One of my favorite movies is “The Princess Bride”, and in one of my favorite scenes, one of the characters says to another (one who is convinced that he’s the smartest man in the world) “you keep using that word.  I don’t think it means what you think it means”.  I find myself flashing on that every time I hear a liberal talk about the “science” of Manmade Global Warming.

I’m not a climatologist.  Technically, I’m not even a scientist.  What I am is an electrical engineer with training and experience in physics, computer modeling, and dynamical (control) system theory.  I’ve also had one article published in an engineering journal, and I’ve spent many years working with formal scientific documentation processes.  The scientific method and critical thinking are second nature to me.  I would have no problem putting up my credentials against those of Al Gore, Ted Turner, and Prince Charles. 

Although I consider myself a conservative, I’ve looked at AGW theory with what I consider an open, scientific mind.  What I’ve seen convinces me that we’re not only dealing with an erroneous theory, but with a worldwide scientific fraud of unprecedented proportions.  Actually, I should say “nearly unprecedented proportions”, as this bears an eerie similarity to the way the Nuclear Winter fraud was carried out nearly two decades ago (the key difference being that the people who perpetrated the Nuclear Winter hoax never found a way to further enrich politically well-connected financiers who would help maintain the fraud).

I could go on for a half hour about the holes in AGW theory, the abuses of the peer-review process, the absolutely outrageous behavior of the IPCC, and the outright scientific misconduct of the people who’ve staked their careers on something that can be fairly described as a crackpot theory.  I could explain how easy it is to bias a computer model to comply with your pre-determined outcome and how such a model will fail to reflect reality.  I could point out that there’s no actual proof that CO2 is causing the Earth (or, for that matter, Mars) to warm up.  I could I could ask them why there’s no evidence of the heat signature that a runaway greenhouse mechanism would cause. 

I could do all of these things, but the fact is that there’s nothing that will convince the alarmists that their pet hypothesis is wrong.

Why will we never convince them?  Well, for one thing, most of them don’t have the fundamental knowledge needed to even understand the problems with the theory.  We’re talking about people who’ve never solved a differential equation or calculated the phase shift of a feedback function, who don’t even know what an absorption spectrum is.  Trying to explain to them the effect of arbitrarily assigning positive magnitude to a major feedback channel in a computer model of a multivariable nonlinear dynamical system would be exactly as effective if done in Latin as in English.

Furthermore, these are people who might have studied the scientific method back in 6^th or 7^th grade, and haven’t given it a thought since.  They simply have no idea how well the AGW crowd has gamed the peer review process (or, for that matter, the grant process).  They don’t understand the incredible ethical lapse of Michael Mann not allowing anyone to see his source data, and then conveniently losing it.  They don’t understand the level of scientific misconduct that went into preparation of the IPCC report.  They don’t understand about the biases in the data collection, they don’t understand about statistical forcing in the analysis of the raw data. 

But the most important reason we’ll never convince them is this: they simply don’t care.  They don’t care where the theory came from, they don’t care if there are holes in it, they don’t care that there are better natural explanations.  They don’t care that the people who are flogging this theory the hardest stand to make billions through the stroke of a government pen.  They don’t even care that their “solution” will lock billions of people into lives of hopeless, grinding poverty in order to assuage their own nagging feeling of environmental guilt.

What they understand, and what they care about, is that they now have a set of beliefs that gives them comfort, defines their place in the universe, and gives them a sense of smug self-righteousness.  Better yet, it gives them an unassailable moral position from which they can tell other people how they should live.  I realize that I’m not the first person to accuse environmentalism of becoming a faux religion, but I find it fascinating that this new religion’s adherents have found a rationalization for all of the negative behaviors that are usually attributed to the worst kind religious zealot.

The point I want to make is that we need to start calling them out whenever they claim to have “science” on their side.  They don’t.  Politicians need to pointedly reference Al Gore’s degree in government management, or Prince Charles status as a complete dilettante.  When they trot out the “consensus” nonsense, we need to point out that consensus isn’t a scientific concept, and then ask them who exactly decided who was included in this “consensus”.  When they claim that the science is settled, we need to ask them which science, and how they know it’s settled, and who settled it.  When they claim that they’re the ones defending “real” science, we need to ask them how much of that science they understand.  And most importantly, we need to ask them what it would take to disprove the whole AGW theory.  Because if the answer is “nothing”, then we need to point out that they’ve crossed from science to theology.

There’s a reason why every socialist government has either started as or degenerated into totalitarinism.  It’s because leftism/progressivism (or any system that beleives “the purpose of government is to take care of people”) isn’t compatible with democracy.

Leftist/Liberal policy is based on the idea that the governmnent’s police power (that is, the monopoly on the use of violence that we the governed grant the government) should be used to *force* people to behave the way “right-thinking people” beleive they should act, rather than in thier own best interest.  And this line of thinking can *only* end in totalitarianism.  They start out with broad and lofty social engineering goals, but eventually human nature and the precticalities of the real world mean that they’ll end up dictating every aspect of life.  It may happen in an afternoon or it may take a generation, but eventually we find ourselves being forced to salute our Dear Leader and facing jail time for being counter-revolutionary (or for hate speach, or for being intolerant, or whatever the leftist crime du jour happens to be).

