I’ll go so far as to say that I am thrilled that Chris Christie, my Governor here in New Jersey for whom I am proud to have voted, has planted his foot right in Lisa Jackon’s RGGI.  In so many words says Phil Kerpen, VP of Americans for Prosperity in this article: 

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/05/26/chris-christie-strikes-major-blow-cap-trade/

This, in response to his announcement to pull out of the initiative today: 

http://www.northjersey.com/news/politics/052611_Christie_to_pull_NJ_out_of_cap-and-trade_energy_program.html

The Governor plans to reallocate the funds to alternative sources of energy, which comes as a surprise to many that thought the money could be used to help the budget deficit.   Well you know what, that’s fine by me!   Let the governor tilt at windmills with a solar-powered lance and suit of armour, to boot.  At least windmills and solar panels would have some useful impact on a localized and functional level, where they belong, never on the level of a national AC grid.   (For instance, traffic flashers, emergency phones, and solar-powered street lights are going up all over Newark, one panel, one apparatus, and no interconnecting copper wiring, a perfect way to exploit the diurnal phase of the day for night lighting, that can’t be taken out by sabotage or accident or the efforts of a random individual.)   Now the Sierra Club of New Jersey (hacks to a person) can’t grouse about any perceived underfunding of renerable energy as well, although they’ll make a point to complain that we aren’t sailing our ship in the same direction as the rest of the planet.   Double smack by the Governor.  Giving the blues a case of the red!  Christie, 2016 (or 2020)!

She sent me this, the latest ORGANIZING FOR AMERICA propaganda on Barack Obama’s “Patient Bill of Rights”:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/patientsbillofrights?source=EMS

Needless to say I’m disappointed with my own mother for toeing the line where our noob President is concerned.  Apparently she’s out to convince other members of our family now, shamelessly, that this 2700 page travesty is a good thing.  I’d like some help in refuting any or all of the six points,

OR, adding six more points in the same bill, illustrating that there is more damage here than the supposed benefits are worth.

Consider it a contest.  I’ll take the best six.  Cite the actual section of the Act if you can.

Thank you for your efforts in advance, and I’ll give the winners honorable mentions!

The last (actually the first) time I went to Europe, it was on a trip to Italy.  That was in May of 2001. back when it was just me and the wife, we were sufficiently flush with the necessary, a fistful of tranquilizers was easier to come by, and flying planes into buildings in an act of Islamofacist terrorism was just a twinkle in Osama bin Laden’s eye.  The trip was fantastic, but, needless to say, I haven’t been back.

I remember my experience there as saturated with the presence of the Euro, which was just getting entering its final stage.  Everybody was still using the Italian lire and prices were always listed in both currencies.  I frowned upon the idea because I knew that somebody somewhere was making an identity change in the nation that was Italy at the time, and I had a feeling that it was unwelcome in some quarters, perhaps many quarters, of society.  However, I also recall a sense that the change was inevitable, but I couldn’t put my finger on the problem as to WHY it might be a bad idea.

The following year back in America, I recall my first clue…Germany, which was head and shoulders the most industrious -and hence the biggest player financially- in Europe, had slipped in the last assessments of the Euro compared to the Deutschmark.  Italy it seems was improving its lot (under Berlusconi, if he can take any credit).  So too, were other nations, comparatively, and the Germans were miffed about it.  I got it then, once the jockeying for a starting point was over on paper, it would never be over in spirit.

Years before, West Germany had re-adsorbed East Germany (along with all its debt, and social problems, and a generation’s worth of (even more) socialist attitudes about labor.    Germany felt the pain but muscled through and things improved, and still finding themselves on top compared to the rest of Europe I might add.  After all, imagine combining two halves of a nation torn asunder by a World War, and bringing them under one political roof, and one currency (the good one, the West’s, naturally!).  That’s years of pain in relatively good times.

But the Euro thing is different, the converse of German Reunification:  Imagine combining the currencies, but NOT THE POLIITICAL SYSTEMS, of several nations, never mind two, that are fiercely nationalistic and, frankly, wildly disparate, economically and culturally speaking.  Now imagine the most socialistic nations kick back after their incorporation is complete, and start riding on the efforts of the other more industrial peoples in Europe.  Now imagine the only authority to re-establish balance is administered from Belgium (God knows why), and their solution is to take your money and prop up the more socialist nations.   After all, kick the offending nation out, and there’s no reason for that nation to pay back.  Prop them up and charge interest, maybe, and they might pay it back, eventually  maybe.  Maybe we’ll get rich by having them owe us, yeah.  Yeah Greece, yeah Spain, yeah Portugal, yeah Balkans, I know what you’re going to do.  You’re going to default.  The payments may stop eventually, but the incentive to keep contributing to the Euro is over.

And thanks to the IMF treaty, we pay too, to prop up a system that has been uniting nations against us in subtle ways. 

Well, the Belgians, being Belgians, attempted to seal the poltical deal some years ago with a hundreds of Articles long Constitution.  They almost managed to pull it off, the Belgians.  An entire country composed of people who don’t do much else but proclaim their executive and diplomatic skills loudly enough so that enough people believe it.  A country composed largely of substandard line management, with tarted-up resumes.  How anyone, even the Belgian populace, was ever convinced that Europe should be run from Brussels escapes me.  France got it suddenly.  The Article that required unanimous consent among all signatory nations was what exposed the Belgians’ arrogance.   It never occurred to Belgium that they couldn’t convince every nation in “Europa” to fork over its soverignty.  I’ll never forget the disdainful browbeating the French got for not falling into line with the new order.  And the French, being French, shrugged it off. 

Poof!  Bye bye, horribly bloated, socialistic, all things to all people, cradle-to-grave control European Constitution.   

