The funny and the bad

Bensblurb #528. 2/27/10

Hello again. The snow is gone for another year, let’s hope and pray. And maybe it’s time to lighten up a bit from winter’s stress. Two things I’ve seen in the past few days have certainly perked me up.

SAY WHAT? One, of course, is President Obama. He’s becoming as entertaining as George Bush used to be with his troubles in speaking. For Bush it was “mis-underestimated.” For Obama, try two beauties. One is his famous reference to the navy “corpseman.” The other is more recent, when in a speech he said “...we will ax all states to put in place...” One wag (on Weasel Zippers blog) commented that such dialect is fairly common in 56 of the 58 states; another noted that Harry Reid had previously said that Obama had no “Negro dialect.” Most of the time, at least.

CHECK THIS OUT from across the pond....Being a skeptic and feeling that climate change is natural and something we can do little about, I enjoyed this comment in a Brit website on the subject:

"The world is about 4.5 billion years old. Judging by such things as the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age together with previous events, it seems that there is significant ‘Climate Change’ two or three times every thousand years. This means there would have been about 10/15 million such warming or cooling events in Earth history.
“There are two schools of thought ...:1. The sceptic camp say that all of these 10/15 million climate change events are natural.2. The AGW camp say that all but one of these 10/15 million climate change events are natural. What they don’t explain is why natural climate change has taken a holiday just
this once.” Droll, eh?
　
GET SERIOUS
Now for matters of greater moment, President Obama’s session on health care concluded recently with mixed commentary.
From News Busters: A report on the health care summit on Friday's CBS Early Show featured a clip of President Obama scolding lawmakers for "trading talking points" during the meeting, that was followed by correspondent Bill Plante pointing a finger at the GOP: "But from their first speaker, Republicans never backed down from their opposition to the Democrats' bill." Plante noted that "John McCain, the President's opponent In 2008, challenged the process by which the Democrats' bill was produced." ....Plante touted how "the President shot back" at McCain, playing a clip of Obama proclaiming "the election is over." Plante also highlighted an exchange in which Obama slammed Senator Lamar Alexander, telling the Tennessee Republican to get his "facts straight." Oddly, after displaying the President's clearly partisan attacks, Plante concluded: "Democrats emerged from the meeting saying they still want bipartisanship. Republicans said they don't see that happening."

Mark Stein’s take:
While Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand-new, even-more-unsustainable entitlement at the health-care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split-screen — because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is farther upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe.
　
National Review online:
The White House was hoping the health-care summit would create momentum among Democrats to push their bill through Congress. It almost certainly did not work. Both sides repeated points that have been made countless times over the past year. That being the case, it seems likely that the public will react to what they heard from the Blair House meeting much as they have to the months-long debate in Congress: by agreeing in larger numbers with the Republican view that the bill the Democrats are pushing is hopelessly flawed.
MY TAKE...Whatever happens, President Obama at the health-care summit demonstrated, by his de facto judge-and-jury behavior, that he tolerates but ignores dissent..

Spring will come soon but we have plenty of rough sledding ahead.

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For Twenty and Ten, never again?

Bensblurb # 527
Friday, Feb 26, 2010

Whew, that new Northeast snow storm this week has spared Virginia.


In our so-called global warming era, it’s easy to shrug off the kind of unpopular findings I cited recently---that it took less than a year for a historic “big freeze” long ago to last for some 1,300 years in ancient times.

Let’s hope our blizzards this February wasn‘t the beginning of something again that’s really all too cool. For it was the worst I’ve seen in 32 years of pleasant living here in Aquia Harbour. Even so, my wife and I got off easy. We lost electric power for only an hour or so at most, while some neighbors elsewhere were lights-out for more than three days.

Son Buddy and family, residing back in the section farthest from the community’s entry gate, had that experience. Fortunately they were veteran campers, so made do with logs in their fireplace and propane in their cook stoves. Not that they were happy over their fate.

The power failures and street blockages of auto traffic in Aquia Harbour were one sad result of a maturing community’s abundant trees growing too freely for safety Our tree-lined streets are very attractive when shading the sun during most of the year and providing beautiful fall color. But the trees hindered the best efforts of our own road crews and the power company workers.

Thus, says Bud, our community needs to start a stringent tree-clearing project alongside our streets and power lines. We could see such February storms and outages again; see first paragraph above.