The sad fact is, democracy simply isn’t a reliable enough foundation for enforcing this level of control; it can’t be counted on when it becomes necessary to make the productive turn over the product of thier work to those who are “more deserving”.  Scott Adams (speaking through Dogbert) has said “you can’t save the planet without making other people sacrifice”, and the same is true for socialism (which is probably why the environmental and socialist movements seem to dovetail so well these days).  At the end of the day, the “consent of the governed” is something that simply needs to be sacrificed if you’re dedicated to the of the Worker’s Paridise (or to Saving the Planet, which is just fancy wording for the same thing).

Bottom line, democracy to a true liberal is nothing more than an annoyance.  It gives way too much of a voice with people who are too stupid to realize how “opressed” they are.

The Democrats shutting down the democracy rather than accepting a loss is simply a piece with this line of thinking.

The Tea Party has brought a lot of people into politics who’ve never been active before because we’re now at a point where a lot of us feel that these fundamental principals are under systematic assault.  We’ve gathered peacefully and respectfully to make this case, as is our right.  What response do we get?  First they try to ignore us, and when that didn’t work, they tried to paint us as a lunatic fringe. When our numbers continued to grow they tried calling us racists, then DANGEROUS racists.  They fabricated stories of racial epithets hurled at congressmen.  They sent union goons to beat us up.  Now they’re calling us murderers because of the actions of a deranged leftist. Now they want to outlaw the “discussion”.  In short, they’ve done everything except present a compelling counter-argument, as one would expect of people concerned about a “civil discourse”.

Over the last week, since the tragedy in Tuscon, there have been calls to “tone down the rhetoric”.  The fact that this occurs weeks after the left has seen the results of ignoring the Tea Party movement is, I’m sure, strictly coincidental.  Well, here’s my response to these requests:

I’ll consider toning down the rhetoric when I see the other side stop acting like they’re tone *deaf*. I’ll believe they want a civil discourse when they stop trying to shut down all discourse and answer our legitimate concerns.  I will stop calling them socialist thugs when they stop sending union thugs to break up our demonstrations.  I’ll stop calling them tyrants when they stop trying to outlaw criticism of thier politices and leaders.

And until that day comes, they can have my free speech rights when they pry then from my cold, dead fingers.

Volcanos spew large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, but they also throw a lot of dust into the upper atmosphere (which is why flights are grounded).  Guess what?  The dust is a much stronger “global cooling” element than the CO2.  A big volcano erupting in the northern hemisphere is going to cause a hellaciously cold winter (we got -60 ground temps in northern MN after the eruption of Pinotubo, and two more winters that were harsher than normal – by Minnesota standards!).

If we can push cap and trade legislation back till next year, people are going to see 2 things:

1) There’s no increase in warming, despite the large carbon footprint of this eruption

2) Putting a few tons of ash into the upper atmosphere would effectively cancel (and then some!) any effect of human-produced CO2. 

This is a perfect “teachable moment”.  Using a few old ICBMs to deliver a payload of talk to the upper atmosphere would cost a few tens of millions of dollars (if that – the missiles would otherwise be decomissioned), as opposed to the trillions of dollars that a cap-and-trade program would cost.  It would actually deliver a solution to the (probably non-existant) problem of global warming (which cap-and-trade WON’T), it would cost a fraction of what cap-and-trade would cost, and it would eliminate the need for a massive government-run intrusion into every aspect of our business and personal lives (oh, wait – that last one might not be viewed as a plus by certain people.

Sent: 3/17/2010 10:35:30 PM

To: “IMAWI03@mail.house.gov” IMAWI03@mail.house.gov (Congressman Ron Kind)

Subject:  IMA MAIL ON HEALTH

Congressman Kind;

I was called by your “electronic town hall meeting” software, and if it wasn’t a complete fraud, it was the most cowardly act I’ve ever seen by a politician.  Why not hold a real town hall meeting where you’re not able to control the questions?  Why is it that none of your town halls during your last recess were within 50 miles of the largest city in your district?

 In the few minutes I listened to you answering softball questions, I heard you contradict yourself at least twice – I don’t care how many sob stories your stuffed audience comes up with, you can’t tell me that eliminating lifetime limits on payouts, requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions, and adding 12 million people to Medicare,  is goig to lead to controlling costs.  Niether can that Marxist snake oil salesman at the other end of Pennsylvania Ave convince me that this is anything other than a government takeover of the health care industry.  I know this doesn’t seem to matter to Democrats this year, but the American people Do. Not. Want. This. Bill.

 If you don’t vote no on this monstrosity, please be assured that I’ll be working every hour I can spare to see you voted out of office.

 ———————————————————————————————————-

From: “Congressman Ron Kind” <wi03ima@mail.house.gov>

To: xxxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 10:49:56 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central

Subject: Re: Your recent email.

Thank you for e-mailing me your thoughts and comments.  It is important that I know the views of my fellow Wisconsinites so I can carry out my responsibilities in the United States Congress. 

