 years ago leaving a lush new Garden of Eden. In that Eden we invented agriculture, money, electronics and our current way of life. But that weather standstill has held on for an abnormally long amount of time. And it's very likely that this atypical weather truce shall someday pass.

Why? What's the real cause of the Earth's norm—a climate that rocks back and forth from steamy tropical heat to icy freeze? A climate that deposits fossilized seashells on mountaintops and makes dry land into seas and swamps?

From NIMBY to BANANA: "Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody"

Eco-Hypocrites II « John Stossel

California's Mojave Desert was to be the site of 13 solar plants and wind farms -- creating those "green energy" jobs that we're told will save both the planet and the economy. But Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein plans to prevent that with a bill to block development of a million acres of the Mojave. The New York Times quotes a well-known environmentalist who has a problem with that.

This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Senator Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist and a partner with a venture capital firm that invested in a solar developer called BrightSource Energy. In September, BrightSource canceled a large project in the monument area.

That's the same Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who wrote an editorial in the New York Times protesting the construction of a wind farm off his family's compound on Nantucket Sound. His uncle, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, tied up the Cape Wind project for years with costly regulatory challenges. Curiously, the Times doesn’t mention that.

The Heritage Foundation says the "Not In My Back Yard" (NIMBY) crowd is everywhere.

It’s not just anti-oil and anti-coal, it’s anti-energy and anti-development.

Even with subsidies, tax breaks and mandates, shifting our energy away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy will be a prohibitively costly and difficult task. Senator Feinstein is about to make it that much more difficult.

In some places the attitude has moved beyond NIMBY to BANANA -- Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody.

Apparently these eco-hypocrites only want to save the world if solar and wind farms are built where they cannot see them.

Then They Came for the Toilet Paper and I Did Not Speak Out -- John Stossel

Amusing, and not at all surprising.  A couple of useful links in the Stossel story:

Then They Came for the Toilet Paper and I Did Not Speak Out « John Stossel

Having solved the rest of the world's problems, environmental groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club have turned their attention to our toilet paper. As you might expect, they don't like soft toilet paper. They think it's too soft.

Why should Americans use luxurious toilet paper made from old-growth trees when much of the world gets by with a far more basic and often recycled product?...

Mountains of paper are dumped every day into recycling bins in homes, offices, factories and schools. Use that to make toilet paper, the activists said.

Charmin, Cottonelle, Angel Soft and Quilted Northern are the worst offenders, according to Greenpeace. Apparently the environmental group, after helping to kill millions of children through its campaign to ban malaria-preventing DDT has enough time on its hands to come up with a "toilet paper guide." If you like soft toilet paper, tough.

It's always something. Meddling busybodies always try to insinuate themselves into our lives. Even locking yourself in the bathroom won't help.

Howard Bloom: Climate Change Is Nature's Way - WSJ.com

Well explained ...

Howard Bloom: Climate Change Is Nature's Way - WSJ.com

Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet's climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?

Climate change is not the fault of man. It's Mother Nature's way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

We've been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

The stroke of luck that's misled us? The sheets of ice in whose shadow we made a living for two million years peeled back 12,000 years ago leaving a lush new Garden of Eden. In that Eden we invented agriculture, money, electronics and our current way of life. But that weather standstill has held on for an abnormally long amount of time. And it's very likely that this atypical weather truce shall someday pass.

Why? What's the real cause of the Earth's norm—a climate that rocks back and forth from steamy tropical heat to icy freeze? A climate that deposits fossilized seashells on mountaintops and makes dry land into seas and swamps?

Howard Bloom: Climate Change Is Nature's Way - WSJ.com

Howard Bloom: Climate Change Is Nature's Way - WSJ.com

Climate change activists are right. We are in for walloping shifts in the planet's climate. Catastrophic shifts. But the activists are wrong about the reason. Very wrong. And the prescription for a solution—a $27 trillion solution—is likely to be even more wrong. Why?

Climate change is not the fault of man. It's Mother Nature's way. And sucking greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is too limited a solution. We have to be prepared for fire or ice, for fry or freeze. We have to be prepared for change.

