The ongoing disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant shows the perils of following the left’s policy on nuclear power.

The debris from the first hydrogen blast had barely settled when DFL-affiliated bloggers and tweeps started chanting “yeah, good job trying to lift Minnesota’s nuke moratorium!  Haha!  You are teh stupid!”.

We’ll come back to the DFL’s dim-witted politicization in a moment.

The headlines paint a dire (and direly confused) picture of the situation at the Fukushima plant, it’d seem nuke opponents have a point. Things sound bad.

But let’s make sure we’re clear on the facts: the Fukushima plant, like all Japanese plants, were designed to withstand ground motion equal to twice that occurring in a 1000-year quake – which in that part of Honshu is in the low 8-point Richter range (it’s not a perfect measurement scale, since Richter measures energy release, not ground motion).  The Japanese earthquake was 9 points on the Richter scale – 5-10 times as intense. And yet by all indications so far, the containment vessels – the steel, lead and concrete capsule that contains the actual reactor cores – are holding up.  It was the release of the intensely interactive fuel from the core – many thousands of times more intense than the fairly limited hydrogen and steam-borne radiation we’ve seen from Fukushima – that made Chernobyl the disaster it was.  Bear in mind, Chernobyl had no containment vessel.  The reactor cooling at Fukushima, of course, seems not to have been up to the damage it suffered in the earthquake and tsunami – or, more directly, to the complete loss of the power grid and backup diesel generators to run the cooling systems.

“Is it wise to build nuclear power plants in areas prone to very serious earthquakes and tsunamis” is a very, very valid question.  It is a fact that engineering can make almost anything withstand almost any disaster imaginable – but the costs escalate drastically, as well.  Power utilities can no more afford to buy plants that can survive every possible disaster than you can afford to buy a car that will protect you from every possible highway accident.  Perhaps building nuke plants in active high-risk quake zones, or low-lying coastal areas, isn’t so smart.

You’ll note, by the way, that Minnesota is prone to neither earthquakes nor tsunamis.

Now, according to the latest reports from Japan, the biggest radiation danger is coming from a fire in a building that contains spent nuclear fuel – uranium that no longer can support a nuclear reaction, but is still radioactive.  It’s being kept, basically, in a swimming pool – because water is an incredibly effective radiation shield…

…unless it boils away due to a fire in the building, which seems to be what may be happening.

Now, the people at Fukushima are dealing with conditions that are unimaginably difficult – even finding food to eat in that area is difficult, without having to deal with a damaged nuke plant and all the things that can go wrong.

But the best way to prevent nuclear waste from getting caught up in a building fire is to get it out of the building, and put it someplace where a fire is both impossible and irrelevant.  Say, miles underground.

Which has been proposed in the United State for over twenty years; the Yucca Flats waste storage facility would have made  disasters like the potential blazing waste plume at Fukushima impossible.  But the American left – the “environmental”  movement, in this case – scuppered that idea.  Partly because of the danger of transporting waste by rail (real, but manageable); partly because of danger to future generations thousands of years from now if the signage, for example, got obscured.

Which leaves us with fifty-odd nuclear waste sites more or less like the one at Fukushima today – including two in Minnesota – vulnerable, in extreme circumstances, to the same kind of disaster.

Thanks, Democrats.

But the issue of waste disposal can’t be laid at the feet of the DFL alone; it’s a national issue.

What we can lay at their feet is the economy-crippling shortsightedness of cutting off Minnesota’s energy-production nose because of an accident that could not be replicated in Minnesota, or for that matter most of the US; with a 45-year-old reactor design, arguably built in an inadvisable place, with backup power that couldn’t withstand twin disasters that are exceedingly rare to nonexistant away from the American west coast.

Especially given that advances in nuclear technology promise to make proposed nuke plants meltdown-proof by replacing mechanical and human safeguards -which are fallible – with the laws of physics.

Al Gore weighs in on the veracity of Global Warming while half of America is freezing their asses off under five feet of snow.

“As it turns out, the scientific community has been addressing this particular question for some time now and they say that increased heavy snowfalls are completely consistent with what they have been predicting as a consequence of man-made global warming.”

“Scientific Community” as in research scientists who rely on government grants to feed their kids in a recession, right Al?

Just remember folks:

1. If it snows, it’s Man-Made Global Warming.
2. If it doesn’t snow, it’s Man-Made Global Warming.
3. The earth has often times been much warmer and much cooler than it is now but since we got here it’s our fault.
4. Celebrities are experts on everything.

Gore said that increased moisture in the air – a result of global warming – can lead to increased snowfalls.

…and if the air is dry, or moist, or in between, it’s Man-Made Global Warming.

Oh, and don’t forget, Al Gore invented the internet.

Gary Miller – late of the great, lamented Truth Vs. The Machine, from which this blog’s “First Ringer” is a refugee, has switched hos oeuvre to Facebook, a medium whose Ambrose Bierce he very clearly is.

And Gary notes something that had flashed across my mind as I listened to the State of The Union:

…the President’s continued references to Sputnik as a way to inspire young people would be much more effective, if: 1. They still taught kids in publik skouls about Sputnik. 2. The country which launched Sputnik, the Soviet Union, still existed and hadn’t collapsed under the burden of a socialist command economy similar to one which the President hopes to implement here. Other than that, heck of a story.

Heh.

