Reader Mail
On Your Mark
Not buying Newt's accounting. Gore knows no rules. Prepared for duty. A Boogeyman sighting. Plus more.
(Page 2 of 3)
I continue to hope the principles of science still hold that a measurement is accurate only to the second-last digit.
Nah. The principles of science in this case are inconvenient,
so they've been masticated and evacuated by agenda-driven
mind-controllers. Just a non-scientific guess on my part. Much
like the "one degree in the past 100 years." (This letter was
slightly revised from one I sent to TAS a year ago, so
things around here haven't changed as much as the average
world temperature has over a hundred years.)
-- A. C. Santore
Global warming is the biggest hoax since "The War of The Worlds" radio broadcast convinced a significant portion of America that we were being invaded from outer space. One only needs to do exactly what the US Attorney in Illinois is doing with the governor: follow the money.
If we follow the money we find two truths. Number one is that Al Gore got richer and even more famous as the mincing, carping spokesman for the end of the world scare tactics. Number two, his little film, though thoroughly discredited by the scientific community, garnered him wealth and fame and the scare tactics it embraced enabled the democrats to raise hitherto unknown sums of money for their progress on the road to totalitarian socialism.
Now as the world actually seems to be cooling, we see what we have wrought. A collapsed economy; a way of life under attack from the resurgent radicals who now control every aspect of our life and will soon shut down the only counter-programming there is: conservative radio shows; and the conquest of our medical system to make it into another failed government program that will be more expensive and work not at all.
No wonder we're all so happy.
-- Jay Molyneaux
North Carolina
MINUTEMEN SPINNING IN THEIR
GRAVES
Re: George H. Wittman's Defense
According to Robert Gates:
The Democrats are true to their word and Gates is being like a lamb being led to slaughter. They want this country to scrap the Constitution and become a world leader in socialism. Really I should say a "representative" fascist form of government.
How sad that we forget how unprepared our military was in the 1920s and 1930s. How sad that they forgot how terrorism has caused harm to this country since the 70s.
They will reduce our military to below third world countries
while bowing to the terrorist. We will have more terrorist
strikes and will be a lot worse than 9/11. The incoming
administration will have a lot more innocent blood on their hands
than Bush does.
-- Tom
"Gates bases his military intelligence forecast on the thesis that the U.S. would not have to fight "on short notice" another major conventional war in the near or predictable future." The mindset behind this kind of statement got our hat handed to us on 12/7/1941, which was two years after the Germans invaded Poland and almost 6 years after Japan started its military expansionist moves in East Asia. We spent a couple more years after that just trying to catch up to the German ground capability on the extremes of the ETO and matching the Japanese naval power in the Pacific. We lost a lot of unnecessary lives because of our blindness to the threats that were right in front of us and spent years making themselves felt. We weren't prepared for WWII, Korea or even Vietnam which we had to draft a military force for.
What gets overlooked consistently in this equation is that our total defense spending as a percentage of the Federal budget and GDP is hardly more than those peace time budgets mentioned above where we got caught with our pants down around our ankles. Clinton's last budget year wouldn't even maintain what we had in inventory then. We threw away three quarters of a million trained military and defense workers and forces in order to create the illusion of a balanced budget and spend the Peace Dividend on more pressing matters. We have paid dearly and are paying for that short sightedness every day in a world where there are only two kinds of power, perceived and actual. Our actual power is less than our perceived in the eyes of those that it matters with. Political power absent the actual military power to back it up is worthless. Ask Neville Chamberlain and Thomas Jefferson, "the dove," about that. Jefferson found out the hard way that cold hard force via the Navy and Marines was required to make his words have meaning with the Pirates of his time. Chamberlain never leaned anything from his one trick pony.
The bulk of the voting public does not grasp that the overwhelming majority of our weapon systems and conventional forces in general are based on 1970's technology. If we started today to recapitalize our existing defense forces it would take over a decade to accomplish.
Add to all this that our existing conventional forces are too small to accomplish exactly what Gates seems to think can be accomplished by other means. Special Forces alone couldn't hold the line in Southeast Asia back in the mid 60s and to the "best and brightest" back then that was the answer to large conventional forces then. Either way we end up spending the money. The difference is usually the amount of blood we shed proving the miracle cure isn't worth the paper it was written on.
We've paid a pretty dear price in the past for trying to fit our
illusions of security to our wishful thinking policies. No one
has ever had a crystal ball on future conflicts and anything less
than a full tool box of capabilities invites the same kinds of
disasters we've seen in the past. Symbolism over substance is not
a defense policy. Far too many people high up in the
federal government and Pentagon think they are smarter than all
those that have come before. If Gates doesn't understand we
don't have the forces for what he thinks will not happen in the
near term then he certainly isn't going to have the forces for
what happens that he doesn't plan for. Kind of works that way in
the real world when your adversary doesn't buy into your wishful
thinking.
