This is the fraud that never ends...

So much has already been written and debated on the subject of Global Warming and its soul mate Climate Change that along with the general public I have become bored with it. This is possibly exactly what the fraudsters are counting on. So completely have they woven the narrative that mankind is the principal cause of climate change and burning fossil fuels is the culprit that every institution on Earth is "dedicated" to reducing their so-called carbon footprint in one way or another. If that was all there was to it then there is little harm in it. Efficient and wise use of fossil fuels is in everyone's best interest. Unfortunately that's not even close to the end game. Thank God there are dedicated souls ready to hold the fraudsters proclamations and activities up to the light.

Two years ago when a flood of e-mails was leaked out of the UEA's CRU in Britain "Climategate" was born. The e-mails revealed a pattern of concerted efforts to skew the data (or ignore the contradictory data), discredit skeptics and steer the UN's IPCC into global warming alarmism. This severely damaged the fraudsters cause and when coupled with the world economic downturn and rising oil prices the polls showed a significant change in the general publics attitude toward so-called climate change. Of course the sympathetic institutional and media investigations exonerated Phil Jones and Michael Mann and the rest of the players at the UEA.

Now another batch of e-mails has leaked that only bolster the case against the global warming fraudsters. The moniker Climategate 2.0 is being bandied about. In the coming days and weeks as these e-mails are parsed we'll learn even more about the duplicity and fraud the profiteers of this farce have tried to pull off. The question is - is it too late?

As I said earlier nearly every conceivable institution has embraced the Politically Correct position that mankind is a scourge on the Earth. Global Warming is just another piece of incontrovertible evidence. It is all sliding toward government control of the global economy with a World Government as the final authority. The only possible outcome is a decrease in the standard of living for the creative and productive societies. The seeds of this are being sewn as we speak while we watch the normalization of high unemployment and debt-ridden governments as corporate institutions continue to thrive. This is the set up of capitalism as the ultimate scapegoat. After all it is fruits of capitalism that brings us bad things like rich people, debt and global warming. (Never mind that capitalism brings us all the good things too).

Does anyone honestly think Occupy Wall Street is spontaneous? It is amorphous and indistinct on purpose. It is designed to sow discontent while the gun sights are firmly fixed on capitalism itself. It will not succeed on it's own as it is supposed to be just another piece of evidence that our system has utterly failed.

If and when that happens - a global meltdown of the world economic system the only possible outcome is the elimination of millions if not billions of people. This is the actual endgame. First the rich (people and nations) have to be made the scapegoats then the institutions must fail.

As Mark Steyn said in his best selling book America Alone it will be America that has to put a stop to this. Europe is in no position to do anything so momentous. We are literally seeing Germany, the only real rich country in Europe, being set up as the scapegoat for the collapse of the EU. China feels it will be able to fill vacuum when the West falls by it's own hand.

Until now the lynch pin of this scenario has not been mentioned. This is the very reason Barack Obama can not be allowed a second term. He instrumental in this normalization of America as a declining nation. He goes around the world criticizing then apologizing for America. He is in my mind a traitor. To others he is a realist because they are also convinced that for the world to succeed America itself must fail. Once America falls either before or after the EU then the West is lost. Barack Obama is doing his part.

I know it is said every election cycle... This is the most important election of our lifetime. This time it really is.


CW

Simply Not True: Lack of Oxygen Leads to Suffocation

I used to enjoy reading the "Onion" a few decades ago. The stories were outrageous but with just enough plausibility to make them outright hilarious. These days, however, with the Onion having gone mainstream with a Internet TV channel to boot I have lost complete interest. It's not that the Onion has changed, it's as good as ever, but because the world has changed. The real news is more fantastic than any made up headline the Onion could come up with. I know this to be true because the mainstream media has more than once been fooled by "Onion" stories and reported them as true. Yeah, they looked pretty silly with onion all over their face.

Today I read with amazement in The Telegraph of London that the EU has banned the claim that water can prevent dehydration.

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration
EU officials concluded that, following a three-year investigation, there was no evidence to prove the previously undisputed fact.

Wow. That even makes my stupid headline seem brilliant. A three year investigation? I think a class of first graders could have come up with that in two. Before you think it can't happen here in America consider that the EPA has declared the trace gas CO2 ( an element necessary for life on Earth) a pollutant. The lack of common sense knows no boundaries.

Many Europeans are questioning the usefulness (or is it the uselessness) of the EU in general. With the problems the common currency - the Euro - has been causing of late the whole notion of the European Union is in question.