Oops.  Sorry about the “rhetoric”.  Gotta watch me – I’m a loose cannon…

…DOH!  I mean, I’m a ticking time bomb…

AAAAAGH! I mean “I’m on Janet Napolitano’s Watch List because of  my beliefs”.  Whew.  OK.  Made it.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.  The Minnesota Legislative session.

Back during the campaign, when I’d do appearances at campaign fundraisers and the like, I frequently signed off my brief talks with challenges to everyone there; to the voters, the challenge was “on November 3,  your work really begins; you’ll need to keep these candidates true to their promises”.  And to the candidates, it was an allusion to the legend of the Spartans, to told departing warriors “come back with your shield, or on it“…

DOH!  Sorry – another bit of inflammatory rhetoric!  Paul Krugman will be displeased!

Breathe.  Center.  OK.

The bit of rhetoric, in context, is generally understood to mean “fight the good fight, politically; don’t put your re-election ahead of the princples for which we’re sending you to Saint Paul”.

It’s good to see the GOP legislative majority is making its first moves this week.  We’ve got two bits of news to report.

More Nukes!:  With energy prices spiking just in time for the hardest winter in decades, it’s perhaps great timing for the GOP to push for the repeal of Minnesota’s dim-witted 17-year-old “moratorium” on nuclear power plants.

Bills to end the 17-year ban will be introduced today in the House and Senate, with a House committee scheduled to vote on the proposal Tuesday. The chief sponsors will be state Rep. Joyce Peppin, R-Rogers, and Senate Majority Leader Amy Koch, R-Buffalo.

With new Republican majorities in both bodies, the legislation is expected to pass easily. Then its fate would be up to Gov. Mark Dayton, who has opposed the effort because there’s still no plan to deal with the highly radioactive nuclear waste generated at those plants.

And of course, that’s wrong; there is a plan.  It’s merely been gundecked – DOH, sorry, I mean it’s been sabotaged by generations of soggy-headed environmentalists who apparently prefer coal power, or energy-starved poverty, to nuclear power.  “Environmentalists”, inevitably, from the DFL and their farm team, the Greens.  “Environmentalist” like Paul Aasen, Dayton’s pick to head the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, a man who targets – AAAGH – job creation and economic growth as remorselessly as Sarah Palin targets a caribou.

Both parties agree it would take years for a new plant to be approved and built. But they differ on the impact of the legislation and the need.

Republicans contend the ban, put in place in 1994 as part of a package allowing dry-cask nuclear-waste storage, must be lifted to allow serious planning to begin. Many Democrats say utilities can do that now; they just can’t act on it.

I bolded that last bit there; doesn’t that sound like someone who looooves regulation, and has not the faintest sympathy for people who actually accomplish things?  Can’t you see them giggling about that at their after-session soiree?

Xcel Energy, which owns the Prairie Island and Monticello nuclear plants, has said it has no plans for another nuclear plant.

Which might have something to do with the moratorium currently in effect…

Republicans contend there’s a greater need for the added baseload electrical generation capacity than Democrats will concede.

Democrats also have argued that ratepayers should be protected from immediate construction costs and overruns.

“I’m really concerned about our energy needs in the future,” Peppin said.

Democrats said they’re surprised Republicans are putting such an emphasis on lifting the ban.

“I’m surprised that with the huge challenges that we are facing … that that is one of the priorities they are pursuing as one of their top issues,” said Rep. Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, the House minority leader.

I can see where it might surprise Thissen.

Someone who is actually concerned with real economic growth, on the other hand, might see where inexpensive domestic power might be important for companies that are contemplating doing business in a place that is, frankly, chilly.  Perhaps the DFL believes heat comes from the Heat Fairy; most of us know better.

Jobs Jobs Jobs:  At 2PM – two hours after this post appears – the GOP Caucuses will be announcing their legislative jobs plan.  No details are available as this is written.  Stay tuned.

A look back on ten climate predictions based on “incontrovertible evidence“, over the past forty years.

I have thirty inches of snow sitting on my lawn and just wrote a check to Elijah’s Tree Service for the removal of two trees felled by an ice storm that came before Thanksgiving this year. He would have been here sooner but I was like 1000th on his list.

I’m cold and I’m looking for some Global Warming about now.

I have been skeptical of global warming ever since I studied it’s origins soon after Algore’s largely discredited but hugely profitable movie An Inconvenient Truth was foisted on an gullible liberal public.

Jettison the “science” or the politics, and I’m still amazed at the amount of people that believe we have the capacity to predict the weather ten or a hundred years in the future when repeatedly, even comically, meteorologists with all their Doppler and satellite technology, can’t predict the weather accurately beyond twenty four hours.

Nothing makes fools of more people than trying to predict the weather. Whether in Los Angeles or London, recent predictions have gone crazily awry. Global warming? How about mini ice age?

Once the warming failed to appear as predicted, Global Warming conveniently became “Climate Change” as if to say that any change in the climate, despite evidence of eons of extreme and catastrophic cold and warm cycles occuring before we got here, are now caused by us.

Since at least 1998, however, no significant warming trend has been noticeable. Unfortunately, none of the 24 models used by the IPCC views that as possible. They are at odds with reality.

The sight of confused and angry travelers stuck in airports across Europe because of an arctic freeze that has settled across the continent isn’t funny. Sadly, they’ve been told for more than a decade now that such a thing was an impossibility — that global warming was inevitable, and couldn’t be reversed.