We've been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we've lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

The stroke of luck that's misled us? The sheets of ice in whose shadow we made a living for two million years peeled back 12,000 years ago leaving a lush new Garden of Eden. In that Eden we invented agriculture, money, electronics and our current way of life. But that weather standstill has held on for an abnormally long amount of time. And it's very likely that this atypical weather truce shall someday pass.

Why? What's the real cause of the Earth's norm—a climate that rocks back and forth from steamy tropical heat to icy freeze? A climate that deposits fossilized seashells on mountaintops and makes dry land into seas and swamps?

The Earth is a traveler. Its angle as it sweeps around the sun produces the massive weather flips we call seasons—the dance from summer to winter and back again. But there's more. Our planet has a peculiar wobble—its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. This is called the Milankovich cycle, named for the Serbian engineer and geophysicist who discovered it.

...Meanwhile, the sun itself is going through a cycle from birth to death. As a result of its maturation, good old reliable sol is 43% warmer today than it was when the Earth first gathered itself into a globe of planetesimals 4.5 billion years ago.

The bottom line? Weather changes and the occasional meteor have tossed this planet through roughly 142 mass extinctions since life began 3.85 billion years ago. That's an average of one mass extinction every 26.5 million years. Where did these mass die-offs come from? Nature. There were no human capitalists, industrialists or cultures of consumerism to blame.

We do not want to be the victims of one of these extinctions. Nor do we want to see whales, elephants and pandas go the way of trilobites and dinosaurs. We need to prepare for far more than just the changes we think we make. We need to prepare for the challenge that forced us to evolve into our modern, highly adaptable form. We have to realize that nature tosses us tests, and that we grow by outwitting her. We have to prepare for fire and ice. And we have to realize that Mother Nature is not nice.

Dumb Looks Still Free: What I saw at the Revolution

My studies were just a little before this time -- got my AB in Geology in 1974 and my MS in Geophysics in 1980 (about -- my memory is a little fuzzy on the exact date ;-), but I remember these days, and this is why I have *_ALWAYS_* been skeptical of the theories of Anthropogenic Global Warming.  This is a great blog post that all geologists (make that all geoSCIENTISTS) should read:

Dumb Looks Still Free: What I saw at the Revolution

I have been very fortunate to be at the outskirts of two major revolutions in science while getting my Bachelor's degree. Each of them were very memorable as they showed a side of science that those outside of it do not see and often cannot fathom. Doing science from the inside is not what you see on the outside, and no program, no speech, no series of papers or even books can describe the actual living through of scientific revolutions. As it was in a period of a few years two major changes in geology and materials science would happen during a short span in the 1980's. What science is and how it works changed my perception of it during those few short years of undergraduate work and they remain with me to this day.

...

Those papers were the norm in science, but the takedown of the critics by pure analysis and reason was something that was hard hitting.

The Alvarez team did NOT hide data, but welcomed it.

The Alvarez team did NOT engage in personal attacks, but examined the data and criticized it.

The Alvarez team did NOT attempt to suborn journals and periodicals or try to create an in-group that would just check each other.

They welcomed every critic with data, every analysis and proposed alternatives, they welcomed, and I suspect with glee, being able to respond to their critics openly in the forum of scientific investigation.

It was brutal.

...

This brings me to the recent activity in Climategate.

As a geologist, though not a current practicing one, I went through two Revolutions in the sciences: K-T Impact Theory and higher temperature superconductivity. Their hallmarks are touchstones in science as a whole, as they represent openness, welcoming of criticism (indeed even reveling in it), and the open by-play of scientists and labs as they work to see what is and is not there in the way of what can be found from examination and analysis of specimens. The data gathered is critical to how science works, and the open display of it and willingness to hand it over to critics is something you don't get from much of anywhere else in life.

The very first warning signs on Antrhopogenic Global Warming (AGW) and just plain old GW came from the paleoclimatologists who tried to run the models made for AGW/GW against known climates and what those models would predict for those climates. The models came through with junk, not even getting close to the actual climates they were tested against. When the paleoclimatologists asked for the datasets from those pushing AGW (mainly EA CRU, but elsewhere) they were stalled and rebuffed. Coming just after the K-T event and its aftermath, paleoclimatologists were not slow in criticizing the models, how they did not form into anything resembling known past climates nor did the models explain how those climates changed.

