Getting personal

Getting personal: Bensblurb #543 April 26, 2010
　
May the circle be unbroken...

My good email acquaintance, Ken Ownbey of Crowell, Texas, and his wife once graciously sent me ancestral details of my grandfather’s establishment of the first schools there back in the pioneering days of the 1890s. Prof. Benjamin Roscoe Blankenship met and married his first hired teacher, Lyda Compere. Their first home: a dugout.

He was, at one time, while growing up in Mississippi, actually a Jr. Then his male heirs continued the monikers, unbroken to the present day. In fact, if all were still alive, I would be B.R. IV, son Buddy #V and my grandson Jamie #VI. No, I’m not kidding.
　
All that, of course, had noting to do with Ken’s latest forwarding. And speaking of professors, here’s a piece from the article he sent me, authored by Anne Wortham, professor, Illinois State U., and an acclaimed black intellectual. In referring to the new President Obama, She wrote:
“So, toast yourselves: 60s counter-cultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians.. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee, Harvard, Princeton , Yale, Duke, Stanford, and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a Black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to -- Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine - what little there is left - for the chance to feel good.”


And, while we’re piling on, there’s this, from Power Line’s John Hinderaker: “Liberals, to put it mildly, are not dealing well with their declining political fortunes. For some reason, liberals seem surprised that Americans have not warmed to the Obama administration’s policies, like government takeover of health care; bailouts and government ownership in multiple industries; wasteful and ineffective ‘stimulus’ spending; unheard of deficits; massive tax increases slated for next year; and a foreign policy that perversely alienates our allies and caters to our enemies. There has never been a time in our history when most Americans would have approved of such policies, yet liberals are somehow convinced that today’s manifestation of longstanding voter attitudes represents a unique and sinister animus against Barack Obama and his administration.”


Finally, here’s some vintage Mark Steyn, on National Review Online:
“[Here’s] Bill Clinton energetically on the stump, summoning all his elder statesman’s dignity (please, no giggling) in the cause of comparing tea partiers to Timothy McVeigh. Oh, c’mon, they’ve got everything in common. They both want to reduce the size of government, the late Mr. McVeigh through the use of fertilizer bombs, the tea partiers through control of federal spending, but these are mere nuanced differences of means, not ends...To lend the point more gravitas, President Clinton packed his reading glasses and affected his scholarly look, with the spectacles pushed down toward the end of his nose, as if he’s trying to determine whether that’s his 10 a.m. intern shuffling toward him across the broadloom or a rabid armadillo Al Gore brought along for the Earth Day photo op.”

--Ben Blankenship

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Organic foods debate

Bensblurb #542

Friends, I'm forwarding below the latest column by my long-time buddy, Dennis Avery, for your edification. He and I once worked together in USDA and he went on to much greater glory. (see the footnote). Enjoy:


Losing the Organic Debate
by: dennis t. avery
Churchville, VA—I lost a debate on organic food last week—to the city of New York.

Intelligence Squared, a philanthropic foundation, which brings Oxford-style debating to American issues, invited me to be part of a debate on whether the organic food movement is a scam. The invitation was a big deal, with the audio carried nationwide by National Public Radio and the TV shown repeatedly on Bloomberg TV.

Each of us six debaters got seven minutes to present our best arguments.

Lord Krebs was formerly head of Britain’s Food Standards Authority.. He quietly pointed out that the UK bars its organic farmers from making any claims of greater food safety or better nutrition—because in 80 years they’ve never documented any such benefits.
The elite New York audience yawned.

Blake Hurst, a farmer from Missouri, noted that most of America’s organic food is produced on giant farms in California, where they avoid using pesticides by having Mexican immigrants pull the weeds by hand. With the subtraction from organic of every "unnatural" additive, the fungi, molds and bugs increase, Hurst said. His biggest environmental sin had been letting too much nitrogen run off his fields and down the Mississippi River—until he adopted no-till, the soil-safest farming system ever. With no-till, there is virtually no runoff from the fields. Organic farmers still commit "bare earth farming," he warned, because they refuse to use herbicides. Their plowing and mechanical cultivation encourage erosion.
The New Yorkers didn’t care.