The point?  My analysis is that the days that France and the Netherlands voted down the Consitution, killing it for everybody, that’s the moment the Euro suffered its mortal blow.   You cannot have a common currency among nations with differing sets of political and social rules.  One country will eventually subdue or be subsumed another financially, or politically.  They are inexorably locked into each other’s fate.  That’s what’s currently beginning to happen in Europe.  The industrious nations are feeling the pain at the expense of the less industrious, and the less industrious have nothing to lose by continuing down that path.

The Euro, the Darling of Bruxelles, is going to collapse for this reason.  I believe that only thing that made it last this much longer was its comparative rise against the US dollar over the last few years.  That has ended, too, and the fall has accelerated accordingly, even with the bailout for Greece. 

I could be wrong, my analysis could be wrong.  It’s tough for a man who’s trained to do things like add and have the answers amount to something factually correct to get his mind around this stuff.   So sue me.

But, in the meantime, somebody should start a dead pool.

Eurover.

P.S.  And by the way, the only guy on the planet that doesn’t understand that Belgium’s star has hit its zenith is Joe Biden.  Just in time to be too late, dude.

Keep your eyes on the Prize.  I have no doubt (although I have no proof) that Stupak’s retirement is engineered to satiate some vengeful feelings on both sides:

The pro-Life Democrats don’t have a turncoat as a target anymore.

The Republicans don’t have the villain that allowed the Nation Health Care Act to pass anymore.

Conservatives of either party can no longer use Stupak as lightning rod for their argument.

The Tea Partiers can rightfully claim a scalp.

But outside of an artificial sense of satisfaction, it will come to no good if another “relatively untainted” or “blue dog” or “conservative” Democrat is elected into MI-1.    The fight must continue unabated in that district.  Michigan-1 should not only elect a Republican in this seat, but one hard-nosed Conservative, ready to help lead a two-year long public horsewhipping to the Obama Administration for every last action that’s damaged this country in the last 15 months.

The Morristown, NJ, TEA Party holds a monthly meeting.  I go to all the events, but I haven’t attended the regular meetings because, as a fledgling entrepreneur, I attend a business meeting which almost always falls on the same Thursday.   Considering the events of the last week, I decided to adjust my priorities slightly.  After all, if the politics in this country doesn’t stabilize in favor of the individual and the small businessman soon, there won’t be a reason to go to the entrepreneur meetings anymore. 

Apparently, this time last year, the first meeting in Morristown could have been held in the corner booth of a Jersey diner.  Last night, the group packed the inside of a Masonic lodge, fixed and portable floor seating.  The venue was packed.  Three hundred people easily, and the biggest group they’ve ever had.  The demographic was from 30′s to 80′s, men and women equally, heavily caucasian, but quite a few exceptions, the average age being 50, I’d say.  One thing was clear, <I>everyone there was a registered voter, ready to do anything they could to remove from power any politicians on any level who weren’t doing the people’s business.</I>  From what I saw, there was no indication that this was going to change before–or after–the upcoming November elections. 

300 people doesn’t sound like a lot.   It isn’t, but then there’s the Pass at Thermopylae…

My guess is that this group is a slim fraction of the number of new/turned voters, people preparing to both vote and campaign against anyone and everyone that helped enact the National Health Care Plan into law.  At 5%, that’s 6,000 people out there somewhere, a conservative estimate, and that’s just in Morris County, NJ, which isn’t particularly populous.  That’s enough of a groundswell to remove any local official from power in the state.  Collectively in NJ, I’d say that’s 100,000 new and turned voters, and let’s not forget that turned voters count twice at the ballot box, one you get and one the other guy didn’t get!  I have no doubt that these people have a mission that very closely resembles an ideal conservative agenda.  They should be embraced wholeheartedly by both the Republican Party and the Conservative movement.

They are galvanized in their unified frustration with the government in Washington and Trenton, and they are guaranteed for November; every last one of them will not forget what happened this week.  You can take it as a form of denial and gross underestimation that a left-leaning press is claiming that voter discontent will fade.  Let them keep making that mistake.

As with every meeting, they started off with the Pledge of Allegiance, and read their mission statement (which again rang true as a purely conservative statement, not at all libertarian.  These people want accountability, fiscal responsibility and representation, hardly radical notions.  This particular group in Morristown, I suspect like many others, are a strictly not-for-profit organization.  They do not endorse candidates, although there is one candidate involved in the TEA Party movement here that will be running against a Republican incumbent Rodney Frehlinghuysen.  That  didn’t go over well.  But people were very interested in the local level, school boards, assemblymen, that sort of thing.  Between now and November, these people have lots of thing to do, and lots of spare time, to ressurrect the connection between the people and elected officials.  They announce they had local lawyers and politicians at their disposal that could help a motivated person run for election. 

A speaker gave a speech about acknowledging the anger and frustrations of last week’s events, complete with suggestions about how to constructively channel them.  He also gave suggestions about how to organize household meetings where each person there might have the potential to invite a group of interested friends and neighbors over to talk about the local meetings and the state of affairs federally.  This went over quite well.  There were already 20 applicants to that idea before this meeting started. 

We were introduced to a number of people that are an integral part of the local movement.   The team of people who will organize the April 15 Tax Day rally in the town square was there.  The counselor who secured the first step in making it possible to recall US Senator Menendez (D, Corzine flunkie-NJ) was there.  The “flag guy”, the semi-famous gentleman that donates time money and effort to put American flags on all the overpasses leading to NYC was there.   Some radical meeting, eh?

Finally a general call from the audience was announced, designed to vent frustrations, find connections between compatible talents, and make strategy suggestions.  Overarching plans, to local ideas were discussed. 

No crying, no yelling, no arguing, no violence, no incitement. 