AGW/GW advocates refused to come out an play in the full contact body sport that was geology.

They retreated to the hothouse of academia, environmentalism and seeking to 'extract' government grants for their perfect theory of how bad man was to planet Earth. Apparently they couldn't model how nasty Earth was to life forms during the Permo-Triassic that saw over 95% of all species perish... but then geologists don't put an anthropomorphic form of the Earth on a pedestal and worship her. If you DID anthropomorphize the planet it would come out looking far worse than Pol Pot and all other mass murderers, combined, with just a hint of Charles Manson thrown in for fun. But then those seeking to castigate man don't bother to look at Earth's history, either.

There is no single good source of science nor bad source of science: there is only good science and bad science.

Lysenko convinced Stalin that there was a 'Bourgeois' Science, that was BAD, and a 'Communist Science', that was GOOD. That moving of science into political ideology set the USSR back decades in genetics research which, given what they got up to in their later years, we can all be thankful for. Yet that marriage of politics and science that is Lysenkoism now runs deep in the West: environmentalists are above suspicion because of good intents, and those working in the petroleum industry are evil and not to be believed. Which is Lysenkoism, at its heart.

Science is simply getting reproducible results given a set of circumstances.

You can be funded by the worst possible institutions and still perform science, although it might be immoral (such as the Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners) which leaves you with a hard problem of what to do with methodical and repeatable results garnered by horrific and immoral means. Saying that you will give blanket trust to one scientist over another based on who funds them, outside of the Nazi example, means you are acting with a faith that there is good and bad science by its source. And that is Lysenkoism.

Do I 'trust' work done by environmentalist groups?

Show me the data, tell me the parameters and I will test that against the knowns of science and see how it stacks up.

But then I do the EXACT SAME THING with research from ANY source be it government, private, commercial... I may read results for interest in them, but they need to be cross-compared to other work in the field. Yet when any field is being tampered with by researchers seeking to shut some researchers out and only 'allow' others to be published and then seek to 'punish' journals that don't follow their wishes, I have problems. And when the groups doing that are backed by governments and 'international' groups, those become extreme problems.

EA CRU refused to show their data for decades.

They didn't welcome criticism nor engage with critics and examine data outside their realm of knowledge.

They, and their associates, attempted to stifle private and government inquiry, beyond that of their scientific peers, and shut down the free-flow of information that, like in superconductive research, is the life blood of science.

When heads of government agency collude to stymie that free flow of information, as has happened with both NASA/Goddard and NOAA, you get a chilling effect on the free flow of information by the use of the threat of government power, even if there is no reality to it.

Is there 'global warming'?

I certainly hope so as there is a marked difference in global temps between now and 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age.

Is what we are seeing human caused?

So far as I can see by all data from previous inter-glacial periods: nothing we see now is out of the ordinary. That 'ordinary' typically sees rapid and sudden swings in global temps up and down and there is no good model for it. As no values of measured atmospherics or temps are outside of previous inter-glacial periods, I would say we are within all norms for such periods. If it is 'human caused' it is not outside of those norms. Get back to me when there is better data. EA CRU lost a lot of current stuff and it needs to be re-gathered. Ditto on our government agencies.

Are we a threat to all species?

See the Permo-Triassic above? Earth is a threat to all species. Stop idolizing Mother Earth and demonizing humans as you are doing yourself no good running into the arms of a killer and away from those offering a chance at a better life. I trust Mother Earth to pay ZERO attention to mankind and continue on her normal state of affairs which includes a number of large scale disasters that WILL happen with or without us hanging around, and a few of them just might be OUR silver bullet with OUR name on it. I would like to get out of the clutches of Mother Earth, thanks. The planet needs no saving.

But isn't it right to assume that the Earth is warming?

