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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Quote of the Day!

"Resisting the fantasies of the self-blinded does not flow from ignorance: It is the product of digested experience dispersed by a “University of Hard Knocks” that is devoid of illusions."  - George Handlery

The Madness Continues: Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs

Paris jihad terrorist Salah Abdeslam BOOED by Muslim inmates at his prison – because he didn’t go through with his suicide bombing - The Muslim mastermind behind the Paris jihad terror attacks was booed by Muslim inmates after arriving in jail – because he failed to carry out his suicide bombing. Apparently, there wasn’t enough infidel blood shed. 130 kufar dead, 400 injured didn’t satiate the religious blood-lust of these devout savages.  Christians didn’t jeer or whistle. Jews didn’t jeer or whistle. Hindus didn’t jeer or whistle. Just Muslims. But we are admonished and viciously ‘corrected’ when we call these attacks Islamic.

Iraq SHUTS DOWN Hillary Clinton’s Favorite Channel AL JAZEERA for ‘Instigating VIOLENCE’ - Al Jazeera has repeatedly come under fire from the Iraqi authorities for coverage too friendly to ISIS. I have long warned of the terror network’s propaganda to incite to jihad. But the left in America embraced it. Al Gore sold his failed network to Al Jazeera (refusing to consider Glenn Beck’s offer). Hillary Clinton lauded these bloody propagandists.
NPR: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went out of her way to single out the Al Jazeera TV news network….. “You’ve got a global — a set of global networks — that Al Jazeera has been the leader in, that are literally changing people’s minds and attitudes,” Clinton told members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Muslim ‘Refugee’ Serial SEX ATTACKER – REPEATEDLY RAPES, Douses Woman with Lighter Fluid, NO DEPORTATION - This Muslim “refugee” made her walk on all fours like a dog, repeatedly raped and terrorized this young woman, and after he was through, doused her with lighter fluid, saying, “You can receive SEK 10,000 if you follow me home and I get to f*ck you all day.”  Sweden’s sex slave stipend. The 34-year-old Muslim “refugee” has previously been convicted of dozens of offenses in Sweden, including domestic violence. And yet he is not deported. Instead, he will be given three hot halals a day and daily prison dawah. Sweden under sharia, eh? Under Islam, this is permissible. The violent taking of this Infidel woman is sanctioned in Islam, for the Qur’an allows Muslim men to have sexual relations with the...

Refugee Kids Get More Than American Kids - America in free fall.   Who do those American kids think they are anyway? We all know that the first priority of our nation is not our children, but other people’s children.
Children born to refugees receive more government benefits like food stamps, cash assistance, and Supplemental Security Income than native-born children, according to a report from the Migration Policy Institute.
 “Islamophobic hate crime” is actually Muslims who MURDERED ‘deradicalization’ Imam -   It turns out, as it almost always does, that the murderer of UK imam Jalal Uddin was not an “Islamophobe,” as had originally been thought, but other Muslims (one with terror links) who had opposed his “efforts to turn youngsters away from radical Islam.” CAIR was unavailable for comment —The above tweet is typical of leftist apologists for Islam. Where’s Sarah’s follow up tweet? How glaring is their malevolent agenda. Islamic supremacists and Islamic apologists immediately cry “islamophobia” when a Muslim or mosque is attacked, and they are almost always wrong. The perps are usually Muslims. And yet, in the near constant news reports of jihad, Islamic supremacists and their apologists never blame...

Muslim Council Of Britain Appoints Pro ‘Death To Apostates’ Imam To Investigate ‘Death To Apostates’ Group - Herein lies the rub – death to apostates is Islamic law. It is absolute. Any imam who follows true Islam is going to support it maybe not publicly but the two faces of Islam (one for believers, one for non-believers) is regular Islamic practice.
“Muslim Council Of Britain Appoints Pro ‘Death To Apostates’ Imam To Investigate ‘Death To Apostates’ Group,” By by Liam Deacon, Breitbart, April 28, 2016: The UK’s largest Muslim organisation has appointed a panel to investigate a sectarian hate group making death threats against alleged “apostates”, led by a man who has supported the group and believes apostates should be killed. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) is the, “largest national representative of...
Kansas DEFIES Obama on Syrian Refugees - We should all defy Obama on his invasion plot in order to “protect the safety and security interests of” all Americans.  Kansas Governor Brownback and several other governors asked the White House in November of last year to share vetting information as President Obama pledged to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees. The administration refused to do so, citing the privacy rights of the refugees.

Italy nabs four Muslims in ISIS plot to attack Israeli embassy, Vatican - But the Pope washed Muslim migrants’ feet and has scolded Europeans for opposing the migrant invasion — and this is the gratitude the Islamic State (which said in February 2015 that it was going to flood Europe with 500,000 refugees) shows him. No amount of appeasement and surrender will suffice: the invaders are after total conquest.......

Bangladesh: After Muslims massacre atheists, 2 Hindu teachers jailed for defaming Islam - In the wake of the massacres of several prominent atheists and secularists in Bangladesh, authorities there are clamping down on…the “defamation” of Islam. Everywhere in the world, authorities bow to savagery and give it sanction......

Australia: Muslim teen, 16, arrested over ‘Anzac Day terror plot’ was in deradicalisation program - “Deradicalisation programs” are a joke. They don’t deradicalize anyone. They gave this boy a gym membership and thought that would turn him away from jihad. This comes from authorities’ not admitting what the source and appeal of the jihad imperative is in the first place......

High and Mighty Amal Clooney Should Host THOUSANDS of Muslim Refugees on Her HUGE UK Estate

By Pam Geller,

There’s a new boss in town. The haughty Amal Clooney is shocked, shocked! I tell you, that Americans like what Trump is saying about immigration and Muslim refugees. She is so perplexed as to why we would be wary of unvetted Muslims from jihad regions. The British citizen then goes on to explain US values to us. It’s not enough that her country, the nation that gave the world the Magna Carta, is dead; these elitists are hell-bent on bringing America down, too.  Amal Clooney criticized GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump for comments he has made about Muslims, adding that she is “perplexed” about why he is leading in the polls.
“When you listen to what the leading candidate on the Republican side has been saying...To Read More.....

My Take - As you read this article take a look at her "HUGE UK Estate".  Now begin to realize just how out of touch these two are by taking notice of  what goes on at their estate in Italy, as shown in the article, Amal Clooney Slams Trump: ‘Building Walls’ Doesn’t Represent ‘U.S. Values’, with my comments. 