One profane word, during a discussion about illegal immigrants and moochers.  And it was used in the following context:  “…let them buy their own damn insurance!”  Thunderous applause.

Take heart!  

The Left couldn’t be more wrong about what’s going to happen in November.

I refuse.

I refuse to pay.  I will not be forced to pay for a product that I choose not to buy, whether it is mandated by the 111th Congress or not.  I exercise my Constitutional right to refuse to pay excise taxes of any kind.  Excise taxes are forbidden and their passage is meaningless under the Constitution.

I refuse to obey.  It is my Constitutional right and duty to actively disobey all bills not correctly passed into law.   I also refuse to obey Executive Orders meant to supersede passed legislation.

I refuse to contribute my talents, my assets and wealth to socialism.  I shall not entertain any programs with the slightest taint of socialism.  While taxation of income is explicitly adopted in the Constitution, punitive taxation is not.   I will stop eating in restaurants, I will stop drinking soft drinks the moment punitive taxation of sugar and fat and salt and cholesterol are imposed.   I will purchase nothing that is not legitimately taxed.  I will not generate taxable wealth, because there is no point in generating it if it is to be taken from me and given to strangers.   I’ll keep my accounts as close to zero as possible in case of a seizure.
 
I refuse on moral grounds to in any way aid in the termination of pregnancies.   Abortion in particular, while part of the law of the land, is elective surgery, and shall forever remain so at a maximum.  I shall neither fund nor encourage others to fund abortions, federally or otherwise (and I’m not even strictly anti-abortion!). 

I refuse to remain silent.  I will raise a holy stink in private and in public with anyone who is stupid enough to embrace or admire an expansive centralized government.  I will call them socialists or statists or fascists, or communists as the definitions apply (I’m capable of that), I will call them traitors to a free America, and I will do it to their faces.  I will embarrass them before their friends, and mock them before their enemies.  There is nothing anyone can do about that.  True, accurate statements are the ultimate defense against libel and slander, after all.

I refuse to allow the medical profession to remain inactive.  I have friends that are in the medical profession, and I will convince them to retire early, because they will have no recourse but to retire.  I will dissuade young adults from entering a medical field, and the government will hereafter make it easy to do just that.

I refuse to let this new system’s fatal flaws go unexposed.  I have a lot of friends with a lot of elusive conditions, a lot of idiopathy, and a lot of sneaking suspicions.  They will be concerned for their immediate health and will show up, often, at emergency rooms, at clinics, at private practices, at hospitals.  It’s our “right”, after all, to receive medical treatment under any and all circumstances, correct?  We’ll be putting this overburdened system and a dwindling medical community under increasing strain in the most glorious Alinskyite fashion.  Millions upon millions can play at that game.

I refuse to stay put.  I will take my family to the first state that rewrites its Constitution to reclaim, once again, their Constitutional primacy of the 9th and 10th Amendment rights.  I’d love to see the Commerce clause taken from the toolbox of progressives for once and for good. 

I refuse to let anyone with a single fibril of socialism in their body come to power.  I will campaign, and if necessary, run, against any such person and I will doggedly pursue them until they admit their treachery.  Then I’ll see them beaten in public.   I will systematically burn their public career to the ground.   

I refuse to allow the institutions that put the state before individuals to stand.  I will work to deconstruct and permanently privatize all forms of welfare, social security, and mandated insurance.   In their place may go charities (religious and otherwise), personal savings accounts, retirement accounts and private insurance.  These things are not rights, they are services which may be regulated, but never controlled, or owned by the government.  They are instruments which one may purchase in various forms at various levels, depending on one’s individual need.  You can’t say that about any true rights, like life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. 

I refuse to allow people in power any further chances to strip Americans of their God-given rights.   I will organize against them.  I will make it my mission to destroy their ability to affect anyone in the public arena.  I refuse to ever give up on these final goals Amended directly into the Constitution by the methods laid out by the Amendment clause: 
To forbid all government ownership of money or assets, thereby criminalizing socialism, statism, communism (and yes, crony-capitalism).  

Most importanty, I absolutely refuse to hand over the hearts and minds of my children to the State.  I will be God-damned and gone to Hell before that happens.

To ensure that any attempts by a public official to undermine the Constitution are regarded as a breaking of their oath, subject to immediate impeachment, which can result in removal or prison, not every two/four/six years, but every stinking day, and if it takes a fourth branch of government composed of state delegates of stellar reputation, elected by the People and their States to enforce that, then so be it. 
To limit the federal government to a specific fraction of GDP, calculated from the year before, incentivizing production of real goods and assets, each and every fiscal year.  
To ensure that all civil officers at the federal level are recallable on the federal level, not just within their original constituency, so that some corrupt local politician can’t escape the will of the entire populace they represent. 
To define democratic representation based solely on enumeration of native, naturalized and American citizens by birthright for every child that has at least one native, natural-born, or naturalized parent.

There are others.  (Let me know if you like or dislike the ones you see here.)  You’ll notice that each concept you see above is a clear limitation set upon the federal government. 

THAT’S WHAT CONSTITUTIONS ARE FOR:  TO DEFINE THE ROLE, AND THEREBY NECESSARILY LIMIT THE ROLE OF, OUR FEDERAL GOVERNMENTS WHICH, LEFT UNCHECKED, HAVE HISTORICALLY ALWAYS DEGENERATED INTO INCREASINGLY TYRANNICAL STATES.

I credit the Obama Administration, and the Progressive movement that has currently hijacked the Democratic Party, for giving us all a glimpse of what happens when violations of the Constitution are embraced, willfully and shamelessly among a largely unvigilant populace. 

Make the populace aware of what’s been done, and put these criminals down like the filth that they are, and never let them up or in again. 

