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What They've Thought
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What They Thought October 1, 2006 Alan
Caruba Click here for columnist bios |
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To understand the whole global warming debate you have to understand that it is not about any dramatic warming of the Earth. The Earth has been warming since the end of the last Ice Age with time out for some mini-Ice Age episodes. As Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, has repeatedly written, the average global temperature has increased about one degree Fahrenheit over the past century. It’s a natural cycle and, since we are at the end of the current 12,000-year interglacial cycle of temperate climate, we are due another Ice Age. Global warming is about controlling the world’s population by impeding or making more costly the use of energy — oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear — in developed, industrial nations and thwarting efforts to expand the use of electricity in Third World nations. Keeping people ignorant and ultimately dependent on a vast one-world government based on failed socialist utopian policies is the name of the game. This explains in part why so much of the global warming propaganda has been coordinated and emanated from the United Nations. Its International Panel on Climate Control and its Kyoto Protocol on Climate Control are just two examples of the mischief that is generated by the UN. The Panel has revised its estimates of global warming so many times that it has become a farce. Worse yet, those estimates are all based on deeply flawed computer models. So what explains just a few of the headlines we are all reading every day now? “Earth spews troubling amount of methane,” “Winter ice declining rapidly in the Arctic,” and “Nastier hurricanes? Just blame us: Study links human activity, monster storms.” A friend of mine, John Brignell, a British professor emeritus, runs a website called NumberWatch.com. On it you will find a page that documents how just about every imaginable natural phenomenon has been attributed to global warming. It’s a very long, often totally contradictory, list and a tribute to the idiocy and hypocrisy that fuels the global warming hoax. While the global warming hoax has an economic component whose focus is energy use, there is a political component because it is through the implementation of laws that the control of human behavior is achieved. This was seen most recently when California’s legislature voted to implement controls on “greenhouse gas emissions” from utilities and other industrial activities said to be the primary cause of global warming. California has notoriously failed to keep pace with the growth of its population and the provision of sufficient electrical power. The global warming hoax is also intended to force people to use public transportation or to select alternative forms of energy such as solar or wind. These latter two are totally inadequate to our needs and exist, like ethanol, largely because of government subsidies and mandates. So why are we reading this sudden new spate of articles about things alleged to cause global warming? It is not a coincidence as, indeed, nothing one reads or hears incessantly is accidental. Where it takes on a very dangerous potential is the proposed legislation emanating out of Washington, D.C. these days. Largely unable to find traction with its anti-war diatribes, the Democrats' fallback position is to scare everyone with global warming. It began in the summer of 2005 when Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) proposed a bill calling for modest mandatory limits on emissions of greenhouse gases said to cause climate change. These limits are moving forward despite the unanimous rejection of the Kyoto Protocol by the Senate some years ago. It is essential to keep in mind that climate change is caused by factors such as solar activity, the heating or cooling of the oceans, cloud formation and activity, and volcanic activity. Human beings have absolutely no “control” over these climate factors. The vast bulk of the Earth’s surface isn’t inhabited, despite the fact there are six billion humans extant. Humans' and other animals’ lives depend on the oxygen we breathe. We exhale carbon dioxide. The Earth’s vegetation benefits from the carbon dioxide as the essential element it requires for growth. And yet there are people in government and elsewhere that will tell you that CO2 is a greenhouse gas or even a “pollutant” that is bad for the Earth. Some of those people are in Congress and these days it is, in the words of Business Week reporter, John Carey “awash in carbon-capping bills and proposals from Senators John McCain (R-AZ), Jim Jeffords (I-VT), Tom Carper (D-DE), John Kerry (D-MA), and others. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) plans to introduce legislation on the first day of the next session of Congress.” Perversely, they will find support from the utility industry that would prefer regulatory certainty. This has nothing to do with the dubious, often duplicitous, science of global warming and everything to do with running a business. Similarly, the agricultural lobby will no doubt support this legislation in order to benefit from crops used to make ethanol, a gasoline additive that actually and grotesquely costs more to produce and provides less energy per use. Finally, these proposed regulations to cap emissions are immediately nullified by the obvious fact that other nations such as India and China, with a billion people each, will not be joining this fraudulent effort. We could shut down all energy use in America without having any affect even if the false assertions about global warming were true. The proposed legislation must be stopped before Congress in its stupidity imposes it. Previous Congresses thought Prohibition and the War on Poverty were good ideas. If you think life in America is expensive today, you have no idea how that cost will increase if global warming “controls” are imposed. |
