Back to Basics

It is clearly unfair to compare, from left to right, Princess Letizia of Spain, Carla Bruni, the wife of France’s president, and Aunt Esther…I mean Michelle Obama, seen here together. That said, one picture is still worth a thousand words.

It’s wrong! Wrong to compare first ladies, but this one is always going on about what we should eat and how much.

We begin another week with another look into the fascinating world of the global warming alarmists who, at this point, are merely incapable of using reason or logic to think things through. I have to admit that I admire the tenacity that these folks have. Despite massive amounts of counter-arguments, they still manage to move forward with the warning calls, completely ignoring all the things that simply render their argument moot. I think the thing that fascinates me the most about these carnival barkers is that they continually lambast opponents for using faulty logic or ill-conceived arguments, and then they go right ahead and do exactly what it is they just railed about. It boggles the mind. Global warming is something that I simply cannot ignore. The consequences of allowing the progressive movement to move forward with their plans are simply too devastating. At this point, I see the really loud voices in the debate as nearly as crack-pottish as Cesca is about racism. Therefore, I will continue to hammer them until the world shouts them down as the fruitballs that they are.

As a quick side note, it is amazing to me to watch the two sides of the political spectrum (GOP and DEM) continue to trounce each other, each accusing the other of using a campaign of fear to trick the American public. It isn’t surprising that they both use the same tactic. It is, after all, the best tactic they have found. And they are two different color shirts both on the same team. No, what is amazing to me is that each side is so quick to see through the fear the other side falsely uses, while simultaneously completely ignoring the fact that their side is doing to exact same thing. Progressives scream and holler about the right’s campaign of fear being used to take us to war or to pass something as dumbfoundingly unconstitutional as the Patriot Act or to oppose health care. Yet they somehow never seem to recognize, or at least refuse to acknowledge, the same bullshit coming out of their camp. They can’t seem to recognize the fear mongering around global warming and corporate bailouts and gun control or the urgency to pass health care. Just an observation. Mind-boggling at best how blind folks are to the tactics of the side they agree with.

Back to the topic of global warming. As an example of their tenacity, we have yet another article published this week over at the most popular far left think-tank, the Huffington Post. I have discussed Johann Hari and his madness around the global warming stuff before. But despite the insanity of what he says, he still gets published over there writing this stuff. I could say that he is hateful, but I don’t think he is. I leave that title to Bob Cesca, who is perhaps the most dishonest and hateful writer on HuffPo. No, Hari instead falls into the category of dishonest environmental alarmist. And you cannot ignore that he has written this piece. Hari was named one of the most influential people on the left in Britain by the Daily Telegraph. That he has influence with the nonsense that is below is downright scary. THAT is something to be alarmed about.

I have long disliked the environmental activists, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I find that they almost always have a passion for what they are doing that is so overriding that they simply don’t make any sense. Hari, for example, wants so badly to believe what he is spouting that he simply ignores logic and reason. I understand their hatred of corporations and of war (war activists and environmental activists tend to come from the same womb). But their belief that humans are somehow less important than some tree or bird is ridiculous. And their hubris as to the power of humans to do real damage to this planet is almost laughable, at least it would be if they weren’t so good at making small minded people agree with them.

I know that some folks think that global warming is not a topic worth discussing, but I disagree. I mentioned above that the potential for usurping our freedom and liberty under the guise of environmental activism is gigantic. Just the fact that Cap and Trade, which has failed miserably in every country or region foolish enough to attempt it, is still on the table is proof enough of how dangerous these global warming hangers on still are. And if you think Cap and Trade is bad based on its effectiveness, that is nothing compared to its impact on our freedom and our wallets. And as I mentioned, this article was posted in the last week over there at HuffPo. The environmental liars are still working hard to raise a false alarm, so we have to work just as hard to point out their lies and talk people off the proverbial ledge. So I will tonight point out the madness in his ridiculously misleading article (which for the record had a remarkable number of “right on” comments to it).

This Is the Hottest Year Ever, and the Climate Catastrophe Has Begun
by Johann Hari at the Huffington Post

Thank god man-made global warming was proven to be a hoax. Just imagine what the world might have looked like now if those conspiring scientists had been telling the truth. No doubt NASA would be telling us that this year is now, so far, the hottest since humans began keeping records.