I got a hold of my cousins in Wareham (don’t know about Hanover).  Husband and wife, no children, either have lost work (and found new work) within a year of today.  Both are going out after work to put the final nail in the Coakley coffin (speaking figuratively, of course).   Local news tells my cousin that Brown is up (count ‘em) 17% in the Wareham area.  Wareham is literally where the cape meets the mainland, about an hour south of Boston.  I suspect the news is good for all points east in the state of Massachusett(es) (sic). 

We already know who can’t spell in the state.  Let’s see if they read well enough to understand the writing on the wall come tomorrow.  If their lips are moving, we can at least expect the message is being processed on some level…

Burn all Socialists to the ground, and sweeten the soil with their ashes…  

Thus spake Sam

Concerned about actions for the disaster in Haiti, I called Naval Command Services, who directed me through to their Public Affairs Dept for the USNS Comfort.  Comfort is the world-famous US Naval floating hospital currently in port in Baltimore, Md. 

Comfort was a BIG deal when I was at Johns Hopkins, the pride of the medical community in the area, and of Baltimore itself.  Served in the Gulf War (the first one, anyway).  It is also known for its humanitarian missions.

As of 2:30 Eastern, today, the 13th, no decision has been made whether to send USNS Comfort. That would have been Exec Decision #1 for me.

I think the state legislature win-loss tally is now 0-whatever.

Still batting 0.000

Most people hear about homes being sold for less money than it takes to run the TV all year in Detroit.  I wouldn’t recommend traveling there this time of year.  Come to think of it, I would recommend traveling there any time of year, after seeing the photo documentary.   I see this future for the United States in short order, should the progressive movement reign beyond 2012.

http://www.marchandmeffre.com/detroit/index.html

This link was brought to my attention in a rather unusual way, through www.totallycrap.com.   (Yes, I know.  It’s a completely sophomoric website run by a Brit who despises George Bush.  I find it entertaining on occasion.  Believe me, it’s sister sites–which I don’t feel the need to metnion here–aren’t fit for the unprepared viewer.)  I’d go straight to the link above. 

Marchand and Meffre, naturally, get it completely wrong everywhere it counts, in the introduction slide. 

At the beginning of the 20th Century, the city of Detroit
developed rapidly thanks to the automobile industry.

Until the 50′s, its population rose to almost 2 million people.
Detroit was the 4th most important city in the United States.

It was the dazzling symbol of the American Dream City with
its monumental skyscrapers and fancy neighborhoods.

Increasing segregation and deindustrialization caused violent riots in 1967.
The white middle-class exodus from the city accelerated and the suburbs grew.
Firms and factories began to close or move to lower-wage states.
Slowly, but inexorably downtown high-rise buildings emptied.

Since the 50′s, “Motor City” lost more than half of its population.

Nowadays, its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt,
the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great civilization.

Emphasis mine.  The violent riots 1967 were part of the CAUSE, not the EFFECT of increasing segregation and de-industrialization.  People and businesses who were the targets of those riots were unwilling to stay in a place where that sort of thing went unanswered.   THAT was the basis of the aformentioned “white middle-class exodus”.   Which wasn’t entirely white, I’ll bet, just honest people.   What also didn’t help was the stranglehold that the UAW and the Democrats had on the tax, workforce, and education policies that continue to persist, even today, in Detroit, and pervades MIchigan in general.   Michiganders stand alone with the highest unemployment rate in the country, even with the described “mass exodus”.  They have only themselves to blame for voting in, and continuing to vote in, the people that helped destroy an entire city, and are destroying the state, for that matter.  Unions choked out their own industry, and socialists, in the guise of Democrats, squeezed the population for an ever larger share of what take-home pay remained.

Witness the result at the link.  Get a glimpse of a socialist America.  (I see a bitter irony in the quote in gold foil on the upper bannister of the East Methodist church, which reads:  “And You Shall Say God Did It”)

Now imagine these filth capturing the entire USA, and forcing the country into a nationally uniform policy that failed so spectacularly in Detroit.  National reach is the only way to cover such failure, by ensuring that there are no so-called “lower-wage states” (aka places with low taxes and competitive markets) to run to, and making things equal–equally bad–everywhere. 

American Civilization hasn’t passed yet.  It’s decline is strictly due to willful neglect and ignorance at this point.    Americans can always turn that around.

Know the enemy.  They currently go by the names of Big Labor, Progressives and the Democratic Party, and they will thrive like parasites at the cost of the host, America, ultimately killing her.  If good people don’t actively stop them at any cost, they will succeed. 

Burn them to the ground in 2010.

I voted early this morning, and if you don’t know how I voted, then you haven’t been paying attention to New Jersey politics, possibly the most corrupt in the country, even beyond the filth that they moved into the White House from Chicago.  Either that, or you were born yesterday.

I live in arguably the reddest county in the state of New Jersey (that’d be Morris).  Up until two days ago, there were almost no Corzine banners up around here.  A few have popped up in the home stretch.  A misplaced fear of retribution, I imagine.  I’ve been fooled before.  McCain/Palin had the same kind of banner showing here before the end.  This time there are lots of people angry at Corzine and Obama, for good, real reasons, and I’m willing to bet that Christie can pull it out.

Importantly, I have my laboratory in Newark, NJ near NJIT.  Only now is my business beginning to pick up.  But that’s because people are looking for chemists that can actually do chemistry, and they aren’t finding them in labs around New Jersey.  (Reuters writes just today that J&J are laying off over 7000).  That’s not an uptick in the economy, that’s a downtick in local talent.   The numbers in New Jersey lie.  Things are worse than people claim them to be.  I’m going to have to change my name to John Galt and move to Wyoming, and can vegetables and extract aspirin from willow bark if this crap keeps up.

