Global warming conflicted

If you are interested in Global Warming, read this.

In its pamphlet, the Royal Society purports to speak on behalf of a consensus of scientists. But no such consensus exists. Direct polling of climate scientists has shown that about 30% are "skeptical" of anthropogenic global warming. More than 31,000 American scientists recently signed the Oregon Petition, which expresses doubt about the major conclusions of the IPCC, and opposes the drastic mitigation demands of the Kyoto Protocol and the proposed "cap-and-trade" legislation of the U.S. Congress.

And this is the most important thing you should know.

Mr. Singer, a professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, is the former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. As a reviewer of IPCC reports, he shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. His most recent book is "Unstoppable Global Warming — Every 1500 Years."

The GW warming argument is failing. In fact, Mr. Singer has split it in half.

Should we be making public policy based on what is conflicted and flawed science?

Surely not.

USA Today editorial catoon comment

USA Today has this editorial cartoon by Joe Heller this morning. It shows a guy filling up his camper while overlooking a cemetery of tombstones named.. Iraq, Korea, etc. The caption says:

"I'm not going to complain about the high cost of anything this weekend."

And while I understand all too well that as you get closer to death many things get less important, I must say:

What pure BS.

My father and four uncles did not serve in WWII, nor did the other millions who served then and since then, including my ten years in Naval Aviation, to save the world so that thugs and dictators can rip off this country, and the world. What OPEC and world wide speculators are now doing is nothing less than a attack on us.

And that we have enabled them with stupid energy polices does not forgive what they are doing nor make it right.

As I write this there are elderly who are trying to figure out what medications they can do without to enable them to buy food and pay utility bills.

There are families world wide who can't afford a pound of rice because of the price increases.

And the future looks bleak.

Heller's cartoon speaks of death in war. Yet millions of those who died in WWII could have been spared if Chamberlain had not disgraced himself and England with "peace in our time" with Hitler, the French responded with vigor when Germany's troops first crossed the border, if we had done whatever we needed to do in Korea and Vietnam, taken our embassy back from the radicals in Iran and finished Desert Storm.

Simply put, you can't put rabbits in the cage with a boa constrictor. At some point the snake will eat the rabbit. It is what they do.

We have fed the snake for years. But now its appetite has grown larger and wants our dogs and cats. What comes next? Our old people and our children?

It is time for action. Not the false sympathy and misplaced sadness of Heller's cartoon.

Nationalize Oil

That's a frightening thought, eh?

Well, think about this.

China and India do that. Both have been shielding their industries and their citizens from the huge run ups in price caused by, mostly speculation not shortages.
Since we are in intense competition with these countries....been to WalMart lately?...their actions result in allowing their industries to be always lower in price.

This has a double whammy. It kills our economy, both consumer goods and manufacturing. The consumer has less money to spend so he travels less and buys fewer big ticket items. That's dollars that used to stay in the economy. And since he is stressed for cash, he will continue to go for the lowest prices, which aids China and the other SE manufacturers/countries.

Obviously there is a point where the sales volumes goes down for foreign produced goods, in a rational environment. Why? Because as our dollar weakens due to interest rate cuts, its value to the importers goes down. But, since the cost basis of the foreign manufacturers is protected by national price and supply control, the impact is not predictable. It is irrational. If our chemical companies are paying $130. for a barrel of oil, and China's is paying $40.00, they can't compete. BTW - Fertilizer is directly impacted by oil. So we are again impacted. Higher food prices hurts our consumers and hurts our farm exports. It also hurts our ethanol prices.

We are literally under attack. I can't tell you what the tipping point is, but in the last three days, at 10:07AM CDT, the market has run off about 460 points.

So we come back to nationalizing oil. Would it work? Well, price controls don't work in a free market. But nationalization would be different. As a whole we have immense bargaining power with OPEC. While our goal would be to tell OPEC we respect a fair price, of say, $80.00 a barrel, we are not going to accept gouging and are willing to take "various actions at various times" to insure our citizens' health and welfare." Let them figure out what that means.