I appreciate hearing from you, and I look forward to considering your comments further.  I will respond more fully to your email as soon as possible.

Sincerely,

Congressman Ron Kind

———————————————————————————————————-

To: “Congressman Ron Kind” <wi03ima@mail.house.gov>

From: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2010 08:06 PM GMT -06:00 US/Canada Central

Subject: Re: Your recent email.

Gee, Ron, thanks for the message from your auto-responder.  It demonstrates the kind of responsiveness to voter concerns I’ve come to expect from the Democrat party.  Keep up the good work, I’m looking forward to meeting you in person on the unemployment line once you lot have finished bankrupting the country.

Sincerely

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

We all know that the Soviet countries embraced a strange concept of equality, described by George Orwell in Animal Farm as “all animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others”.  In my mind, we now have a very similar problem here.  I make this statement based on several decades of imperial behavior by Congress, along with a remarkable web of laws that either exempt congresspeople or provide them with special priveledges.  I find myself asking how many politicians have children and grandchildren in the public school system, and seeing answers that scare me - once the ruling class starts to institutionalize its priveledge, the Republic is in serious danger.  We all know that, even if you allow yourselves to be subjected to the same government-run health system as us “little people”, it won’t be quite the SAME system; you won’t face the same faceless bureacrats, you won’t have to wait in line for procedures, you won’t face the same escalation processes and triage rules as the  rest of us.  And, depending on which party is in power, the American media will either watch for such behavior like a hawk, or give you a complete pass.

So, how do we ensure that you’re going to have the same level of commitment to the success of this  project as you’re imposing on a not-terribly-populace?  How about this: since you people don’t seem to mind the concept of a different set of laws for yourselves, and since you’re determined to remake the American health system in one  bold stroke, I would like to ask if you would commit to killing your families if you get it wrong?  I know this sounds obscene, but really, it’s what you’re asking us to sign up for.  In the  final analysis, you’re asking me to be to put the lives of my loved ones on the line; I’m asking the same from you.

So, if my parents or in-laws end up warehoused in a dim, dismal, bleak home where they’re loaded up with happy pills so that they don’t impose demands on the civil-service nursing staff, well, how about we lobotomize your  parents?  If my children can’t get treatment for a joint problem without a three-year wait, how about we cripple  one of your children?  If I my wife dies waiting for an angioplasty, how about we plunge a knife into your spouse’s heart?

You people are now trying to tell me that, once you’ve passed this monstrosity, and I see how “good” it is for me, I’ll really like it.  You want me to bet my health and my family’s health that, for the first time in human history, a massive government program will be put in place and will immediately and forever, be efficient, caring, and will focus on the needs of the governed (rather  than it’s own political well-being).  Here’s my response to that:

Put up or shut up.

The question isn’t going to go away until it’s either proven or disproven using real scientific methods, as opposed to the pseudo-science that’s been foisted on the world. We need to drive a stake through the heart of this beast now, while it’s stunned and confused. We’ll never get another opportunity like this.

I recently found myself wondering how I would handle an analysis of the Global Warming computer models “liberated” from the University of East Anglia and published on the web.

Unlike the emails that were also leaked, there will be no possibility to claim that they were taken out of context; computer programs don’t hedge or use potentially misleading colloquialisms. On the other hand, it’s been the output of these programs, not the casual statements of the senders and receivers of the emails, that have been used as the impetus for climate change legislation that could effect every person on the planet. To date, these programs have never been subjected to the kind of analysis that one would expect for such world-changing research. We now have an opportunity to do just that. This document details what I would do if I was selected to head up the team performing such a review.

Objective:
This is not a witch hunt; the goal isn’t to prove or disprove scientific malpractice on anyone’s part. The objective of this project should be to bring transparency to the research, not to support any particular point of view. This is a last-chance opportunity to drill through the political outer shell that’s grown around AGW and to expose the science at its center to the kind of open and transparent examination that would be applied to a theory in any other field.

Project Structure:
I propose a two-tiered approach; a code analysis stage, performed by programmers, to fully document the inner workings of the programs, followed a review by climatologists and statisticians, both pro- and anti- warming, of the finished analysis. The purpose of the first phase will be to abstract the statistical methods and the mechanics of the simulation from the mechanical aspects of the code. The second phase will attempt to validate the methods and mechanics. I’d also like to propose a third phase, to convert the Phase One analysis into an Open Source model, written in a modern, object-oriented language, that can be used as a framework (under a “full disclosure” license) for future research. A fourth phase, aimed at reconstructing the raw data and making the model and its results open and available to the world, is also a possibility.

The work product of the analysis group (Phase 1) should include the following:
1. A diagram of the calling structure of the program(s); this indicates how the various functions within the program interact. It’s roughly similar to a wiring diagram for a home.
2. A set of flow charts for the various functions within the code. This provides reviewers an insight into the sequencing of the operations on the data.
3. A set of “Data Dictionaries” describing the data structures and intermediate files used.
4. A single, unified dataflow diagram describing in mathematical terms the path(s) of input data from input to final output.
5. Output of test runs of the original code using test vectors provided by the phase 2 teams (a test vector is a set of data designed to expose and measure a specific aspect of the system under test).

