REFLECTIONS

Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy -

In this issue:

1. Plague
2. Redoubt
3. SCHIP
4. Barney’s Bank
5. Reverse Reagan
6. Sensors

1. Plague. At least 40 members of an Al Qaida cell in Algeria were stricken with a curious outbreak of bubonic plague a few weeks ago. The outbreak contaminated one of the Al Qaida safe areas in Algeria. The Washington Times and British Sun ran stories early last week noting the outbreak and quoting unnamed intelligence sources suggesting that this was a botched experiment in producing a biological weapon of mass destruction. Perhaps in the future, Islamist friendly governments will be somewhat more reluctant to allow these people (and I use the term loosely) to operate inside their borders. The story demonstrates quite pointedly that the members of the Religion of Perpetual Outrage, the Islamists are not going away any time soon – unless they manage to kill themselves off completely with their little experiments in new weapons systems. And they are quite serious about wining the war that President Obama and congress are now in the process of turning away from. Eventually they are going to perfect one of their little weapons systems and use it on this soil. Elections have consequences – sometimes very unpleasant consequences.

2. Redoubt. There are several active volcanoes west and southwest of Anchorage. They periodically erupt and dust the city with volcanic ash, the last being the summer of 1992. Yesterday, one of the largest, Mount Redoubt which sits about 100 miles southwest of Anchorage started rumbling, with increased seismic activity. An inspection overflight did not note any ash or new holes in the icecap on the mountain. It did note a strong sulfur smell. Most of the volcanoes close to Anchorage are monitored by the Alaska Volcano Observatory – avo.alaska.edu There are web cameras on several of the mountains which can be accessed via the AVO website, and live seismograph outputs are also available. Cook Inlet was a busy place over the weekend with a 5.7 Richter earthquake Saturday morning about 50 miles west of Homer, or about 160 miles southwest of Anchorage. We felt a little swaying up here, but nothing moved too harshly.

3. SCHIP. One of the things that I forgot to mention about the SCHIP legislation that was passed out of the House last week was that it is funded by a massive increase in tobacco taxes. For all cigar, pipe and smokeless tobacco users, expect the taxes on your particular guilty pleasure to increase by a factor of three to ten. Cigarette smokers will also be slammed once again. The increase in prices for cigars in particular will create a thriving black market in fine cigars and you can expect smuggling and prosecutions for smuggling to increase accordingly, making criminals out of cigar, pipe, smokeless and cigarette users.

4. Barney’s Bank. There is no way on God’s Green Earth that you can spend $850 billion without a significant percentage of it going to the well connected banks and investment houses. One such bank was OneUnited Bank in Boston, which was not in any particular financial difficulty, but got a $12 million infusion of Your Tax Dollars courtesy of Barney Frank (D, MA). Barney wrote the provision into the enabling legislation specifically to assist this bank. Barney Frank was not the only congresscritter doing this, as the WSJ has a state by state breakdown of who is getting the money and why. Alabama received $3.7 billion for four troubled banks, and state banking officials credit the work of a pair of Republican congresscritters for getting them a place at the taxpayer funded feed trough. Ed Morrissey in Hot Air Friday noted that the TARP works a lot better than old fashioned pork because the money gets there quicker. The drawback is that sooner or later the general public will start seeing the economic bailout efforts as simply a corrupt money transfer of money from the taxpayers to friends and political supporters of members of congress.

5. Reverse Reagan. Dick Morris is out screaming doom and gloom over Obama’s effort to re-FDR the economy so that democrats will be in power for another 50 years. That concern is very real and very possible. One of the things that Reagan managed to do with the tax cuts and increases in defense spending was to jack up federal deficits to the point where democrats in congress were unable to muster the political strength to roll back the tax cuts. Morris believes that Obama and congress will attempt to do the opposite thing – jack up federal spending and deficits to the point where a future conservative congress will be unable to cut taxes. He believes that Obama will not immediately raise taxes, but will instead sit by and allow the Bush tax cuts to expire in 2010. When the “tax cuts” for those that don’t pay taxes – read this as new welfare payments – are implemented, he will move more and more people off the tax paying rolls and create a permanent voting majority of takers. Once the deficits get large enough, he and congress will slam through incredible tax increases on everyone not well connected to elected democrats. There are a couple problems with this analysis. First is that tax cuts are the only known way of increasing revenues over an extended period of time. Second is that Atlas may shrug, and the entrepreneurs, the small businessmen, and other creators of wealth may take their efforts offshore and quit producing wealth and paying those newly increased taxes here in the US. Obama is driven to create his socialist utopia, and will be successful in getting some distance down that road. His goal is what is currently going on in Argentina and / or Venezuela, both rich nations that have been destroyed by putting socialists in charge of their governments over an extended period of time. It is our job to ensure that he is not successful.

6. Sensors. When NASA and NOAA global warming cheerleaders like Hanson, Mann and others start cooking the data and tossing out manufactured graphs and studies as real science and incontrovertible proof of manmade global warming, it opens the door for skeptics to start drilling into the conclusions, the methodology and the actual data gathering itself. The skeptics have demonstrated that Mann’s Hockey Stick graph “proving” the existence of manmade global warming is an artifact of the methodology. They proved it by inputting a randomly created set of data points into his algorithm and coming up with the same shaped graph. Hansen’s handiwork at NASA Goddard was uncovered by Canadian scientists that proved they used September temperature data in their October temperature dataset last year when they announced that 2008 was the one of the hottest years in recent history. Now it appears that they have been playing games for a number of years with the placement of the thousands of temperature sensing sites worldwide. The temperature sensors have been sited in urban areas, in the urban heat island rather than in a representative cross section of countryside. The cities are always hotter than the surrounding countryside because concrete and asphalt absorb heat. If this is where you are gathering your data and not correcting it before you feed it into your algorithms, you will end up with an intentional and artificial increase in global temperatures. A good analysis of the ongoing temperature data gathering problems can be found at Science and Public Policy’s web site. This is a particularly good article: Science and Public Policy Org (PDF file)

It appears that climate science at NOAA and NASA is hopelessly compromised and corrupt, and has been so for at least a decade or so. The only accurate global temperature readings are those coming out of satellite data, but they are only available since 1979. We have a problem when our elected leaders are making policy decisions based on cooked data, bogus algorithms, (intentionally) poorly placed sensors, and conclusions based more on the political agenda of the scientists involved than what the data actually is telling them. Manmade global warming is a house of cards that is falling down just at the point when democrats hold sufficient majorities in congress to push legislation through.

More later — AG

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
- Samuel Adams, speech at the Philadelphia State House, August 1, 1776.

Note: Interesting Items can be found also at the following locations: MatSu Valley News and the home page. Rod Martin’s The Vanguard site is also a long-time supporter of this column. Alex Gimarc is a long-time member of the Town Hall Conservative group.