An Explosion of Green Lies

By Alan Caruba, November 24, 2008 @ Warning Signs

Editor's Note:  As you can see, this was published in 2008, and it's timeless.  When I first started P&D Alan was among the first to allow me to publish his work, and was a constant encouragement to me. My friend Alan died ten years ago in June.  I've continued to occasionally publish his work since it has a sense of timeless about it, and this piece is evidence of that.   Even though Alan has passed, his Warning Signs blog is still there waiting for those who wish to see behind the curtain.  Take some time and review his legacy.   RK

If you think you’ve been hearing and reading more and more Green lies about global warming and a whole range of other Green scares, you’re right. The election of Barack Obama has opened the floodgates to a deluge of propaganda by the many Green groups seeking to advance their various agendas.

The mainstream news media folk who have not yet figured out that their credibility has long since gone into the toilet keep pushing this stuff and with exquisite irony—no doubt lost on these geniuses—NBC nearly killed one of its Today Show anchors in a stunt that dispatched all them to the far corners of the globe to prove that global warming was happening.

At the very same time, it announced that it was firing the staff of its Weather Channel’s environmental unit! That’s right, while the famed anchors were trudging up mountains, hanging out on glaciers or snorkeling reefs, the entire staff of “Forecast Earth” was laid off halfway through NBC’s “Green Week.” In all, some 80 people were cut, but it was the Forecast Earth staff that existed solely to spread global warming lies despite the fact that the real Earth has been in a cooling cycle since 1998.

Meanwhile, on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Ann Curry and more than a hundred local Masai porters were experiencing a dangerous condition called High Altitude Cerebral Edema in order to prove that global warming was causing the mountain’s ice cap to melt. Everything about this idiot stunt was wrong from the gitgo.

If anyone on the Today Show had bothered to do any research, they would have known that the mountain’s ice cap had been receding for years due to deforestation. In the October 2003 edition of Nature Magazine it was pointed out that, “Without the forest’s humidity, previously moisture-laden winds blew dry. No longer replenished with water, the ice is evaporating in the strong equatorial sunshine.” Sunshine! On the Equator!

A June 2007 study published in American Scientist revealed that the melting of Kilimanjaro’s icecap had been occurring for at least a century as forests were cleared for farmland. Indeed, most of the melting had occurred prior to 1953!

Curry, age 52, aborted the trek up the mountain that was intended to announce something that an NBC page spending a half-hour on Google could have told her was not just a waste of time, but a complete and total lie.

As the Obama administration makes ready to assume power, the Greens are going crazy with campaigns denouncing coal as “dirty” and demanding an end to the use of all plastic bottles, claiming that a life-threatening component exists. If this is so, don’t you think we would know about it by now? Plastic, of course, is made from oil and that too has been stigmatized for decades by the Greens. The plunge of global oil prices has been about the only good news that consumers have had in weeks.

The new big lie is that millions of jobs can be created from Green sustainable or “clean” energy in the form of solar and wind power, but even with vast government tax subsidies and other incentives, neither of these has gained a foothold because they both require back-up generation facilities when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining.

The notion that electric cars will replace those using the highly efficient gasoline powered automobiles and trucks has been around since the late 1800s and the problem now is the same problem as then; the batteries which must be so large and so frequently charged that they are impractical. A new electric auto from a company called Tesla will cost you $50,000 to purchase. Only demented Hollywood stars will be able to afford them.

There will be no explosion of jobs from so-called Green industries and the real industries, like auto industries, are just blowing smoke up your skirt when they trumpet how Green they are. It is a marketing scheme, not science, and frequently a costly waste of money that could have been spent more wisely to benefit their investors.

I keep telling people that businesses large and small exist to make a profit!

At some point, when the economy reaches a truly horrid low point, people will begin to shed all the nonsense they have been taught in America’s schools about the environment and start thinking about where the next rent or mortgage payment will come from. They will have noticed by then that, wherever they live, it is getting colder and the cold weather is lasting longer.

Over at the Weather Channel, the newly trimmed down staff will be tracking and talking about the latest blizzards burying cities and rural areas in snow.

No Strategy. No Clue.

By Alan Caruba Thursday, June 11, 2015 

Editor's Note:  My Friend Alan Caruba passed on June 15, 2015, Age 77.   Alan was one of the first writers to allow me to publish his work, and was an unending encouragement to me to keep going and expanding my focus.  As I've said, Alan allowed me to publish his articles, many of which can be found here.  Alan's articles had a timelessness about them, so I've republished many of them over the years, all in order to keep his work alive.  The characters many change but the underlying facts and logic remain, as in no strategy, no clue, the true theme of Kamala's run to the White House.    RK

The Wednesday, June 10 Wall Street Journal headline at the top of the page was “Obama Set to Expand Troops in Iraq.”  We were 589 days into the two terms Barack Hussein Obama has served in the office of President of the United States and he is as clueless now as he was when he arrived on January 20, 2009.

“President Barack Obama is poised to send hundreds more American advisers to a new base in a strategic Iraqi region to help devise a counterattack against marauding Islamic State militants, U.S. officials said Tuesday, a shift that underscores American concern over recent battlefield losses.”  It’s 450 “trainers.”

We have had losses because (1) Obama was elected on a promise to end the conflict in Iraq and (2) reelected by pulling out troops to the point that the remaining Iraqi troops—Shiites in the south—decided it wasn’t worth dying for their leaders. Can’t say I blame them, but dying at the hands of ninth century Islamic fanatics is the fate that threatens the entire Middle East, not just Iraq or what’s left of it.