When one digs down into the minutiae of this issue we find that the German scientists who made the claim that water can prevent dehydration filed it wrong, and they did so knowingly. They were openly testing the new laws which allow products to claim they can reduce the risk of disease, now subject to EU approval. So then the claim had to be rejected by EFSA because it was filed under the wrong legal provision (Article 14 of Regulation 1924/2006/EC instead of Article 13). In short, Article 14 deals with diseases and illnesses whereas dehydration was not regarded by EFSA as a disease.


Still, this could have been made clear in the ruling (and the newspaper article) and the issue could have never been brought into the bright light. Instead the claim is rejected outright leaving the impression that morons are in charge. This doesn't make the scientists look stupid, when presented like this after a 3 year investigation it does make the ruling authority look like imbeciles.

Three years ago a simple rejection of the case as being filed incorrectly would have prevented this whole affair. What this has done having been handled this way brings to mind a preposterous (now overturned) ban on curvy bananas and bent cucumbers. Sometimes government is needed to protect the safety of the public from misleading claims and unsafe products, however, preventing the declaration of water preventing dehydration and banning bent cucumbers will not save the public from risk. It will however put common sense in jeopardy.


CW

Legal Graft and other Games

The new book "Throw Them All Out" by Peter Schweizer hits the shelves today. Schweizer has written many good books in the investigative journalism vein over the years, but this one strikes chord with me (after reading a few reviews).

One of the biggest unheard of, unseen scandals in American politics is festering. Will we get the full story of the inside game in DC that shows how the elite political class enriches itself at the expense of the rest of us, while driving our economy into the ground? Do we even want to know? Or does playing ostrich suit us just fine?

It's not new, it's not partisan and it's apparently not illegal, but it is disgusting and morally bankrupt. We have all watched as a nearly 800 billion dollar stimulus package became a funnel to supporters and benefactors, ensuring yet more campaign donations for Obama and the Democrats. We've seen the husbands of Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstien get lucrative deals based on their wives influential positions. John Kerry seems to always come out smelling like a rose with his investments. Republicans are no better, I imagine Bob Dole was not always a very wealthy man, but he was a Senator for a century, right? I mean hasn't Rick Perry done the same thing in Austin Texas? DC has become a profit center for the permanent ruling class and those that support them. They use the government to tilt the playing field in their favor with little regard for the country as a whole.

In her Indianola, Iowa speech last summer Sarah Palin said these same things and the country re-hit the snooze button, and we probably will again in 2012. While there has been a lot of condemnation of Wall Street and fat cat bankers (as well as greedy businessmen) it just misses the boat entirely. It's the ruling class that sets the rules and the rules just aren't going to favor the poor and the middle class. All the more evidence that the Occupy Wall Street uprising needs to move their tents to Washington, D.C. That's home base for people who are really gaming (read: effing up) the system.

In the book’s introduction, Schweizer refers the phenomenon that is the subject of Throw Them All Out "The Government Rich". Yes, these are the same people who are "fighting" for you! Makes you feel empowered, right? These politicians arrive in Washington as people of modest means and somehow become very rich. These elected jobs receive generous pay, but nothing exorbitant. The Government Rich, Schweizer writes, insider deals, insider trading, and taxpayer money have become a pathway to wealth. They walk this exclusive pathway because they get to operate by a different set of rules from the rest of us. Schweizer calls the means by which these politicians achieve wealth honest graft i.e., abuse of their office for personal gain and it's not illegal.

What bothers me more is the attitude of the average citizen. It's either - whataya gonna do? or - boys will be boys, that's how the game is played. Perhaps throwing the bums out will accomplish nothing, Washington will simply corrupt the next batch. Eventually an ethical chap will rise to the top and shame will return as a behavior modifier, right? Am I dreaming?

To think it was not going on when the country was in its ascendancy is maybe naive, but now while we decline it's like rubbing salt in the wound. They probably laugh at the rubes that vote them in time and again and especially at those who put $10 or $50 in an envelope for them. These guys and gals tell us they are fighting for us (the newbies probably believe they are). After a few terms and many flattering (lucrative) meetings with lobbyists and their party bosses they're all playing the game.

Whataya gonna do?


CW
 

What a good idea!

This really makes me angry. You should be angry too...

Every time I shop at a home improvement store these days I make sure to buy incandescent light bulbs. Oh, yeah, and I make sure they are Sylvania brand too. The days of finding these on store shelves in America are numbered.