A kindlier recollecton now, if you will, about snow storms and one in particular. On the February day when I got married, in Chicago, a blizzard was well underway. That was 54 years ago. The blizzard ended, but the marriage didn’t, yet. I had always said it would be a cold day in hell when I got married and sure enough...
　
Almost exactly a year earlier, in 1955, I experienced a Colorado snow drift up close and personal and alone. A snowstorm, followed by a high wind in those Colorado mountains had drifted the access road to my father’s ranch shut. Three separate drifts had formed. They looked like mountains, sprawled across the road. I checked them out.
Each one had mounded up about 5 feet. I had brought a shovel. It should have been a pick axe. The drifts consisted of blown-in snow, grainy and hard as salt and packed just as tight.

Even our medium sized Farmall tractor, I discovered, wouldn’t budge them. Three days later the county’s road-maintainer blade came and busted them up.

Back to the here and now, I had to laugh at the unfortunate timing of two pieces in a newspaper that I had dug out of the snow. One was this announcement: “President Barack Obama's administration is forming a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.” Wow. Whatever happened to the Weather Bureau?

The other was a Washington Post editorial, titled “Still a climate for change.” It argued for a new carbon tax to be imposed on energy providers in the name, not of stopping global warming, but of conservation, don’t you see.
Its chances? About as likely as a snowball in [February’s] hell.
　
　

Global Warming--A Sad Joke

Bensblurb #526 2/16/10

(The snow here is still way too deep for Lollipop and may even hang around another week or so. Brrrrrr)

GLOBAL WARMING--A Sad Joke

Leave it to the Wall Street Journal to capture in a few words the essence of today’s global warming disputes. In a 2/16 editorial: “Now we are discovering the U.N. reports are sloppy political documents intended to drive the climate lobby’s regulatory agenda.”

That agenda, of course, is to levy new taxes on energy producers to reduce carbon emissions and stop the world from getting hotter and presumably less hospitable. That all supposes that we inhabitants are the reason it’s hotter than ever before.

Two big problems: I say it’s not hotter than ever before, and we inhabitants have precious little to do anyhow with how the globe reacts to major influences like the sun and the seas.

Now check these three recent nuggets I have collected to confirm my long-time convictions about the matter..
　
.....In National Review Online, here’s Mark Stein‘s take: “Climategate U-turn as Scientist at Centre of Row Admits There Has Been No Global Warming Since 1995. That would be 1995 as in a decade and a half ago? Gee, you wouldn't get that impression from reading the papers. Here's another first. Dr. Jones is the first IPCC honcho to concede the possibility that the present allegedly roasting planet may not be unprecedented:
He said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.”

....In a new piece, friend Dennis Avery writes, “The UN’s climate change panel is reeling from a series of scandals about unsupported claims in its 2007 report.
1 India has documented that the Intergovernmental Panel’s claim of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 was mere speculation—and has now been proven false.
2 The 2007 IPCC report claimed global warming could cut rain-fed African food yields in half by 2020. New lead author Chris Field says this is highly unlikely, and he can find nothing in the report’s supporting chapters to document it.
3 The Dutch are complaining that the IPCC said half of its land area lies below sea level, when the figure is actually 20 percent.
But the biggest scandal in the IPCC's closet remains its 1995 claim to finding a “discernible human influence” on the earth’s changing climate. Lead author Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore government laboratory inserted those words—after the IPCC’s consulting scientists had signed off on a draft that specifically said no such “human fingerprint” had been found!...Thus the IPCC’s whole claim of a “discernible human influence” remains without scientific support to this day.

What will we learn next?... Expect proof that the land-based thermometer records have been deliberately sabotaged to lower the temperature readings of yesteryear and raise recent thermometer readings—to make global warming seem scarier...Is it an accident that most of the world’s raw climate historical data has disappeared?

Veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo appeared on John Coleman’s TV special at KUSI-TV on January 14, charging that U.S. official temperatures have been rigged by quietly dropping “cold” weather stations: those at high altitude, high latitude, or in rural areas.
Looking back, an “official” global warming of 0.6 degrees since 1900 may not seem all that dramatic. Especially after a dozen years of non-warming. But think how hard it would have been for the global warming alarmists to panic the people if they’d admitted the rural areas hadn’t warmed at all! That “global warming” was mostly cities ratcheting up their own heat.