This is how we lost the war in Vietnam. There was a time when Americans utterly destroyed their enemies on the battlefield. In the latter half of the last century, starting in Korea, we forgot how to do that and why that’s how wars are won.

In all candor, like a lot of Americans, I went back and forth about the Mideast conflicts. Looking back, I think George H.W. Bush showed remarkable insight when, after driving Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, he stopped at the border and came home. George W. had the notion he could somehow introduce democracy to the region. He couldn’t and it will likely never really occur there because Islam is the only law and it has kept the region ignorant, backward, and under the thumb of tyrants for centuries.

The Islamic State troops must be stopped at some point, but Obama is not the President who will do it. Whatever U.S. backed combat occurs will be just enough to present enough television news images to convince the gullible that progress is being made.

Obama arrived in office without any strategy and has spent the last six and a half years “muddling through” as the British say. He and the Democratic Party had only one goal; to win the elections. After that, they wanted to “fundamentally transform” the greatest nation on planet Earth. They have largely made a mess out of everything they touched from ObamaCare to Common Core.

There’s a reason why Obama will send more troops and that’s because every one of our allies has told him that, if the U.S. does not again assert its role of global leadership, they are not going to cooperate with him in a thousand different ways.

Our allies in the Mideast have told him they lack the military strength (and will) to conduct any kind of war with ISIS. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world cannot afford to sit by and let the enormous oil wealth and reserves of the Mideast come under the control of ISIS.

So, once again we read headlines about U.S. troops returning to the Mideast.

What that means is that the 2016 elections are more critical to the future of the nation than all previous ones.

I think Americans, liberals, conservatives and independents alike have had more than enough of President No Strategy. I think there are enough older Americans who remember and take pride in a nation that was unabashedly the world’s leader in the pursuit of peace and democracy. And I think that the thirty percent or so of brain-dead liberals are not sufficient to affect the outcome of a 2016 election devoted to restoring the nation’s economy and leadership.

It can be done. John F. Kennedy was on his way to doing so. Reagan did so. In 590 days from now, we can begin to do so again.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Alan Caruba Died on June 15, 2015, Age 77.

By Rich Kozlovich 

Alan was one of the first writers to allow me to publish his work, and was an unending encouragement to me to keep going and expanding my focus.  My friend Alan Caruba died nine years ago on June 15, 2015, at the age of 77.   As I've said, Alan allowed me to publish his articles, many of which can be found here.  Alan's articles had a timeless about them, so I've republished many of them over the years, all in order to keep his work alive.  The characters many change but the underlying facts and logic remain.   . 

While excoriated by left wing publications, he was respected by those who dared challenge the left/green cabal.   Here's the obituary from the Heartland Institute.

Alan Caruba (1938-2015) Founder, The National Anxiety Center Alan Caruba  was a writer by profession and host of several Web sites and blogs, including Warning Signs, The National Anxiety Center, Caruba Editorial Services, and Bookviews by Alan Caruba. His daily column, “Warning Signs“, is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. The National Anxiety Center is a clearinghouse for information about scare campaigns such as “global warming” designed to influence public opinion and policies.

If you wish, you may like to view his blog, Warming Signs, which is still up, and still being hit.  He would be pleased. 

The Endangered Animal Act of Futility

By Alan Caruba Friday, January 24, 2014

Editor's Note:  My friend Alan passed in 2015 at age 77.  Alan was a prolific writer and a generous writer allowing me to ad a timelessness to it, and after all these years people are still hitting his Warming Signs blog articles. He would be pleased.  Here's one of them. RK 

By Alan Caruba

David W. Snook, 57, of Bridgewater, New Jersey died on Wednesday, January 15, when two deer leaped into the path of his Dodge Ram on Route 206. One of them was airborne when it smashed through the front windshield, striking him before exiting out the rear window. This caused the truck to veer into the guard rail and come to rest in a ravine.

In 2012, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection estimated that the Garden State was home to 110,000 deer. Each year about 35,000 are killed in hunts and those of us who live here owe the hunters a debt of gratitude. In my county of Essex, home to Newark, the freeholders regularly hire hunters to cull the herd that shares its home with one of the most densely populated counties in the state.

Need it be said that the animal rights crowd is always upset about this. New Jersey also has a fairly sizeable bear population and during the hunting season, between 250 and 450 are “harvested” as the Fish and Game agency calls it. They have been found in all 21 counties of the state. And state officials now estimate that there are more coyotes in New Jersey than bears.

Suffice to say New Jersey’s animals are not suffering from a decline in species, nor facing extinction any time soon. My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that this is true nationwide. However, to justify one of the dumbest laws ever passed, the Endangered Species Act, some 1,500 species are classified with fuzzy definitions of being “threatened”, “endangered” or “recovered.”

The Act was signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon, who also gifted us with the Environmental Protection Agency, currently doing everything in its power to destroy the coal industry and plants that use it to generate electricity. They claim that the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are a threat to the climate, but ignore the many other natural sources of CO2, including all seven billion humans that exhale six pounds of it a day. And that all species would die without CO2 maintaining all the vegetation on Earth.

What is never mentioned is that species extinction has been around as long as there have been species. It was not CO2 that killed the dinosaurs and 75% of other species that had dominated the Earth for 180 million years and there were no humans around to blame for the Great Permian Extinction when more than 90% of all life on Earth disappeared—animals, plants, trees, fish, and even algae. Most geological eras have come to a close with calamitous events.

In December 2013, the Obama administration granted industrial wind farm operators a 30-year permit to kill legally protected bald eagles and golden eagles without being subject to legal repercussions. Wind energy has killed 1.4 million birds and bats every year, including those regarded and protected as threatened such as California condors, bald eagles, and Indiana bats. Apparently, if you are producing 1% percent or so of electricity, it’s okay to kill these creatures. Meanwhile everyone else pays higher electricity bills.