Would it work? I don't know. But I do know that we are on the edge of a huge problem that could make 1929 look like a picnic. I also know that there is no reason why our lives should be so under control of the thugs and dictators whose only claim to anything is that they happened to be born "Kings" of oil.

The rights of Kings has been settled in the favor of democracies. Time to remind them of that.

Gays and the military

The 9th Court of Appeals has reversed a lower court and this issue is going back to court. I am cross posting this comment I made on TalkLeft.

Before I start let me note that I have commented many times on gay rights, including marriage and I am uncomfortable with the current "don't ask don't tell." Now to some thoughts.

Having spent 10 years in naval aviation long before "don't ask don't tell," I can tell you that no one cared what the sexual orientation of the other person outside of a few individuals. The issue was: Can the person do the job.

Believe it or not, the military is composed of fairly small units responding to orders of larger units. Squad to platoon to company, etc., in the army, similar in the Navy, Marines and Navy. This structure has not changed. The success or failure of these "fighting units" depend on many variables. But chief among them is absolute confidence in each other. I have seen crew members who could do the job rejected by the crew as a whole for, in some cases, no visible reasons. In the end, the person either becomes part of the group or must leave. Strangely enough, in many cases the individual recognizes this and asks for a change, and goes on to another group and many times succeeds.

In the ten years of my service I knew of about 11 individuals who I felt were gay. Of the 11, 2 were arrested off base for solicitation of homosexual sex, and two on base for consensual homosexual sex. All received undesirable discharges.

Of the other 7, and I would say there were others, there were no problems. Simply put, the standard was "don't ask, don't tell and don't get caught."

In reality that has not changed.

And in reality the issue is not a military problem but a societal problem. When gays are accepted with no exceptions as civilians, no problems will exist in the military. Unfortunately we aren't there yet.

Will forcing the issue in the military correct the problem?

I confess that I do not know. But I do know that if you take a group that is performing well and insert someone that the group doesn't accept then you have a group that will start to be less effective. This is not good in the civilian world. It is a formula for disaster in a military. And the reason does not matter.

In this life we all become engaged in trade offs. We join teams that demand we practice at certain times in certain places and that we do certain things as team members.

When you join the military you accept the rules. You have no "right" to join. Perhaps the individual should accept the rules and go forward with their life.

Perhaps it is time to the tell military that their rule is wrong. But let us understand something.

If you do you will not know what the results are until the next time the results must be equal to are better than they are now.

The current rules are hard on the individual, but the results are an outstanding military. Be careful what you ask for. You may not like what you get.

Wilson and Plame and logic

Blogs blogs, whose got the blogs? And the answer is, everyone. Not only shall we have our 15 minutes of fame, we'll have it on video on My Space and You Tube...
And not only that, every newspaper has Forums and the editorials are linked to letters and opinion has become "hot."

And what do we get? Mostly trash.

And I am not just talking about "Bush lied and soldiers died." I am talking about comments that are just so wrong that it boggles the mind to read them. People talk about the flooding of New Orleans during Katrnia without even knowing that the city is below sea level which meant that the breeches had to be fixed and then the water pumped out. Which made the task much more difficult than just letting the water run back into the river which is the usual way of flood recovery.

They claim that there was a conspiracy on 9/11 and that the steel building frames could not have failed when any number of experts have shown that to be wrong.

They buy into man made global warming when the weather sweetie can't forecast what will happen 72 hours out, and no one can explain why the Medieval Warming period exists since they had no cars....

In short, it appears that although we have more information available in the history of the world, the people who could use it have very little ability to separate facts from fiction and without that they become easy prey for the media, who in turn are easy prey because most of them have little training in science and logical thinking.

For an example, I remind you of the NYTimes article written by Joe Wilson when he made huge brough haha over Bush's statement that the British claimed that Iraq had tried to buy yellow cake from Niger in 1999. In fact, Bush was quoting the Brits, so if you want to make a point you have to allude to dark actions and lies. Now this is what Wilson wrote:

I spent the next eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country's uranium business. It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place.

Okay fine. But what did write? Did he write that no meeting between Iraqi and Niger had taken place? No. He said that it was doubtful that any such "transaction" had ever taken place.