The validation process (Phase 2) will use the Phase 1 documents to evaluate the following:
1. Are the methods used to filter or pre-sort data statistically valid? If there are problems, what recommendations can be made to improve them?
2. Are the simulations of the climate mechanisms valid?
a. What assumptions have been made? How can these effect the output?
b. What simplifications have been made? Are they justifiable? Could these effect the output, and if so, how could the model be extended?

The final result of this process would be:
1. A list of errors in the original source code, along with thier impact on the final output
2. A list of assumptions and simplifications in the source code, along with an assessement of thier impact on the output.
3. Development of one or more dataset based on publicly available and published data, with all proxy data and adjustment noted and justified.

The final report of the validation team will include all findings by all members; the initial findings will be discussed, and for members will be allowed to write follow-ups to their initial findings. Each of the team will be invited to write a summary of his/her analysis or may work with other members of the team to prepare joint reports. All of the initial findings, amended finding, and summary reports will be made available to the public. There will be no single summarization of the findings (as was done with the IPCC report).

Work Product:
Phase 1 documents as defined above (Call tree, data dictionaries, flow charts, dataflow diagram)

Phase 2 documents:
1. Initial and amended findings.
2. Summary reports
3. Recommendations for future models
4. Recommendations for future datasets
5. Questions and responses passed between the Phase 2 and Phase 1 teams

Staffing:
Having no idea of the size of the code, it’s hard to make any kind of estimation of manpower or schedule (it gets a lot harder when you’re working with volunteers who are contributing what spare time they can from their own lives). Phase one will require three programmers, this will eventually expand to six or eight; they should have pretty good analytical math skills and at least a passing familiarirty with Fortran. They’ll need access to a system with a Fortran compiler, which isn’t all that common these days.

Phase two will require a number of people with a solid background in modeling and simulation, climateology, and control system theory. In order to ensure that both sides are represented in the analysis, I’d like to see a balance between “warmists” and “skeptics”. It might be difficult to find academics willing to cooperate with the analysis of “stolen” code, but the fact that the code was supposed to have been divulged under British FOIA laws might mitigate this timidity.

Logistics:
I suspect that the Phase 1 team will break down into groups according to the list of work products, with the dataflow diagram starting once the other parts are done. This means that a team of at least three to begin with, with additional team members added once a process has begun to solidify. We’re going to want to have at least two people working on each section of the documents, in order to provide a peer review mechanism (peer review in the software world has a different meaning from the practice used by the scientific journals). We’ll want to add someone with strong numerical methods background to work on the dataflow diagram.

If any bugs are found (for example, a math function found to return an incorrect value under certain circumstances), they’ll will be noted in the dataflow diagram, but no attempt will be made to determine the extent of its effect on the outputs.

The final documents will be reviewed by the entire team before handing off to the Phase Two team. The project manager will have final say on the disposition of any red-lines that come from these reviews; the list of redlines should be published with the Phase 2 reports, but shouldn’t be made available to the Phase 2 reviewers; the project manager might end up taking a lot of heat over any perceived bias in the documents turned over to the Phase 2 people.

A “firewall” should be established between phase one and phase two; “clean room” approach similar to that used by various companies to reverse-engineer the IBM BIOS system in the early ‘80s. This will prevent any possibility of the validation team from being influenced by the opinions of the code analysts based on either comments in the code or coding methods. It will also clear the legal road for creating an Open Source climate model for the proposed third phase; it will allow the Phase Three developers to work from a structural model reverse-engineered from the source code, rather than examining the source code itself; there’s no grounds for a copyright infringement claim. (There might be grounds for a claim if any of the methods (“algorithms”) are covered by patents, but since a patent requires full disclosure, I strongly suspect that none have ever been filed). The rules of the firewall would prohibit the Phase Two reviewers from communicating directly with (or even knowing the identity of) the Phase One analysts until after the final summaries are released.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any way to do the Phase One work package in such a way that the Phase Two reviewers won’t have questions. We’ll have to work out a mechanism for the reviewers to pass questions to the analysts, and for the responses to be “scrubbed” of any potential bias, in order to maintain the integrity of the “clean room”. I think another independent team of analysts should review any responses, and the full text of questions and responses should be included in the final document package.

Conclusion:
It’s important to note that this process isn’t intended to provide “an answer”; it’s intentionally designed to provide a platform for airing multiple viewpoints in an open and transparent way.

You would think that a Catholic campus would be a safe place to do this, but you’d be wrong. A female student wrote to the college paper to complain about it. In the process she hauled out the tired old liberal meme that “men don’t have the right to an opinion on abortion”.

This has gotto be the single most offensive statement in the entire liberal repertoire at least, I hope it is – it’s hard to imagine anything more insulting.