These two live in a bubble of wealth and privilege completely out of touch with reality.  They live in a world that provided the very best of everything, including security, by American capitalism and yet support every left wing socialist loon in the world, and every left wing socialist philosophical flavor of the day, including the idea that Islam is completely in harmony with western values and ideals.  I often wonder what people like these two members of the Club For The Galacticly Stupid talk about in private. 

The Fourth Amendment and the Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

The USA Freedom Act provides cover for unconstitutional searches of citizens.

| April 28, 2016

Would all of our lives be safer if the government could break down all the doors itWikimedia Commons wishes, listen to all the conversations it could find and read whatever emails and text messages it could acquire? Perhaps. But who would want to live in such a society?

To prevent that from happening here, the Framers ratified the Fourth Amendment, which is the linchpin of privacy and was famously called by Justice Louis Brandeis "the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men." He wrote those words in his dissent in the first wiretapping case to reach the Supreme Court, Olmstead v. United States, in 1928.......Evidence procured that is the fruit of the poisonous tree has been inadmissible in federal criminal prosecutions in the United States for the past 100 years and in state criminal prosecutions for the past 50 years.

Until now.......To Read More

Millennials Hate Capitalism Almost as Much as They Hate Socialism

Seize the means of production? Meh. Millennials love private enterprise—as long as you don't call it "capitalism."

Forget Denmark, Venezuela is the Real Culmination of Bernie’s Socialist Dreams

For the Vermont senator who favors press censorship and sees bread lines as evidence of success, the Bolivarian regime would seem to embody his ideals.

| April 26, 2016

Last September, Independent-Socialist-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders got a bit pissy when supporters of Hillary Clinton tied him to Hugo Chavez, the late supreme leader of Venezuela. They "tried to link me to a dead communist dictator" his campaign complained of a super PAC mailing that pointed to Sanders working with Chavez in 2005 to bring oil subsidized by the Venezuelan government to Vermont as part of a mutual publicity ploy.

The harsh distancing may have been a step too far for lefty fans of the late Venezuelan strongman and his American comrade. A press release on the same incident preserved at BernieSanders.com refers instead to "the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez."

Apparently all is forgiven. Last month Nicolas Maduro, Chavez's hand-picked successor, praised Sanders as "an emerging candidate with a renovating and revolutionary message."
And why not? In addition to oil deals, Sanders and the Bolivarian regime in Caracas have much in common. Venezuela has people waiting for hours to buy strictly rationed quantities of basic foodstuffs, and the Vermont senator loves him some bread lines......To Read More

Germany’s Green Energy Fiasco

Wind Farms Paid €500 Million A Year To Stand Idle

Because of the boom of renewable energy, more and more wind turbines have to be switched off. The reason is power overloading. The network operators must turn down electricity generated from windmills when their power threatens to clog the network. For the grid operator Tennet alone, these costs added 329 million euros in 2015 – two and a half times as much as in the previous year. The other network operators 50Hertz, Amprion and EnBW had a combined cost of 150 million euros, according to a survey of Wirtschaftswoche among the four network operators in Germany. --Christian Schlesiger, Wirtschaftswoche, 28 April 2016

Because of the boom of renewable energy, more and more wind turbines have to be switched off. The reason is power overloading. The network operators must turn down electricity generated from windmills when their power threatens to clog the network. For the grid operator Tennet alone, these costs added 329 million euros in 2015 – two and a half times as much as in the previous year. The other network operators 50Hertz, Amprion and EnBW had a combined cost of 150 million euros, according to a survey of Wirtschaftswoche among the four network operators in Germany. --Christian Schlesiger, Wirtschaftswoche, 28 April 2016
 
The online German national daily Die Welt has a piece by business journalist Holger Zschäpitz on Germany’s sky-high, ever climbing electricity prices. Awhile ago it looked as if prices had finally stabilized. But now Zschäpitz writes that German electricity prices, already among the highest in the world, have jumped once again. Families today are paying 21% more for electricity than they did 5 years ago. So what is driving the rapid upward price spiral? Zschäpitz reports that it’s due mostly to the “Energiewende”. In the meantime, Germany’s CO2 emissions have been rising, and thus consumers are not really getting anything for the massive amounts of money. --Pierre Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, 29 April 2016
 
The boss of struggling steel giant Tata has blamed soaring energy costs and high business rates for crippling British industry. Tata chief executive Bimlendra Jha, whose UK operations are losing around £1million a week, said the firm’s energy charges are £40million more a year than those in Germany. His comments came as discussions continue over the future of the company’s plant in Port Talbot, South Wales, with thousands of jobs at risk. Mr Jha told members of the Business Select Committee today that high prices and a strong pound were hitting trade. --David Maddox, Daily Express, 28 April 2016
 
George Osborne risks killing off British manufacturing with sky-high green taxes and business rates – the Indian boss of the Port Talbot steelworks blasted today.  Tata Steel chief Bimlendra Jha said his UK business would be MAKING money if it had Germany’s electricity prices. And he told MPs that the Government’s existing policies – such as eco taxes which send energy costs through the roof – meant it was almost impossible for firms “bleeding money” to recover. He stormed: “We cannot be the ones who shut the door on the industrial revolution which began in this country.” --The Sun, 29 April 2016

The Paris Agreement not merely fails to ground the policy of mitigation of global warming, it ensures that the policy will fail. And the INDCs of China and India, which Lord Turner especially mentioned, are statements of an intention massively to increase emissions. The Paris Agreement provides an explicitly legal permission for developing countries not to make any CO2 reductions and will be the legal basis of continued immense increase in China’s and India’s CO2 emissions. China’s extremely ambitious and apparently positive intensity targets actually represent a statement that the increase in its emissions will be vast. Everything Lord Turner said about the Paris Agreement and China’s Intended Nationally Determined Contributions was wrong. That a person of his influence says things that will mislead the listening public is regrettable. That the BBC airs such statements without any challenges is a disgrace. --Professor David Campbell, Global Warming Policy Forum 28 April 2016

Brought to you by Benny Peiser's Global Warming Policy Forum

Global Warming and Climate Change: Time to Debunk the Nonsense.