I pointed out that high-yield farming has saved millions of acres of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield organic crops. We’re farming 37 percent of the land area now, and we’ll need twice as much food when human populations peak about 2050. To prevent mass starvation and wildlands destruction we’ll need to double yields again—with nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides and biotechnology.
The New Yorkers barely restrained themselves from booing.

On the other side were Jeff Steingarten, the Vogue food critic; a cheerful frequent traveler on the organic talk circuit named Chuck Benbrook; and Urvashi Rangan of Consumer Reports. Benbrook professed to be puzzled why nobody cares about the tiny and intermittent differences in nutrient levels between organic and conventional foods.

Ms. Rangan starred, drawing cheers and applause as she complained about "pools of pig poo the size of the Great Lakes" and "chickens that didn’t have room to turn around in their cages." Apparently animal welfare arguments are resonating louder than pesticide scares in New York this season.

On our side, Hust remembered when the mother pig rolled over and crushed his 4-H piglets; gestation crates prevent that. His neighbor’s free-range turkeys often got their throats slit by weasels.

I said the best argument for confinement livestock was human disease risks. I quoted physiologist Jared Diamond, best-selling author of Guns, Germs and Steel, that most of humanity’s epidemic diseases came from microbes shuttling between humans and their domestic critters. They mutated into cholera, yellow fever, and smallpox, among other deadly risks. Today, Asian flu mutates every year in Asia’s outdoor village poultry flocks, and wild birds spread it worldwide.

Urvashi said she’d never heard of such a thing. But then, she didn’t really want to concede another valid, scientifically documented reality.

When the debate opened, 21 percent of the audience had agreed organic was "marketing hype," 45 percent said no, with 34 percent undecided. At the end, our side still had 21 percent for "marketing hype"—but all the "un-decideds" had swung against us.
New York may be hopeless. Will the rest of the country continue to back organic food if it takes 80 percent of the earth’s land area to produce our basic food supplies organically?

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net
　
　
--Ben Blankenship

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It's spring again...Oh Yeah?

Bensblurb #541 4/22/10

It’s spring again, oh yeah?


Ah yes, it’s so good to see spring again. My aging azaleas are again beautiful and everywhere the saps are rising.

So it’s probably just natural that aggravations new and old pop out of the fertile soil of Virginia’s fruitful environment, right on schedule. Perhaps our genes also make us seasonally restless. Love springs eternal, etc., especially about now. And sometimes things around us crop up to confound our customary notions of how things should be.

For instance, lots of folks who think we truly must do something to deter the world’s climate from changing further must have been unhappy to hear about that giant volcano's eruption in Iceland the other day, just in time to becloud Earch Day celebrations. Proves that nature indeed can be perverse despite us mere mortals. And how about the recent earthquakes? Watch out, California. You may sink physically as well as financially.
　
One effect of Iceland’s eruption, some say, is that it portends an even bigger one blowing nearby and perhaps some very cold winters in our future. Don’t ask me why. Scientists can maybe explain it. But, like the plans to cool the climate, that’s not the same thing as doing something about it.

True, the Environmental Protection Agency does want by edict to limit carbon dioxide production--a fool’s errand, I’d say, since everyone belches it with every breath. (A coming belch next week: another Senate climate bill.)

Such notions make a lot of people antsy, even crabby. They think it’s not just nature, but everyone’s fault, even us here in Stafford County, including mankind universally. (Note: “mankind” is a traditional term and doesn’t imply sexism by this aging writer.)

So the hotbreaths go around claiming for instance that we must stop using plastic bags, or else. And eat foods grown only in manure. And put up windmills and solar panels. Whatever floats your boat, friends, have at it with gusto. It’s that time of year.