I’m in my early 50’s and a father of three, one of whom was “unplanned”. Our oldest child is now a senior in college, our youngest is now a senior in high school, and I’ve been there every step of the way. I’ve changed diapers and boiled bottles, wiped noses and dealt with all the childhood illnesses. I practically bankrupted myself paying for Catholic schools because it was my responsibility to give my kids the best education I could afford. In order to be in a good place to raise children, I quit a job with NASA, a dream that sustained me through an inner-city high school and four years of engineering school. Aa few years later, I took a pass on most of the internet boom while people less qualified than me made millions, because I didn’t want to uproot the kids.

I’m not looking for any medals for any of this; it’s no more than doing what I was supposed to do. But can you imagine how it feels to read that I don’t have a right to an opinion on child-bearing issues?

After 20 years of being a devoted parent, am I supposed to accept the idea that, by dint of having a uterus, some college girl has the right to lecture me on what an imposition nine months of pregnancy are? About the financial and personal burdens of having (not RAISING, mind you, just HAVING) a child? I passed up an opportunity to be a part of history, then passed up an opportunity to make a fortune, and instead spent two decades taking jobs I HATED in a steadily dwindling local market, just to avoid making my kids change schools; is there anyone in the world who has the right to tell me anything about what it means to subordinate your youth and your career to the good of your children? I’ve spent a fortune on non-pubic schooling, and I have nothing saved up towards retirement; who knows better than me the cost of raising children?

And if none of that earns me the right to an opinion on this topic, how about this: in the middle of one particularly awful night my wife miscarried a child in her fifth month, and I ended up midwifing the delivery myself, because we didn’t have time to get her to the hospital. Anyone who can look into the dead eyes of a five-month stillborn and call it “tissue” is uttrerly and completely soulless. Does looking into the dead eyes of my own stillborn child buy me the right to an opinion on the humanity of a fetus?

The next time you hear someone claim that men have no right to an opinion on abortion, I want you to remember me. Then I want you to look them in the eye and tell them that they’re full of crap.

Gentlemen/Ladies:

The letter of 9/14 titled “Party of no ideas…” demonstrates either severe short-term memory loss or a complete lack of intellectual honesty.

There’s no other way to explain a belief that Joe Wilson’s outburst even approached the standard of behavior set by the left since 2000 towards President Bush and the Republicans, particularly not by someone who was in the Twin Cities during the 2008 RNC convention; it wasn’t Republicans planning the use of “urine bombs”.  She’s also forgotten the entire Democratic caucus booing Bush’s 2006 State of the Union address, President Obama’s staff chanting “Na Na Nana, Goodbye” as Bush left the White House, and an endless stream of demeaning portrayals of Bush in the Democrat-friendly entertainment media.

Throughout this, not one mainstream Democrat politician, including the current president, came forward to ask that the office be accorded some respect, if not the man.

I don’t approve of what Wilson did; I don’t think Republicans should engage in a “race for the bottom”, particularly not against people who are already living there.  But these shrieks of outrage against the Democrats’ new-found sense of decorum and reverence for the presidency ring a bit hollow.  Don’t complain about the bar being low when it was set there by your own behavior, day by day over an 8-year period.

It’s rather amusing that the party that spent 6 years calling the last president a liar for being wrong is suddenly sensitive to the current president being called a liar for telling lies.

If you’re old enough to recall the 80′s, it was the time when feminism was still the cause du jour. When a good, progressive (male) Democrat’s is informed that his family doctor has retired, he schedules his anual physical with a young female doctor. Since he’s just turned 50, it turns out that she will be giving him his first-ever prostate exam.

As he’s bending over the examing table, his doctor says to him, “You seem tense.” He replies “Yes, I am”. She immediately gets defensive; “Is it because I’m a woman?”. He replies “No, I’m pretty sure I’d be tense with *anyone* doing this to me.”

Freud said that “sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar”, but a finger up the butt is a always a finger up the butt.

And that’s a truth we can count on, regardless of whether the person doing it happens to be a woman, or as happens to be the case this time, a smoot-talking, marxist “community organizer” from Chicago who happens to be half-black.

Accoding to the folks at Real Cler Politics, Nancy Pelosi claims protesters are “carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.” link here.

Here’s the thing I find so ironic about this – guess who was one of the first political parties to bring about universal health care in Europe? Anyone? Beuler? Beuler? Beuler?

The answer is, the Nataionale Sociliste Deutcsche Arbeiter Partie (NSDAP, or National Socialist German Workers Party), which later shortened its name to Nationale Socialiste, and later to Nazi. That’s right folks, universal health care was an essential part of the Nazi party platform.

Oh, and by the way, once they’d taken over the health care system, they decided that it was simply too expensive to maintain what was known as the time as the “feeble minded”; they quietly turned the mental institutions into abatoirs, in a move that was a tragic forewarning of the horrors to come.

Pretty much what you’d expect from a system that banned dissent and used government takeovers and a cult of personality to join industry, government, and trade unions into a strong central government (or fascie).

Sound familiar?

Either these people are monumentally stupid, or I’m missing something here.  We’re talking about a lifelong bigot deciding to commit suicide-by-cop in the most conspicuous place possible.  Do people think that someone in that state of mind is going to stop and say, “Golly, I’d better not do that, it would be a hate crime!”

