Casual Friday Edition - 9/23/11

Calm down.  Everything is under control.  A dastardly criminal enterprise has been shut down.  Get back to your normal lives knowing all is well in America.

In case you weren't aware of it, a California couple was doing something very improper in their home; something involving a group of people.  The Fromms were cited under a municipal code in the city of San Juan Capistrano, California.  When asked for comment, Stephanie Fromm said, "How dare they tell us we can’t have whatever we want in our home".

What type of debauchery was taking place at their home?  They were holding a bible study.  I know, there goes the neighborhood.  Well, one of their neighbors, in an effort to preserve their house's value I assume, called in a complaint.  The couple have been fined $300 and must now apply for a permit to allow three or more to meet in their home to avoid further $500 fines.

The Fromms live in a neighborhood with large homes and have a corral, barn, pool and huge back lawn on their property, so parking and noise aren’t a problem. 

"There’s no singing or music,” Stephanie said. “It’s meditative.”

Well, thank God for that at least.

(h/t Gateway Pundit)

New Discovery Could Shake Scientific Consensus

Roll Over Gore: Pillar of Climate Change Challenged

Is Gore Wrong?  Galactic Cosmic Radiation Says Yes

Cern Scientists Challenge Climate Change after Cosmic Rays test

CERN scratching head over Global Cosmic Radiation

Physics Shocker!  The Sun controls cloud cover/global temperature

Climate Change Theory in a Spin as Cosmic Rays seed cloud formation

Wouldn't it have been great if the media would have been able to print accurate headlines like these just a few weeks ago following another CERN experiment (Click here for more info).  But the politics of challenging the AGW position on Climate Change is too fraught with danger for science to be allowed its proper place.

But I must say that if challenging consensus is inappropriate in Climate Change, wouldn't it seemingly be out of the question when it comes to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity and his famous equation Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.  This "pillar of physics" says that nothing can move faster than the speed of light.  Even now, most scientists are in disbelief.  Notice though that no one is trying to shut down the discussion by saying the debate is over.

Yet below are the headlines declaring the results of CERN's recent experiment.  The hypocrisy in the media is beyond belief.

Roll Over Einstein: Pillar of Physics Challenged

Was Einstein Wrong? Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Says Yes

Cern scientists challenge laws of physics after 'breaking' speed ...

CERN scratching head over speed of light

Physics shocker! Neutrinos clocked faster than light

Einstein's theory in a spin as neutrinos pass speed of light

Debate Reaction

The strongest reaction of the night came when I over-anticipated a Herman Cain talking point by yelling, "CHILEAN MODEL!" a little too enthusiastically while sitting next to the beautiful Dawn.  Suffice it to say that I finished the remainder of the evening in solitude.

In small bits, one forgets that Newt Gingrich is unelectable.  I would like to see him as the VP pick, if only to see him debate Biden into the ground.

Cain is also unelectable based on foreign policy issues, but I do like his $9.99 pizza deal.

Rick Santorum seems more like the regular guy than Rick Perry, so I'm not sure where Perry's strength is anymore.  Bachmann is fading fast, while Huntsman should get his parting gift soon too.  Gary Johnson one liner was unable to overcome Gary Johnson.  I'm purposely leaving out Ron Paul.  I wish these debates would too.

Wait, you forgot Romney.  No, I didn't.  Romney is still exactly the same as he's been since 2008 - good enough to get my vote over Obama, yet has done nothing to get my vote in a primary.

In case you didn't watch, here was Johnson's big line of the night.

"My next-door neighbor’s two dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than this current administration"

I hated the format of the debate.  Too many candidates who didn't have a chance to answer each question.  It's time to thin the herd and get down to business.  How the impending collapse of our economy this week didn't come up is beyond me?

The Social Contract

Get ready for the new liberal talking point - The Social Contract.  The Social Contract outlines the relationship between a people and its government.  Our nation was founded on the Social Contract as espoused by John Locke.  He recognized a Law of Nature (moral law) that man  would live by on his own, but for man to live without fear of those who chose to act against this law, he would collectively consent to be governed.

This government would be a neutral party to protect what is outlined in our Declaration of Independence as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of which property rights were a foundation.  This goverment "derives it's power from the consent of the governed".

Locke argued that government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their right of self-preservation. The government thus acts as an impartial, objective agent of the people, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner--the condition that takes place in the absence of government.

Locke was the foremost authority on political philosophy with the majority of America's founders.