The dirty little secret about the Endangered Species Act is that environmentalists have used it for years to deter all manner of economic development by claiming some fish or other creature was endangered if you built a hospital, new homes, or in the case of the dunes sagebrush lizard which lives in the West Texas and Southeast New Mexico Permian Basic when oil companies want to explore and extract this energy resource that will generate jobs and huge tax revenues to help reduce the national debt.

It is insanity to think humans can or should do anything to “save” various species. The most dramatic and tragic evidence of this has been the twenty-year effort to “save” the northern spotted owl. The result was to close millions of acres of federal forests in the Northwest from logging, devastating the once flourishing timber industry.

In July 2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would permit the killing of barred owls believed to be killing the spotted owls. The sawmills that once thrived are mostly gone, along with their jobs, and revenue. The forests are overgrown and are immense fire traps. And the Fish and Wildlife Service thinks that spending $127 million might restore the spotted owl population over the next 30 years.

This kind of stupidity is criminal.

How effective has the Endangered Species Act been? As it enters its 41^st year it has “recovered” less than 2% of the approximately 2,100 species listed as endangered or threatened since 1973. A December 17 Wall Street Journal article reported that “it has endangered the economic health of many communities and created a cottage industry of litigation that does more to enrich environmental activist groups” that pays their salaries.

The Endangered Species Act is a huge failure. It should be repealed, but don’t expect Congress to do anything that sensible.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Blast From the Past: Obama Disses Alaska

By Alan Caruba 

Alaska's "pristine" wildlife refuge

 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor's Note: My friend Alan passed in 2015 but he'd given me permission to publish his work many years ago, and one thing about Alan's articles is, they're pretty much timeless.  The characters many change but the underlying facts and logic remain.  This  originally appeared here, and in P&D in 2015. Given Biden's and his administration's insanity on energy, and this recent winter storm, I think this is an appropriate piece to resurrect.  RK

 

Fifty million Americans who live in the northeast will experience what is predicted to be a historic blizzard from Monday evening through Tuesday. Cities and towns will virtually or literally close down. People will be told to stay indoors for their safety and to facilitate the crews that will labor to clear the roads of snow.

In other words, welcome to Alaska, a place that is plenty cold most of the year and which is no stranger to snow and ice.

Alaska, however, has something that the whole world considers very valuable; oil and natural gas. Lots of it. In 1980 a U.S. Geological Survey estimated that the Coastal Plain could contain up to 17 billion barrels of oil and 34 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

In 1987, the U.S Department of Interior confirmed the earlier estimate, saying that “in place resources” ranged from 4.8 billion to 29.4 billion barrels of oil. Recoverable oil estimates ranged from 600 million barrels at the low end to 9.2 billion barrels at the high end.

A nation with an $18 trillion debt might be expected to want to take advantage of this source of revenue, but no, not if that debt was driven up by the idiotic policies of President Barack Obama and not if it could be reduced by the same energy industry that has tapped similar oil and natural gas reserves in the lower 48 states by drilling on private, not public lands.

Instead, on Sunday President Obama referred to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) as “an incredible place—pristine, undisturbed. It supports caribou and polar bears” and other species and, guess what, tapping its vast oil and natural gas reserves would not interfere in any way with those species despite the whopping lie that “it’s very fragile.”

At Obama’s direction, the Interior Department announced it was proposing to preserve as wilderness nearly 13 million acres of land in ANWR’s 19.8 million-acre area. That would include 1.5 million acres of coastal plains that Wall Street Journal reported to be “believed to have rich oil and natural gas reserves.”

Not a whole lot of people choose ANWR as a place to vacation. It is a harsh, though often beautiful, area that only the most experienced visitor might want to spend some time. I would want to make every environmentalist who thinks any drilling would harm the area have to take up residence in its “pristine” wilderness to confirm that idiotic notion.

They would find plenty of caribou, polar bears and other species hanging out amidst the oil and gas rigs, and along the pipe line. The Central Arctic Caribou Herd that migrates through the Prudhoe Bay oil field, just next to ANWR has increased from 5,000 animals in the 1970s to more than 50,000 today. There is no evidence than any of the animal species have experienced any decline.

The Coastal Plain lies between known major discovery areas and the Prudhoe Bay, Lisburne, Endicott, Milne Point and Kuparuk oil fields are currently in production In 1996, the North Slope oil fields produced about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day or approximately 25% of the U.S. domestic production. Alaska is permitted to export its oil because of its high levels of productivity.

So why has Obama’s Department of the Interior decided it wants to shut off energy exploration and extraction in a whopping 13-million acres of what is already designated as a wildlife refuge and along its coastlines on the Beaufort and Chukchi seas? The answer is consistent with Obama’s six years of policies to deny Americans the benefits of the nation's vast energy reserves, whether it is the coal that has previously provided 50% of our electrical energy—now down by 10%--or access to reserves of oil and natural gas that would make our nation energy independent as well as a major exporter.

The good news is that only Congress has the authority to declare an area as wilderness. It has debated the issue for more than 30 years and in 12 votes in the House and 3 votes in the Senate it has passed legislation supporting development and opposing the wilderness designation.

 

And guess who is the new chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee? Sen. Lisa Murkowski, an Alaskan Republican. She also heads up the appropriations subcommittee responsible for funding the Interior Department!

 

This latest Obama ANWR gambit is going to go nowhere. It does, however, offer the Republican Congress an opportunity to demonstrate its pro-energy credentials.