Johann Hari

Interestingly, a partial year’s worth of temperatures is given as proof of something, right before he gets to the part of the article where he points out how stupid people are for thinking a snowy winter last year meant something. Very small length trends are only proof when it gets hotter, not colder. The other misleading statement here is “hottest since humans began keeping records.” Care to guess how long that time period is? Not thousands of years…. no, just 160 years with instruments and only about 60 years with any accuracy or global coverage. The truth is, the earth has been significantly warmer than this within the last 10,000 years. But it doesn’t sound as scary when you tell the truth, so Hari makes it sound as bad as possible.

The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia’s vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate.

Notice that he didn’t make use of other periods of drought, such as say the worst drought in history in China from 1876-79 (killed 9 million), or its second worst in 1942-43 (killed a million). In fact he ignores reality in even Russia. It isn’t the worst drought they have ever seen. Droughts are an inherent feature of the climatic conditions in the main agricultural zone of Russia. From 1891 to 1983 (92 years) Russia has spent a total of 27 years in moderate drought or above. Almost every article I could find on the Russian drought said that this drought is the worst in 50 years. A few speckled in with a hundred years. But no one but the environmental con-artists are claiming it as the worst in Russian history. And how about this for a whopper: “killing 15,000 people!” I could not find a single source anywhere that put the death toll from the Russian fires higher than 50. Hari’s ridiculous claim is 300 times higher than reality.

Because warm air holds more water vapor, the world’s storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence — drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.

Again Hari attempts to distract by using false numbers presented in a way to scare the crap out of readers. The world’s storms are not reaching some unprecedented level of intensity or violence. A 1970 Cyclone in Bangledesh killed 500,000. One in 1737 in India killed 300,000. or even the worst storm in history, which was in 1287, part of a horrible storm year in Europe. The fact is that history is full of massive storms that did major damage and took hundreds of thousands of lives. And we find another misleading figure from Hari: “drowning one fifth of Pakistan.” The death toll in Pakistan is somewhere between 1,600-1,800. Pakistan is the world’s sixth highest population at over 170 million. One fifth of the population drowning would be 34 million people. Hari here implies that the death toll was 19,000 times higher than reality.

As for floods, there are far worse ones in recorded history. China had floods that killed a million people in 1887 and 300,000 in 1642. All this talk about the flooding that is happening is misdirection. It ignores the massive amount of data on past flooding that was worse, and attempts to baffle with bullshit, pointing to anything recent as unprecedented.

The world’s ice sheets would be sloughing off massive melting chunks four times the size of Manhattan. The cost of bread would be soaring across the world as heat shriveled the wheat crops. The increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be fizzing into the oceans, making them more acidic and so killing 40 percent of the phytoplankton that make up the irreplaceable base of the oceanic food chain. The denialists would be conceding at last that everything the climate scientists said would happen — with their pesky graphs and studies and computers — came to pass.

Has Hari ever looked at a map? First of all, I have read all the hype that a ice shelf three times the size of Manhattan sloughed off (see, they can’t even do a single thing without at least a little number manipulation), or is about to, I can’t remember which. I look at a big old world map, though, and can plainly see that Manhattan, despite it’s gigantic ego, isn’t really that big of an area. Even putting something three times that in the world’s interconnected water surface is like dropping an ice cube into a swimming pool. The claims of massive flooding or rising sea levels due to this are borderline insanity. But what Hari really misses in this whole thing is that THIS IS NOT A NEW PHENOMENON. That ice has melted, sloughed off, and reformed time after time in history. But it sure sounds like a dire emergency when he says it, doesn’t it. I am only surprised that he didn’t tell us about how millions of polar bears made their homes in that shelf.

Right on:

(h/t Sissy Willis via F.A.M.)

And right on again, from Jerome Hudson via Human Events:

Like most Americans, I’ve had enough with this administration’s policies. I was fed up and fired up.

I am even more so in the wake of the most moving gathering I’ve ever been privileged to be a part of.

At one point, some of the people attending the Rev. Al Sharpton’s “counter rally,” coined “Reclaiming King,” stopped me. I guess they must have been judging me by the color of my skin not the content of my character, because they asked if I was going to come join them.

“No, I won’t be there,” I told them. “Why?” one of them asked with a grimace on his face. I looked at him and said, “I want to be where the Lord is and the Lord is in this place.”