Dr. Phil Taverna, on April 28th, 2016

The liberal media pushes at least 2 pieces a week on climate change. And they have certain reporters that know nothing but report on it constantly. But no matter how you look at the numbers, shall we say real numbers not the made-up numbers the facts are not there to prove there is global warming or climate change à la liberals. And basically it has never been about saving the planet. But about taxing you and giving your hard earned money to poor countries so they will create less carbon emissions. Really?......To Read More

Britain’s Choice

By George Handlery, on April 29th, 2016

Evidently, Britain’s decision about her continued EU membership (“Brexit”) is crucial. Obama’s threatening butting in on the debate underlines this assessment.

The consequences go beyond the “Europes”. (Yes, plural!) The term reflects that there are several Europes. One is the developed Atlantic West. Then there is the “South”; wobbly although it enjoyed the “north’s” opportunities and escaped Soviet rule. With local consent, it remained misgoverned. Lastly, there is the “new” Europe, of the “Visegrád Group” (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary.) England’s special tag expresses her island-geography and tradition. Their combination enabled her to defy, Spanish domination, then French tutelage, and Nazi conquest.

Recently, a new threat arose. It aims to unify Europe through the bureaucratic centralism of an “ever closer union”. Peripheral Norway is not a member, and the encircled and extorted Swiss, continue to resist. The region’s highest GDP society is defiant because its federal government by plebiscite clashes with the EU’s system.

While the belt is tightened by “Brussels”, the pressure hurts. Additionally, the mismanagement of the € -the common currency- threatens an economic crisis. Add the mishandling of the migrant question and the rise of Islamic enclaves. This nurtures doubts –in the people but not the elite- about the union in its present form.......To Read More....

The Healthcare Exclusion Is the Tax Code’s Most Harmful Loophole

April 29, 2016 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
 
What’s the worst loophole (properly defined) in the cluttered internal revenue code?

I think the deduction for state and local taxes is very bad policy since it enables higher tax burdens in states such as California, New Jersey, and Illinois. The exemption for municipal bond interest is another misguided provision since it makes it easier for states to finance spending with debt.


Special favors in the tax code for ethanol also deserve scorn and disdain, and I’m also not a fan of the charitable deduction or the ways in which housing gets preferential treatment.

But if I had to pick just one tax preference to repeal, it would be the so-called healthcare exclusion. This is the policy that enables employers to deduct the cost of health insurance policies they buy for their employees.

You may think that deduction is reasonable. After all, employers also can deduct the wages and salaries they pay their employees. But here’s the catch. Employees pay tax on their wages and salaries, but they don’t have to pay tax on the value of their health insurance, even though such policies obviously are a form of compensation.

Moreover, since this type of compensation is shielded from both income taxes and payroll taxes, the playing field is therefore very tilted, which generates some very perverse results.

First, some background. As part of a broader analysis of the non-taxation of fringe benefits, Scott Greenberg of the Tax Foundation explains how government has created a big incentive to take income in the form of fringe benefits rather than wages and salaries.
…eighty years ago, it was relatively uncommon to offer workers compensation other than their regular wages and salaries. In 1929, only 1.9 percent of employee pay took the form of fringe benefits. By 2014, fringe benefits had risen to 19.2 percent of worker compensation.
Here’s a chart looking at the historical data.



Greenberg says this distortion in the tax code is unfair.
…the growing trend of unreported fringe benefits is “inequitable and inefficient.” This claim is spot on. For an illustration, imagine two employees, one of whom makes a salary of $100,000, and one of whom makes a salary of $80,000 and benefits worth $20,000, which largely go unreported. Although both workers receive the same overall compensation, the first employee is subject to a significantly higher tax burden than the second, which seems plainly unfair.
Moreover, the distortion lures people into making economically foolish choices.
Furthermore, this arrangement incentivizes companies to shift more compensation towards benefits, to help employees avoid taxes. This leads to an inefficient allocation of resources, towards services that employers might not have been willing to pay for in the absence of tax incentives.
He’s correct.

Writing for the Weekly Standards, Ike Brannon looks specifically at the biggest tax-free fringe benefit.
…allowing employers to provide health insurance tax-free to their workers is terrible policy, a truism that any honest economist—whether liberal, conservative, or otherwise—would agree with. …First, workers end up with more health insurance than they would ever purchase on their own (since tax-free health insurance is worth more than income that’s taxed at 30%-50%), which gives people less take-home pay to spend as they see fit. Second, more generous health insurance entails lower co-pays as well as other provisions that insulate the worker from the actual cost of their health care. As a result, people become less sensitive to prices when seeking health care, and they consume more of it—most of which does nothing to improve health outcomes, numerous studies have shown.
For further details on this unfortunate tax preference, A. Barton Hinkle looks at the evolution of the health exclusion in a column for Reason.
…the original sin of the American health-care marketplace…was committed back in World War 2, when inflation led workers to demand higher wages – which many employers could not afford to pay because of price controls. …With wages frozen, employers needed another way to compete for labor made scarce by the draft. So some began offering health coverage. The practice took root, spread, and outlasted the war. In 1949 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that health benefits counted as wages for the purpose of union negotiations. Five years later, the IRS ruled that health coverage was not taxable income. The result was a double incentive for employers to offer fatter health benefits in lieu of fatter paychecks. …The result: a skyrocketing, ultimately unsustainable increase in national outlays for health care. …In short, for decades the federal government has encouraged employers to provide gold-plated health-care plans.
Joe Antos of the American Enterprise Institute explains how the “healthcare exclusion” is bad fiscal policy, bad health policy, and bad economic policy.
If we hope to move to an efficient healthcare system that is fair to everyone, Congress will have to take on the largest subsidy in the tax code. …Premiums paid for employment-based health insurance are excluded from federal income and payroll taxes.
When describing provisions that allow people to keep more of their own money, I would prefer to say largest distortion rather than largest subsidy, but I realize I’m being pedantic. Regardless of word choice, the net effect of this preference is negative.
The tax exclusion…fuels the rapid growth of health spending, contributes to stagnating wage growth, and disadvantages low-wage workers. Because there is no limit on how much can be excluded from taxes, workers are encouraged to buy more expensive coverage than they would otherwise…makes consumers less sensitive to prices and promotes the use of medical services, including services that may not provide much value to the patient.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the problems associated with the exclusion.
The exclusion has caused a shift in compensation from taxable cash wages to greater health benefits which are not taxed. Between 1999 and 2015, the average employer contribution for family coverage nearly tripled while wage rates increased by only about half.
By the way, our leftists friends should oppose the exclusion for class-warfare reasons.
…workers in higher tax brackets benefit the most from the exclusion. The Joint Committee on Taxation found that the average savings for tax filers with incomes less than $30,000 was about $1,650 compared to about $4,580 for those with incomes over $200,000.
To deal with these negative effects, Antos proposes a modified version of the “Cadillac tax” from Obamacare combined with tax credits for consumers who purchase their own health insurance.
That’s better than the status quo, but the ideal solution is a flat tax, which would eliminate the deduction provided to employers for compensation in the form of fringe benefits.