This is a big problem for those who see human-caused global warming as an irreversible result of the Industrial Revolution’s reliance on carbon-based fuels. Based on global warming theory — and according to official weather forecasts made earlier in the year — this winter should be warm and dry. It’s anything but. Ice and snow cover vast parts of both Europe and North America, in one of the coldest Decembers in history.

Is it arrogance or ignorance?

No matter what happens, it always confirms their basic premise that the world is getting hotter. The weather turns cold and wet? It’s global warming, they say. Weather turns hot? Global warming. No change? Global warming. More hurricanes? Global warming. No hurricanes? You guessed it.

Liberal icon Rahm Emanuel made famous the line “Never waste a good crisis” this past political cycle and it appears when one doesn’t present itself they’re perfect content with creating one.

Nothing can disprove their thesis. Not even the extraordinarily frigid weather now creating havoc across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The Los Angeles Times, in a piece on the region’s strangely wet and cold weather, paraphrases Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert as saying, “In general, as the globe warms, weather conditions tend to be more extreme and volatile.”

Got that? No matter what the weather, it’s all due to warming. This isn’t science; it’s a kind of faith. Scientists go along and even stifle dissent because, frankly, hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants are at stake. But for the believers, global warming is the god that failed.

Hmm. A failed messiah? That sounds familiar.

Why do we continue to listen to warmists when they’re so wrong? Maybe it’s because their real agenda has nothing to do with climate change at all. Earlier this month, attendees of a global warming summit in Cancun, Mexico, concluded, with virtually no economic or real scientific support, that by 2020 rich nations need to transfer $100 billion a year to poor nations to help them “mitigate” the adverse impacts of warming.

Hmm. A transfer of wealth? That sounds familiar too.

This is what global warming is really about — wealth redistribution by people whose beliefs are basically socialist. It has little or nothing to do with climate.

But is there any scientific method for predicting the weather, you know for those of us who would be genuinely concerned for future generations if a global climate threat manifested itself in earnest?

…pay more attention to Piers Corbyn, a little-known British meteorologist and astrophysicist who has a knack for correctly predicting weather changes. Indeed, as London’s Mayor Boris Johnson recently noted, “He seems to get it right about 85% of the time.”

How does he do it? Unlike the U.N. and government forecasters, Corbyn pays close attention to solar cycles that, as it turns out, correlate very closely to changes in climate. Not only are we not headed for global warming, Corbyn says, we may be entering a “mini ice age” similar to the one that took place from 1450 A.D. to 1850 A.D.

For those of you Algore disciples that can’t do math…that’s four hundred years of this. If man is causing a warming of the planet, now might be the time to step it up a bit.

Or move South.

Miami is experiencing its coldest December in 115 years, according to the local branch of the National Weather Service, where employees have exhausted their thesauruses trying to describe the anomaly. (One of them, Dan Gregoria, settled on this: “very rare.”)

HEADLINE IN THE MIAMI HERALD ON MONDAY “Time to Pull Out Those Winter Coats Again”

…Okay. Farther South.

I don’t begrudge your choice to smoke cigarettes as long as you:

1) Keep it out of my face.

2) Keep it out of my kids’ face.

3) Quit throwing them out of your god-damned window.

4) Pay your fair share: don’t expect me to pay higher life, disability or health insurance premiums. You should though.

5) Let me bum one off of you once a year or so for old times.

But seriously, if you don’t know smoking is dangerous by now, is it because the government hasn’t done an adequate job of edumacating you?

Apparently the government thinks you’re so damn stupid that the dangers can only be conveyed to you in pictures.

Corpses, cancer patients and diseased lungs are among the images the federal government plans for larger, graphic warning labels that would take up half of each pack of cigarettes sold in the United States.

Whether smokers addicted to nicotine will see them as a reason to quit remains a question.

Sounds like another shovel-ready project to me.

The share of Americans who smoke has fallen dramatically since 1970, from nearly 40 percent to about 20 percent, but the rate has stalled since about 2004. About 46 million adults in the U.S. smoke cigarettes.

In the same period, the average cost per pack has gone from 38 cents to $5.33. Much of those increases are from state and federal taxes.

It’s unclear why declines in smoking have stalled. Some experts have cited tobacco company discounts or lack of funding for programs to discourage smoking or to help smokers quit.

I would submit to you that there are a certain percentage of us that are going to smoke cigarettes.  They like to smoke. It aint illegal. They know it aint good for ’em. And they don’t give a rip.

In the mean time are we to assume the federal government intends to spend more and more of everyone’s tax dollars until there are no smokers left? Maybe we should just let evolution run its course.

I used to be a technical writer, working in software, science and engineering.

And this piece from the Guardian made me howl with laughter.

Your mileage may vary.

Science is joining forces to analyze…

…Ozzy Osbourne:

Ozzy Osbourne’s genome will be sequenced, in hopes that scientists can figure out how the notoriously self-destructive rocker is still alive.

“Sequencing and analyzing individuals with extreme medical histories provides the greatest potential scientific value,” Nathan Pearson, director of research at Knome, a leading gene-sequencing company, told the U.K. newspaper the Daily Mail.

Although the 61-year-old Osbourne has been sober for eight years, he spent the bulk of his life consuming legendary amounts of alcohol and hard drugs, as well as engaging in other high-risk activities.

Perhaps next “Knome” can analyze the genomes of people who thought Black Sabbath didn’t suck.