On Monday all the talk in the news was of an Israeli Rabbi who had called on G-d to strike down Abbas, the head of the terrorist Palestinian Authority, and the rest of his gang. On Tuesday, terrorists murdered a pregnant woman and three other people. The same media that dedicated a great deal of time and energy to condemning Rabbi Yosef for inciting violence, wasted no such time on discussing the constant incitement to violence practiced by the Palestinian Authority media under Abbas’ authority. Earlier this month Abbas had participated in a ceremony honoring the Munich Massacre terrorists. But the media has never been particularly interested in discussing Muslims calls to violence, only in tarring any opponents of Muslim terrorism in the darkest and ugliest shades.

The murder of four Israelis and an unborn child was described not in terms of their human toll, but their political toll. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs condemned the terrorists as “enemies of peace”. The six orphans no doubt thank him for his concern for “peace”. State Department spokesman PJ Crowley dispensed with the human side entirely, warning that, “There may well be actors in the region who are deliberately making these kinds of attacks in order to try to sabotage the process”. A statement that could have been produced by a particularly unfeeling computer.

Gibbs boasted that the Palestinian Authority had condemned the attack. In reality what the Palestinian Authority had said was that the attack went “against Palestinian interests”. As condemnations go, this is right up there with, “Don’t sell drugs while the police are watching my house” and that all time champion, “I am completely against adultery in an election season”. The Palestinian Authority did not condemn terrorism. It condemned the attack because it wasn’t in their interest today to murder the Ames’ and their friends today. Tomorrow it might be again.

Meanwhile the US is funding a Palestinian Authority ad campaign aimed at Israel, which suggests that Abbas and his terrorist gang is interested in peace, and Israel isn’t. So while Obama talks about being evenhanded, he is actually funding a series of domestic attack ads against Netanyahu, and for Abbas.

The media coverage has proven to be every bit as human as Gibbs and Crowley, focusing on the murders only in terms of their potential for disrupting the negotiations. This has been the modus operandi for almost two decades now, as articles have run off the press treating every murder of Israelis not in terms of the dead, but in terms of what it will do to the prospects for a terrorist Palestinian Arab state.

There is of course not a word of regret from any of Hamas’ useful idiots in Code Pink or any of the other leftist supporters of the flotilla. The Huffington Post, which ran a puff piece promoting Khaled Meshaal, has no regrets either. Neither do any of those who called for an end to the blockade of Gaza. The same people who can spend pages moaning about the plight of the people of Gaza showed their true humanitarian colors with their silence. Ordinary Arab Muslims meanwhile filled the comments section of newspapers with cries of “Allahu Akbar”. As they have in response to the murder of Jews for over a thousand years.

There is of course no talk permitted of that. No context given beyond that of the omnipresent “occupation”. No acknowledgment that murdering Jews is part of the Koran, which dehumanizes Jews in particular, and other non-Muslims in general. Meanwhile within Israel itself, the left has conducted a hateful campaign of incitement against those Jews they brand as settlers. While the Ames’ were being murdered, leftist radical writers like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua were calling for a boycott of settlements. Like the ghetto police and the Kapos who responded to being confined to ghettos and concentration camps by beating the Jews that the Germans had placed under their authority, Israel’s leftists respond to European boycotts by finding Jews within their own country to boycott.

But to the left the Jews are occupiers, much as they were to the Nazis. The murder of Jews is discussed only in terms of whether the latest bodies of men, women and children will dissuade Israeli from making more concessions to terrorists. In their eyes Arab Muslims are human, Israeli Jews are not. Will the murder of a pregnant woman keep Israeli negotiations away from the table for an extra day? An extra hour. An extra minute. That is all that matters.

by Dahr Jamail and Erika Blumenfeld
Global Research, August 30, 2010

Laboratory confirmed oil-soaked sorbent pad. (Photo © Erika Blumenfeld 2010)

The State of Mississippi’s Department of Marine Resources (DMR) opened all of its territorial waters to fishing on August 6. This was done in coordination with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Food and Drug Administration, despite concerns from commercial fishermen in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida about the presence of oil and toxic dispersants from the BP oil disaster.

On August 19, Truthout accompanied two commercial fishermen from Mississippi on a trip into the Mississippi Sound in order to test for the presence of submerged oil. Laboratory test results from samples taken on that trip show extremely high concentrations of oil in the Mississippi Sound.