Show me the data. EA CRU in their own files admit they can no longer: 1) Produce uncorrupted data sets, 2) repeat previous runs on data to get reproducible results, 3) have cherry picked data sets to get certain results. They now have papers with no underlying data, no way to reproduce the results and with artifacts of selectively chosen data sets that are not representative of larger data sets. That is not a good thing to base an assumption upon as it is indicative of fraud, not openness of scientific research. When fraud takes place you default to the last known good state prior to the fraud if you can. Here that means relegating a raft of papers to limbo until they can be re-analyzed. Anything based on the corrupted EA CRU, GISS or NOAA data sets past 1960 are now suspect and not to be considered valid until they are thoroughly re-analyzed in light of current findings. Papers without data, without backing and that cannot be repeated to get valid results are not papers that can be considered doing science. Science is a full contact body sport, no handicapping allowed. No padding either. The Alvarez team is one that I admire deeply as they waded right into the fray and defended themselves in the open process of science, and didn't resort to popular TV to make their case, nor to politicians, nor to issue advocacy groups. The Alvarez team did SCIENCE and joyously. Too bad the AGW/GW advocates can't do that and wish to stifle the free flow of information. That gets you where the USSR is today.

And that is not a good place.

EU Cap-and-Trade trading dominated by organized crime

Why am I not surprised?

FOXNews.com - Fraud in Europe's Cap and Trade System a 'Red Flag,' Critics Say

The top cops in Europe say carbon-trading has fallen prey to an organized crime scheme that has robbed the continent of $7.4 billion -- a massive fraud that lawmakers and energy experts say should send a "red flag" to the U.S., where the House approved cap-and-trade legislation over the summer amid stiff opposition.

In a statement released last week, the Europol police agency said Europe's cap-and-trade system has been the victim of organized crime during the past 18 months, resulting in losses of roughly $7.4 billion. The agency, headquartered in the Netherlands, estimated that in some countries up to 90 percent of the entire market volume was caused by fraudulent activities.

ESR: Copenhagen Conference Crashes

I couldn't have said it better than Eric S. Raymond does:

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Copenhagen Conference Crashes

Well, it’s happened. The Copenhagen climate conference has concluded with a three-page fig-leaf over its naked failure that even the New York Times can’t spin as good news for the AGW alarmists. It’s kind of entertaining to watch them try, actually, but the glum tone of the report is palpable.

The best laugh line from the article is that President Obama left before the vote on the document because he wanted to get back to Washington ahead of a major snowstorm. Yeah, I know, weather not climate, but it’s still funny. Good thing Al Gore cancelled or they’d probably be trying to dig out from under record accumulation.

I won’t say this was the best possible outcome from Copenhagen; the best possible outcome would have been an outright PR disaster that wrecked the careers of everyone even remotely connected with this boondoggle. And yes, on a sane planet the fact that they invited Robert Mugabe, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez to speak would have been that PR disaster; cripes, were they trying for the thug-tyrant trifecta? But having all that sound and fury add up to a big fat nothing is excellent.

It’s excellent because, by the time the kleptocrat gang at the UN can wind up for another try, the likelihood is that the “scientific” support for their AGW scam will have been entirely exposed as a tissue of fraud. That’s the way things seem to be heading, anyway. Faster, please!

The Second Amendment: it protects the other Rights in the Bill of Rights

An unarmed man is not a citizen, he is a subject.

Tucson Sammy » Blog Archive » Tucson Celebrates Bill of Rights Day

Charles Heller, host of the “Swap Shop” and “Liberty Watch” radio shows heard on KVOI 1030 AM, and all around good guy, arranged the event and acted as the moderator. The food was catered by Fourth Avenue Delectables; it was fantastic. Folks volunteered to take turns reading the amendments, including the preamble. After each was read aloud, it was discussed.

At one point, Charles asked Ken Rineer to read the second amendment of the constitution. Ken recited from memory, “The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself or the state shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals or corporations to organize maintain or employ an armed body of men.” There was much smiling, and some chuckling, as the folks in the room recognized his recitation as not the second amendment of the United States constitution, but rather the equivalent in the State of Arizona constitution (Article II, Section 26) – as you can see, a much stronger statement than the federal version. Most states have there own version of a statement of rights in the their respective constitutions similar to the federal Bill of Rights.

If you're a vegan, well too bad...