I was reading Ed’s piece yesterday on the apparent attempt by “human-caused global warming” partisans at the National Academy of Sciences to attack their detractors (via the NYTimes, naturally, rather than via actual science or anything), and I came across this bit here (emphasis added):

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Paul Ehrlich.  Leading the attack.

Ladies and gentlemen, this battle may be over.  Because while the fact that Ehrlich has spent his entire fifty-plus year career being wrong about absolutely every single issue he’s touched , saying that disproves anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in and of itself is a bit of a logical fallacy.   But let’s just say that not only am I glad Ehrlich’s not on my side of this debate, but frankly the fact that the politic0-scientific left associated with Ehrlich at all is a bit of an indictment of the left’s entire “science as advocacy” meme.

Ehrlich started his academic career as an entomologist, an expert on Lepidoptera – butterflies.  But in 1968 he wrote one of the biggest best-sellers in the history of pseudo-scientific literature, The Population Bomb.  In it, Ehrlich reprised the work of Thomas Malthus, arguing that population growth would eventually, inevitably lead mankind to three choices:  Stop making new humans, stop consuming resources, or starve to death.  The book started “The battle to feed all of humanity is over … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” He spent much of the next decade writing other books and articles in support of his thesis in Population Bomb, adding in a later article “By 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the earth’s population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people.”  The book and his body of “work” through the seventies proposed a number of radical solutions to the overpopulation crisis; dumping sterilizing agents into water supplies, allowing only selected people the privilege of reproduction, and performing mass “triage” of nations, the same way an emergency room triages patients – between those who don’t need help (North America, Australia, parts of Europe), those who can be saved, and those who are behond help – India, Sub-Saharan Africa, and much of Asia, which he predicted would be hell on earth by the 1980’s; he essentially gave up all hope for Africa and India.  Our ecology was going to strike back at us; in a 1969 article, “Eco-Catastrophe!”, he predicted that by the end of the century the population of the US would be under 20 million, and our life expectancy would be around 40 years – due not to starvation, but to pesticides.

By the mid-seventies, though Ehrlich broadened his sights a bit, behond overpopulation and into geopolitics.  In 1975’s The End of Affluence, Ehrlich predicted cataclysmic food riots in America, leading the President to declare martial law.  But it did no good – in Ehrlich’s narrative – because the world was driven to destroy the US in a combined nuclear assault, spurred by our use of…

…pesticides.

He broadened it further with 1978’s The Race Bomb, which was a paranoid melange on the dangers of racial diversity, followed by The Golden Door: International Migration, Mexico, and the United States, in which he called for sealing off the border long before it became Tom Tancredo’s issue. 

By the eighties, he’d joined with much of the left’s elite (who were, by the by, not busy participating in food riots or race wars, and were well-fed enough to go to protests) in warning about the danger of nuclear war, joining with Carl Sagan to write The Cold And The Dark, demanding the US disarm just in time for our generations of deterrence to render the point moot with the fall of the Soviet Union.

He was, of course, early on the Climate Change bandwagon, with Betrayal of Science and Reason: How Anti-Environment Rhetoric Threatens Our Future, a 1998 book co-authored with his wife Anne, which basically served as a model for the left’s response to questions about Global Warming this past decade – he didnt’ call for Nuremberg trials per se, but he wasn’t that far off, either.

His body of work – at least, his work that impinges on politics and human events – has had three things in common. 

He’s blamed Western Civilization – especially our economic freedom – for successive waves of self-caused, predicted catastrophes.

He’s prescription to deal with these catastrophes has been, in every case, for the individual to surrender his/her autonomy, and even future, to an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful central entity that’ll make all the hard, life and death choices for them.

And he’s been wrong on every count.  Humans, rather than sitting in caves waiting to get eaten by sabre tooth tigers, invented spears.  Faced with floods, we invented the sandbag as an alternative to drowning and mildew.  And faced with shortage of resources, we adapt.  And humanity in the past forty years has adapted – learning to grow crops where we didn’t before, learning to conserve farmland and water, developing new crops and practices. 

Julian Simon, an American economist, placed a bet with Ehrlich:

Simon set up a bet wherein he would sell Ehrlich $1,000 dollars worth of any five commodities that Ehrlich chose. Ehrlich would hold the commodities for ten years. If the prices rose — meaning scarcity — Simon would buy the commodities back from Ehrlich at the higher price. If the prices fell, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. Professor Ehrlich jumped at the bet, noting that he wanted to “accept the offer before other greedy people jumped in.”

In October of 1990, Ehrlich mailed Simon a check for $570.07. As Simon predicted, free markets provided lower prices and more options. Simon would have won even if prices weren’t adjusted for inflation. He then offered to raise the wager to $20,000 and use any resources at any time that Ehrlich preferred.

The bet never happened.  Ehrlich moved on.

To global warming.

While Simon died, it’d seem that another bet was placed, if only in spirit.  Ehrlich is paying us all back with excess hot air.

He’s a sick man.

Gore suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

…and Dementia.

“an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”

…just so you know, he’s talking about Man-Made Global Warming, not the Obama administration.

God broke off a chunk of ice and sent it out into the ocean. It’s so large it will solve the looming Global Warming Disaster (run for your lives!) for the surrounding area for decades to come.

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg split off from Antarctica and could disrupt global ocean patterns and weather systems for decades, according to scientists cited in The Times of London on Saturday.