James “Catfish” Miller and Mark Stewart, both lifelong fishermen, have refused to trawl for shrimp because they believe the Mississippi Sound contains submerged oil.

James "Catfish" Miller, third-generation fisherman. (Photo © Erika Blumenfeld 2010)

“I can’t tell you how hard it is for me not to be shrimping right now, because I’m a trawler,” Miller told Truthout as he piloted his shrimp boat out of Pass Christian Harbor, “That’s what I do. I trawl.”

In Colonial America it was common for British soldiers, tax collectors and other representatives of the Crown to obtain a writ of assistance giving them the authority to enter any home, business or ship at any time of the day or night in search of contraband goods or to interrogate the residents and owners over payment of taxes or for most any other reason.

Writs of assistance were very vague search warrants and it was a simple procedure to obtain them. They could be had for any reason or no reason from the Colonial governor or from judges — all of whom held their positions at the whim of the King of England.

In 1761 James Otis Jr., the Advocate General of Massachusetts — whose job it was to defend the issuance of the writs in court — resigned his position and took the side of 63 Boston merchants in a court battle against the writs. He represented the merchants for free, and though he lost the case in a court stacked against him, he earned the title of patriot.

It was his five-hour speech in court that served “as the spark in which originated the American Revolution,” according to John Adams, who was sitting in the courtroom at the time.

“The child of independence was then and there born, every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance,” Adams said.

The issue was such an important one to the Colonists that it was mentioned as one of the grievances in the Declaration of Independence: “He (the king)… sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

The challenge: to trivialize this in order to label it as irrelevant:

No simple task.

The best way dismiss the gathering is into a racial issue (no big surprise). This requires proving it’s all about racism, but in order to do so, the media must wade into the crowd, find unwhite people, and patronize them by asking what the hell they’re doing there (it’s been done previously, but they rarely get the answer they’re looking for).

Reporters never seem ashamed of the fact that they’re singling out black people and essentially calling them stupid right to their faces without knowing anything about them (that’s kind of racist if you ask me), and a CBS reporter certainly didn’t shy away from doing so yesterday:

CBS News: “I’m noticing that there are not a lot of minorities here today, why do you think that is?”

Black woman at Glenn Beck rally: “They’re probably over there with Al Sharpton.”

Yeah, she was right:

Sentence first, verdict later!

Another day, another left-wing rush to Fox-bashing, right-wing demonizing judgment…

As you may have heard, a Muslim cabbie was stabbed in a terrible incident in NYC today.

The reportedly drunk perpetrator worked/volunteered for a liberal interfaith film company and there is zero evidence that he is a Fox News fan, Glenn Beck listener, Republican voter, or conservative blog reader.

No matter. The left-wing media couldn’t wait to indict the Right.

University of Michigan professor Juan Cole headlines his screed: Republican National Committee Slashes New York Muslim Cabbie.

The Village Voice asked hopefully before providing grudging updates: Was the Muslim Cab Driver Slashing the First “Ground Zero Mosque” Hate Crime?

Remember back in 2008 when left-wing pundits and naysayers were warning America that Sarah Palin as vice president would result in an intellectual melt down in the White House?

Not bright enough to be in a responsible slot they claimed. America needs more brain power in the candidate that could wind up being president.

Remember?

Well, perhaps Sarah Palin is not Mensa material, but she is one hell of a lot brighter than Joseph Biden, the gaffe-prone court jester currently making a mockery of the “Exceptional American” theory which holds that we have the best and the brightest in charge of things in America.

Biden’s latest Oops! moment came this morning when the addled VP reportedly said the following:

“Biden conceded that the economic recovery was not proceeding as fast as the administration had hoped, but claimed there was ‘no doubt we’re moving in the right direction.’”

This idiotic statement at a time when:

• New home sales slumped to slowest pace on record;
• Foreclosures head toward one million for 2010
• Bankruptcies at five year high
• Job losses continue with unemployment still out of control
• Federal deficit at 13 trillion and growing

This is “moving in the right direction,” Mr. Biden?

Thank goodness we have a mid-term election in which voters can diminish the influence of the Obama-Biden comedy act which, by the way, is not all that funny these days!