The ordinary light bulb symbolizes the human race coming out of the dark ages, literally. The light bulb is birth of modernity. Just as the light bulb symbolizes mankind coming out of the darkness the U.S. epitomizes the modern technological world. Soon, the ordinary incandescent light bulb will be banned in the U.S. - a dark day indeed.

What this all means is a huge boost to China and the American firms that will complete the Chinese takeover of this industry. All this is happening with the blessing AND the help of the U.S Treasury Department. Perennial light bulb maker GE is already in China making bulbs after having closed it's last U.S. plant in 2010 and laid off many American workers. It's a shocker, I know. In the name of a greener world other major U.S. firms are bankrolling the Chinese lighting industry. And here we thought President Obama's chief  go-forward strategy was fostering a green everything industry.

To be fair to the President the seeds of this were sown long before his time in the White House, but he certainly was a part of the Democratically controlled Congress in 2007 when the Federal law was passed to ban the incandescent bulb. Regardless of the timing it is the notion that there is a concerted effort to build this industry in China with Federal government and United Nations backing. Enter the gigantic investment house Goldman Sachs and networking powerhouse Cisco Systems and a juggernaut is born.

The altruistic underpinnings of this project like all "green" efforts isn't helpful when American and other western workers are thrown out of their jobs. Here the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which invests in projects that can produce global environmental benefits is spearheading this project. Yes, the U.S. Treasury is a major funder for the GEF. This is being done as an environmental benefit by reducing China's carbon dioxide emissions and thereby benefiting the whole planet. So, I guess the ends justify the means and the means is destroying yet another domestic industry.

This new project backed by the aforementioned investors builds on a previous, $26 million GEF/UNDP pilot project, known as the China Green Lights project. That project was a roaring success for the environment and for China. The claim that it saves 15.78 billion kilowatt hours of energy, worth about $986 million to consumers, and, using dubious calculating methods is supposed to have kept 6.8 million tons of carbon out of the atmosphere. All is well. Nevermind that it threw thousands of Americans out of work and shuttered numerous factories.

The fact that the incandescent bulb is being replaced by an inferior and possible dangerous product - the compact fluorescent bulb  - is the just one part of this story that gets the dander up.That they are made primarily in China is the kicker. Perhaps the inevitability of the end of the lowly incandescent bulb was to be expected, but the destruction of an industry in order to force us to buy inferior foreign products is just wrong.

The LED light bulb is making a move.Currently they are expensive, but they are far more efficient, safer and at least for now they are being made in America where they are exported to China. Small victories I guess.




CW

We suck, yes, but, these other guys...

I doubt at any time in American history there has been as inauspicious a beginning to a presidential campaign as we are seeing right now. The incumbent is presiding over a literal disaster. His one truly shining moment was being President when a nearly irrelevant Osama bin Laden was killed. Rumors abound that in fact Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming to his fateful and "courageous" decision to take bin Laden out.

The administration can't point to a strong and growing economy, or robust job growth. We are mired in 9.1% unemployment land. They can't point to seminal legislation that was supposed to address a looming health care cost explosion. The plan was unpopular when it was passed in the dead of night just before Christmas 2009 and it's still unpopular. ObamaCare, as it has come to be known, has done more damage to an uncertain economy than can be measured. Already costs are rising just in anticipation of its implementation.

The Dodd/Frank bill the President signed is paralyzing the banking system even before the actual regulations have been written. Do they not understand that ours is a debt based economy and it's the private sector banks that introduce "new" money into the system. It's almost as if they - the President and the Democrats - are purposely suppressing the domestic economy (and by extension the global economy). To what end? Win elections? Hardly.

If ever there was a ready made situation for a John Wayne character to ride in on a white horse and save us from a deadly mess the 2012 election is it. Obama seems to be saying, yes, we suck, but these other guys, you won't want them, they're goofy.

So we turn to the Republicans which is like admitting to you're pining for hope and change. We hope this current field changes and soon. What a crop of misfits and dopes. Really? Can't we do any better?

I had hope for Perry, but then he opened his mouth and removed all doubt. I thought Obama was petulant little prick. Perry disappoints.

Newt, no.

Bachmann, hell no!

Santorum, Huntsman, Paul... zzz...

Cain. I love him, but every day I wonder if today will be the day he admits he's been yanking our chain.

That leaves Mitt. If it has to be Mitt so be (M)it.