“I cannot understand why this administration is willing to negotiate with Iran, but not Alaska,” said Sen. Murkowski when informed of Obama’s latest attack.

 

Just Another Race Riot

By Alan Caruba @Warning Signs Thursday, April 30, 2015

(Editor's Note:  My Friend Alan passed two months after this article was published, but I had always told Alan his work had a timelessness about it.  This is just another example of how true that was. RK)

When you’ve lived over seven decades in America, the news about another race riot is really not news. It’s just another race riot.

The latest is Baltimore and the theme for this one is police violence against an unarmed black youth. This was the theme of the Ferguson, Missouri riots last year and has been a fairly common theme since the arrival of the new century fifteen years ago. Such events included riots in Cincinnati in 2001, the Oakland riots in 2009, and the two most recent.

A December 2014 article in Real Clear Politics by Jack Kelly put the statistics in perspective. “Young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot dead by police than are young white males, Pro Publica said. But because more than two-thirds of police officers are white and blacks commit about half of violent crimes, it stands to reason most police shootings would involve a white cop and a black suspect.”

Largely unreported is that “Black cops shot black suspects at essentially the same rate as white cops…”

For those of us outside of the black community and living in safe suburban zones surrounding our cities, the riots might as well be taking place on Mars. Why anyone would, as is often the case, destroy their own neighborhood, loot and burn down businesses (often black-owned) defies an answer.

Because riots offer television news dramatic images of violence and destruction, one can depend on coverage for a long as it lasts. Being photographed looting or engaging in violence against police and others seems to be one of the “perks” of rioting. Baltimore’s riot dominated the news on every channel Monday evening to the point one might conclude that nothing else of any importance was occurring anywhere in the world. The earthquake devastation in Nepal had to fight for the very few minutes of coverage it received.

It is astonishing to recall that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was able to lead many civil rights marches with so little violence, but it was the years concurrent with and following the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965 that saw large riots such as several in 1964 in Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York. There were three just in New Jersey that year.

Having achieved the goals of the civil rights movement, historic federal laws, one might have concluded that rioting was no longer needed to call attention to the ills of the post-civil rights era.

You would have been wrong. The one that got national attention was in the Watts area of Los Angeles in 1965. The pattern continued with riots in 1966 and 1967. In April and May 1968 after Dr. King was assassinated, there were riots in 125 cities. The 1980s and 1990’s had their share of riots.

Just add Baltimore’s Freddie Gray’s name to the list of those who died either during an arrest or in police custody, sparking a riot. In the past the public generally backed the police, but now they are being depicted as undisciplined killers. The reality is that the police are the thin line of defense between us and the criminals whose job is theirs to arrest and detain. That occurs all the time. Police have more reasons to act in their own defense in a week than most of us will have in a lifetime.

As we learned from Ferguson, the original allegations against the police officer were totally false. Let it also be said that is not the only reason riots have occurred. A lot of them just seem to reflect feelings of alienation, anger, and dissatisfaction that bubble below the surface in black urban enclaves. Nothing is likely to change that.

So, as Baltimore cleans up the mess left behind by the latest riot, be assured that another is right around the corner somewhere. There is a core of law-breakers and angry blacks for whom virtually anything is excuse enough for a riot.

We had to pass through a Civil War to resolve the race-based ills of that era. Americans elected the first black American as President in 2008, but his race has not reduced riots during his time in office.

The lesson that we can draw from this is that, if you put enough people together in close proximity in a city where there is both wealth and poverty, where there are economic disparities between whites and blacks, you need only wait a while for the next riot.

Alan Caruba, 2015

 

Caruba's Corner: Are We Seeing History Repeat Itself?

By Alan Caruba Sunday, February 15, 2015 @ Warning Signs

 

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is the famed quote of George Santayana, a Spanish philosopher (1863-1952).  I am beginning to think that the world is making its way toward a future that repeats the horrors of the last century’s wars and earlier times when Europeans battled Islam to free Jerusalem, to protect their homelands in Europe, and to eject Muslims from Spain.

In his book, “Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7^th to the 21^st Centuries” historian Paul Fregosi documented the history of Islam and its attacks on European nations, characterizing jihad as “essentially a permanent state of hostility that Islam maintains against the rest of the world.” It is a Muslim sacrament, a duty they must perform.

Occurring at the same time is the agenda of the global environmental movement and on February 4 Christina Figueres, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves; which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history."

"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for the, at least, 150 years, since the industrial revolution.” (Italics added) 

Figueres was wrong. The objective of the 1917 Communist revolution that began in Russia and Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958-1961) was the same that is now being openly embraced by the United Nations in 2015. The result of both was the death of millions.

Humanity is under attack from an Islam that intends to impose its barbaric seventh century Sharia law and from the environmental movement’s intention to end capitalism and replace it with the income distribution central to Communism.

Both spell a terrible future for the people of the world.

The President of the United States is devoted to pursuing both of these goals as the defender of Islam and the opponent of “income inequality.”  We have twenty-two months to survive Barack Obama’s remaining time in office.

Obama was first elected on the promise to end the U.S. engagement in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. After many years Americans welcomed the prospect of ceasing the loss of lives and billions those wars represented. With the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) they are now seeing the true price of that policy. Just because we don’t want to fight a war doesn’t mean our enemy will cease to pursue it.

We are at a critical moment in time because it is evident that Obama wants to provide Iran the opportunity to build its own nuclear weapons arsenal. It is a time as well when the military capability of the U.S. has been diminished to what existed before the beginning of World War II. All of Europe and much of Asia would have fallen under the control of Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan if the U.S. had not stepped up to the task of defeating them.