I would venture the guess, though, that someday my heirs will look back on today’s huge windmills and laugh at the folly, just as we do now over the backyard bomb shelters of fond memory.

Nevertheless, there was a lot of gusto recently at Stafford’s Courthouse when grass-roots sentiments blossomed. The Tea Party there attracted lots of friendly types whose only gripe was the federal government. It’s entirely too big and powerful. And we’re going to do something about it...

I sympathize with those feelings. But in some ways it’s like trying to do something about carbon dioxide. But in this case we’re dealing with another kind of danger equally toxic--lawyers.

Don’t get me started down that path. But as a recent e-mailing put it: DON'T VOTE FOR LAWYERS!
It went on: “Could this be the reason we don't see tort reform in the health care bill?...Perhaps it’s why so many physicians are conservatives or Republicans...Every Democrat presidential nominee since 1984 went to law school...Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford...The United States has 5% of the world's population and 66% of the world's lawyers...then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high.”

...And why global warming remains such a hot topic.

Our All-Knowing Obama

Bensblurb # 540 April 18, 2010

Our All-Knowing Obama:

There’s no doubt he has the smarts. Maybe he knows it only too well.
As Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto cautioned recently: “A truly humble president would occasionally evince some doubt as to whether he is worthy to lead America. Obama seems to doubt whether America is worthy of being led by him."

Predictably, in an address last week he smirked that the Tea Partiers should be thanking him for all the tax cuts he has wrought instead of griping.

Then, as a Washington Post column today by Jim Hoagland notes, “President Obama was making editing changes in the Nuclear Posture Review right up to the last minutes before it was to go to press,” according to William J. Perry, defense secretary in the Clinton administration...

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, since Obama surely knows more about nukes than...Tea Parties.

He and the rest of our Democratic rulers in Washington... “[B]elieve that they can spend your money better than you can. They believe that we can tax and spend our way to prosperity rather than allowing the ingenuity of the American worker and our free-market system to thrive. They believe that the government knows better than you and your doctor what medical treatments you need. Simply put, they believe that the government is the solution to every problem we face.” -- I’m sorry I lost the attribution of that quote, but it’s clear that “they” aren’t you or me.

Here’s another anonymous tract someone sent me that also rings true:
The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party.Every Democrat presidential nominee since 1984 went to law school...Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school.The Republican Party is different. Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford...
The United States has 5% of the world's population and 66% of theworld's lawyers. When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association goes to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high...

And, thanks to Walt Kreutzer for forwarding me this gem:
To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature : ...
a.. The U.S. Post Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right, and it is broke.b.. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.c.. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke.d.. War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 45 years to get it right; $1trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.e.. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.f.. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.g.. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 32 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.
You have failed in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollarsAND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN FIX OUR FINANCIAL MARKETS WITH REGULATION?______

But let’s be kind. As they say, it’s for our own good...and forget about our heirs.

--Ben Blankenship

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Tax Day Woes

Bensblurb #539 April 13, 2010
Hope you get past April 15 OK...Meanwhile,
　
　
Tax returns are great...for H&R Block: During an interview on C-SPAN's "Newsmakers" IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman said he uses a tax preparer for his own returns: "I've used one for years. I find it convenient. I find the tax code complex...” So he, like many of us, pays extra just to comply with the law.

Tax day vignette: Mark Ernst, a new top IRS boss, had led H&R Block for years. Now collecting taxes, and next, collecting health insurance premiums?

Maybe we should adopt sort of a poll tax again, where you would get to vote only if you had paid the tax...
“According to the Tax Policy Center, for the year 2009, 47 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax....But at a time of massive increases in federal spending, half the country is effectively making no contribution to it... Half a decade back, it was just under 40 percent who paid no federal income tax.”--columnist Mark Stein

And finally, about the IRS’s new role:
"Do you know who will be in charge of health care? The IRS. You thought getting audited was bad? Wait until your next prostate exam." --comedian Jay Leno
Take another bow: Obama again bowed to China’s Lu, and as one blogger put it, during the nuclear-control talks here, “Obama also bear-hugged that Lula guy from Brazil. If Stalin were alive, Obama would probably give him the full Lewinsky.”