Of course, this kind of thinking can only be expected when discussing something that’s called “the Mathew Shepard law”; the morons who murdered Shepard were spared the death sentance only at the request of the because the victims family; apparently the death penalty isn’t quite enough of a deterrent, so they literally want a “fate worse than death”.

2) There is no such thing as deserved poverty. Poor people are poor because there is some sort of clandestine system in place that ensures that the wealthy stay wealthy, and not due to any life-decisions they might have made. This cabal runs all politics outside the Democratic party (and the Unions). Only by turning over all decision-making authority to the Democratic party can we achieve anything like “justice”.

3) Profit is fundamentally immoral, because it’s based on the principal of the job creator paying the worker less than the value of his/her work and pocketing the difference. Anyone who makes a profit can only be assumed to be working in his/her own best interest. This immorality taints all things in the private sector.

4) Religion is fundamentally undemocratic, because it attempts to impose rules on individuals, based solely on “superstition”. All religions have an implicit goal of imposing of their primitive rules on other people (Islam being the only exception). The only acceptable religions are the new age superstitions, which allow people to make up the rules as they go.

5) All moral authority therefore resides in the government, through the agency of unelected bureaucrats who, fortunately, know more than you and therefore can be trusted to make all decisions in your best interest. These government bureaucrats are the only ones who can be counted on to not be working in their own best interest. This rule does not apply if there is a Republican in the white house. The highest form of moral authority is the UN, which has NO elected officials and is therefore is clearly above operating in its own best interest.

6) There can be no freedom without health and safety. Anything that might cause the most minute health or safety hazard must therefore be regulated and controlled by people we can be assured aren’t operating in their own best interests (i.e., government bureaucrats). Even those things that don’t actually cause physical harm must be controlled, as they might, in the future, be found to cause health or safety problems, or could cause mental or emotional distress. The logical conclusion is that the only way we can be free is by turning over all decision making authority to the government.

7) If the planet isn’t healthy, none of us are free. Therefore anything that might effect the planet or the climate (like exhaling) must be regulated by the government is any of us are to be free.

All white people must bear and accept the responsibility for all of the bad things that have happened to people of color, everywhere. This is much like the concept of original sin – there is no time limit on this and there is no redemption. Guilt has a long memory, and nothing has really changed since 1960. However, it’s in poor taste to blame the Democratic party for generations of support of slavery, establishment and enthusiastic enforcement of Jim Crow laws, the use of the Klan as its military arm, its opposition to civil rights legislation, and its continuing cynical practice of race-baiting; those things were all in the past and must be forgotten.

9) No individual has the right to the work of another human being. However, everyone has the right to health care, and the poor have a right to housing, food stamps, child care, and an education. That’s because those things are provided by the government and not by people.

Casablanca is the story of a jaded American expatriate in the late 1930′s, a former idealist who’s watched the world descend into fascism and has given up on it. His feelings aren’t muche different from what I’ve been feeling lately, as I watch our beloved country sinking into socialism in order to buy some temporary financial safety.

The first 20 minutes or so of the move very effectively set up the sense of utter hopelessness of the refugees from Nazi occupied Europe who’ve found themselves trapped in Moroco, a colony of “neutral” France, unable to continue thier trek to America and freedom. Rick, a man who once ran guns for the Ethiopians and fought for the Spanish loyalists, owns a cafe (nighclub) that’s very popular among the disposessed, but he’s as hopeless and cynical as anyone in Casablanca.

Into this mix comes Victor Laslo, a tireless anti-Nazi crusader who’s been in and out of German concentration camps across Europe as an “enemy of the reich”. Wherever he’s gone he’s served as the a lightning rod for the local resistance, and the Nazi’s want him dead. His only hope is to acquire a set of transit papers that Rick has in his posession. Just prior to this scene, he’s trying to talk Rick into giving them the papers. Then this happens.

We see here a room full of people who’ve become so wrapped up in the act of fleeing the opressors that they’ve forgotten how to be free men and free women. These people who, seconds before, were willing to meekly turn thier heads as the conquerors sing of the glory of thier new world order, are suddenly brought to thier feet by one man who refuses to knuckle under. And suddenly the Marcilles become not just the French national anthem, but the anthem of all free men and free women everywhere, everytime.

One man. One man with the courage of his confictions and the dignity of all free men and women.

One man.

Maybe we all need to send a copy of this url to EVERY ONE of our republican “leaders” in the senate.

Now, it’s not that unusual for Chavez to insult the American president.  Personally, I was a bit worried that the Immaculate Inauguration would force Chavez to find a new hobby, like supporting terrorists in neighboring countries (no, wait… oh, yeah).  As it turns out, I needn’t have worried; Chavez has already managed to fit the Obamassiah into his paranoid delusions. He’s now decided that Obama is out to remove him, and that if he doesn’t, the Pentagon will have him killed. I’m guessing that he sussed this out while wearing a tin foil hat and sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber. Or, he might have been tipped off by his close personal friend, Bigfoot.

All of this reminded me of one of my favorite of the “ealy, funny” Woody Allen movies, the immortal Banannas.  Ironically, Banannas is SUPPOSED to be about south American revolutionaries of the 60′s.  I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Enjoy.