Relentlessly, Obama has done everything he can to reduce the size of our military fighting force and the ships, planes and other weapons needed to protect our security or support that of our allies. He has withdrawn the U.S. from its position of global leadership and left behind allies that no longer trust us and enemies who no longer fear us.

Raymond Ibrahim of the Middle East Forum wrote on February 5 that “approximately 100 million Christians around the world are experiencing the persecution by Muslims of all races, nationalities, and socio-political circumstances.”  

At the same time, we are witnessing a new exodus of Jews from Europe, mindful of the Holocaust in the 1940s.  According to the Pew Research Center, as of 2013 the Jewish population worldwide was approximately 14 million. Just over 6 million reside in Israel, another 6 million are U.S. citizens, and the rest are in Europe and elsewhere around the world. What has not changed from the last century, however, is the level of anti-Semitism and it appears to be on the rise.

What we are witnessing is a full-scale attack on the West—Christianity and Judaism—and upon Western values of morality, democracy, and freedom.

Whether it will erupt in a new world war is unknown, but if history is a guide, we are moving in that direction.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Editor's Note: My friend Alan Caruba passed on June 15, 2015. Alan's work is insightful, logical, factual, and has a timeless about it.  

Alan had given me blanket permission to publish his work when he was alive. I have archived his work in my   file.  I publish them occasionally as they fit the events of today, as this piece certainly does with the Biden/Harris administration and a left wing radical Congress in charge. 

The Government's Endless Orgy of Spending

By Alan Caruba Thursday, September 26, 2013

Editor's Note: My friend Alan Caruba passed in 2015, but his work has a certain timelessness about it so I've often re-posted his articles because they dealt with current events.  This is one of them, and  based on current Congressional spending, this piece demonstrates just how true that is.  They will always find ways to steal our money and waste it on their deep state favorites.  RK

I frequently marvel that a loon like Nancy Pelosi could have become Speaker of the House and is currently the House minority leader. Recently she said, “The cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make. It’s really important that people understand that. We cannot have cuts just for the sake of cuts.

This is dishonesty on a galactic scale. It also provides an insight into why, short of the mandatory sequestration that went into effect last year when Congress could not come to any agreement on any cuts, the government continues to spend money in ways that are just short of criminal.

In July, a Rasmussen poll determined that 62% of likely voters thought the government should cut spending in response to the nation’s economic problems. That percentage was actually down from the previous month’s 65% and was the lowest support for reduced spending since August 2012.

That same month, a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll revealed that 83% of Americans disapproved of the job performance of Congress. Approval of President Obama’s job performance was closely divided between 45% approval and 50% disapproval.

There are any number of think tanks and citizen’s organizations that keep tabs on government spending, but their periodic reports and news release seem to have no impact whatever. That’s something that members of Congress and others inside the Beltway know.

At a time when Republicans and Democrats will lock horns over raising the debt ceiling and the President thinks that any effort to defund the Affordable Care Act is the result of the Republicans “messing with me” and not a reflection of how widely disliked Obamacare is, it is instructive to look at just a few of the ways public funding is being regularly and routinely squandered in ways that are obscene.

As just one small example, one good way to save taxpayer dollars would be to shut down the National Science Foundation (NSF). It is spending $5.7 million on a project to develop card games, videos and other “educational” programs “to engage adult learners and inform public understanding and response to climate change.” The Climate Change Educational Partnership (CCEP) was established by Congress in 2009 and, to date, it has already spent $46 million on the “threat” of something that doesn’t even exist, global warming.

One of the NSF’s grants went to a study of what motivates workers, love or money? It cost $179,784. Another NSF grant, $2.25 on Tasmanian Devil facial tumors. This is an animal native to an island off the coast of Australia nowhere else. Part of another a half-million dollar grant was used to develop a video game the stimulated a high school prom. The NSF funded $350,000 to Purdue University to study how golfers could improve their game.

The NSF may take top honors for insanely wasteful programs and projects, but there is hardly a single department of the government that does not do the same thing. All that whining and wailing about sequestration was really about having fewer dollars to waste and fewer people with which to waste it.

For example, the Transportation Security Administration lets 5,700 pieces of unused security equipment sit in storage in a Dallas, Texas warehouse. Worth $184 million, it costs the TSA $3.5 million annually to lease the space.

As Obamacare expands the role of the Internal Revenue Service and we learn how some of its administrators targeted, denying or delaying, a common tax-exempt status to conservative groups routinely granted to all manner of other kinds of organizations, let us not forget the $4.1 million the IRS spent in 2010 on a lavish conference for employees.

The Department of Agriculture awarded a $149,000 grant to researchers at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey to study how to eliminate the “freshman 15” extra weight that these students pack on when they can eat anything and as much as they want.

Morocco must have one heck of a good lobbyist because the Labor Department spent $1 million there to improve “gender equality” in the workforce there. The State Department spent $450,000 to develop “green jobs.”

Dave Ramsey, who advises people on radio, TV and in print on how to manage their personal finances, has said, “The fact is that government can get out of debt the same way you get out of debt. You quit borrowing money. You quit spending. You balance the budget. But to do all of that, you’ll need to make some sacrifices.”

The only reason sequestration went into effect was because a blue-ribbon panel of members of Congress could not agree to any reductions in spending.

Now we must endure a few weeks of meaningless political haggling to increase the debt ceiling while the government continues its orgy of senseless spending on projects and programs like those noted above.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

 

Trying to Use the UN to Destroy Israel

By Alan Caruba 

(Editor's Note:  This is a blast from the past.  My Friend Alan Caruba wrote this in 2014, and sadly passed the following year.  Six years have passed and with Biden as President, a man with serious cognitive problems and sewer trout moral convictions, who knows how bad it will become. 