This is the one time Obama seems to be telling the truth, these guys are goofy. But, as I've said before:
dogcatcher vs Obama. Dogcatcher.


CW

Occupy This

I think it's interesting that the kids occupying Wall Street for 4 weeks now still don't know what they want. Mostly what I am hearing is that rich people suck. I'm sure some of them do, but I think some poor people probably suck too.

There, now that we've gotten that out of the way, we can delve into the true meaning of this protest. Just as with the Tea Party it's frustration over this country's failures that is driving this. While there is plenty of blame to go around I think the protesters are "occupying" the wrong city. Washington DC is where they need to be.

Simply put it's not capitalism or the so-called rich that have failed us. It is forced socialist policies designed to fail that make everything and everyone they touch fizzle a little bit more with each new layer of government bureaucracy. Am I being facetious when I declare that forced socialist policies are supposed to fail? Not really.

I used to think and still do in some instances that the do-gooders have the best of intentions, but it is the unintended consequences (of human nature) that ruin everything they foist upon us. After reading Bruce Carlton's post: Good intentions? Not so, I have to conclude that the good intentions motivation I have bestowed on extreme leftist (PC) policies are just the opposite.

At least capitalism in it's pure form is honest. Socialism, leftism or PCism - whatever you want to call it is a liar's game. If you believe the lies that America's financial problems are the result of greedy capitalists then no doubt you will side with the Occupiers and demand "someone" gives you what you want for free. The ones who believe the liars are ignorant or deceived or are lying to themselves. A child knows that someone else will always have more than they do, but only a child is allowed to deceive themselves into believing that the unfairness of it all should be rectified with more unfairness.

I have always marveled at the notion that a rich man's inheritors should be forced give a huge percentage of their gains to the government out of some sense of fairness. What fairness is it that the government deserves or has any right to that money? I don't care if it is more money than any one person could ever use - it is theirs. It is more obscene in my eyes that the government can by the use of force take a man's inheritence than it is for a man to have more money than he could ever use. To what end? So that the government can spend it better?

The list of government programs and agencies that have been wildly successful and worked as intended (without costing society in other ways) is very, very short.

The failure of America's financial system, fiscal system, educational system and moral system can be laid at the feet of the men and women in Washington DC not New York City's Wall Street. DC acts Wall Street reacts. This not defending Wall Street, this placing the fault where it belongs.

The totality of "good" government failures (with all the good intentions, or lies if you will) is long. From the mortgage/subprime meltdown and it's inception in government policies to the coming demise of the venerable postal system. Government makes the rules, the rules are fixed so that some succeed and the rest...

So tell me how (real) capitalism has destroyed our country?



CW

Occupy Wall Street and Me

My natural inclination would be to scoff at the "kids" putting on this Occupy Wall Street event. In general the proclamations I've been hearing from the participants leads one to believe they aren't really serious. It sounds like "we want everything, for free of course". Of the list of actions they are demanding almost none of them are reasonable or even realistic, but if I really listen what I hear is extreme frustration. Back in 2009 I myself participated in a rally where the overarching feeling was extreme frustration. It was the initial Tea Party rally in my area.

Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party are two sides of the same coin.

The Occupiers are upset about Wall Street bailouts, so is the Tea Party. The Occupiers oppose bailouts because Wall Street is "the rich" and the rich are the reason they are poor. The Tea Party opposed the bailouts because it's bad policy (so they say) and because it was done with deficit spending. The Occupiers are upset about corporate lobbyists because corporations are rich and the rich are the reason they are poor. The Tea Party opposes corporate lobbyists because they steer public policy so that it enhances their bottom line instead of ensuring that policy is good for the public.

The Occupiers sees corporate America as the enemy, the Tea Party sees an out of control government as the enemy. In some ways they are both right. The truth is the mega-government and mega-corporations are in bed together. It's a symbiosis that ensures riches for the prime movers in both entities. The worker and middle management in both government and corporate America are fungible and ultimately anonymous.

There is a divergence depending on on which side of the coin lands face up. While the Occupiers believe the government should give them the basic necessities of life just because they are breathing - not realistic or reasonable. They see rich corporations walking off with millions and billions while human services worthy or not are getting cut. Whereas the Tea Party sees government, particularly the Federal government as out of control as it exercises extra-constitutional power and enriching the elites inside corporations and by symbiosis the elites inside government as they move from one to other.

The rules are made by the government - and the rules are rigged. This is the source of the frustration for both.

Wouldn't be interesting if they somehow came together? Nah.




CW