Here’s the  summary:

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams. Was this what adulthood promised?”

I doubt that there’s a human being on the planet who hasn’t seen this movie, with the possible exception of a few tribal groups deep in the Amazon.  The author of this review puts a completely selfish and cyincal spin on the story.  He goes on at length about how horrifying the movie was to him at 15, much fun the town looks like after it’s degenerated into Pottersville, and the empty look in the eyes of Ernie the cabbie as he drives George around the changed town.  He also points out that at a couple of times in George’s life, he lashes out at those closest to him.

This was once of the most self-centered, small-minded articles I’ve ever read.  I’m horrified.  The point of the movie is that when we sacrifice our own desires to a greater good, the rewards are worth the  price, even if they’re something we take for granted.  George subordinated his wanderlust for the sake of his family and his town, and he did it of his own free will.  Yeah, he chaffed at it, and it turned into rage at a couple of the lowest points in his life (primarily so that the character would be more interesting), but then he sucked it up and “did the right thing”.

As for how much “fun” Potterville looked like, and the blank look on Ernie’s face, they’re one and the same;  all the vice and glamour was nothing but a facade for the empty misery of life in a town without values.

That was once of the most selfish, self-centered, small-minded articles I’ve ever read.  I’m horrified.

The point of the movie is that when we sacrifice our own desires to a greater good, the rewards are worth the  price, even if they’re something we take for granted.  George subordinated his wanderlust for the sake of his family and his town, and he did it of his own free will.  Yeah, he chaffed at it, and it turned into rage at a couple of the lowest points in his life, primarily so that the character would be more interesting; we need to know that he’s chaffing and that the dreams of the young man have never been forgotten.  But then he always sucked it up to Do The Right  Thing.

As for how much “fun” Potterville looked like, and the blank look on Ernie’s face, they’re one and the same;  all the vice and glamour was nothing but a facade for the empty misery of life in a town without values.

The character of George represent every family man in the world; I saw my father in him the first time I saw this movie, and I’m usually pretty dense about these sorts of things.  I’m truly stunned that a writer who has a son of his own hasn’t figured this out. 

This author is an example of a generation that never seems to stop harping on how we ”change the world”, and he works for a newspaper that’s relentless in it’s desire to see the government used to FORCE people to do what it sees as the right thing, and yet he can’t seem to understand the moral in a trite little movie about personal sacrifice, or the nobility of an “ordinary life”.

So, what does that leave?  Meet the energy source of the future:

It’s not all bad news; they’re cute and I think four of them should be able to out-accelerate a Prius.

I recently joined a social networking group centered around an activity that tends to attract a lot of liberals. Someone started a discussion thread on politics, and more than one lefty jumped in with the usual talking points. I haven’t so far seen anything from a conservative. Here’s the entry I’m thinking about submitting.

1. War is a horrible, horrible thing. It’s a complete failure of the higher purposes of civilization. Unfortunately, there are things worse than war.

 a. The time to worry about the questions of “just” war is before the fighting begins. The time for worrying about the cost of the war is after the war has been fought. While troops are in the field, the only concern should be how to win. To my way of thinking, anything else is treason. b.I think that what we’re seeing in the Muslim world is their equivalent of the Protestant Reformation, and the only reason that the Western world is being attacked is because we represent where the reformers want to go. The reformation in the Christian world took centuries, and cost thousands of lives BEFORE modern weaponry. We can’t allow that to happen in the Muslim world. The war in Iraq was a way to short-circuit that reformation, and it appears to be working. c. I can't imagine a more racist act than leaving the Iraquis to the tender mercies of people who will send a retarded woman into a pet store with a bomb strapped to her chest. We have to finish what we started. We can argue about the rest of it later. 

1. I’ve worked in the private sector, I’ve worked in the government, and I’ve worked on government projects as part of a contractor organization. Anyone who thinks the government can do anything better than the private sector is living in a fantasy world.

   a.Many people think that the profit motive corrupts, and the only way to keep an organization “honest” is have the government take it over. What they’re missing is that no matter how lofty the initial goals may be, any government organization will eventually degrade to the point where it’s only real mission is maintaining it’s own budget.

   b.The profit motive serves as a reality check on the organization. The fact that private-sector organizations need to keep bringing in revenue from voluntary customers (rather than taking it from unwilling taxpayers who have no choice about paying) more than makes up for the corrupting effect.

2. I believe in charity. I believe in helping those who need help. I DON’T believe that this should be handled by the government. If I don’t have a right say “yes” or “no”, it’s stops being charity and starts being theft.

   a. If you have a cause you think should be funded, convincing a large portion of the population to voluntarily donate (rather than convincing a small number of politicians to steal it for you) is better for both the giver and the receiver. When you factor in the 50% inefficiency of government operations, you’ll probably come out better.

   b. Government social programs are NOT “entitlements”. The only person who’s “entitled” to the money I’ve earned is ME.

   c. There’s no such thing as “welfare rights”. No one has a “right” to the fruit of someone else’s labor.

   d. Health care is NOT a “right”. No one has a right to the fruit of someone else’s labor.