Currently the International Criminal Court has decided they have jurisdiction over Israel, in spite of the fact Israel isn't a member.  Will it get worse? Yes, and mostly because Trump brought many of the Middle East countries to the table with Israel and they're working together.  

The left and radical Muslims will go crazy and pull every  string they can to overcome that, and the UN, the most corrupt and incompetent organization the world has ever known, will play a big part in it, just as they've been doing for many decades.  Neither history or reality will have any impact on their views and actions.

Nothing has changed.    RK?)

The right of Israel to exist as a nation was officially recognized by the United Nations on November 29, 1947 when it adopted Resolution 181 favoring the partition of the area claimed by the Zionist movement. The resident Arabs refused to accept the land set aside for a "Palestinian" state.

The British “mandate” of the area dated from the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Previously the Balfour Declaration was issued by the British government, favoring the establishment of a Jewish national home in what was then referred to as Palestine.

In 1946 following World War Two and in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust that killed six million Jews in Europe President Truman announced his support for the creation of a Jewish state. Throughout 1947 the United Nations Special Commission on Palestine had examined the issues involved and recommended the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state.

The Arabs, then and now never ceased to oppose the existence of a Jewish state. To have a state of their own would require acknowledging Israel and that is why, to this day, there is no Palestinian state, nor ever was one.

In the wake of several Jewish revolts against the Roman Empire, Emperor Hadrian changed the name of Judea, Samaria and the Galilea to “Syria Palaestina” and the name of Jerusalem to “Aelia Capitolina.” The name change did nothing to eliminate Israel whose restoration remained an active dream for two millennia.

Now, having refused to come to any agreement with Israel despite years of negotiations and the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza to give the Palestinians living space in addition to an area in the West Bank, the Arab League is turning to the United Nations.

In the years since the 1947 resolution the U.N. has long engaged in anti-Israel activities. As Anne Bayefsky wrote in the Jerusalem Post, “From November 24, 2014 until December 5, 2014, the UN human rights headquarters in Geneva mounted a public exhibit that was pure incitement. UN-driven anti-Semitism that takes the form of seeking to demonize, disable and ultimately destroy the Jewish state.”
 

“The exhibit was entitled: ‘La Nakba: Exode et Expulsion des Palestinians en 1948’ or ‘The Nakba: Exodus and Explusion of the Palestinians in 1948.’ The occasion was the annual UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Solidarity Day marks the adoption by the General Assembly on November 29, 1947 of the resolution that approved the partitioning of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state.” It was rejected by Arab states. “Thus,” wrote Ms. Bayefsky, “the Arab war to deny Israel’s right to exist began.”

The day following the Fatah (formerly the Palestinian Liberation Organization) announcement of its intent to seek a U.N. resolution, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met with a delegation from the Arab League to discuss the resolution that sets a timeline for an Israeli withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. Indeed, they want to declare East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and want the assurance that “refugees” could “return”. The Obama administration has been the first to break with the long tradition of good will and solidarity that has existed between the U.S. and Israel.

As Rabbi Aryah Spero noted in a December 17 CNS News commentary, “Despite the partnership between the terrorist organizations Hamas and Fatah (the new name for Arafat’s PLO) some European nations are demanding that Israel immediately accede to the Hamas/Fatah demands or they will proceed in the U.N. to declare a Palestinian State and impose on Israel conditions that will not only strip her of her capital, Jerusalem, but place Israelis in instant jeopardy from rockets launched against her from this newly declared state abutting Israel. Like Gaza before, this newest Palestinian state will become a terrorist state and a proxy of Iran.”

European anti-Semitism is steeped in centuries of enmity and it is reasserting itself again within the living memory of the Nazi Holocaust that sought to kill every Jew in Europe. U.S. pressure is a major departure from decades of support for Israel. At the same time President Obama has lifted sanctions against Iran, giving it more time to develop nuclear weapons he has been threatening sanctions against Israel if it continues to permit the construction of housing in Jerusalem.

The Arab demand that it is the heir to “Palestine” and that Jerusalem is a holy city is absurd. As Rabbi Spero notes, “Unlike the Jewish Bible that mentions Jerusalem over 700 times, the Koran never mentions Jerusalem, even once. Jerusalem is simply a location they conquered and has become, as with other places, a symbol of Islamic power and control over Judaism and Christianity.” By this thinking, the Arabs should demand the return of Spain which they had also conquered.

In sum, the Arab League, Europe, and Obama's U.S. policy want Israel to accept terms that amount to suicide.

That is not going to happen. The months and years ahead will be no less filled with the kind of turmoil and threats that Israel has lived with since it declared its independence in 1948. A world that turns its back on Israel is asking for its own apocalyptic destruction.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

 

Violence is Very Human

By Alan Caruba  Originally published Saturday, November 30, 2013

The “knockout game” is in the news these days along with much discussion of bullying. Football is a game of violence with rules in which players frequently sustain injuries. Terrorism has been adopted to advance the Islamic goal of global domination. And the administration just announced an agreement with Iran in a vain effort to slow their intention to join the nuclear club of nations with the capacity to kill thousands, if not millions.

It is impossible not to conclude that violence is not built into the DNA of mankind.

In his 2007 book, “The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War”, David Livingston Smith, a professor of philosophy at the University of New England, wrote: “The track record of our species shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are extremely dangerous animals, and the balance of evidence suggests that our taste for killing is not some sort of cultural artifact, but was bred into us over millions of years by natural and sexual selections.”