For my part, I’m kind of locked in right now.  It would run counter to my contractual obligations (don’t ask) to even suggest that I would take my business and my business models out of the state.  I have a nice home here.  My wife has a good job here, and until I was laid off in 2007, so did I.  (My layoff was due to a lack of foreign interest and had nothing at all to do with the impeding and current economic situation.)  But now it’s damn near impossible to find a job that is more than half of my salary since that time.   I want to stay put.  I’ve moved enough in my time, and have small children to consider.  And I did manage to get the company started, and have the lab ready for any actual upswing. 

It’s worth it for me to stay, for now.  I’m lucky, in a sense, but it didn’t have to be like this.  It’s too bad really, New Jersey was for a long stretch, THE place to build a company.   Now, I fear for the suburban and rural families of this State  who, should Christie fail to win today, will have to seriously consider moving from otherwise perfectly good homes in order to make lives for themselves. 

The complexion of the political landscape in Newark is quite different.  There, in the last week of campaigning, some very pointed signs reflecting a visceral guilt-by-association sentiment sprang up overnight.  “Similar values, Same results” in big red letters.  In the dark posters are in the foreground Chris Christie, with George Bush standing over one shoulder.  I’m curious..is it at all accurate to say that George Bush did any campaigning for the Republican party in 2009, never mind any contributions to Christie?  I wonder…have these two men even met?  Does it matter to the people that the Corzine administration is targeting, that there is no connection, even a philosophical one between the two men?

Still, for that segment of the population that likes its lifestyle (such as it is) handed to them, so they can complain and demand more, and vote to get it, this association can only be seen as a threat.   And so the machine that grinds away to keep itself in more and more power, and keeps them satisfied, simultaneously grinds them under its wheels.   But not nearly fast enough to favor those that want to improve their lot.  The rest of us will be voting with our feet I imagine, as it has been happening for a decade, but I think it will accelerate, should Corzine win.

So here’s hoping that Christie fights corruption, takes on the special interest, cut taxes, limits government, all that groovy stuff that Republicans say they’ll do.    Because NJ can expect to be squeezed and squelched into oblivion. 

It’s that important this time.  Vote Christie.

Because I have my own company, my very impressionable elder daughter, 6, will officially be going on a “Take Your Daughter To Work Day”, started by yours truly as a work holiday, which may very well come up every time something like an Obama indoctrination speech happens.    She is old enough to understand the President’s speech, but she is not old enough to say no to an “authority figure” like her teacher or the President, and does not have the sharpened tools to employ critical thinking processes (but soon, now that I see what’s coming), should she need them, in order to deconstruct a series of statements to determine whether or not they ring true.  She is OUT Tuesday.

My younger daughter, 2 1/2, goes to a private daycare chain, and is pre-K.  I do not know if they plan on spending the day with our President, but I suspect that even if they do drill her for a day it will go in one ear and out the other.  She cannot write, or spell, and she doesn’t like watching anything that isn’t a cartoon.   She may even think that Barack Obama is D.J.Lance, from Yo Gabba Gabba (A Noggin show we don’t let our children watch, because it’s poorly written), without the orange jump suit.  She is IN Tuesday. 

Admittedly, I’m looking for an opportunity to jump down the throat of these people if they do try to push the speech.  Children not yet old enough to to effectively question a series of statements shouldn’t be exposed to politics.  Children not yet old enough to produce a counter-argument should be prepped in advance, ready to openly criticize the President’s speech the moment it’s over.  Unfortunately I don’t have a child onl enough to do that yet.  But I’ll be damned if my first-grader’s first homework assignment is written by our current President.  If I wanted that, I’d move to Venezuela.

And by the way, here’s the ultimate tell that this is a liberal agenda that’s being pushed, for those of you who say this is no biggie.  Parents were deliberately circumvented.  A speech given by a politician, complete with a lesson plan designed to ensure that the message sticks, is what’s being provided here, all coordinated with public educators, active members of their Union, one of the largest Democrat voting blocs in History. 

If Barack Obama simply wanted to encourage children to do well in school (for their own individual sake, not the government’s) he would have pre-recorded the speech, he would have made it available to children through their parents before the school year started, he would have dispensed with the “captive audience” tactics, and he would have left the “lesson plan” out entirely.  Period.

From this Fox News article:  http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,538902,00.html

comes the amazing News that an (essentially all-)electric car is going to be receiving a fuel economy rating of 230 MPG.

You read it right, two hundred thirty.  Two. Three. Zero.  An amazing order-of-magnitude leap in fuel efficiency, from fossil fuel to electric power, if you ask me.   Almost makes a man wonder why this nation didn’t start with electric cars in the first place, eh?

Well, the article itself gives away its first tell (and sorry to quote so heavily from such a short article, but there’s just so much cracked crab in this dish), the car in question:  

runs purely on electricity for the first 40 miles of driving

and then in the next breath goes on to mention something critical to the rating itself, the dead giveaway:

The EPA is currently developing a special methodology to calculate fuel efficiency for vehicles that work in this fashion

Is that a fact?  Why would MPG (miles per gallon), a simple unit of distance per fuel consumed, require any special consideration by the EPA?  Wouldn’t it be more consistent (read: accurate, truthful, not a weasel) to account for the fuel consumed in creating the electricity needed to run the car on the first 40 miles in the first place?  Or, would that accidentally pull the curtains back a little too far on the outrageously huge whopper that a 230 MPH would be to anyone with a brain?

Another indication that this number is flatly fictitious is the fact that the fuel efficiency of the vehicle in question is expected to drop to about 100 MPH in the highway mileage, that’s right 230 city, 100 highway, quite a loss on the smooth, open road, hmmm?

Here’s what’s really happening.  The EPA is doing its best to get people to buy electric cars.  Car companies that are heavily invested in selling their electric car tech are only to happy to look the other way when it comes to a ridiculously high mileage rating.  It means bigger sales, no doubt.  Finally, the appearance, at least, of cars that helps Americans wrest themselves free from fossil fuel and all the consequences, real or imagined, of their use.