In their book on tax reform, Professors Hall and Rabushka explain the obvious beneficial consequence of a level playing field for all forms of compensation.
The flat tax eliminates the distortion toward fringe benefits created by the fact that employers can deduct them, thereby receiving a subsidy that can be passed on to their employees. The best alternative, and one we expect your employer to select, is to offer you higher pay in exchange for lower fringes. You can then use the extra cash to buy whatever combination of benefits you desire.
This will make the healthcare marketplace much more efficient.

Here’s what I wrote about the healthcare exclusion way back in 2009, as part of a column on government-created inefficiency in the health sector.
…social engineering in the tax code created this mess. Specifically, most of us get some of our compensation in the form of health insurance policies from our employers. And because that type of income is exempt from taxation, this encourages so-called Cadillac health plans.  …our gold-plated health plans now mean we use insurance for routine medical costs. This means, of course, we have the paperwork issues discussed above, but that’s just a small part of the problem. Even more problematic, our pre-paid health care system is somewhat akin to going to an all-you-can-eat restaurant. We have an incentive to over-consume since we’ve already paid. Except this analogy is insufficient. When we go to all-you-can-eat restaurants, at least we know we’re paying a certain amount of money for an unlimited amount of food. Many Americans, by contrast, have no idea how much of their compensation is being diverted to purchase health plans. …this messed-up approach causes inefficiency and higher costs. We consumers don’t feel any need to be careful shoppers since we perceive that our health care is being paid by someone else. Should we be surprised, then, that normal market forces don’t seem to be working? (though it is worth noting that costs keep falling and quality keeps rising in the few areas – such as laser-eye surgery and cosmetic surgery – that are not covered by insurance) Imagine if auto insurance worked this way? Or homeowner’s insurance? Would it make sense to file insurance forms to get an oil change? Or to buy a new couch? That sounds crazy. The system would be needlessly bureaucratic, and costs would rise because we would act like we were spending other people’s money.  But that’s what would probably happen if government intervened in the same way it does in the health-care sector.
By the way, to make sure politicians don’t get a windfall of new revenue, the healthcare exclusion should only be repealed as part of a reform that also lowers tax rates.

Here’s a video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity that highlights how the healthcare exclusion is a major cause of the third-party payer problem.



And if you like videos, I strongly recommend this Reason TV explanation of how simple and affordable healthcare can be in the absence of government-created third-party payer.

Is Lyme Disease A Ticking Time Bomb?

Posted on by admin @ The American Council on Science and Health

On any ranked list of nasty diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, ticks and fleas in the Western world, Borrelia burgdorferi, would have to lie near the top. These bacteria cause Lyme disease, which was first recognized in the US in the early 1970s among patients in Lyme, Connecticut. However, the oldest known case was the Tyrolean Iceman, a 5,300-year-old Copper-age mummified individual, discovered in the Italian Alps.

Lyme disease is one of the fastest growing vector-borne diseases in the Western world – the threat it poses has become increasingly apparent in recent years. Estimates suggest that more than 300,000 people are diagnosed with the disease each year in the US and more than 65,000 cases a year are diagnosed in Europe. However, the true number of people affected is probably underestimated due to under-reporting and the limitations of current diagnostic tests.

Borrelia burgdorferi is a spirochete (corkscrew-shaped bacterium) that consists of more than 20 sub-species, five of which can cause disease in humans. Borrelia can flourish inside the tick, where they migrate from the gut to the saliva glands. In this way, they can penetrate human skin when a tick takes a blood meal and disseminate via the blood to multiple tissues. To survive and establish infection, Borrelia mutates in a number of ways to become invisible to the host’s immune system.

The main vector for transmitting the bacteria in Europe is the deer tick, Ixodes ricinus, but other Ixodes species act as vectors in the US and in Asia. Humans can become infected after being bitten by an infected tick. However, as Ixodes ticks can also transmit other pathogenic bacteria and viruses, it can be hard to diagnose Lyme disease among the potentially large number of infections that may have been contracted as a result of the tick bite, meaning it often goes untreated.

But it’s not just ticks we have to worry about. Lice, fleas, and mosquitoes have also been found to contain Borrelia. Worrying, Borrelia bacteria may also be transmitted from person to person through saliva, organ transplants, blood transfusions, sexual contact or breast milk. It has also been suggested that Lyme disease could be transferred to a fetus via the placenta, however this has yet to be proven.

What Borrelia can do to people

Some individuals develop a bull’s eye-like rash, called Erythma migrans at the site of the tick bite, three to 30 days after infection. As infection spreads, Borrelia can also affect other skin sites, the nervous system, the joints or the heart. Brain infection is a rare but potentially serious complication, arising in 15% of untreated Lyme patients who go on to be very ill. This can also cause permanent neurological injury. Because of this wide range of non-specific symptoms, patients often don’t get a clear diagnosis or treatment options. When Lyme disease is suspected, laboratory tests to detect specific antibodies against Borrelia burgdorferi can help confirm the diagnosis – although these are far from perfect. Some patients, about 10-20%, can develop a debilitating chronic condition called post-treatment lyme disease syndrome, with symptoms that include arthritis, fatigue, muscle pain and minor cognitive impairments such as headaches and sleep disturbances.

Unfortunately, there is currently no vaccine available against Lyme disease. However, there are measures that can mitigate the risk of infection, including avoiding tick-infested areas, wearing personal protective measures to reduce the risk of tick bites and the use of antimicrobial treatments following a tick bite.

Timely treatment for Lyme disease is crucial to prevent illness and avoid long-lasting symptoms. Early stages of Lyme disease can be effectively treated with antibiotics, but patients with the chronic variant may require months or even years of treatment before it resolves. Unfortunately, some physicians still view antibiotics as the only solution to this disease but chronically infected patients require multidisciplinary care – addressing all simultaneous infections, providing immune support and management of any other health complications.

Tackling the threat

The effects of the disease on so many body systems, and the debilitating impact on the life of the affected patient, have triggered a crisis that has far-reaching implications for public health and policy. When people get diagnosed with Lyme, they make a shift to a life of increasing uncertainty, particularly from a lack of adequate and credible information.