But when the left begin to speak of a social contract, don't be fooled.  They do not refer to Locke, but to Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Whereas Locke's theory was about personal freedom and a government designed first and foremost to protect that freedom, Rousseau emphasized the collective over the individual.

[The social contract] can be reduced to the following terms: Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.

Rousseau envisioned the government as the seat of power, rather than the individual.  He thought that man often had "to be forced to be free" in that popular sovereignty was to decide what is good for the whole.

The Bill of Rights, is a direct repudiation of Rousseau's Social Contract and an embrace of Locke's.

So if you hear someone such as Paul Krugman or Elizabeth Warren say that the Social Contract means that one's property and/or it's proceeds, belong to society, the state or anyone other than the rightful owner, then understand what they are saying.  They are expressing a desire to force upon us a popular-elected socialistic state rather than the representative government, free market society our founders intended. 

They wish to wield the popular will of the masses against the minority, the Bill of Rights be damned.  Today it is class warfare against the rich.  Tomorrow, it will be the young against the elderly under Obamacare.  Before one smugly exclaims "take from the wealthy", be sure to reflect upon how the Bill of Rights may one day be your sole refuge against the state when it turns its eye upon you.

Only under Rousseau's Social Contract could the state ever believe that it has the right to fine an individual for holding a quiet, orderly Bible study on that individual's own property. 

Unfortunately, we currently have a president who agrees with them and is actively working to stir the masses for his own political gain.  Taxes to pay for the roads and the military may flow from Locke.  But taxes to take from one and give to another is not Locke.  Its not Jefferson or Madison either.  It's also not American.

On-Air with the Pseudo-Intellectual Elite

When poetry represents historical scholarship, a Hollywood film is hard science and Wikipedia becomes the final arbiter of fact, one should be careful about saddling up their high horse and denouncing the intelligence of anyone.  Yet time and time again, the leftists in the media rush to rebuke conservatives as unintelligent buffoons.

In June, while speaking in Boston Sarah Palin mentioned that Paul Revere had warned the British that "they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms by ringin' those bells and by makin' sure that as he's ridin' his horse through town to send those warnin' shots and bells that we were gonna be secure and we were gonna be free … and we were gonna be armed."

Naturally, the liberal left began reciting the Longfellow poem and thought to themselves, "Hey, there's nothing in there about Revere warning the British or warning shots and bells."  Using all the knowledge they had garnered of Paul Revere from their childhood, they felt safe to openly mock her.  From Mediate:

CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin, who was covering the story this afternoon, could barely contain her contempt as Palin described Paul Revere “sending those warning shots and bells” to tell Americans that “the British weren’t taking away our arms.” 

Palin strung together an off-the-cuff explanation of the famed Midnight Ride for those listening that seemed to involve a ton of noise, bells, gunfire, and a warning that the British were out to take away Americans’ as-yet-nonexistent Second Amendment rights, which Baldwin couldn’t help but react to with deer-in-the-headlights confusion. “History lesson from Sarah Palin on the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” she deadpanned.

I can just hear her saying, "That stupid Sarah Palin.  Revere didn't warn the British.  Duh!" 

The following is an excerpt from Brandeis University professor David Hackett Fischer's book Paul Revere's Ride entailing the events that took place following Revere's capture on the night of his famous ride:

At last the [British] officers began to feel the full import of what Paul Revere had been telling them. His words of warning took on stronger meaning when punctuated by gunfire. The sound of a single shot had suggested to them that surprise was lost. The crash of a volley appeared evidence that the country was rising against them. As they came closer to the Common they began to hear Lexington's town bell clanging rapidly. The captive Loring, picking up Revere's spirit, turned to the officers and said,"The bell's a'ringing! The town's alarmed, and you're all dead men !"

The media was so ignorant of the actual history, that they didn't even comprehend what Palin was saying.  If they had been smarter than a 5th grader, they would have remembered that Revere was captured during his ride.  Revere (and Loring) used the shots and bells to warn the British regulars it was a sign the citizens were prepared to fight.  As Palin correctly points out, the pretense for the British mission was to confiscate guns.

Another kerfuffle developed earlier this year when Michelle Bachmann hailed the "different cultures, different backgrounds, different traditions" of the European settlers who formed our nation to highlight the diversity and tolerance of our founding.  She also noted that the founders, notably "men like John Quincy Adams... would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country."