Although the impact was not expected to be felt for decades, the iceberg could block the production of cold, salty water, known as “bottom water,” which could lead eventually to cooler winters in the North Atlantic.

In other news, Luxembourg is still a country. I checked.

Berg’s Seventh Law – when liberals defame conservatives, they’re projecting – just keeps gaining evidence.

Remember three years ago, when the wahabbi global warmingists were demanding “scientific Nuremberg trials” for global warming skeptics – as if belief in sound science were akin to a war crime?

Yep. Unethical.  And it should be investigated.  Not as a war crime, naturally; more like fraud, with the complicity of vast swathes of government, academia, the media and the UN:

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate Files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).

Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify.

“In [Gore’s] science fiction movie, every assertion has been rebutted,” Inhofe said. He believes Vice President Gore should defend himself and his movie before Congress.

To be serious for a moment, I’m not sure Algore’s little flight of fancy – as damaging as it was – deserves criminal investigation.  Ignominy will do.

But for a bunch of “scientists” and politicians who tried to gin up a worldwide fraud to bring money and political power to themselves (allegedly)?

I think it’s worth a look.

The science behind global warming is taking more hits than Jean-Pierre Koopman against Mohammed Ali:

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife.

Sounds bad.

However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Long story short; humans do cause warming – where they live:

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

Do you think a weather station surrounded by strip malls and houses is going to be warmer than one out on the lone prairie?

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

In other words, he was part of that universal consensus, before he wasn’t.

….but I’m smarter than you.

Enough about about Health Care reform. What do you think about Health Insurance Reform?

Obama reminds me of the guy that says

“Enough talk about me. What do you think about me?”

There are many and several ways America has expressed it’s disapproval of reform of health care reform via an ever-expanding liberal government growth plan.

It’s been three weeks since Massachusetts voters elected Scott Brown to the Senate, in large part because of his opposition to the health care confusion Democrats have sown. It’s been even longer since Americans at tea parties and lawmakers’ town hall meetings plainly told Washington they wanted no part of the health care elixir that Congress was peddling.

Still, our political elites, impressed by their own intellects, insist that the public will get the health care system they want the public to have, not the health care the public wants.

This was confirmed by the president when he told Couric he would not throw out the proposals that are stalled in Congress and start over, even though public opinion (see chart) strongly indicates that he should.

Everyone’s heard the message loud and clear save one man.

Unfortunately he happens to be the President of the United States.

“Just in case there’s any confusion out there, let me be clear,” Obama said. “I am not going to walk away from health insurance reform.”

You see what he did there? He smuggled the word insurance into his monologue. Make no mistake, a man of words, and only words, chooses them wisely. Also of note, Jimmy II also threw in his signature and so very very tired “let me be clear,” mantra; a sure sign he intends on being anything but.

America cares about jobs and the economy at the moment and for the time being the majority are satisfied with their health care and are dissatisfied with the size of their government. Obama is increasingly making himself an island on both fronts.

There was immediate skepticism from Mr. Obama’s own party that the forum would break the impasse. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) said he had reached out to Republicans “on several occasions” last year to seek their ideas and feedback. “I was, however, disappointed that these meetings did not result in any serious follow-through to work together in a bipartisan fashion,” he said.

So, it’s the Republicans’ fault that health care reform is pushing up daisies?

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) said he welcomed the outreach. “Obviously, I am pleased that the White House finally seems interested in a real, bipartisan conversation on health care,” he said in a statement. “The problem with the Democrats’ health-care bills is not that the American people don’t understand them; the American people do understand them, and they don’t like them.”

At least someone’s listening.

Tangent warning!

Riddle me this: if you could remotely control the President and somehow direct his actions to further derail his Presidency, and really light up Americans who are quickly growing angry at their government’s expansion into issues no one believes in or cares about, what might you do?

This?

Amid the growing fight over the accuracy of climate data, President Obama is seeking to have the federal government put its imprimatur [screeeeeeeeeeeeeeechhhhhhhhhh!-JR]

…that means approval; consent. I had to look it up.

on the science by calling for the creation of a new federal office to study and report on global warming.

Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat: “This service will be a vital part of our growing body of knowledge on climate change, and will be held to the highest standards of scientific integrity and transparency”

Right.

Sir, is that the Nancy Pelosi definition of transparency or the Barack Obama variant?

…oh, and re the “highest standards of scientific integrity”…is that the IPCC definition or the Al Gore version?

I thought so.

Barack, we love ya. You’re making all the right moves…you know…for the one-term-and-out deal.

Sadly, you’ll be a one-term president, and a mediocre one. At best.

I was a biology major for one semester.  I’m not going to claim to be an expert on science or the scientific method.

But then, either should Algore.

But I digress.  One of the key tenets of the scientific academy is the notion of “peer review” – the idea that scientific work is going to get a rigorous going-over by other scientists, to try to find weaknesses, errors or gaps in the thesis.

At any rate, more details are emerging about how climate “scientists” got their “universal consensus”:

Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.

But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.

Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The bottom line?  The “scientists” involved in the scandal engaged in back-channel back-biting no less venal and stupid than you’d find at the most vapid Humanities department, to get their pet theory (and all of its attendant funding) accepted.

The scientists involved disagree. They say they were engaged not in suppressing dissent but in upholding scientific standards by keeping bad science out of peer-reviewed journals. Either way, when passing judgment on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.

Read the whole thing. And the next time some chattering hamster chants “the science is settled”, ask them if they have the faintest clue what that means.