The supposedly dedicated “climate researchers” have nearly cost the world trillions of dollars in higher energy costs, agonies of wintertime suffering for the elderly “energy poor,” and needless deaths for lack of air conditioning in the summers.
　
　
Harry A. Taylor, Jr., retired space scientist lastly at the NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center, has reviewed the literature and concluded:

1. The modern contemporary measurements of T fail to show convincing evidence of a
sustained and significant warming.
2. The satellite data include oscillations in T which are suggestive of natural forcing.
These oscillations which dominate the record are not predicted by climate models.
3. Model predictions of future increases in T and CO2 are dubious and exaggerated.
4. The effects of CO2 emissions upon T are estimated to be to be at most modest.
5. Climate models have many limitations;, most serious is the failure to address the
effects of weather processes and the role of the oceans and clouds.
6. Historic evidence of climate change indicates natural warmings and coolings of greater
magnitude than seen in modern industrialized times.
7. There is no certainty that climate is calculable.
8. Regulations imposed by Governments will not significantly affect climate, but will instead likely be wasteful and costly.
9. Disregard for scientific debate suppression of opinion, and management of news threatens both Science and Society.
10. Climate is largely driven by Nature, not Man

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Grow again? Attract more Feds

Bensblurb # 525 2/11/10....(.by the way the 54th wedding anniversary for Ben and Carole Lee.)

Improve our County? Attract more feds

Getting rid of the BPOL(business and professional occupations license) tax should help make Stafford more attractive to new businesses and less hostile to those already here. That’s the upshot of your vote for county supervisors last fall.

In turn, let’s hope the businesses will again thrive and help the county out of its troublesome financial situation. But let’s face facts.

What we really need are lots more prosperous homeowners to move here and get the builders to humming again. And here, things are looking up.
The county has enjoyed relatively low unemployment. But much more important, prospects are particularly brightening for our folks commuting to jobs up north in bureaucrat land.

It’s no secret that government remains the major financial nourishment for lots of our residents. And there’s no prospect of that flagging, but rather the opposite during President Obama’s first term. Pass Obamacare and the jobs floodgates will open even wider.

Whatever. Government just grows and grows. That is the truism for our times. It doesn’t shrink. For example, although our area has a lot fewer farms than 50-75 years ago (when there were agricultural county agents’ offices to serve them), the offices still thrive. In four area counties, they still employ 30 or more workers. Of course, some specialize in gardening--a vital taxpayer concern no doubt.

It’s plain to see why. “Government is out of control, schools are out of control, health costs are out of control, lawsuits are out of control...” writes Philip Howard in the Washington Post.
　
Just look at this. For 2009, federal civilian (full-time equivalent) employees numbered 1.978 milion versus 1.875 million in 2008. Obama’s budget adds another 170,000 in the next two years.

Granted, as the Washington Examiner has noted, Obama in 2008 pledged a net spending cut: "I will conduct an immediate and periodic public inventory of administrative offices and functions and require agency leaders to work together to root out redundancy. Where consolidation is not the right strategy to improve efficiency, I will improve information sharing and use of common assets to minimize wasteful duplication."--happy talk.

Those cuts must be awfully hard to find. Yet, Head Start, that flagship pre-kindergarten program introduced in 1965, has been a $166 billion failure, according to a multi-year study from the Department of Health and Human Services, according to Pajamas Media.
Hold your breath and count to ten, and that program may just die.

One reason for sarcasm: “A majority of union members in America (52 percent) now work for the government, up from 49 percent in 2008. Put another way, three times more union members now work in the Post Office than in the auto industry,” wrote another blogger.
Over 37 percent of government employees belong to unions

Two conclusions: The trends are good for Stafford, and good contrarily for the Tea Party movement, whose growth had puzzled many Washingtonians.

Another, nonpolitical observation: Goodbye, global warming, sadly, considering our winter here. Which occasions a further wintry shudder: Climate change, according to a piece in Mother Jones, can come with violent swiftness. The ice age once froze Europe in less than a year, some 12,800 years ago...Once triggered, the cold persisted for 1,300 years.

So don’t throw away your Snuggies.---Ben Blankenship

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