3. Corporate welfare is just as repugnant as personal welfare. I believe in letting corporations succeed or fail on their own. The role of the government in business should be in preventing the creation of businesses that are “too big to let fail”.

   a.If your company or industry needs money to make itself more competitive overseas, you should be talking to your banker, not your senator.

4. I believe that letting 30% or more of the voting population get away without paying federal income tax is a recipe for disaster. If it’s right for any taxpayer to bear the cost of government, then it’s right for all taxpayers to bear that cost. Representation without taxation is as much of an injustice to the taxpayers as taxation without representation.

   a. I think that the day we start letting the government decide how much income is “enough”, and who is more “deserving” of wealth than the person who created it, we stop being citizens and start being subjects.

   b. We should implement a “fair tax” scheme; tax consumption (and therefore wealth) rather than income via a national sales tax, and rebate everyone the equivalent of the tax on a “subsistence” living (with the rebate amount adjusted to inflation and not to tax rates)

   c. I think that corporate taxes are a complete waste of time. They cost jobs and raise costs. They give politicians the ability to impose an indirect tax on all of us without taking any heat for it.

5. I believe that “diversity” is another term for “cultural suicide”. If a culture isn’t confident enough of it’s own values to expect immigrants to adapt to them, then it doesn’t deserve to exist (and in the long run, it won’t).

   a. Assimilation was the engine that created the unique and immensely successful American culture. “Diversity Training” is an idiotic attempt to fix something that wasn’t broken.

   b. If you want to speak your native language at home, dress your daughter like a beekeeper, and raise your kids to be citizens of the “old country” (the one you left because it sucked), that’s your right. Just don’t expect to live the American Dream, and don’t expect it for your kids.

   c. I don’t care where you came from, you don’t have the right to demand that the rest of us adapt the workplace to your culture. If you can’t abide by the rules that everyone else has to follow, then go get a job where you can.

   d. Can someone please explain to me how it is that six months of immersion education is considered enough to become fluent in a language, unless the transition is from Spanish to English?

   e. Any country that’s not willing to secure it’s own borders isn’t long for this world.

6. I like green trees and chirpy birds. Really. But I think that the modern environmental movement is full of organic fertilizer.

   a. It’s amazing to me how the environmental movement’s goals have basically merged with the communists of the last generation; eliminate business, give the government the control over the means of production, redistribute wealth.

   b. There’s not a single aspect of your personal life that the environmental movement doesn’t feel it should have the right to control. These guys make Maoists look like libertines.

   c. It’s not a scientific movement, it’s a political one. From what I can tell, 90% of environmentalists haven’t taken a science class since eighth grade. The ones that can claim the mantle of scientist are also dependent on a pro-environmentalist grant system, yet are the first to call anyone who disagrees with them a “shill for the oil companies”.

   d. Anyone ever notice that there’s no actual qualifications for “environmental activist”? All you need is an opinion and a business card. Birkenstocks and an air of smug self-satisfaction help, but aren’t actually mandatory.

   d. The greenhouse global warming theory (and it IS a “theory”) is full of holes. There is absolutely no proof that the concept is valid, and plenty of evidence that it’s wrong. Any other theory would have been abandoned years ago as hopeless.

7. I believe that racial issues in this country are being addressed in exactly the wrong way.

   a. The gains of the civil rights movement were real, lasting, and amazing. I don’t know of any situation in human history in which a minority population was able to achieve parity in a single generation without an armed uprising. But they weren’t a matter of minorities wrenching power from whites. They were brought about by the white majority accepting responsibility for the injustice of the situation and changing the way they acted, the way they thought, and the way they did business. And they institionalized these changes as law.

   b. There are certainly still white bigots out there. But to the widest extent possible, those people are marginalized, fringe figures, and there are laws to keep them out of power. There are also minority bigots out there, but I can’t say the same about them.

   c. The problems facing the minority communities today, the “performance gap”, drug use, illegitimacy, and black-on-black violence can’t be laid at the feet of white people.

   d. The idea of establishing a black culture separate from the white middle-class has proven to be an abject failure. We advance when we work together; apart, we all become victims of the race-baiter’s obsessions with past injustices.

Let me get this straigh – prices are higher at the pump because we didn’t tax the oil companies enough? Or are you saying that taxing them more will bring gas prices down?

What kind of business is this “Dan” character in???

The simple fact is that if these technologies have any technical merit and can become cost competitive, they’ll be huge commercial successes, and they won’t need the subsidies or guaranteed market shares.

Of course, the liberal response to this is that we need to “prime the pump”. Again, I think this is a stupid argument; no one needed to prime the pump to make the automobile a success, or the personal computer, or the internet (aside from a small DARPA grant that, yes, Al Gore had a part in awarding). But, ok, maybe some times we need to help incubate an embryonic industry.

So how about this for an approach: eliminate the capital gains tax for investments in companies that are doing the basic R and D on alternative fuels. If the companies fail, they fail on thier own, the government’s not out a penny, and the only people who get hurt are the ones who voluntarily took the risk. If they fly, the government’s STILL not out a penny, the people who took the risk reap a larger reward, and the entire economy benefits