The Earth is getting warmer!  And Humans are causing it!

Don’t question the theory, peasants!  It is SETTLED SCIENCE!

No, really! It’s all solid peer-reviewed science, and when the peers speak, you peasants must hold your filthy tongues!

In its most recent report [the IPCC] stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

Silence, Peasants!  When we say “the science is settled”, it means “go away and talk about last night’s Desperate Housewives” or something, and let the Elites think Big Thoughts.

Add this guy to the roles of those who owe their livelihood to the Obama stimulus plan. Is he creating more jobs? No. …growing the economy? No.

He’s researching the myth that is man-made global warming.

A scientist in the middle of the ClimateGate scandal received economic stimulus funds last June.

As NewsBusters reported on November 28, Penn State University is investigating Professor Michael Mann, the creator of the discredited “Hockey Stick Graph,” for his involvement in an international attempt to exaggerate and manipulate climate data in order to advance the myth of manmade global warming.

According to the conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research, Mann received $541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.

It’s one thing to see stimulus dollars funding worthless but predictable make-work projects employing government workers whose jobs were never at risk in an era overseen by liberals hell bent on growing the public sector. It’s quite another to see funding of borrowed taxpayer dollars diverted to support a failed and blatant liberal cause.

It should be a crime.

Via, ironically, the Sun:

A STAR primed to explode in a blast that could wipe out the Earth was revealed by astronomers yesterday.

It will self-destruct in an explosion called a supernova with the force of 20 billion billion billion megatons of TNT.

I look for it on cable in three months.

Vegetarians choose not to eat meat for a variety of reasons. Some cite the lower fat and cholesterol and higher fiber on their plates. Others for more emotional reasons: they don’t want to eat anything that smiles back at them. Hypothetically at least.

I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham.

George Clooney’s political bent certainly qualifies him as a pig, but I hardly think he looks like one.  Or vice versa.

If God didn’t want us to eat animals, why did he make ’em smell so good when they’re cookin’?

Now scientists (possibly those furlowed in the recent Global Warming controversy) are telling us that vegetables should be off the table too.

we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot.

Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way.

It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

Sorry, what? I couldn’t hear you, I was trying to bite off a chunk of my laptop battery. I think I chipped a tooth.

When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants “forage” for resources like light and soil nutrients and “anticipate” rough spots and opportunities. By analyzing the ratio of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground “rhizosphere” and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade.

Maybe so, but can they dance?

Plants can scream though. Sort of.

Some of the compounds that plants generate in response to insect mastication [that means chewing gutter-huggers-JR] — their feedback, you might say — are volatile chemicals that serve as cries for help. Such airborne alarm calls have been shown to attract both large predatory insects like dragon flies, which delight in caterpillar meat, and tiny parasitic insects, which can infect a caterpillar and destroy it from within.

So dragon flies can eat delicious caterpillar meat but I can’t?

It’s a small daily tragedy that we animals must kill to stay alive.

If that’s not a bumper sticker yet, it should be.

Plants are the ethical autotrophs here, the ones that wrest their meals from the sun. Don’t expect them to boast: they’re too busy fighting to survive.

Well then, why didn’t the Democrats include plants in the health care bill? Don’t they care?

So as you sit down to your bountiful (hopefully) table later this week, have compassion. Remember: you can’t eat animals; you can’t eat plants. Merry Christmas!

An ambulance crew brings in a shooting victim; one shot to the chest, one to the head.  There was a lot of blood loss from the chest wound, and the victim is in immense cardiopulmonary distress.

The head wound missed the medulla, at the brain stem, the part that controls the heart and breathing and the rest of the body’s automatic functions (and, for most of the Minnesota Progressive Project staff, their writing as well) – so the victim didn’t die instantly.  But the victim seems to be non-responsive; there are indications his brain functions are badly damaged; he may be in a coma, or worse.

So the doctors give up and administer a massive overdose of morphine to kill the patient, because it’s all over anyway and why drag it on?

Well, no.  They don’t. They stabilize the patient as best they can.  They check further to see if the brain is really shut down; if it’s not, they do what they can to restore function.

When in doubt, they err on the side of saving lives [1].

Now, I don’t write a lot about abortion.  I’m opposed to it, of course; I’m personally pro-life.  I find most of the arguments in favor of “choice” to be self-indulgent and childish.  I’m going to skip most of them – it’s nothing I haven’t written about in some depth, of course.

With that in mind, the argument about the “viability” – the idea that a fetus isn’t really all that terribly human until it’s “viable”, or capable of living on its own – is perhaps less stupid than most.  It’s wrong, of course; after three kids, I can say with authority that a “fetus” isn’t “viable” until it can get a job and pay its own rent.

More seriously?  I believe that since a fertilized egg, left to its own devices (no medical intervention for or against its existence – just like in our great-great-grandparents’ time) will gestate for nine months 75% of the time, and those who get that far will be born alive two out of three times (those stats are from primitive cultures like 1890-era rural Minnesota), it’s fairly clear that whatever the physics and physiology and metaphysics behind the process, the whole thing is intended to create living, breathing human beings.  Beyond that?  I think it’s fairly clear that since preemies have been successfully brought along to fairly normal lives as early as 22 weeks into gestation, that the idea that a “fetus” isn’t “human” until a 40-week fetus’ umbilical is cut is a self-indulgent, illogical absurdity.