It’s clear, given the rise in clinical cases across the world and the number of people who continue to suffer even after antimicrobial treatment, that Lyme disease is spreading rapidly. For example, in the US the number of annual reported Lyme cases has increased about 25-fold since the national surveillance began in 1982.

Many aspects of the disease mechanisms, such as the chronic condition, remain controversial or evolving, due to the scarcity of robust evidence-based data. There is not even one consistent terminology that defines “chronic Lyme disease”. More measures are also needed to resolve the crippling uncertainty surrounding the infection. We need more research to help develop reliable diagnostic tests, identify sub-populations of patients who are most likely to benefit from antibiotic treatment, and ultimately to ensure that Lyme disease does not become a pandemic reality.The Conversation

By Hany Elsheikha, Associate Professor of Parasitology, University of Nottingham. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Big Labor, Big Problems

By Frank Friday

Amid all the election hoopla this year there is an amazing story about to break, almost completely ignored by the liberal media. The country’s largest labor union, the Teamsters, is about to have its largest pension fund, the Central States, go bust. Without some sort of bailout, draconian cuts to pensions could be authorized by a May 7 deadline. Lots of other union plans may follow. If the Obama Treasury Department doesn’t approve the cuts, or the members vote them down, the whole fund will then be headed for bankruptcy court.

You may remember the Central States from such movies as Casino and Hoffa and TV shows like "Crime Story". Basically the scam was Central States, controlled by mob-connected union bosses, lent money to front men who bought Las Vegas casinos and in turn allowed the Outfit to skim untold millions. This was a great deal for everybody involved, except the working stiffs who saw their pension money being plundered by the Mafia. The Las Vegas racket ended years ago, but Central States continued to invest unwisely and now the jig is up, so to speak. This is all very much in keeping with the irreversible decline of union membership.......

Read more

Intersectionality: Fuelling the Race, Gender, and Class Wars

By Paul Austin Murphy

We can hold Kimberlé Crenshaw (a “woman of colour”) responsible for the ugly word, 'intersectionality'. (She coined it in 1989.) The incredible thing is that she deemed it to be a "common everyday metaphor".

I'll let Crenshaw herself define the term. Thus:
“The view that women experience oppression in varying configurations and in varying degrees of intensity. Cultural patterns of oppression are not only interrelated, but are bound together and influenced by the intersectional systems of society. Examples of this include race, gender, class, ability, and ethnicity.”
What we have here, essentially, are various (Leftist/ “progressive”) movements and individuals trying to discover -- or invent -- yet more minorities to exploit for their own political/social ends.

Thus today we have to take on board the following identities and backgrounds: cisgender (female/male at birth, and still identifying as female/male), national origin, criminal record, race and ethnicity, class/socioeconomic background, ideology, religion, immigrant status, refugee status, body type, educational background, appearance... ad infinitum.......Read more

Cuomo's righteous regulators send pipeliners packin'

By Russ Vaughn

If you haven't seen those laughable Start-Up New York television ads, then you must be one of those who has cut the cord.  New York, a blue state with an oppressive tax and regulatory business atmosphere typical of those states where liberals infest the statehouses, has been running these promotional ads for a couple of years now, promising business owners and entrepreneurs big tax breaks if they'll just relocate to New York. I call them laughable for the obvious reason: any business owner who does due diligence is going to find that Andrew Cuomo and his bureaucratic accomplices are liberal to the core, to the point of screwing their own citizens on even the basic standards of living to uphold their liberal values.....So all they need is for the energy companies... to build... pipelines... to the eastern markets, right?.... Nope," say the bureaucrats to the cheers of the liberal environmentalists/anti-fossil fuelists who would much rather see millions of New Yorkers and New Englanders shivering in their homes in mid-winter as fuel imports run low, than allow these horrid Big Oil companies bring a plentiful supply of their product to a market where it is much needed, ensuring that basic creature comforts are met in these blue states and done so at a reasonable price.....

Read more

Friday, April 29, 2016

Quote of the Day!

“The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.”   Milton Friedman

Economic Lesson from Europe for Hillary: Higher Tax Rates Are a Recipe for More Red Ink

April 28, 2016 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

We can learn a lot of economic lessons from Europe.
Today, we’re going to focus on another lesson, which is that higher taxes lead to more red ink. And let’s hope Hillary Clinton is paying attention.


I’ve already made the argument, using European fiscal data to show that big increases in the tax burden over the past several decades have resulted in much higher levels of government debt.

But let’s now augment that argument by considering what’s happened in recent years.

There’s been a big fiscal crisis in Europe, which has forced governments to engage in austerity.

But the type of austerity matters. A lot.
Here’s some of what I wrote back in 2014.
…austerity is a catch-all phrase that includes bad policy (higher taxes) and good policy (spending restraint). But with a few notable exceptions, European nations have been choosing the wrong kind of austerity (even though Paul Krugman doesn’t seem to know the difference).
And when I claim politicians in Europe have chosen the wrong kind of austerity, that’s not hyperbole.

As of 2012, there were €9 of tax hikes for every €1 of supposed spending cuts according to one estimate. That’s even worse than some of the terrible budget deals we’ve seen in Washington.

At this point, a clever statist will accuse me of sour grapes and state that I’m simply unhappy that politicians opted for policies I don’t like.

I’ll admit to being unhappy, but my real complaint is that higher tax burdens don’t work.

And you don’t have to believe me. We have some new evidence from an international bureaucracy based in Europe.

In a working paper for the European Central Bank, Maria Grazia Attinasi and Luca Metelli crunch the numbers to determine if and when “austerity” works in Europe.
…many Euro area countries have adopted fiscal consolidation measures in an attempt to reduce fiscal imbalances…in most cases, fiscal consolidation did not result, at least in the short run, in a reduction in the debt-to-GDP ratio…calls for a more temperate approach to fiscal consolidation have increased on the ground that the drag of fiscal restraint on economic growth could lead to an increase rather than a decrease in the debt-to-GDP ratio, as such fiscal consolidation may turn out to be self-defeating. …The aim of this paper is to investigate the effects of fiscal consolidation on the general government debt-to-GDP ratio in order to assess whether and under which conditions self defeating effects are likely to materialise and whether they tend to be short-lived or more persistent over time.
Now let’s look at the results of their research.