The criticism came immediately from the talking heads that Bachmann was a "bubblehead" for believing the founders ended slavery.  But that is not what she said.  I can say that I will not rest until I've extinguished stupidity, but if stupidity should outlive me, that would not invalidate what I've said.  It just means I failed.

If only they had bothered to check their research library - I mean - Wikipedia on John Q. Adams,

...he was famous as the most prominent national leader opposing slavery....Adams vilified slavery as a terrible evil and preached total abolition.

In 1841, Adams had the case of a lifetime, representing the defendants in United States v. The Amistad Africans in the Supreme Court of the United States.   He successfully argued that the Africans....should be considered free.  [His] speech was directed not only at the justices of this Supreme Court hearing the case, but also to the broad national audience he instructed in the evils of slavery.

Adams repeatedly spoke out against the "Slave Power"...

You would think the left would have known this already.  After all, Amistad was a movie.  But when the founders and slavery are found in the same story, the Constitution's 3/5th clause is used to disparage the document and the men who wrote it.  What many don't realize is that this was an anti-slavery clause. 

All free men, no matter their race or ethnicity were held as equals in principle, if not in  practice.  The Northern founders wanted to limit the slave trade and didn't want slaves (considered property with no right to vote or citizenship) to count towards a state's population for the purposes of apportioning representatives to the new national legislature. That would have given the Southern states, whose framers were insisting on a full count, a voting advantage. (before parties, political power often came from geography)  So, the delegates to the Philadelphia convention of 1787 agreed to the three-fifths compromise.

While certain statements by Bachmann can be considered controversial, that doesn't make their substance incorrect.  Too often the media elite considers anything it finds contrary to their world view baseless, and attack it out of ignorance.

In last week's speech, President Obama made a small error when he said that Abraham Lincoln had started the Republican Party.  Unlike when a Palin or Bachmann make such a gaffe, there was no outcry against our "bubblehead-in-chief" getting history wrong.  In fact, PBS (government funded television) edited out the remark in their transcript of the speech. (nothing to see here, move along)

Also seemingly washed away was the president's 57 states, speaking Austrian and "corpse-man" gaffes along with many others.  But of course it would be wrong to expose those, because Obama is obviously so much more intelligent than conservatives that there is no reason to question it or even release his collegiate grades.

For the media, the "he's dumb" schtick only applies to politicians on the right.  Recently, the MSNBC team took offense when Texas governor Rick Perry  described Social Security as a Ponzi scheme during a Republican debate.  Chris Matthews said that was crazy talk and Lawrence O'Donnell quickly googled the term to explain a Ponzi scheme was named after Charles Ponzi, a fact that we already knew and noted that it was a criminal endeavor, which we all also knew.  

A Ponzi scheme, according to O'Donnell's research database(Wikipedia) is an

...operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors.... The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors to keep the scheme going.

And Social Security is so very different.  Why just listen to Noble prize winning economist Paul Samuelson gush about the wonders of our Social Security program in 1967.

The beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in....

How is it possible? It stems from the fact that the national product is growing at a compound interest rate and can be expected to do so for as far ahead as the eye cannot see. Always there are more youths than old folks in a growing population. More important, with real income going up at 3% per year, the taxable base on which benefits rest is always much greater than the taxes paid historically by the generation now retired…

Social Security is squarely based on what has been called the eight wonder of the world — compound interest. A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived. And that is a fact, not a paradox. [Emphasis mine]

Naturally, he doesn't know what he's talking about.  Let's check back with Chris Matthews, who we last saw wondering how Perry could appeal to independents with such crazy talk about Ponzi schemes.  The next day on his own show HARDBALL, in a discussion with former Speaker Tip O'Neill, Matthews said this,

Today, lots of people fortunately make it past 65. They live into their 80s and 90s. They’re still getting checks. The system doesn’t work that way anymore. It’s not as healthy as it once was. So, how does a Republican deal with the fact it is a Ponzi scheme in the sense that the money that’s paid out every day is coming from people who paid in that day? It’s not being made somewhere.[Emphasis mine]

As Samuelson noted, Social Security's fiscal soundness is reliant on an expanding youth population.  But as Matthews explained, what we actually have now is an expanding retiree population.  In a Ponzi scheme, "once investment slows down, the scheme will begin to collapse under its own weight as the promoter starts having problems paying the promised returns ." 