And this from friend Larry Black:
Very important information has just been made public that I think is something you should all be aware of: Gonorrhea Lectim. The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of this old disease. Called Gonorrhea Lectim, it's pronounced "Gonna re-elect'im."

And seriously, this advice is passed along by friend and former good Aquia Harbour neighbor Fran Hopkins:
Using credit/debit card? Read this note. I did not knowabout the clear button, but I will be pushing the clear button before I swipe my gas or debit card and after just to be safe.People are getting really desperate due to the constantly rising gas prices. A friend just told me about something that happened to one of his coworkers.She used her credit/debit card to purchase gas at the pump (like most of us do). She received her receipt like normal. However, when she checked her statement, there were 2 $50. charges added in addition to her purchase. Upon investigation, she found out that because she did not press the 'clear' button on the pump, the employee inside the store was able to use her card to purchase his/her own gas!To keep this from happening, after you get your receipt, you must press the 'CLEAR' button or your information will be stored until the next customer inserts a card.--Ben Blankenship
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More Tea Parties

Bensblurb # 538 April 9, 2010

More big Tea Parties are coming
　
A year ago in this space, I wrote:
“Raise your hand if you think the [IRS tax] system will change in our lifetimes. The hopelessness over reining it in undoubtedly fueled the crowds waving signs on Tax Day, April 15 this year. But I suspect it also reflected the frustration of folks being told by Washington how their toilets must flush, which light bulbs to use and whether paper or plastic will be allowed for bags.”

Well, turns out we’re certainly not reining in the tax system, just the opposite. It so happens that in the monstrous ObamaCare health law just passed the IRS is given a prime role in how we’ll get dunned in paying for it, like it or not.

But wait. Before I get all out of sorts in bawling about that crazily coercive aspect of the new law, let me talk about how all of us frustrated folks are getting our voices heard once again: By bunching up, cheering and waving signs.

Last summer I first wrote about our own local Tea Party, which held its first rally on July 4. I had expected to find a few malcontents grumbling there in front of Stafford Courthouse. To my surprise, a crowd of over 500 cheerful demonstrators showed up, and they behaved more like it was a church picnic. Impressive.

Those rallies soon ballooned into something big, as we all now know. So get ready: Stafford is having another one, this weekend, on Saturday, April 10, again on the Courthouse lawn. Y’all come. At least drive by and honk.
In my commentary a year ago, I mentioned frustration. That will be front and center this time around. For example, the other night, Bill O'Reilly tried to get Rep. Anthony Weiner (D., N.Y.) to admit that the IRS would have to enforce the penalty tax for people who refused both to get the mandated [health care]coverage and to pay the penalty. He wouldn’t. But it’s true. Over 16,000 more IRS agents, it’s said, will be necessary to assure compliance.

As William McGurn explains it in a recent Wall Street Journal piece, “There's no way to afford expensive provisions such as forcing insurance companies to cover people with, say, pre-existing conditions unless millions of healthy people who won't need insurance are forced to pay...the government gets more healthy people into the risk pool—and with the penalty, it gets their money whether they buy coverage or not.”
That’s why some 14 state attorneys general are charging the new law is unconstitutional, with Virginia leading the way. We’ll see, someday.

Meantime, if you don’t get the chance to vent your (civil) frustrations at the courthouse this weekend, there’s always April 15. That’s Tax Day and time for a huge Tea Party rally downtown on the Capitol steps. Momentum has been building for months and it should be another biggie--which mainstream media types will do their best to ignore or belittle.