On the plus side, he wrote “But we have also seen that there is something in human nature that recoils from killing and pulls us in the opposite direction.”

It’s worthwhile to take a moment to contemplate violence. A statistical analysis, Smith noted, reveals the constancy of war. “Looking at forty-one modern nation-states between 1800 and 1945, we find that they average 1.4 wars per generation and 18.5 years of war per generation.”

“Almost 200 million human beings, mostly civilians, have died in wars over the last century, and there is no end of slaughter in sight,” wrote Smith. “The threat hangs over all of us, constant and unrelenting.”

The brief notice of the slaughter occurring in Syria when poison gas was used is instructive. A wider war was avoided when Russia stepped in to negotiate the destruction of this weapon and was occasioned only when President Obama contemplated military strikes. At this writing, 100,000 Syrians and combatants have died. It is no longer an on-going news story.

“The Value of Violence” is a new book by Benjamin Ginsberg. “Honesty would be so frequently damaging that virtually all politicians and public officials become practiced liars,” notes Ginsberg, suggesting that “cynicism should be understood as a reasonable, if mainly intuitive, popular response to the realities of politics.”

The deal with Iran, albeit for only six months, was conducted in such secrecy that none of the members of Congress, including its leadership, were aware of it. The killing of a U.S. ambassador in 2012 on the anniversary of 9/11 was immediately surrounded in lies when Americans were told it was initiated by a video no one had seen, rather than one more episode in the war that Islamic fascists have engaged in since the 1980s. The nation is trying to extract itself from Afghanistan after the 2001 act of war we call 9/11 and has left Iraq after a war whose justification is subject to question. Long wars of attrition sap the strength and will of even a superpower.

The reason the deal with Iran is so suspect is the fact that it is the nexus for much of the terrorism in the world, sponsoring organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas. It has engaged in every manner of violence from assassination to kidnapping and hostage-taking.

Ginsberg notes that “In recent decades, for example, armed insurgents have employed violence or the threat of violence to overthrow a number of established regimes. The African continent alone has experienced some eighty-five successful military coups during the past sixty years.” It is Africa that mankind evolved, standing upright, and walking to inhabit all the other continents.

Much is made of violence in America. It is the daily content of news. “In the United States alone, nearly one and a half million individuals become the victims of violence every year—pushed, kicked, pummeled, stabbed, and shot—while tens of thousands of others are the perpetrators of these same acts.”

Indeed, America was born in violence as citizens took up arms against the British to establish the nation. Not that long after, it fought a bloody civil war to retain the union. The right to bear arms, as much to hold the government in check as any other, is part of our Constitution. An estimated eighty million Americans own a gun or rifle or both.

One can argue that violence on the individual, national, and international level is the price that humanity pays for its own inherent, even genetic, inclination to use violence for a wide variety of purposes. It has been used by the great religions and by nations alike.

It will not end. Our best efforts can only restrain it within ourselves, but weakness, too, is an ancient invitation to violence. Appeasement is a trap.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

From Prohibition to Obamacare

By Alan Caruba Originally Published on Monday, December 2, 2013

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia and many other works of literature.

It is one of the great mysteries that, for progressives, also called liberals, the past provides no lessons, no warnings that would prevent them from repeating their errors. Progressives are always focused on a magical future in which there will be no wars, no hunger, no poverty. Their belief in the redistribution of wealth—communism—is, in Winston Churchill’s words, “the equal sharing of misery.”

Obamacare is a perfect example of the progressive inability to accept that socialism and/or communism simply does not work. It depends on coercion and in the case of communism it left hundreds of millions dead in its wake over the course of the last century. Obamacare depends on (1) the belief that human nature will change—which it will not—and (2) the lies to implement it.

The news is filled with the failure of the government, despite the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, to provide a working website. Even assuming that the technical problems are solved, the failure of Obamacare is built-in because Americans have always enjoyed a culture of independence, despite the creep of government programs that occurred over the last half century.

The trust in the federal government, of Congress, is at an all-time low.

Social Security is insolvent or soon will be. Medicare was rendered even more insolvent when billions were transferred to Obamacare. Medicaid will bankrupt states as thousands more sign up for this program of minimal medical service.

As I listened to and read about the Obamacare roll-out, I was reminded of an earlier program that was adopted, Prohibition. It involved a nationwide ban on the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages. It was the law of the land from 1920 until 1933. When it went into effect it was hailed as a victory for public morals and health. By the time it was repealed with the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution, Americans had seen the growth of organized crime, the corruption that permitted ordinary citizens to ignore it, and the loss of the taxes to fund other aspects of governance.

Wikipedia notes that “By 1925, in New York City alone, there were anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 speakeasy clubs” where liquor was sold. Prohibition proved nearly impossible to implement and enforce."

Barack Obama represents the high-water mark of progressives to impose communism on America. A totalitarian form of government, we have witnessed how his administration has turned the Internal Revenue Service into a political instrument to suppress its opponents and has expanded the National Security Agency into a means to spy on all Americans, accessing every piece of communication between them. Obamacare enables the government to know every bit of information about individual’s health records.

It is, as C.S. Lewis said, “tyranny exercised for the good of its victims.” Even so, the progressives ignore the failure of communism in the former Soviet Union and the decision of China to move to a capitalist economy while endeavoring to retain a single party government that is encountering increasing protests and resistance from its population.

Obamacare is being imposed at the same time that socialist healthcare programs are in retreat in Europe. In Britain, the government led by Prime Minister David Cameron has introduced a bill seeking to partially privatize the National Health Service (NHS) in an effort to avoid the Greek-style financial meltdown that threatens the European Union member states. Cameron’s argument for the bill is that there is too much bureaucracy in the NHS system and that it interferes will patient care. NHS is based on the rationing of medical care as opposed to the free market system where costs are determined by supply.