As promised this evening, I have brought forth a topic that I am a little excited to have some of you folks, who are so entrenched in your beliefs about regulation and government’s necessity in the realm of business, sink your teeth into and debate here at SUFA. I will allow the topic to rest on its own for two days until Tuesday night’s open mic (simply meaning I won’t be posting a new article on Monday night). I have spent the last couple of years debating with folks here and elsewhere that I believe that the market could take care of things better than the government. I don’t actually feel that there is any question as to the validity of that statement. The government hasn’t met a regulation that has worked. Sure some of them make small improvements in some areas, but the problem is that the unintended consequences seem to always negate any good that comes from regulation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the world controlled by the Food and Drug Administration. Not only is regulation completely ineffective in that realm, but the unintended consequences are devastating to a society that has the potential to be much farther down the path of better health than the FDA has allowed.

So what I am going to offer here is my vision for the elimination of the Food and Drug Administration. I cannot claim that all of what I will say here is 100% mine. It is the result of reading many different ideas and having many different discussions with people over the years. I wish I could name every person who had a thought that contributed. Some of them are in books (John Stossel, Hayek, and Andrew Napolitano for example), while others I knew only as “that guy I talked to while waiting for the Metro in DC.” Now let me first address the concept that I am espousing here:

I fully understand that we cannot eliminate the FDA tomorrow and think that everything is going to magically transform and the private markets are going to have instant solutions. I also understand that the idea of doing so simply scares the poo out of anyone who still, in their own mind, cannot grasp the concept of a world without government regulation. That means that any proposal that would take this drastic step would be shouted down by the same type of people who sound the alarm that without government intervention the climate will change, Bill Gates will buy the Presidency, and Coca-Cola will go back to putting Cocaine in their soft drinks.

That is why what I offer is a two-step proposal. We will get to the two steps in a bit. Step two is actually quite simple. It is nothing more than eliminating the FDA. But in my opinion we have to do step one first. Before I get to explaining step one, I thought the first relevant thing to do was justify why this is necessary at all. I made the claim above that the FDA is the best example of how unintended consequences negate any good that comes from regulation. I am going to provide a few reasons why I believe this. It will be a sort of justification for the elimination of the FDA in the first place. After all, you don’t go changing things all willy-nilly. There has to be a need for changing things in order for the private market to take action. If a need doesn’t need to be filled, the private market doesn’t fill it. But there is plenty of need to eliminate the FDA.

The Food and Drug Administration was formed in 1906 by Teddy Roosevelt as part of the Food and Drug Act. Many of the regulatory powers associated today with the FDA were granted via the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. Currently the FDA is responsible for “protecting and promoting public health through the regulation and supervision of food safety, tobacco products, dietary supplements, prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, biopharmaceuticals, blood transfusions, medical devices, electromagnetic radiation emitting devices, veterinary products, and cosmetics.” The agency was meant to do good. It was formed as it currently exists a result of some public outcry over interstate transportation of food that had been doctored and a 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in which over 100 people died after using a drug formulated with a toxic, untested solvent. See, even then progressives knew how to take advantage of a crisis.

Over the years the size and scope of the FDA did what every government bureaucracy does: grow out of control. Let’s start with the operating budget which taxpayers would no longer be responsible for. Last year’s operating budget for the FDA was 2.4 Billion dollars. That a nice chunk of change. But that is only a fraction of the actual costs to consumers. Drugs in the United States are some of the highest priced in the world. Financially strapped folks in the US break the law to get the same drugs for less money from foreign companies in Canada and Europe. I would suggest that simply lowering the costs of drugs would be reason enough to eliminate the FDA.

Henry I. Miller, a former FDA official, presented a crushing analysis of the FDA’s regulatory process and procedures. In his early 2001 editorial commentary, Dr. Miller noted that the total time it takes to develop a new drug and get it to market had doubled since the 60′s. He also noted, “Costs are spiraling out of control because the FDA meddles endlessly in clinical trials and keeps raising the bar for approval.” Furthermore, he cited statistics that showed the average number of clinical trials per average drug increased from 30 in the early 1980′s to 68 during the 1994–95 period while the average number of patients in clinical trials for each drug more than tripled! As expected, the average time required for clinical trials for a new drug rose from 85 months in the first half of the 1990′s to 92 months in the last half of the 1990′s. (found here )