You see, they’re doing their best to portray Tea Partiers as racists and malcontents who hate Obama. But when was the last time you heard of participants at those huge rallies getting arrested, hmmm? That’s long been par for the course at left-wing gatherings.
　
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--Ben Blankenship

Civil War revisited

Bensblurb #537 April 7, 2010

Civil War erupts again.

So Virginia’s Gov. McDonnell proclaims April, not as tax-haters month, but Confederate History month--without mentioning slavery. That’s like talking about atom bombs without mentioning Japan. My dog Lollipop isn’t in this fight, me being a native Texan. But I’m also “son” of a Confederate veteran. A great grandfather fought the Yankees as a sergeant for the Peach Creek Rangers in north Mississippi. And now I live where Yanks encamped between their crippling battles for Fredericksburg.

For my Lone Star State friends, I’m talking about the other town, in northern Virginia, where the Rebs fought in bloody defense of States Rights. So there.

Meanwhile, in today’s real TV land, here’s Tucker Carlson, on Hannity last night, about his major fear today: “The people in charge don’t know what they are doing.” To wit: Obama announces we won’t use nuclear weapons to retaliate if others strike us, unless of course his attorney general decides after due deliberation that the ACLU says it’s okay.

For an interesting take on our dear leader (Obama, not Hannity) and his Tea Party, etc., opponents, read these fine analytical comments by John Podhoretz , editor of Commentary.

“Obama really does seem to believe that the opposition to his core policies—the creeping nationalization of health care, the effective nationalization of the American automotive industry, the imposition of onerous regulations on energy production, and the expiry of tax cuts...is not principled. Rather, such opposition deserves to be dismissed as bad faith—the efforts of the status quo, big business, and the politicians in their pockets. Or it is to be explained away as evidence of psychological or spiritual impairment created by the wounds inflicted upon sorry and ignorant souls who are being manipulated by forces beyond their control.
How is it that Obama can fail to see that changes of the magnitude he is seeking would compel those who believe that those changes are dangerous...to marshal their forces to do whatever is in their power to prevent them from taking place? And that it would be wise not to dismiss or belittle the energy and resolve of the opposition, but rather to take their full measure and plan accordingly?
Obama’s failure may reside in his contempt for politics. For the national counter-assault against Obama is a manifestation of democratic politics as they ought to work. A rather vague promise of change during his presidential campaign morphed afterward into an agenda of astonishing size with an astonishing price tag...
Americans did not take this grandiose and ruinously destructive plan on faith, nor should they have. A majority of them may have voted for change, but that change was change from something, from George W. Bush primarily, and not necessarily change toward something, toward a wholesale revision of the relation between the state and the economy. In response to Obama’s call for an end to talk and a time for action, an engaged and concerned citizenry used whatever political means were at hand....In using politics to slow down and thwart him, Obama’s rivals are not simply talking. They are acting as citizens in a democratic republic. When challenged by their president, they, too, decided that the time for talk was over and the time for action had begun.

--Ben Blankenship
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Great Teens, Dumb Politicos

Bensblurb # 536 April 5, 2010

Great Teens?? YES !

Denzel Washington’s fine movie performance in The Great Debaters as a coach for black kids in the 1930s was my only frame of reference as I agreed to help judge a homeschoolers’ debate contest this past weekend at Stafford’s Mount Ararat Baptist Church.
In a contest involving short extemporaneous speeches, I sat there in awe at the knowledge of the seven youthful competitors. Each one had to choose among only three, previously undisclosed, current topics and then was given 30 minutes to prepare a 5-minute speech about it. In their prep time (barred from using a laptop or Google), they could reference only their own prepared indexes on likely news topics of the past month. You would never have known from their subsequent erudition that they had been restricted at all. (In contrast, Obama was taking questions in Charlotte recently when a woman said she was paying too much in taxes; his answer took 17 minutes.)
It’s said there are several hundred homeschooled students here in Stafford Co., Va. Nationally they constitute roughly 4 percent of the student population through high school.