"Transaction" dear hearts refers to a sale. Not an offer, not an attempt, not discussions, but a sale. He further says:

Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.

The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.

What facts are in doubt? Bush said that there had been an attempt per the Brits. Wilson's article writes that no transaction (sale) took place. So he doesn't deny that a meeting could have tak place, but you have to read what he writes very carefully.

He then says that "his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them." So he says there was no sale, which was never claimed, and that the Brit's conclusion, which Bush believed, was wrong.

Oh really? Remember he also wrote this?

In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.

What did he tell the CIA? Have a look at the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The CIA's DO gave the former ambassador's information a grade of "good," which means that it added to the IC's body of understanding on the issue....The reports officer said that a "good" grade was merited because the information responded to at least some of the outstanding questions in the Intelligence Community, but did not provide substantial new information. He said he judged that the most important fact in the report was that the Nigerien officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Nigerien Prime Minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium, because this provided some confirmation of foreign government service reporting.

Huh? And have you noticed what the title of the New York Times article was?

"What I Didn't Find in Africa"

So what he found was there had been no sale, no purchase. And if he told his buds in the Department of State that Bush's embraceof the Brits information was wrong, why did he tell the CIA that Nigerien officials said the Iraqis came in 1999 and that the Nigerien PM believed wanted to purchase.....That is a huge disconnect.

Did the media just ignore it, or were they just too dumb to figure it out? To return to my initial comments, at one time I thought the media was in the tank for Wilson. I now think that they were in the tank, and because of that, couldn't exercise enough logical thinking to ask some very hard and very important questions.

That's sad.

McKinnon leaving... So??

You have to wonder about some of the people involved in politics.

MIAMI (AP) - A top adviser is leaving Republican John McCain's presidential campaign because he doesn't want to work against Democrat Barack Obama.

Mark McKinnon, the chief media consultant to McCain, wrote in a campaign memo last year that if Obama won the Democratic nomination, he would not actively campaign against him. With the results of Tuesday night's primaries in Kentucky and Oregon, Obama claimed he had a majority of convention delegates.

McKinnon said Tuesday evening he was making good on his pledge, and was "moving from middle linebacker to cheerleader" for McCain.

Now wait just a gol darn minute.....

If you think McCain is the best man why do this??

He said last year that he didn't want to work against an Obama candidacy. Electing Obama "would send a great message to the country and the world," McKinnon said at the time, although he added that he intended to vote for McCain.

Now let me see...

"Doctor I think you are the best brain surgeon in the world and that I need surgery...but I'm gonna have John step in because it will send a great message to the country and the world??"

Me thinks his leaving is a blessing for McCain.

Bits and pieces

Either cousins of Bugs Bunny or Rocky the Flying Squirrel devoured a number of my just up okra plants yesterday. Given that fried okra is referred to as candy in this house a state of war now exists. The 20 gauge short barrel pump has had No. 6 shot loaded and I am ready to rend shock and awe on the varmints. Seeing as how the failure of global warming delayed spring, the replanting of these will be a rereplanting.

Given that the price of oil hit $130. yesterday, driving the stock market into a
$199 drop, veggies from the garden may be more important than we think...

In response our valiant Congress people have passed a law that says we can sue OPEC and speculators.... Send in the clowns....er lawyers...

Supposedly the increase is based on fears of shortages in 2016....I guess any excuse is okay when dealing with the American public who, basically, have proven too stupid to raise hell with Democrats until, fearing for their jobs, the Demos join the Repubs and start to push drilling in ANWAR, offshore and downtown Hartford if we think oil is there.

Also named as a reason was an interview with the well known oilman, T. Boone Pickens, who says we have maxed out and is investing millions in windmill farms. He may be right. He may be wrong. I just wish he didn't have a dog in the fight.

In other news the coronation of Hussein is being planned, yet the polls show him unable to beat McCain, or a best, tie him. That's an amazing factoid when all the problems we currently have are factored in. Any Democrat should be leading by a mile yet he is struggling when away from The Borg.

In other news.... women in the United Kingdom have won the right to have children without fathers... Heck, we have had that right for years. Visit your nearest ghetto.

Later chums!