It turns out that austerity does work, but only if it’s the right kind. The authors find that spending cuts are successful and higher tax burdens backfire.
The main finding of our analysis is that…In the case of revenue-based consolidations the increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio tends to be larger and to last longer than in the case of spending-based consolidations. The composition also matters for the long term effects of fiscal consolidations. Spending-based consolidations tend to generate a durable reduction of the debt-to-GDP ratio compared to the pre-shock level, whereas revenue-based consolidations do not produce any lasting improvement in the sustainability prospects as the debt-to-GDP ratio tends to revert to the pre-shock level. …strategy is more likely to succeed when the consolidation strategy relies on a durable reduction of spending, whereas revenue-based consolidations do not appear to bring about a durable improvement in debt sustainability.
Unfortunately, European politicians generally have chosen the wrong approach.
This is an important policy lesson also in view of the fact that revenue-based consolidations tend to be the preferred form of austerity, at least in the short run, given also the political costs that a durable reduction in government spending entail.
Here are a few important observations from the study’s conclusion.
…the findings of our analysis are in line with those of the literature on successful consolidation, namely that the composition of fiscal consolidation matters and that a durable reduction in the debt-to-GDP ratio is more likely to be achieved if consolidation is implemented on the expenditure side, rather than on the revenue side. In particular, when fiscal consolidation is implemented via an increase in taxation, the debt-to-GDP ratio reverts back to its pre-shock level only in the long run, thus failing to generate an improvement in the debt ratio, and producing what we call a self-defeating fiscal consolidation. …fiscally stressed countries benefit from an immediate reduction in the level of debt when reducing spending.

In other words, restraining the growth of spending is the best way to reduce red ink. Heck, it’s the only way.

When debating my leftists friends, I frequently share this table showing nations that have obtained very good results with multi-year periods of spending restraint.

My examples are from all over the world and cover all sorts of economic conditions. And the results repetitively show that when you deal with the underlying problem of too much government, you automatically improve the symptom of red ink.

I then ask my statist pals to show me a similar table of data for countries that have achieved good results with higher taxes.

I’m still waiting for an answer.

Which is why the only good austerity is spending restraint.

P.S. Paul Krugman is remarkably sloppy and inaccurate when writing about austerity. Check out his errors when commenting on the United Kingdom, Germany, and Estonia.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Vows to Push Conservative Amendments to Spending Bills

Josh Siegel / / /

The chairman of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that Republicans should be able to put forth “conservative policy riders” to appropriation bills.

“If we really are about quote ‘regular order’ then that means the ability to offer amendments and push for those policy changes that we think make sense,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told The Daily Signal in an interview.

Asked if it mattered at what spending level the appropriations bills were at, Jordan responded, “We don’t know for certain [if the normal appropriations process will happen]. We will see when these appropriations bills come up. I think there’s a real problem with bringing appropriations bills without a budget, but it [Jordan’s support] also depends on which bill it is.”

Even though the House has failed to pass a budget, Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., reaffirmed his support Wednesday for moving on spending bills this year, fulfilling one of his goals to pursue “regular order.”...... Read More

No coffins, no embalming: Residents unhappy with plans for Muslim cemeteries

April 28, 2016 at 11:51 am 64

On the site of a long-idle dairy farm, leaders of a local mosque hope to build a final resting place for about 500 Muslim families -- to the dismay of many residents of this quaint town in central Massachusetts.  In arguments cemetery developers and activists decry as thinly veiled bigotry, neighbors say they fear burial practices could contaminate groundwater because Muslims traditionally do not embalm bodies and bury their dead without coffins.

They also cite concerns about noise, vandalism and increased traffic on the narrow road where the cemetery would be built. One resident said he worried he would have to put up with “crazy music” like the Islamic call to prayer.  Similar sentiments have been expressed by people in communities around the country where Muslim cemeteries have been proposed, including Farmervsille, Texas; Walpole, Massachusetts; Carlisle, Pennsylvania; and Farmington, Minnesota.....To Read More

A Leading Jihadist is Dead

By J. Millard Burr

The Gama'a takes its direction in accordance with the predecessors [salaf], and is united under a single intellectual banner which aims to isolate the submission of people to their Lord to the exclusion of others, and to establish an Islamic viceregency (khilafah) in accordance with the prophetic guidance, and to seek the pleasure of Allah, the Lord of the worlds. -- Refai Ahmed Taha, Egyptian al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya

On 6 April a drone strike in the area of Idlib, Syria, killed Egyptian Rifa'i Ahmed Taha, a predominant member of the mujahideen. The killing of Taha (AKA Refa'I Ahmed Taha Musa, Ahmad Refa'I Taha, Abu Yasser al-Masri, Issam Ali Muhammad Abdallah, etc.), ended the career of a jihadist who for more than a quarter-century was considered by Western intelligence agencies to be one of the world's most dangerous terrorists. Fifteen years after it had caught Taha for the first time, "US intelligence managed to hunt him down again." .....To Read More

The Madness Continues: Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs

Citadel PUNISHING cadet for leaking story about Muslim cadet possibly getting uniform exemption - Back on the 15th, I reported that the Citadel was considering its first-ever uniform exception in its 175-year history — the hijab.  Instead of manning up and standing for their values and mores, The Citadel is instead punishing the cadet who exposed the Citadel’s weakness, cowardice and submission to Islam. And this school is supposed to produce our heroes and warriors. We are in deep trouble.  I salute the one young, brave man who spoke out — bless you and thank you, sir....

Rutgers Student Newspaper Scraps Entire Issue over ‘Muhammad’ Cartoon -  Rutgers University pulled the latest issue of their student newspapers because of a cartoon of Muhammad, Buddha and Jesus in a bar. Muslim supremacist students on campus demanded the issue be removed from campus and destroyed. And they were. Further, the editor-in-chief of the paper, ‘The Gleaner,’ must apologize to the terror-tied Muslim group, The Muslim Students Association,  and agree to meet with it “so that we can rectify this issue and ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”
The school should have stepped in and stood firm. Leaving it on the shoulders of a young student who would be targeted by savages had he not submitted was not the remedy. The quisling administration did nothing. Of course.....

Department Of Education Encourages Islam In Classrooms To Stop Muslim Bullying - What happened to the separation of religion and state? And what Muslim bullying? Jewish students are being increasingly targeted, but Muslim students? There is no evidence for that. Where is the DoE encouraging Judaism in the classrooms to stop bullying of Jews? Where is the DoE encouraging Christianity in the classrooms to stop bullying of Christians? No discussion of how frequently the bullies are Muslims…..