None of the above, by the way, touches on spirituality at any level.  It’s nothing but logic, so far.

But I’m a Christian.  I believe  that every person (except Ryan Seacrest) has a soul.

“When?”

We don’t know.

Souls are not measurable.  There’s no place in human physiology that’s been identified as a “soul fill valve”, leading to a “soul tank” where the ephemeral concept is kept.  It’s not like a brain wave, much less synonymous with it, and if it were, the gunshot victim in the example above would be out of luck.  Not everyone agrees that there is such a thing; atheists all bet the “under” on Pascal’s Wager.    No matter – if you assume there is no soul, and are motivated by anything other than naked self-interest, it actually makes the question harder to resolve.  We’ll come back to that.

So the question – part of it, anyway – is “when does a fetus get a soul?”

Dog Gone at Penigma writes a very long treatise that says, essentially,  we don’t know because spirutual authorities have never agreed on the subject:

I have read widely on the subject of our human soul and spirituality, and listened to many different voices pontificating ther dogma on the subject in the course of satisfying my own curiosity…This breadth of recognition might suggest some sort of consensus, some unanimity of understanding, a clarity and agreement on definition, right?

Of course, not.  Ecclesiastical bodies have fought long, bloody wars over the subject; when two of the great Christian denominations have been split for almost a thousand years over the Nicene Creed and the job description for saints, when Presbyterian congregations fall into epic near-blood-feuds over applause in church, to say nothing of gay marriage, looking for general consensus on the nature of the Soul is hopelessly optimistic.

There is no consensus across history or across the geography of our planet on any single specific aspect of that essence we name souls. We don’t agree on what it is; we don’t agree on when it is inside of us; we don’t agree on the origins. We don’t even fully agree on whether or not the soul is immortal or eternal; some believe that the soul can die, others that it grows as the body grows, with experience. We don’t agree on how, where, and from whom our souls derive. We don’t agree on who or what possesses a soul.

DG goes on to note that even within Christian tradition, the idea of the genesis of the soul has knocked around a bit:

The Christian tradition is contradictory. The roots of early Judaism posited that animals, at least some animals, had souls, as do other religious and spiritual traditions. In Islam, the belief is that the soul enters the body of a fetus in utero after 40 days. Not 90 or 180 days, not 30 minutes, and not at conception; they are quite definite on the 40 day figure. But then, in the Islamic faith, not only humans have souls either. Djinn and angels also have souls in that faith’s traditions. In the Druidic tradition, and in many other traditions (the many irreverent verses of “Give me that old time religion” are playing in my head) so do some trees and other inanimate objects.

Right.  But then, traditional religion from the dawn of time until pretty recently believed all sorts of stuff we find crazy today; insert boilerplate here about burning witches and kosher laws and selling indulgences and human sacrifice and stoning gays (oops; one religion still does that).

Of course, in that era people couldn’t tell with any certainty that the crop they planted in April wouldn’t be eaten to the ground by bugs in July or blown away by a sudden storm in August; people never connected “taking a dump upstream from where you get your drinking water” and the hacking, fever-ridden wave of deaths that would periodically befall the village; in a village where the people had raised vegetables and sheep for uncounted generations, humans were born the same way the animals were; the way nature had left the process.  And it was an ugly process; 1/3 of babies (of the 3/4 that weren’t miscarried earlier) were stillborn or died of complications during delivery, as did 10% of the mothers (with each birth); and that was even before infant mortality set in.

So given the exceedingly crude nature of “science” back when years had three digits and the world’s major religious leaders were half a generation removed from raising keff and goats, especially the understanding of human physiology and development at the time, the question “when exactly does the soul inhabit the body” was purely academic; like “what will I wear on my third date with Scarlett Johannson”, it might be fun to think about, but the practical application is pretty minimal.

But today, the vast majority of “fetuses”, barring pseudomedical interference and, of course, miscarriage, survive until birth and beyond.  Not only that, but as noted above “fetuses” born just past half-term go on to live normal lives – utterly unthinkable even a generation ago (which, if logic rather than politics reigned, would make most non-health-related third-term abortions murder).  We don’t know when life is viable, but the boundaries keep getting pushed back.

The objective boundaries, anyway.

And since, unlike my third date with Scarlett Johannson, the essense of life is actually a valid, testable question these days, the question “when does viable, human life begin” isn’t an academic question.

100 years ago, the gunshot victim in the first paragraph might have been given up for dead without bothering with a trip to a hospital.  Today, science can find out if there really is a brain function in there that can be nursed back into control of the body.  People what would have been give up for dead fifty years ago walk among us today.

And definitions of “when does a human become human” written a thousand years ago by people for whom it was an utterly academic question are no more informative to us today than surgery textbooks from 1700 are to the Mayo today.

Leaving aside the fact that the concept of “the soul” is ephemeral and unmeasurable in any way; even the fairly objective measurement of “when life begins” is, paradoxically, more difficult than ever, since science has made the instrumentation and criteria so much finer than before.

And so the paradox is, if you care about the intangibles that make humans human, the more we know about how life works, the less meaningful the attempts to put an arbitrary, “objective” limit on them.  How do you put a number on something that gets less measurable, the better able to measure it you theoretically are?

Since we don’t know – and, unlike the rabbis of the Old Testament and the druids and popes and mullahs of 1000 years ago, we know what we don’t know – then if you believe that human life has any intangible but real value (call it a “soul” if you want, or “worth as a human life” if you don’t), then the only logical response, as with the gunshot victim above, is to err on the side of life.  If we don’t know life to be absent in an organism that is intended to live, then you assume it – he or she – is alive.