An investment scheme that seems too good to be true in the beginning yet turns into a bad deal as the number of new investors (taxpayers) dwindles?  Well, maybe Perry is not quite so off base now, is he?  In fact, Governor Perry is simply a realist who knows we need a solution that can overcome the basic fallacy inherent to the program.

During the same debate Perry, in defending his stance that a scientific consensus does not necessarily equate to good science on Climate Change, mentioned that Galileo was on the outs with consensus too.  He analogized that Galileo had been outvoted in the past.

In the immediate post-debate coverage on MSNBC, Al Sharpton spoke up to show how he felt about Perry's "anti-science" stand by saying he didn't understand all this talk of "Galeo".  The viewer was left to ponder whether he was disagreeing with Perry's statement,  whether he was unaware of Galileo's history or whether he just had no idea who "Galeo" or Galileo was or why Perry mentioned him or her or whatever a "Galeo" was in the first place.

Can you imagine how hard it must be to jump into that void on a national TV and begin talking, when you have absolutely no knowledge base to speak of?  For too many in the media, Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth is as close to hard science as they get.  What they may not realize is that a British court ruled that this movie contained factual errors and could only be shown in schools with a set of guidelines.

Our psuedo-intellectual elites in the media mock conservatives as anti-science, yet they have no idea who Richard Lindzen, or Jasper Kirby or Hans Svensmark are despite the fact that they each have been a part of important research that contradicts the "consensus" on Climate Change recently.   Instead, Chris Matthews likes to ask conservatives if they believe in evolution, then laughs at whoever answers incorrectly.  For the longest time I thought Chris was doing a homage to IDIOCRACY with this bit.  The irony that a question of belief substitutes as a statement of scientific merit obviously escapes him.

Are there intelligent leftist in the media?  In my heart, I believe there are.  But for now I have no empirical evidence of it.  But despite the facts, I will continue to believe they exist on faith.  It's the least I can do for a group of people who have such utter faith that they are right, even when all evidence is to the contrary.

The Sky is Falling Said the Man With His Head in the Sand

So I'm working the overnight shift and I've been using part of my time twittering with a green Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) advocate in the UK who took exception to yesterday's post on the CERN CLOUD experiment.  I know I shouldn't, but hey, what the heck - I didn't have anything better going on?

As per usual, he first attempted to posit that maybe I'm arguing from an ideological basis rather than scientific.  If you know me, you know that's not the case.  I'm a natural skeptic and given that weather modeling is the classic example for Chaos Theory, it's a pretty high bar to clear for me on any climate model.  I want to see a theory that is testable and/or repeatable today, yesterday and tomorrow. 

Rather than offer me such a theory, he asked for me to produce one.  I'm not a climatologist and I'm not trying to push a theory.  All I am asking is for those who advocate AGW to make their case by putting in place a testable theory.  That's how science works.  Create a hypothesis, run experiments to see if the data fits; try to punch holes in your assumptions.

A scientific theory should be as sturdy as a house.  Any cracks in the foundation will spell doom.  Test, test and retest some more.  Probe any weaknesses in your hypothesis.  It must be able to withstand scrutiny and questioning from others.

But the AGW theory has been built very differently.  A hypothesis was created to explain a noticeable short term increase in temperature.  When the existing data did not conform to the hypothesis, it wasn't scrapped.  It was simply reshaped, but the basic claim, that humans are dramatically changing our climate, was never changed.  At no point has the model ever been able to make accurate predictions. 

The math is so contorted that it is now amusing.  Have you ever played one of those silly games where you take your age, do some mathematical calculations, only to end up with a predetermined answer?  Professor Mann's "hockey stick" graph showing a large recent increase in global temperature was surely based on similar equations.  Put any random numbers into it and you'd get the same hockey stick shaped graph.

I believe that the CERN CLOUD experiment is important because I would expect the large yellow ball of fire at the center of our solar system to play a large part in our climate and any changes taking place in it.  The initial IPCC AR1 model did not agree.  Each new model has gradually given the sun a bigger place in climate change, but only based on irradiance.  Thanks to Jasper Kirby, we now know that galactic cosmic radiation also plays a part.  The new data will force future models to add a whole new aspect to the solar effect.

Why is that important?  Because the greater the solar effect, the lesser the internal CO2 effect.  Bringing CO2 Climate Sensitivity down is paramount to creating a more realistic climate model.  Some AGW advocates are pushing a change of up to 4.0K with c=1.5, which is far from reality given the cooling that took place up to 1978 when CO2 emissions were still experiencing a massive increase during that time.  Lindzen-Choi-2011 gives a much more realistic number of 0.6, but even that may be too high in light of the new data.