From what I saw, there’s still hope.
　
Ignorant Rage

Long ago, friends and I finagled to get a few words into a farm-law change that enabled us to print and distribute my ag agencies’ reports and leaflets independent of the mighty Government Printing Office’s Superintendent of Documents--which later got awfully mad at me until they realized those few words were law and hard to scrub. So we continued merrily down our independent way.

So it made me laugh when I read the following account of something similar on a much larger scale.
As Glenn Reynolds, in Instapundit, put it:
“...[R]ecent events suggest that it's not just the economy that regulators don't understand well enough -- it's also their own regulations.
This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation...Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them....So once Obamacare passed, massive corporate write-downs were inevitable.
They were also bad publicity...and they seem to have come as an unpleasant shock to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman...who immediately scheduled congressional hearings for April 21, demanding that the chief executive officers of AT&T, John Deere, and Caterpillar, among others, come and explain themselves...
Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But... Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation - well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.
In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created...Possibly this is simply because Waxman and his colleagues are dumb...But it's just as likely that adding 30 or 40 IQ points to the average congressman wouldn't make much difference.
The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117pages long and composes 226 volumes.
No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer... We're governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can't help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system...helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don't know what they're doing.”

--Ben Blankenship
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OIly promises

Bensblurb #535 April 1, 2010

Oily promises:

Virginia is gonna get rich off of...OIL! But hold the applause. We might see some of it off Virginia’s coast someday...say, when I’ll be long gone and after gasoline soars in price.

Why the delay? Environmental lawyers will tie up any actual drilling for years, fer sure. The deal Obama announced, to pave the way to get his energy tax bill passed this year, is mostly a smoke screen.

“So what does his plan [for offshore oil drilling] really do? First of all, it kicks the can down the road on the issue of leasing off the coast of Virginia, from 2011 to 2012..The sale was scheduled for 2011; now it’s 2012. As for the ‘new areas’ off the Atlantic Coast from Maryland to Georgia, the new plan doesn’t call for leasing in those areas, but instead...study...But the biggest threat to U.S. energy security is what the president did in Alaska, and by extension, to America. He cancelled five existing lease sales that were to be held in 2011 and 2012.”--Daniel Kish, Institute for Energy Research.
　
The Washington Times chimes in...
“...Russia is making a bold strategic leap to begin drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. While the United States attempts to shift gears to alternative fuels to battle the purported evils of carbon emissions, Russia will erect oil derricks off the Cuban coast...A Pew Research Center poll from February showed 63 percent support for offshore drilling for oil and natural gas. Americans understand the fundamental points...If we don't drill it out, we have to buy it from other countries..The Obama administration, however, views energy policy through green eyeshades. Every aspect of its approach to energy is subordinated to radical environmental concerns. This unprecedented lack of balance is placing offshore oil resources off-limits...But we have not yet reached the green utopia, we won't get there anytime soon, and America needs more oil now...”

Meanwhile, we simply must stop global warming...But it’s not.

Here’s friend Dennis Avery’s latest:
Energy Secretary Stephen Chu recently spoke on global warming to the scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—and told them we don’t understand it. “We don’t understand the downward trend that occurred in 1900 or in 1940. We don’t fully understand the plateau that’s happened in the last decade,” he concluded.
[He] is bravely soldiering forth to spend umpteen-trillion dollars of the public’s money to forestall a global warming he doesn’t understand? That’s impressive honesty, especially as the vote on Obama’s proposed hefty energy taxes is coming before the Senate and he will have to support it...At Oak Ridge, Dr. Chu was referring to the thermometer record, which tells us global temperatures rose sharply from 1860-1880, and then declined again until about 1915. The temperatures zoomed upward again from 1915 to 1940, only to decline moderately from 1940–1975. Recently, after another sharp temperature gain from 1976–1998, the earth has apparently has entered another of the moderate declines Dr. Chu can’t explain.

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--Ben Blankenship