Threatened with throat-slitting and slaughter: Christian persecution in Swedish asylum centres - But remember, islamophobia is the problem, folks.  Obama says, “Islam is peace.” Obama says, “respect it!”   John Kerry says, Muslims are lured to jihad by the “regular meals and companionship,” not religion.  We are under siege by our so-called leaders. They are not — they are destroyers......

National Intelligence Director Clapper: Islamic State Exploiting Migrant Crisis In Europe - What was his first clue? They’ve been exploiting it for months. Back in February 2015, the Islamic State vowed to flood Europe with 500,000 refugees. Only now he is waking up to the crisis? And what is he doing about it? Has he persuaded Obama not to bring the “refugees” here in massive numbers? Of course not......

Pakistan: 18-year-old Christian boy HANGED by Muslims for wanting to marry Muslim girl - Will the international media be able to pause its coverage of islamofauxbia long enough to take any notice of this?  A Christian boy in Pakistan has allegedly been hanged by Muslims who believed he was attached to a Muslim girl who lived opposite his brother’s house. A report in the Pakistan Christian Post cites an investigation from The Voice Society which concluded 18-year-old Qaisar Masih was killed by the girl’s family in an attack led by her father, Mohammad Billa. Previous reports said he had been murdered for resisting drug traffickers, while.......

John Kerry on Terrorism’s Appeal: ‘Regular Meals, Companionship’ – Not Necessarily Religion -
The more wrong the Obama administration is on the issue of Islam and jihad, the further off the wall their explanations for the what is self-evident and obvious. This is Obama’s foreign policy: the complete denial of reality.  The whole of jihadist war is Islam. Their reason for living and dying is in the cause of Allah. But the Obama administration will create out of whole cloth fictions and myths in order to protect and defend Islam. It is extraordinary treason.  John Kerry claims that regular meals and companionship lure Muslims to jihad. Why not go to a soup kitchen and get that very thing without all the beheadings, religious fervor,  and jihad wars?  What idiocy! Further he goes on to say,......


 

Full Of Shite: Why a Fecal Transplants Paper Was Retracted

Posted on by Julianna LeMieux

The bacteria in our gut are really in their glory days. Bacteria found in our feces have gone from being dumped on to being at the forefront of new cures for diseases such as Clostridium difficile infection through a process known as fecal transplantation. We now know that there is a balance between the different types of bacteria in your gut, and, that they can cause a load of problems by causing disease when they are out of balance. Now, don’t poo-poo it just because it involves having someone else’s feces transplanted into your colon. Someday, we might go for fecal transplants like we go to the dentist.

Whenever a scientific topic gets hot like this, scientists are under a lot of pressure to get their results published first. This is because a tenet of scientific publications is that once something is published, that same result cannot be published again. Sometimes this pressure leads to mistakes, but it can also result in fraud: intentionally making up data. This latter situation was recently reported for an article originally published over two years ago in “Diabetes”. ......“The lead and corresponding authors wish to retract the above-cited article,” the retraction announcement states, “as an institutional investigation has identified that coauthor Yassine Sakar falsified the data used to produce Fig. 4B, fabricated Fig. 5A, and fabricated the data used to produce Fig. S3(C).”.... Read more

Britiots Substitute Stinky Vinegar for Glyphosate

Posted on by Josh Bloom @ The American Council on Science and Health

True or false: It is a good idea to use a more dangerous chemical to replace a safer one?
Before you answer, take a look at a couple of videos that the folks in Bristol in the UK should have watched before they decided to “go organic” and substitute vinegar (acetic acid plus water) for glyphosate — a supernaturally safe herbicide, which has been used for more than 40 years in the United States........

PROSCONS
Advice to Bristol:
  1. Take a chemistry class
  2. Put vinegar on your salad, and glyphosate on your weeds. Not the other way around.
  3. Duh
Go green!

Editor's Note:  There's much more worth viewing at the original site.





Canadian Naturopath Couple Guilty in Son’s Meningitis Death

Posted on by Hank Campbell  @ The American Council on Science and Health

David and Collet Stephan's son Ezekiel died in March 2012. What's shocking was that the 19-moth old died of meningitis while his folks tried to cure him with naturopathic smoothies of hot peppers and horseradish. We hope this senseless tragedy will spotlight Canadian tolerance of medical neglect, which exists due to tolerance for cultures where anti-science beliefs hold sway.

The results of a recent court case are going to bring on a debate in far-too-tolerant-of-alternative-medicine Canada: Whether parents should be able to take their kids to a naturopath or have to go to a real doctor instead.

David and Collet Stephan’s 19-month-old son Ezekiel died in March 2012. What was shocking is that he died of meningitis while they tried to cure him using naturopathic smoothies of hot peppers, garlic, onions and horseradish.

The day before he stopped breathing, and the bearded hipster and his equally dumb hippie wife finally decided to go to a real doctor, he had to lie on a mattress in their car because he was too stiff to sit in a car seat on the way to the naturopath’s office.

The issue is not the naturopath they used, that has quasi-legitimacy in Canada and the medical establishment there has to take the blame for not standing up to nonsense inside their borders, the issue is how to protect children from parents that are shockingly stupid. In the United States, if you try to keep a toddler on a vegan diet you will go to jail. And in Canada too. So it would make some sense that a senseless tragedy perpetrated by people who should know better, and chose to deny science anyway, should bring a rethink to Canadian tolerance of medical neglect under the guise of tolerance for cultures where anti-science beliefs hold sway.

If the title ends in “path,” alarm bells should go off. Don’t be fooled by the term “allopath” for real doctors either, that title was invented by the first homeopath to create false equivalence. 

State Department Announces Plans to Circumvent US Law in Order to Advance Climate Agenda

Brett Schaefer / Steven Groves / /

State Department spokesman John Kirby announced that the Obama administration plans to circumvent U.S. law in order to advance its climate agenda. This should come as no surprise, as the president has already circumvented the Constitution through not submitting what is clearly an international climate change treaty to the Senate.

U.S. funding for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) should now be prohibited since the Palestinian Authority has signed on as a party to the treaty—and the U.S. does not recognize Palestinian claims of statehood. Under U.S. law, this should trigger a funding prohibition enacted in 1994:
The United States shall not make any voluntary or assessed contribution: (1) to any affiliated organization of the United Nations which grants full membership as a state to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood, or (2) to the United Nations, if the United Nations grants full membership as a state in the United Nations to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood, during any period in which such membership is effective. (Adopted as Public Law 103-236 in 1994.)
Indeed, it is a long-standing U.S. policy that a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood would undermine internationally accepted frameworks for peace, including the U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 and other U.N. statements, and that recognition should occur only after a negotiated peace agreement with Israel. The Palestinian effort threatens both U.S. and Israeli interests, and the administration is right to oppose it....