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As we draw inexorably closer to the next election here are a few things for you to ponder if you’re a conservative, and feel if you’re a liberal. They have to do with the security of this nation. I hope that got the attention of all of you soccer moms who voted for Bubba because he was for "Women’s Rights" and had nice hair. Liberals tend to say they stand for one thing, when in fact they don’t even understand the nature of what they claim to stand for. They are master manipulators of even themselves and it is only amusing when they aren’t in power. That being said here are a few examples to consider. At the moment we have knuckle-draggers such as Harry Reid, who seems to suffer from the occasional bout of rational thinking only when his poll numbers drop, always having to explain himself but quickly following the apology with another amusing episode of Tourettes. Here is fine example of one of those episodes: “Three years into war the American people still don’t have a clear picture of what’s gone wrong in Iraq or how to set it right.” He also added that we’ve been going backward for too long. I know exactly how to fix this problem, but I suspect there are laws against jailing people and sticking them in special re-education camps. Since that’s illegal we can always go with the more civilized version and the Republicans can get to work investigating how the liberals ruined Vietnam, a war the Democrats started by being against our interests as usual. They are always running their mouths and bolstering the other side because they care only about their own interests — POWER. Yes I’m talking about the usual pansy pandering. During the good hair years of the Clinton regime, the Chinese took over the Panama Canal and built that really cool base in the Bahamas that can handle the largest civilian and military cargo planes in the world. Clinton wasn’t even a big boy about it. He allowed the Panama takeover to happen and then didn’t even go to the hand over ceremony in order to keep it out of the news. When China threatened to nuke us the first time our ships were moved to a position that made them happier. On the lighter side Russia finished Yamantau Mountain (their version of our Crystal Mountain/NORAD) under Clinton’s reign. It was also during this time that Clinton had his own Iran-Contra that didn’t get reported. He allowed the Iranians to ignore the weapons embargo and bring weapons to the Moslems in Albania, spreading their influence at the same time. That was to counter an imbalance that he had created in the first place which led to the war in Kosovo, and our bombing our former ally Yugoslavia back to the Stone Age. Up until that time the Russians were suffering internal problems. Since we attacked Yugoslavia they were able to unite their people under the ‘See how scary those western imperialists are?’ banner. One very interesting thing occurred at the very end of the above period: China’s leader went on a world tour passing through South America to visit Chavez and ended up dropping in on Castro. There were a few other terrorist states thrown in there after Castro but I don’t remember them at the moment. And in order to do his best at furthering the cause of world socialism, during Clinton’s reign the communists went unchallenged in our own back yard and now we have Chavez at the UN. Threatening to take us down. And every time you buy gas or anything at a CITGO station you’re furthering their cause. Their words and deeds don’t match up and they never will. They, like their comrades, are diametrically opposed to what they claim they are. The liberals are apparently in favor of a faux freedom with a boot heel in their mouths. They are in favor of backing away in fear, while saying that the next time will be the last. They are in favor of Islamic fascism and American cowardice. In short they are in it for themselves and care not one bit for you and I. So in the next election why don’t we tell them and all of their minions “Why don’t Hugo and Chavez it!” Because their mixed signals are being used to bolster our enemies, they are the biggest threat to this nation. I propose we take
Cindy Sheehan (who makes the post-Katrina New Orleans look pretty) and
we make her their mascot. Look at what a mess she has made of her own
life and now we have her down there hugging Hugo. What a typical liberal. http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060924/D8KBE44O1.html http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/09/26/D8KCL1PG0.html R.A. Hawkins Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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No column this week. Jonathan David Morris Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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No one disputes the diagnosis: American health care is in lousy shape. As a practicing physician for more than 30 years, I find the pervasiveness of managed care very troubling. The problems with our health care system are not the result of too little government intervention, but rather too much. Contrary to the claims of many advocates of increased government regulation of health care, rising costs and red tape do not represent market failure. Rather, they represent the failure of government policies that have destroyed the health care market. It’s time to rethink the whole system of HMOs and managed care. This entire unnecessary level of corporatism rakes off profits and worsens the quality of care. But HMOs did not arise in the free market; they are creatures of government interference in health care dating to the 1970s. These non-market institutions have gained control over medical care through collusion between organized medicine, politicians, and drug companies, in an effort to move America toward “free” universal health care. One big problem arises from the 1974 ERISA law, which grants tax benefits to employers for providing health care, while not allowing similar incentives for individuals. This results in the illogical coupling between employment and health insurance. As such, government removed the market incentive for health insurance companies to cater to the actual health-care consumer. As a greater amount of government and corporate money has been used to pay medical bills, costs have risen artificially out of the range of most individuals. Only true competition assures that the consumer gets the best deal at the best price possible by putting pressure on the providers. Patients are better served by having options and choices, not new federal bureaucracies and limitations on legal remedies. Such choices and options will arrive only when we unravel the HMO web rooted in old laws, and change the tax code to allow individual Americans to fully deduct all healthcare costs from their taxes, as employers can. As government bureaucracy continues to give preferences and protections to HMOs and trial lawyers, it will be the patients who lose, despite the glowing rhetoric from the special interests in Washington. Patients will pay ever rising prices and receive declining care while doctors continue to leave the profession in droves. Rep. Ron Paul Web Site Back to Top |
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No column this week. Nancy
Salvato
Web Site Contact
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©2004-2006 by their respective authors. Reprinted by permission. |
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