And you can tell Pope Pius II I said so.

[1] Although with Obamacare in place, they’ll have to check with a committee of government accountants and lawyers for medical advice, first.

In timely fashion, Monckton presents the most definitive cross examination of a Global Warming Alarmist zealot ever. Points to both participants for the civility. But wow… Global Warming Alarmism doesn’t come out smelling so fresh in this one.

(H/T to the always excellent Global Warming Hoax Weekly Roundup, at the Daily Bayonet)

Just as our time on earth represents a slim slice of the eons since our planet was formed, our current atmospheric episode is a respite in a wild ride featuring extreme heat, cold and large objects falling on our heads.

We’ve been deceived by a stroke of luck. In the two million years during which we climbed from stone-tool wielding Homo erectus with sloping brows to high-foreheaded Homo urbanis, man the inventor of the city, we underwent 60 glaciations, 60 ice ages. And in the 120,000 years since we emerged in our current physiological shape as Homo sapiens, we’ve lived through 20 sudden global warmings. In most of those, temperatures have shot up by as much as 18 degrees within a mere 20 years.

All this took place without smokestacks and tailpipes. All this took place without the desecration of nature by modern man.

And governments and groupies have been deceived by jet-setting rock stars and carbon-trading billionaires.

Lucky us…

The stroke of luck that’s misled us? The sheets of ice in whose shadow we made a living for two million years peeled back 12,000 years ago leaving a lush new Garden of Eden. In that Eden we invented agriculture, money, electronics and our current way of life. But that weather standstill has held on for an abnormally long amount of time. And it’s very likely that this atypical weather truce shall someday pass.

Man-made Climate Change enthusiasts are not only politically-motivated opportunists, they must also be the most arrogant people on earth, thinking we actually have a role in the climate of the relative pebble we live on as it screams through the universe.

The Earth is a traveler. Its angle as it sweeps around the sun produces the massive weather flips we call seasons—the dance from summer to winter and back again. But there’s more. Our planet has a peculiar wobble—its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years. This is called the Milankovich cycle, named for the Serbian engineer and geophysicist who discovered it.

But the wobbles in our trip around the sun are just a start. The sun is a traveler, too. It circles the black hole at the galaxy’s core every 226 million years. And it takes its tiny flock of planets with it. That means us. The result?

The journey around the galactic core is fraught with dangers. For example, every 143 million years we pass through a spiral arm of the galaxy, an arm that tosses tsunamis of cosmic rays our way. Those rays produce massive climate change. Then there’s the innocent-sounding stuff astronomers call galactic “fluff,” massive clouds of cosmic dust lurking in our solar system’s path that also cause dramatic climate change.

Meanwhile, the sun itself is going through a cycle from birth to death. As a result of its maturation, good old reliable sol is 43% warmer today than it was when the Earth first gathered itself into a globe of planetesimals 4.5 billion years ago.

The bottom line? Weather changes and the occasional meteor have tossed this planet through roughly 142 mass extinctions since life began 3.85 billion years ago. That’s an average of one mass extinction every 26.5 million years. Where did these mass die-offs come from? Nature. There were no human capitalists, industrialists or cultures of consumerism to blame.

…unless you have a Convenient Agenda that is.

So while the uncovering of the East Anglia CRU Email scandal is into its third week with scarcely a peep of direct coverage, it seems the usual suspects are hard at work trying to shore up the thesis, on a public relations and political front (although certainly not a scientific one).

I flipped on MPR twice this weekend, more or less at complete random.

The first time, I turned the show on to Speaking of Faith – the normally-excellent Minnesota-based production that explores religion and faith in all its many flavors, to normally-fascinating depth.  The show is one of MPR’s few regular programs whose podcasts I listen to punctiliously.  But today…:

A conversation about climate change and moral imagination with environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben. He’s been ahead of the curve on this fantastically complex issue since he wrote The End of Nature in 1989. We explore his evolving perspective on human responsibility in a changing natural world.

Not a word of controversy or skepticism to be heard, naturally – and this from a show that gives intellectually-ravenous credibility to every variety of lack of belief as well as all of the world’s manifestations of it – just the blithe acceptance that man-made global warming is a fact, and that collectivizing our society is our only real hope.

Still, it was better than On The Media – a program for whom leftist apologetics seems to be an unstated given.

For years, George Monbiot has written for the British newspaper The Guardian about the dangers of man-made climate change and how the denial industry sows confusion. But when he wrote recently “we’re losing,” it seemed a surprising admission. He explains why, despite scientific consensus, much of the public remains unswayed.

Quote of the day: Brooke Gladstone asked Monbiot about Copenhagen.  “I’ve heard many people who wish we just had a huge Communist world government, so we could just do what needed to be done”.

Runner-up quote of the day? Monbiot on the East Anglia scandal (!):  “This was a disaster – we have to make sure our science is absolutely foolproof”.

Sorry, George – that train left the station.

Like this one, ripped from the headlines:

Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex

But just because the joke writes itself doesn’t mean we can’t, too.

Have at it, readers!  The comment section is open for your versions of the story – and like those Danish doxies’ ministrations, it’s absolutely free, although that offered by the Scand0-Strumpets, the  “Happy Ending” will be purely rhetorical.