Read More

Varroa Mites and Associated Honey Bee Diseases More Severe than Previously Thought

by Entomology Today

Researchers from the University of Maryland and the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently completed the first comprehensive, multi-year study of honey bee parasites and disease as part of the National Honey Bee Disease Survey. Key findings, which are published in the journal Apidologie, show that the Varroa mite, a major honey bee pest, is far […] Read more of this post

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Climate Hustle demolishes climate alarmism

Paul Driessen

Be sure to see this movie Monday, May 2 – during its one-night nationwide engagement.

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That is exactly what CFACT’s new movie demonstrates is actually going on.

Climate Hustle is the perfect antidote to the destructive, demoralizing climate alarmism that dominates political decisions and obsesses the Obama White House and EPA. You owe it to yourself to see it.

It’s coming to a theater near you on Monday, May 2, for a special one-night engagement.

I saw Climate Hustle April 14, at its U.S. premiere on Capitol Hill in Washington. The film is informative and entertaining, pointed and humorous. As meteorologist Anthony Watts says, it is wickedly effective in its using slapstick humor and the words and deeds of climate alarmists to make you laugh at them.

It examines the science on both sides of the issue … presents often hilarious planetary Armageddon prophecies of Al Gore, Leonard Nimoy and other doomsayers… and lets 30 scientists and other experts expose the climate scares and scams, explain Real World climate science, and delve deeply into the politics and media hype that have surrounded this issue since it was first concocted several decades ago

Sizzling temperatures. Melting ice caps. Destructive hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts. Disappearing polar bears. The end of civilization as we know it! The end of Planet Earth!

Emissions from our power plants, cars, factories and farms are causing catastrophic climate change!

Or are they? Is there really a “97% scientific consensus” on this? Or is “dangerous manmade climate change” merely the greatest overheated environmentalist con-job and shell game ever devised to advance the Big Green anti-energy agenda?

See this amazing film on May 2, and find out for yourself. To learn where it’s showing near you, and to buy tickets, visit www.ClimateHustle.com

You’ll be glad you did.

Climate Hustle is hosted by award-winning investigative journalist Marc Morano. A former communications director for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Morano is publisher of CFACT’s ClimateDepot.com. The film is a production of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and CDR Communications. See the movie. Bring your friends. Make it a party. www.ClimateHustle.com

Follow this link www.ClimateHustle.com and scroll down to find where this is playing in your state.

Here in Ohio it's playing in Akron, Beavercreek, Cincinnati, four locations in Columbus and one in Gahanna, Huber Heights, Macedonia, Maumee, Milford, North Canton, Ontario, Pickerington, Piqua, Solon, Springdale, Strongsville, Toldeo, West Carrollton, Westlake, Wooster and Zanesville.


NASA: Higher CO2 Levels Responsible For ‘Greening’ Earth

Climate Models Fail Again, Didn’t Predict CO2 Would Green The Western US


Figure S12, Zhu et al. (2016)

From a quarter to half of Earth's vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25. An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet's vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States. --NASA, 26 April 2016

Among the many climate-alarmist fears of CO2-induced global warming is the concern that the productivity of the biosphere will decline if global temperatures rise to the extent predicted by computer models. So just how bad is the biosphere suffering in response to these much-feared events? A new paper by Zhu et al. (2016) provides valuable insight into this important topic. 32 researchers -- representing 9 different countries -- report finding "a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated LAI (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area, whereas less than 4% of the globe shows decreasing LAI (browning)." Could one hope for anything more promising than this? Quite the opposite of what the world's climate alarmists contend should be happening to Earth's vegetation, rising atmospheric CO2 enrichment is proving to be a tremendous biospheric benefit, overpowering the many real and negative influences that society and nature have inflicted upon it over the past three decades. --CO2 Science, 26 April 2016

Empirical data confirms that the biosphere’s productivity has increased by about 14% since 1982, in large part as a result of rising carbon dioxide levels. It is very likely that the impact of rising carbon dioxide concentrations is currently net beneficial for both humanity and the biosphere generally. These benefits are real, whereas the costs of warming are uncertain. Halting the increase in carbon dioxide concentrations abruptly would deprive people and the planet of the benefits of carbon dioxide much sooner than they would reduce any costs of warming. --Indur Goklany, Global Warming Policy Foundation, October 2015

Several analyses have been conducted to estimate potential monetary damages of the rising atmospheric CO2 concentration. Few, however, have attempted to investigate its monetary benefits. The present study addresses this deficiency by providing a quantitative estimate of the direct monetary benefits conferred by atmospheric CO2 enrichment on both historic and future global crop production.  The results indicate that the annual total monetary value of this benefit grew from $18.5 billion in 1961 to over $140 billion by 2011, amounting to a total sum of $3.2 trillion over the 50-year period 1961-2011.  Projecting the monetary value of this positive externality forward in time reveals it will likely bestow an additional $9.8 trillion on crop production between now and 2050.  -- Craig D. Idso, CO2 Science, October 2013

Roger Harrabin (BBC): Do you think that somebody who benefits from the burning of CO2 should take responsibility for the waste product which is the CO2 that is unwanted, in the same way that a chemicals firm who used raw materials would have to take responsibility for the waste effluent into the water, for instance, would that be a reasonable position?

Benny Peiser: I think it would actually be a reasonable position under the condition that the same company could also get the benefits of their product, so yes, they should pay for the negative externalities, but they should also get paid for the benefits of the positive externalities. I think in that case it would make sense. Just to make them pay for the negative consequences, disregarding the positive benefits they bring, I think would be a one sided thing, unlikely to be adopted by any government. --
Open University, November 2015

Climate scientists and environmentalists have claimed for years droughts and heatwaves were getting worse because of man-made global warming, but those predictions have not come true, according to a new study. “Evidence that droughts have become more prevalent on a global scale is equally hard to come by,” Andrew Montford, a British author and global warming skeptic, wrote in a new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Montford’s report debunks many claims advanced by activists that droughts and heatwaves were getting worse, citing examples of alarmism playing out across the world and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. --Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 25 April 2016