The real question is this - how can we say the science is settled, when there are still so many unanswered questions?  Yes, the climate is changing.  But it is constantly changing - it's not static.  We are still learning the how and the why.  In truth, we may never know all that there is to know about our climate.

Of course, rather than offer any answers, my Twitter buddy kept questioning me.  That's not science - that's avoidance.  While he and his ilk attempt to scare you into believing that the air you breath is killing our planet, I find a much a greater danger in people who are so blind to what they don't know.

I know I don't have all the answers.  That's why I'm not afraid to continue looking.

Who's Anti-Science Now?

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, signalling the end of the Soviet Empire.  At least that's how it was reported.  Like a football game, victory should never be openly declared until time has expired.  But by the time The Wall fell, the West, led by America had already taken a knee to run out the clock.  In truth, the end of the Soviet Empire was assured early in Ronald Reagan's second term.  When President Reagan introduced his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program, the Soviets had their collectivist legs knocked out from under them.  They had used up all their resources in defending the body blows Reagan's defense buildup had caused and were in no shape to withstand this new futuristic StarWars weapons system with its space-based Lasers.  StarWars' offensive potential (in the Soviets' minds) was a knock-out blow.

A similar knock-out blow may have been delivered against Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) recently.  But it may be years before most will learn anything of it.  In 1996, two Danish scientists hypothesized that the sun and cosmic rays promote the formation of cloud formation at the molecular level.  If true, it would show that changes in cloud formation (and thus climate temperatures) were directly correlated to changes in the the amount of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere, which is controlled by the sun's magnetic field.

The day after presenting their hypothesis at a scientific conference in Britain, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), denounced their theory and sought to discredit them.  An attendee from the conference, spoke of their theory in a lecture at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) one of the world’s largest centres for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories.  CERN is the organization that invented the World Wide Web, that built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and that has now built a clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreated the Earth’s atmosphere. 

A CERN scientist, Jasper Kirby, saw the importance of the theory and developed an experiment that would create a cloud chamber.  In 1998, Kirby told the scientific press, "The theory will probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century.”   Some in the scientific community were put off by the thought that such an experiment would take place and pressured CERN to withdraw support for Kirby.  It took nearly a decade to be able to move forward with the project and several years to build it.

The research was published with little fanfare this week in the prestigious journal Nature.  In Kirby's cloud chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds, the cloudier and thus cooler it will be. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays), it follows that the sun has a large controlling effect on the Earth's temperature apart from its natural radiant effect.

This data will be very unpopular with those scientists whose livelihood relies on AGW for funding.  Many of these same scientists have decried the unscientific masses who deny the existence of AGW today.  Will they now step up and accept the science?  Or was their stance not really about science in the first place?

This is hard science with data originating at one of the premier scientific institutions on earth.  Of course it's too early to declare victory for common sense and good science.  But several year from now, we will see that while the IPCC began to unravel under it's own doctored science in 2010, it was when Kirby's research was released in August 2011 that the clock began to run out on the AGW scaremongers.

How odd is it that Reagan's threat of rays from space ended the Soviet threat, while cosmic rays from deep space may be the end of AGW?  Who knew science had such a wonderful sense of irony?

I Give Up, Al Gore! Now Make It Stop Snowing.

As I sit at work and watch it snow yet again, I had a thought.  Can we Anthropogenic Global Warming “deniers” declare defeat, proclaim Al Gore the winner, congratulate him on his overwhelming success in defeating AGW, give him a prize for his work in restoring ‘balance’ to the earth and then shuttle him and his merry little band of do-gooders off to the next global crisis?  Could that work?

Unfortunately, I don’t put too much hope in my plan.  The Goracle, being able to see the writing on the wall, has dropped the ‘warming’ verbiage and now preaches against the scourge of Climate Change.  This of course means that as long as the seasons change, the green mafia will be with us.  I just wish it was as funny as it sounds.

The Green cures for our world are many – Cap & Trade, investments in green energy (perhaps we should look into that blue energy on “V”), higher oil prices, higher CAFÉ standards, high-speed rail and even allowing the EPA to regulate the air we breathe.  In attempting to do something, even anything that might work, they fail to see that the cure is worse than the sickness.  In fact, the patient may just be a hypochondriac.