Seen online at a password-protected site:

There has been an argument for years as to when and why human brains started to grow large. The early hominids had brains no bigger than a chimp. One argument was that the brain got big then we started to walk because that freed the hands and the use of the hands forced the brain to develop. That is all very Lamarckian which should have made people wonder. But the fossils now show hominids walking well before the brain developed. Ardipithicus ramidus kadabba walked on two feet 5.2 million years ago but still had the brain of a chimp. It wasn't a free hand that caused the brain to develop. What the archeologists have found was that the brain began to get big after the early hominids started eating large amounts of meat.

A brain needs a lot of high quality protein and energy. A big brain needs even more. Once our ancestors starting eating more meat, the protein and energy was available to support a big brain. We got smart once we started eating meat. Vegetarianism is a decadent sign of civilized man's disconnect from nature. Vegetarians in Nature are dumb prey. I don't need to make the obvious commentary that goes with this. If you eat meat you should be smart enough to figure this out and if you are vegan, well, too bad: next time I'll use really small words. I will just comment that scientists have now looked at vegans and found that the low quality foods they eat does cause shrinkage of the brain, like that isn't obvious. With all the PETA leaders being vegans, their political antics make sense.

Hat-tip to "Rod O'Steele" ...

Armed and Dangerous: From Russia, with Love

Eric Raymond, one of my favorite geek-libertarians, has a few choice words for the AGW proponents in his blog Armed and Dangerous:

From Russia, with love

Oh, it just keeps getting better. As the Copenhagen conference collapses, word comes from Russia that the Moscow-based Institute for Economic Analysis has found evidence of skulduggery and fraud in the CRU’s treatment of Russian climate data.

This story from Kommersant, via Novosti, seems to be a close to a primary source as we can get in English. ...

For those coming in late, we’re not talking about tree-ring measurements and paleioclimate here. These are the surface-temperature measurements that the IPCC relied on most heavily in its apocalyptic we’re-all-gonna-fry projections.

And now it looks like the “team” and their allies have been caught playing fraudulent games with that data. No surprise to me; reports of cherrypicking and suspiciously convenient “adjustments” have been coming in from Australia, New Zealand, and China over the last week.

Climategate isn’t over. Oh, no indeed – these reports strongly suggest the most damaging revelations are still to come, when people start doing serious auditing of the “homogenized, value-added” data in comparison with raw datasets from real stations.

I think we’re going to find that the scale of active fraud by the AGW-alarmist crowd will dumbfound almost everybody. Well, almost everybody except me. I’ll be the guy cackling madly and yelling “I told you so!”

If you think Private Industry is short-sighted, look at politicians

Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » San Francisco: Progressive Paradise or Bankrupt Banana Republic?

I always laugh when folks tell me that government intervention is needed because private industry is too short term oriented. But no one is more short term oriented than politicians looking to the next election or closing this year’s budget hole. In particular, capital maintenance is always ignored until infrastructure is literally falling apart. We see it in parks, transit systems, roads, schools, etc. It is the same phenomenon that causes third world state-run oil companies to have their production fall off – instead of reinvesting their profits into upgrades and maintenace of their fields and infrastructure (as those short-term focused American oil companies do) they transfer the money into social giveaways that cement their political power.

Peter Taylor lecture on the real cause of global warming

Fascinating lecture if you can take the time to watch it.

» Lecture on Global Warming. It’s the Sun. Dvorak Uncensored: General interest observations and true web-log.

This guy is a research analyst who does the most wonkish job of slamming global warming fears thus far. This lecture is from 2008. About one hour long.

Update Wednesday, 16 Dec 2009
Here's a shorter Q&A session of his: Peter Taylor - Climate Change Video

What choice will you have with health care?

Well said ...

Government v. The Market | QandO

... the burger at Jack in the Box is safer than the mystery meat your child is served at school. Children are served tons of chicken in school each year that KFC won’t touch (KFC doesn’t do “spent hens” but your child does).

Jack in the Box and KFC have to please and answer to customer demands if they want to stay in business. If KFC makes you sick because of bacteria, you and others will most likely vote with your feet and go elsewhere. What is your choice if that happens in a government school?

Now, think health care.

Reid’s Compromise Plan – More Costly To Taxpayers | QandO

... why are many Democrats so “enthusiastic” over the proposal. Well, let’s knock off all the spin and be blunt about it:

“Extending this successful program to those between 55 and 64 would be the largest expansion of Medicare in 44 years and would perhaps get us on the path to a single-payer model,” said Representative Anthony Weiner, Democrat of New York.