The methodology the EPA wants to use can only start from this:  treating mileage in the first forty miles as consuming no fossil fuel.  Of course, if you’re somebody from the isle of Manhattan that couldn’t survive outside their idiom, the car in question would NEVER require pumping fuel into the tank.  The problem is of course is that results in an infinite gas mileage, something neither a complete moron nor a modern environmentalist can accept without balking.

So the EPA figures to run the test using a standard method for something like a 50-mile commute, 40 miles on electric, 10 on gasoline, and, voila!  Five times better gas mileage than a hybrid than runs just on gasoline.  It’s a freaking miracle!

Of course, then we get to the highway mileage.  Just create a 75-mile standard test method, running 40 miles on the electric (that’s all you get), and 35 miles on the gas.   One and a half times the distance on three and a half times the gasoline. 

That gets you 230 city and 98 highway.  Well, no kidding.  Hidden costs, hidden facts, hidden truth, ladies and gentlemen.  Redefine the measurements to get attractive enough numbers to claim something that people might be willing to accept.

What do you think’s going to happen when people start getting their electric bill, especially if that electric bill is cancerously large because of a cap-and-trade scheme?  You think people have buyers remorse now…

What do you think’s going to happen when people start plugging in overnight at the hotel, or plugging in at work instead of at home, so you have enough power to commute, and you aren’t directly paying for the electricity because they can’t afford their own electric bill?  

What do you think’s going to happen when people start plugging into the neighbors’ or strangers’ homes, when they think nobody is looking?

Here’s what’s going to happen, they are all going to find a way to make you pay for the electricity which they are supplying.  And when I say pay, I mean in ways that make a gallon of gasoline look cheap. 

EPA, Mr. President, all the President’s little con artist friends, you ain’t fooling me, and I’ll make sure you ain’t fooling anybody.  Get your thumb of my scale.

I’d like to address, point by point, the latest Times (o’London) article concerning Al Gore’s comparison of AGW non-believers to Nazis.  I cannot let this article go unanswered. 

Please, this is important.  It is this kind of comparison that engenders the true imprisonment of the Human mind.  It must be stopped, fought, tooth and nail, or I fear that we will all fall into a period of zealotry that hasn’t destroyed a people since the time religious fundamentalism permanently crippled Middle Eastern science, mathematics, art and literature.  Literally, 1000 years of darkness.  And yeah, I’m sticking with that statement.

I’ll have to quote heavily from the article, because so many chilling things were said.  I don’t at all suspect Mr. Gore was misquoted here:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6658672.ece

He just loves to preach to the choir in Europe, and they are happy to publish his words as if they were from on high.

He [Gore] also accused politicians around the world of exploiting ignorance about the dangers of global warming to avoid difficult decisions.

Indeed, “exploiting ignorance” is a problem.    Here’s an example: concluding that weather changes of any kind are due to human activity is “exploiting ignorance” about the long, extreme history of weather both in the 20th century, and on a geological timescale.    On rare occasions on earth have temperatures even been so steady.  Trends categorically “exploit ignorance” about weather.  Trends assume a fictitious baseline.  Weather, even weather under some sort of stress doesn’t follow trends; it is periodic in nature, with events of several different magnitudes and time scales interwoven, and that has always been the case.   Mr. Gore and his AGW proponents use trends, the grandest trend of all being an overall warming trend, to make his case.  Problem is, all these trends are now failing, (including the biggie, because of the cooling which occurred over the last decade), which flies in the face of the underlying assumptions about the connection (the trend) of excess CO2 (still rising), with rising absolute temperature.

This cannot be dismissed.  When the underlying connection fails, the conclusions that arise from that connection fail.    I am not a Nazi for pointing that out.  I am a responsible scientist for pointing that out.

He added: “We have everything we need except political will but political will is a renewable resource.”

Well that’s a cute line.  By “everything we need…” Mr. Gore means a preponderance of data, the appearance of consensus, and the moral high ground, I’m sure. 

Problem is, mountains of data may be statistically correlated, but the cause-and-effect, the connection between human activity and a warming Earth may yet be coincidental.  I have also noticed that quite a bit of data has been coming in a massaged form, or has been treat statistically in a way that is improper.  Filling in arctic temperature data in polar Russia is always fun.  Statistically deriving an average hurricane number is meaningless; hurricanes are discreet phenomena, they vary in size shape intensity over varying time periods in a variable season.  No sufficient tacking program yet exists.  They are wildly unpredictable, and yet are totally natural objects absolutely following physical law.  This lends strength to the notion that our quantification is poor.  Further examples of data manipulation and mistreatment are replete.  It’s hard to build anything useful from such statistical neglect.

The appearance of consensus, even consensus itself is meaningless in science.  I don’t care how many people shout 2 + 2 = 5 from the rooftops, it’s still incorrect.  And the loner that whispers 2 + 2 = 4 from the street below isn’t the Nazi in this scene.

If the effects of human activity on climate are to be held true, they must be distinct (isolable) from natural weather phenomena, quantifiable, verifiable, non-falsifiable by unbiased observations, and the mechanism that connects the cause and effect must engender all the data, not some of the data.  Finally, a good explanation doesn’t shift with incoming data, it should predict it.

Your friends-for-hire in the business of assembling a fine consensus are 0 for 5 on those counts.  Color me unimpressed. 

Mr. Gore’s ”moral superiority” arises from the assumption that people are deleteriously affecting the planet, and that he alone is the man with the answers.  That it’s naturally a position of moral high ground to claim that people are evil, simply by virtue of the fact that they have an impact on the world outside his purview, and must change their behavior. 