As reported in a recent article by Arnold Ahlert on Front Page Magazine.com, “Last November, such rationing reached a scandalous level. A study by the Co-operation and Competition Panel revealed that Primary Care Trust heads were imposing arbitrary spending caps, denying patients procedures such as hip replacements and cataract removals—and that waiting times for services were seen” to be deliberately extended ‘so patients would go private or die before they were seen,’ to slash costs.”

Obamacare, as has been widely reported, has increased the costs of healthcare insurance, particularly for the young on whom the system relies to pay for the costs of caring for the elderly. It has led to the cancellation of millions of healthcare insurance plans and millions more will lose their plans.

In a November 30 Washington Times article by Jennifer Oliver O’Connell, it is reported that the inherent unconstitutionality of Obamacare will bring about its end. Cases making their way through the judicial system such as Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp v. Sebelius, Indiana v. IRS, Pruitt v. Sebelius, “may be the final nails in the coffin of Obamacare.” The first two cases cited will likely be heard in March with a final ruling in the summer of 2014. There are others such as Halbig v. Sebelius, King v. Sebelius, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, as well as the HHS employer mandate and origination clause challenges are among the many cases challenging the basis of Obamacare.

Finally, in the November 2014 midterm elections, political pundits are virtually unanimous in the prediction that Democrats will be driven from their control of the Senate and Republicans will increase their control of the House.

Obamacare is the ultimate expression of the progressive and/or liberal approach to government and it is, just as was the case of Prohibition, the increasing resistance of the American public and will be, at some point, repealed.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

 

Obama's Deliberate Destruction of the Economy

   By Alan Caruba  Originally published on Tuesday, December 3, 2013

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance." ~ Cicero 55 BC

What was true for Rome is true for America. President Obama may know little about history and less about economics, but he is relentlessly destroying America and has been since he first took office in 2009.

In September, the Gallup polling organization, reported that “Americans’ trust in ‘the American people’ to make judgments about political issues facing the country has declined each year since 2009 and, at 61%, is down nearly 20 percentage points from its recent peak in 2005. Still, that exceeds the 46% of Americans who trust the ‘men and women…who either hold or are running for public office,’ which is one point above the historical low from 2011.”

“The results are based on Gallup’s annual Governance survey, conducted Sept 5-8. The same poll found that American’s trust in the federal government to handle domestic and international problems, their trust in the news media, and their trust in the three branches of the federal government, and in state and local governments are all at or near historical lows.”

In the end, the primary currency of government is the trust people put in its ability to respond to the problems they encounter in their daily lives.

As of October, more than ninety million Americans were out of work. The data the federal government publishes is not trustworthy. It is manipulated for political gain. By October, even the Bureau of Labor Statistics had to admit that 90.6 million Americans over the age of 16 were not in the labor force--an all-time high.

Writing in Investor’s Business Daily, Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, noted that “After four and a half years of the Obama presidency, an unprecedented number of Americans have given up looking for work, wages are stagnating, low-wage earners are suffering most and the U.S. is fast becoming a nation of part-time workers.”

An October CNS News article reported that “Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau. They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.” The figures worked out to about 1.7 people getting some form of means-tested government benefit for every one person working full-time year round.

In September, CNS News reported that “A record 23,116,928 American households were enrolled in the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)---AKA food stamps---during the month of June, according to data released this month by the Department of Agriculture. That outnumbers the 20,618,000 households that the Census Bureau estimated were in the entire Northeastern United States as of the second quarter of 2013.”

Also in September, CNS News reported that “During the four years that marked President Barack Obama’s first term in office, the real median income of American households dropped by $2,627 and the number of people in poverty increased by approximately 6,667,000, according to data released by the Census Bureau. The record total of approximately 46,496,000 people in the United States who are now in poverty, according to the Census Bureau, is more than twice the population of Syria,” a nation that has lost 100,000 people in its civil war.

“In 2008,” the CNS News report noted, “the year Obama was elected, people in poverty represented 13.2 percent of the national population. In 2012, they represented 15.0 percent of the population.” And, in 2012, Americans either went to the polls or stayed home sufficiently to reelect Obama. Obama supporters in effect voted to continue the nation’s poverty rates.

In late January, the Federal Reserve released data that revealed that its holdings of U.S. government debt had increased to an all-time record of $1,696,691,000,000 as of the close of day. The Fed’s holdings of U.S. government debt had increased by 257 percent since President Obama was first inaugurated in 2009. It is the single largest holder of U.S. government debt. China is the largest foreign holder of this debt.

“The misery is not going to end soon,” wrote Mort Zuckerman, the editor-in-chief of the U.S. News and World Report, in a July Wall Street Journal commentary, noting that the economy represents “the weakest gross domestic product (GDP) growth since World War II. This anemic growth is all we have to show for the greatest fiscal and monetary stimuli in 75 years, with fiscal deficits of over 10% of GDP in four consecutive years.”

Over the past five years, the U.S. spent $3.7 trillion on welfare. That includes approximately 80 different means-tested poverty and welfare programs. That figure is nearly five times greater than the combined amount spent on NASA, education, and all federal transportation projects over that time.

You don’t have to be an economist to see that Obama embarked on a deliberate program to impoverish as many Americans as possible since taking office in 2009. If this is not a cause for impeachment than nothing is, but he will not be impeached. Instead, he will continue to attack all aspects of the economy. Obamacare is the ultimate example of this.

© Alan Caruba, 2013