That is the name of the game here and don’t ever loose sight of that. Liberals want a government run single-payer system. And whether they get there via a “public option” or expanding Medicare doesn’t matter one whit to them.

The Sun, Cosmic Rays, Clouds And All Of That …

This is one of the main reasons I am skeptical about AGW theory.

The Sun, Cosmic Rays, Clouds And All Of That … | QandO

Which leaves me asking – again – how can such “science” that disregards the sun’s effect and raises an 800 year lagging effect (CO2) into a “cause” be taken seriously by intelligent and seemingly rational adults? Forget “consensus” and “conspiracy”. How did the Sun get ignored and CO2 changed from effect to “cause” in this hypothesis which can’t be reproduced?

Espresso Pundit: UofA's Malcolm Hughes responds ...

If you live in Arizona or went to the UofA, this might be of local interest. One of the emailers exposed in ClimateGate is a UofA prof, and here's some news about his response to a local reporter's questioning:

Arizona's Own Espresso Pundit: Malcolm Hughes Responds

The local media is starting to engage on the Climate Gate scandal. Nearly three weeks ago, I pointed out that the UA’s Malcolm Hughes was one of a handful of recipients of the now infamous “Hide the Decline” memo.

Kudos to the Star's Tony Davis who followed up my post by talking directly to Hughes

It's not looking good for the Tree Ring lab ...

Does the Second Amendment Apply in Chicago? - Reason Magazine

Does the Second Amendment Apply in Chicago? - Reason Magazine

Later this term, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in McDonald v. Chicago, a case that centers on whether the Windy City’s notorious handgun ban violates the 14th Amendment. As we’ll see, it most certainly does. The text of the 14th Amendment, the historical events leading to its adoption, the goals of its framers, and the statements of purpose made both by its supporters and by those who ratified it, all point in the exact same direction: The amendment was designed to secure individual rights—including the right of armed self-defense—against abusive state and local governments.

In the wake of the Civil War, the former Confederate states began passing a series of laws, ordinances, and regulations that robbed the recently freed slaves and their white allies of their political, economic, and civil rights, including the right to arms. Mississippi’s 1866 Black Code, for example, declared “that no freedman, free Negro, or mulatto…shall keep or carry firearms of any kind.” In other words, America’s original gun control laws were designed to disarm African Americans and leave them at the mercy of predatory state governments.

So the Radical Republicans of the 39th Congress responded with the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, and which was explicitly designed to secure the life, liberty, and property of all Americans from tyrannical state attack. One of the leading figures in this process was Rep. John Bingham of Ohio, the author of the 14th Amendment’s first section (quoted above). In a speech before the House of Representatives, Bingham explained that “the privileges and immunities” protected by the amendment “are chiefly defined in the first eight amendments to the Constitution.” That quite obviously includes the Second Amendment.

Similarly, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, who presented the 14th Amendment to the Senate, declared that its purpose was “to restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees,” including “the right to keep and to bear arms.” As the legal scholar Michael Kent Curtis writes in his masterful history No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights, both Bingham and Howard “clearly said that the amendment would require the states to obey the Bill of Rights. Not a single senator or congressman contradicted them.”

For its part, Chicago currently maintains that the Second Amendment should have zero authority over its gun control regime, arguing that the city should enjoy “the greatest flexibility to create and enforce firearms policy” and that “Firearms regulation is a quintessential issue on which state and local governments can ‘serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”’ But of course the Supreme Court would never allow Chicago to try a novel “experiment” like banning free speech, so why should the Second Amendment enjoy any less respect than the First Amendment does?

Indeed, as the libertarian Institute for Justice argues in the superb friend of the court brief it filed in the Chicago case, “To enslave a class of people requires three basic things: destroy their self-sufficiency, prevent them from fighting back, and silence any opposition. Southern states did all of those things both before and after the Civil War, and the point of the Fourteenth Amendment was to make them stop.”

By striking down Chicago’s draconian handgun ban, the Supreme Court has the chance to finally restore both the Second Amendment and the 14th Amendment to their rightful place in our constitutional system. Let’s hope the justices get it right.