He [Gore] said skeptics who refused to believe dramatic cuts in carbon emissions could be delivered should consider the example of the young scientists in the NASA team which put a man on the moon on 1969.

“The average age of scientists in the space centre control room was 26, which means they were 18 when they heard President Kennedy say he wanted to put a man on the moon in 10 years. Neil Armstrong did it eight years and two months later.”

First of all I DO believe that carbon emissions can be cut, drastically.  All we have to do is go back to living like we did 100 years ago, or even further back we could take the lesson of the American Indian, and live in teepees.  I simply submit that is not desirable, it may not even be necessary, and that Mr. Gore’s assertion that it is rings hollow to say the least, thanks to a complete lack of evidence that what is happening is 1) due to people, or 2) a bad thing.  Such actions may even cause more problems than not.

And to take the lesson from those young men of average age 26 who wrought the Apollo lunar missions.  The first thing they did was KILL THREE ASTRONAUTS by assuming that it would be a great way to save mass if they used pure oxygen in the capsule, neglecting the FACT that aluminum combusts in pure oxygen.  One spark and the mission was doomed on the launching pad.  This is what you get when you leave out people who know the physics and the chemistry of an atmosphere.  After that, they didn’t make a move until every last detail about the mission was worked out, complete with EXACTING MATHEMATICS, PHYSICS, and LOGISTICS.  

We WANT number-Nazis on the job.   We don’t want people who can’t do math, and find their only option is politics and government funding to run those numbers.  We’re dealing with the entire world’s economy, here.  Action can wait for a well-laid plan.

Again, quoth Gore:

“It will either be ’what were you thinking, didn’t you see the North Pole melting before your eyes, didn’t you hear what the scientists were saying?’  Or they will ask ’how is it you were able to find the moral courage to solve the crisis which so many said couldn’t be solved?’.”

This is a false choice.  I did see the North Pole losing ice over a number a years.  I also see it coming back.  I also see the South Pole gaining ice some years.  Show me that this natural, seasonal process has something to do with human activity.  I am asking that as a scientist that requires things like evidence and a traceable mechanism of action.  No, simply claiming that rising CO2 is the source of our woes is not enough. 

Moral courage, sir, is standing athwart a legion of well-funded, biased researchers, full presumption of a guilty Humankind tattooed across their forehead, demanding you bring something more than a weak claim from incomplete, poorly treated data, before you take possession of the world’s assets and functions.

I am not a Nazi, I am a scientist, and I do not have a following, but then again I don’t need one.  You do.  You, Mr. Gore, and your followers bear all those characteristics of fascism, not I.   You silence intellectuals and other people, not I.  You demand money, action and power by right of claim.  It’s only a matter of time before your cronies wrest these things from others by brute force.  You demand that certain people be marginalized.  All the while, you claim righteousness and moral superiority as did Hitler and Mussolini.  You spread your poison over Europe and threaten to do so everywhere else, not I. 

You have become the enemy of America and the rest of the world, not its savior.  The world should see what you have become, rise up and defeat you, for once and for good. 

About 1500 in Morristown, NJ, same as last time.  Better than expected, I’d say.  A much broader spectrum of race and age this time.  It may be because this particular event was held on a Saturday, not on a weekday, like April 15 when everyone was working for fighting to get their taxes in.  Let’s not minimize the gravity of that.

Neither the Republican nor the Democratic candidate for governor of NJ showed up.  The Libertarian candidate did.  Score for him.

We’ll see how much media coverage it gets in the wake of Sarah Palin’s decision to step down.   Payne from FOX gave a rousing speech!  Matt Perez, the Cuban immigrant, who has been on the Glenn Beck show on the citizen shows gave another fantastic speech. 

Enjoy fireworks tonight.

Sam

The Fox News article is found here:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,529953,00.html

And I quote:

Sometimes researchers are citing a potential connection to global warming to get noticed, he says, and sometimes journalists are focusing on that connection to make the story more compelling. “There’s a bit of a backlash amid people who have a brain,” says Schmidt.

You know, those crazy people they call deniers, like me.  Now, Dr. Schmidt makes a point to say that as a climate modeler he believes that the Earth is indeed warming, and it is doing so specifically because of human activity.  But then he happily goes on to knock down five of the most poorly constructed arguments that might lead to a claim a person might hear to suggest that AGW is real.    You’ll all recognize most of them as the main cudgels in the silencing of AGW critics, and the basis for the.

By the way, one example of studies NOT mentioned is the increasing CO2 levels over Mauna Kea, HI.  He doesn’t mention it because like me, I believe to be sound work.  It’s the journalistic hype and the political agendizing that is the current problem.  What remains to be seen is the underlying cause of that increase, and also what impact that increase really has.  I maintain that, the reasons, the mechanism and the total impact have never truly been approached. 

Thanks to people like Al Gore, and the media that love them so, that careful scientific investigation was stopped at a critical time, in a way policitally advantageous to people who seek undue control over other people.  There was just enough information out there, all ominous, to shift policital power.  I believe that will change when scientists start taking back their science.

I’ll be going to the Tea Party in Morristown, NJ from 11 AM to 1 PM on the 4th.    I think the event wisely chose short hours because of the traveling and family event-related nature of this long weekend.  Last time, it lingered until 3 PM and the crowd began to dissipate earlier than that.  I expect the turnout to be excellent, especially considering the recent behavior of the Democrat-controlled house, and the three (count ‘em, THREE) NJ House republicans that voted for the Waxman-Markey Cap and Trade bill.  To his great credit, my representative, Rodney Frelinghuysen, was the only House Repubican in NJ that did not vote yea.

I’ll be speaking to as many people as I can about finding an effective, legitimate way to make NJ House Republicans, and US Senators Lautenberg and Menendez, understand that there are going to be political repercussions for voting aye on the latest mockery on human freedom in living memory.   I suspect neither of them will bow to pressure from the populace under any circumstances, but it’s worth a shot at saving this country.

Nevertheless, I will find a way to enjoy the weekend, and I hope all of you do to.  I’m particularly appreciative about this blogsite, Redstate.  It has been just about the only place where my voice as a professional scientist and a concerned citizen has been heard

Enjoy your 4th.  Make some noise.  Thank you all.

Sam

(I think the phrase, common in the analog world, is appropriate considering the entire country just went digital over the weekend)

This happened just this afternoon.

http://wcbstv.com/local/washington.township.hail.2.1045714.html

Something for the recordbooks, ladies and gentlemen, and wonderfully amusing in June, but it comes with a caveat from me. 

Please, don’t fall into the trap of ascribing today’s event as further proof that AGW is bogus.  There are better reasons.  This isn’t directly related.  Hail, despite the fact that it is made of ice, is strictly a warm weather phenomenon, associated with thunderstorms.  Liquid water must travel with storm updrafts to the ice anvil above the storm.  The drop freezes, and falls, and iteratively gets pushed back up to gather another layer of ice on its surface.  Seriously strong updrafts from seriously energetic storms allow more layers.  Eventually the mass of the hail wins and it falls through the rain.  Imagine how big the hail had to be before melting on the way down.  Dime-sized hail is somewhat respectible.  Enough to cover the ground in NJ in 70 degree weather is most impressive.

I have seen this happen precisely twice in my life (enough dime-sized hail to cover a few inches on the ground), as a teenager in Texas.  And then fifteen minutes later, not a cloud in the sky.  I’ve described it people up here who thought I was making it up.  Well, at least I know everyone else is hallucinating now…

Enjoy!

Sam

Why not simply have it written into the Congressional rules the manditory reading of a bill by a voting Congressional member personally, before PASSing (but not REJECTing) that bill?

Imagine how much less seriously the Declaration of Independence would have been taken if Delegates from all over the colonies hadn’t put their “John Hancock” on it.  Or, if some of the delegates could later claim that they never acutally saw or read the document.  It’s kinda tough to do that when you sign something.

I suggest PASS only, not REJECT, for a number of reasons.

Passing bills would be hard work.  Rejecting bills would be a snap.  There’s a check right there.

Minority parties would be able to avoid beng saddled by the overwheming flurry of paperwork, generated by a party with a voting majority.  They could spend time on bills that they could circulate to the majority, if they wanted.

Congressional members would not be able to claim that they didn’t know what was in a bill they helped pass.  Members would be able to reject a bill on the grounds of any part of the bill that they read.  In both instances, Congressmen could be held to account for their decision.

Bills would tend to be reasonably concise if a sponsoring member of Congress wished to have it read, and passed.

Bills would become less likely to be stuffed with earmarks. 

Line-item vetos would become less necessary (and less of a coveted power by the President) where bills, in order to keep unrelated subjects concise and separate, were broken down into unique, individual, but whole concepts.

Bills would have to be more holistically constructed from the onset of the debate process.  Members would have to really debate its construction long before a draft was issued for consideration.

Minority parties could sign and reject a bill, and then issue a well-formed critique for the public about why a bill they couldn’t stop from being passed stunk.  Voters would respond well to such a critique from signatories, I think.

I believe a lot of this nonsense with rubber-stamping huge, unread bills would go away if this type of reform were made law in Congress.

First let me point out the Global Warming Petition, which I and my wife have signed.   (You’ll find my wife Alexandra and I on the first and second line of the names under D.)  We are a professional chemist and biochemist, respectively.  If you think I’m pissed off about the AGW, stay away from the Doctress, she’ll rip out make you eat your own liver!  If you have any qualifications at all to sign this petition as a scientist of any kind at all, please find the petition at:

http://www.petitionproject.org/

I can’t overstress the potential of the work that could come out of this conference.  Lavish the goods on us, Skanderbeg!  

I’m looking for more juicy tidbits in the way of photochemistry, lightning-induced chemistry, and chemical/biochemical rate kinetics this time around.  Looking for a good model on the evolution/de-devolution of clouds (very difficult, but all important).  Well defined chemistry and physics of the atmosphere and biosphere.  Red meat!

For laypeople, I say take the plunge and dig in!  I recommend the website from the March conference,

http://www.heartland.org/events/NewYork09/proceedings.html

which is still evolving, apparently.  A website for today’s conference doesn’t seem to be up yet.

There are more videos and Powerpoint presentations and *.pdf files than the last time I looked.   Great scientists have great integrity and are extremely careful about what they say and the manner in which they say it.  The telltale sign of good work here is that they are taking the time to check every last detail and ensure its veracity before making it available to their community and the interested public.

It’s a real disadvantage against people like Al Gore, who spend their efforts “getting ahead of an issue” and “framing the argument”, “establishing a consensus opinion” or “declaring the issue closed” thereby capturing an early propganda advantage.  That sort of despicable tactic doesn’t register in the mind of true scientist.  It’s all meaningless in the face of what actually is.  Of course the true scientist has time, truth, and physical reality on his side…  the Sound versus the Strong. 

Do the homework, struggle through the math, demonstrate in your own mind that it’s accurate, see what it might be lacking.  You’ll find there are many branches of science and math that are brough to bear on the website.  Help yourselves understand.  And speak up if you see an error.  Or can’t follow a train of thought.  Don’t be afraid to ask questions.  Unlike the IPCC, and Al Gore, we/they won’t mind.  And you’re more likely to get a rational, enthusiastic response.

Remember, the slow blade penetrates the shield. 

(I think the Dune ref is particularly fitting when it comes to the environment, nicht wahr?)