Damon W. Root is an associate editor at Reason magazine. This article originally appeared at BigGovernment.com.

Today's Quick Links

Quick Links:

• Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Health Care Cost Control
  

  Good editorial today in the WSJ on the myth of government health care cost control:

• Chicago’s Thick Blue Wall | The Agitator
  

  My crime column for Reason this week look at the Chicago Police Department, which despite accumulating misconduct scandals continues to push for policies that make its officers less accountable to the public.

• Did the Stimulus Create Jobs? - Reason Magazine
  

  ... consider the Congressional Budget Office’s statement on page 9 of its report, Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output as of September 2009, that “it is impossible to determine how many of the reported jobs would have existed in the absence of the stimulus package.” It seems clear that for the sake of taxpayers and for the sake of job creation, a second stimulus is absolutely the wrong idea.

• Who Are The Deniers Now? Part II | QandO
  

  ... to those trying to wave away the scandal and pretend this isn’t “any big deal” it is you who are in denial now.

• Obama's False Economic Consensus - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine
  

  Successful stimulus relies almost entirely on cuts in business and income taxes. Failed stimulus relies mostly on increases in government spending. [...]
  
  A growing body of evidence suggests that traditional Keynesian nostrums might not be the best medicine.

  Obama is a political master at drawing boundaries around the "respectable" debate and marginalizing a swath of his critics as being beyond the pale. Will he succeed at doing it with economics, too? We only know that he will try.

• When Science Becomes a Casualty of Politics - Reason Magazine
  

  In the unfolding debate over "ClimateGate," the affair of the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia that offer an inconvenient peek behind the curtain of climate science, one thing is clear. Virtually every commentator's position on the issue—is this a scandal that exposes global warming as a scientific sham, or a faux scandal stoked by climate-change denial propaganda?—can be predicted by his or her politics. You can look at the byline or the publication, and predict with near-100 percent accuracy what the article will say. It is no surprise that The Wall Street Journal deplores the arrogant and dogmatic mindset of the "warmists," or that The New Republic assails the brazenness of the "deniers."

More bad news for the AGW crowd

The main-stream media is starting to find out about the faulty foundation underlying the AGW edifice.

BusinessDay - End ‘authority’ on climate change

Prof Bruce Hewitson (Uninformed vitriol, November 19) pontificates on Andrew Kenny’s assessment (Ideology and money drive global-warming religion, November 16). Unfortunately for him, there has been a reformation. The time for pontification is over. The critics must be answered. Instead Prof Hewitson stood in his pulpit and preached the gospel according to St IPCC.

He says he was a lead author for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). That is not material — I was a co-ordinating lead author, but it gives me no mantle of infallibility. Instead, it gave me insight into the flaws behind the whole process.

The IPCC claims that it has thousands of scientists and almost as many reviewers of the scientists' work to produce their reports. There are two problems, however. In the scientific world I move in, “review” means that your work is scrutinised by several independent, anonymous reviewers chosen by the editor.

However, when I entered the IPCC world, the reviewers were there at the worktable, criticising our drafts, and finally meeting with all us co-ordinators and many of the IPCC functionaries in a draftfest.

The product was not reviewed in the accepted sense of the word — there was no independence of review, and the reviewers were anything but anonymous. The result is not scientific.

.... The process is so flawed that the result is tantamount to fraud. As an authority, the IPCC should be consigned to the scrapheap without delay.
Dr Philip Lloyd Pr Eng

Read the whole article here: BusinessDay - End ‘authority’ on climate change.

Hat Tip: Christopher Horner  Big Government » Blog Archive » ClimateGate: This Can’t Help

AGW: What should we do about it?

Interesting way to look at the AGW issue:

Climate as an Indicator of Faith in Government » The Antiplanner

In short, the real issue is not, “Is anthropogenic climate change happening?” Even if they could decipher the science behind the debate, which few of them can, the answer to this question doesn’t even matter to either progressives or libertarians.

The real issue is, “What should we do about it?” Progressives want big-government solutions because they believe in such solutions with or without climate change. Libertarians oppose such solutions because they know government does far more harm than good even when the original intentions are sound.