-- Thom Bateman
Newport News, Virginia
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frost| 12.15.08 @ 9:38AM
Thom Bateman nailed it. Period. Good stuff.
iamse7en| 12.15.08 @ 10:31AM
via my buddy, John Lott:
"The SEC (very) partially solves the mark-to-market accounting rule problems."
http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2008/12/sec-very-partially-solves-mark-to.html
Thomas| 12.15.08 @ 10:40AM
An excellent assessment by Mr. Bateman. Just don't look for anyone in the Federal Government to listen.
David Govett| 12.15.08 @ 12:11PM
We have become a people of the government, by the government, and for the government.
Michael L. Hauschild| 12.15.08 @ 12:31PM
RE: David Shoup
Here is the problem with the global warming alarmist models. Most “weather stations” are now where they have always been, now encompassed by municipal heat islands. A typical example of this is official temperatures being taken ten feet from the exhaust vent of an air conditioner. There really is no overall change in the average temperature, just an anomaly in the local distribution. Heat is being generated but it is at the source of the power plant. No rational meteorologist would place a recording site on the top of a cooling tower.
Second, and this is the most significant, is the model itself. Historical temperatures “averages” are linear, simple lines on a graph. It is ironic that the adage, “climate is what is supposed to happen, weather is what occurs,” is ignored. The global warming school will use changing (+) temperatures to write headlines but not allow cyclic climate change to be deemed relevant within the prediction models.
Meteorological science is just now beginning to get a handle on the two-dimensional aspect of “weather.” In some locations prediction is relatively simple. For instance weather stations in San Diego could be staffed by a third grader with a radio, just call a ship four hundred miles off the coast to the west, ask that ship its ambient air temperature, barometric pressure, wind direction and velocity, humidity and precipitation conditions. Write that up, hand it to some very attractive on air personality and bingo, twenty-four hours later astounding accuracy.
The wrench in the works occurs the closer you get to the center of a continental area with those long “reaches” where air move across mountains, hot areas where solar radiation penetrates to the surface, cool areas where the surface is either obscured by clouds or lighter colored and less absorbent. All this convergence makes these areas a virtual battleground of factors, what happens fifty miles away from a weather station quite often bears little resemblance to what is happening to actual the observer. Accurate prediction at such a site is measured in hours, not days. This “map” two-dimensional model is the stage of our learning curve, if you do not believe the “weather” forecast for the next day how could you place any credence in the ability of anyone to predict the climate for the next decade or century?
Furthermore, any model being used for “prediction” is only as accurate as the data it is based on. The hundred thousand feet of atmosphere above the surface in which these variables occur is a virtual unknown. The interface at the earth’s surface is the only place in this vast virtually transparent volume that can be measured easily. Weather balloons, hurricane planes, and other instrument platforms traversing this “volume” still only report basic “linear” cross-sections. The energy and matter transfer exchanges that occur in this dynamic area are so vast and unmonitored that virtually every month someone comes up with a new (and often contradictory) explanation for a process.
Mankind someday will develop an extensive set of tools to measure the millions of cubic miles of atmosphere involved and a matching computer powerful enough to store and evaluate that data. As of yet, nothing exists with that processing capability, much less the ability to build a reliable model for prediction. Until that happens take all this “doomsday” rhetoric with a grain of salt.
Bryan St. James| 12.15.08 @ 2:13PM
Re: Paul Chesser's Truth, Economics, and Politics
There is a host of basic facts that make the theory of recent-term human-driven carbon dioxide output warming as impossible:
1. Over the last 6000 years, there have been 6 universally documented warming and cooling periods with several having more severe highs and lows than today’s changes. How could these have occurred if there was a dramatically smaller human footprint and NO industry to speak of? This indicates a natural forcer of climate.
2. From the 1940’s to the 1970’s, during the peak of human growth and industrial spread, we went through a period of Global Cooling. See Newsweek’s April 1975 alarmist article on impending global cooling (not to be confused with their spate of 2006-2008 global warming catastrophe articles).
3. There has been no cooling since 1998. What happened to continued catastophic warming due to the measured climb in carbon dioxide levels?
And when you look at the above, is it warming OR cooling from what magic temperature? In a 5 billion year old planet, do we think the average temperatures of the last 5, 20, or 250 years are close to meaningful? There have been periods ranging from hundreds to thousands of years where the temperature was several degrees Celsius warmer or colder than today.
If you are interested in open debate on this topic, check out a recent body of scientific evidence by Henrik Svensmark that makes sense with ALL the major aspects of our climatic history. You can read on the internet on his work about the interplay of the sun and cosmic rays and its global effect on cloud cover and therefore, global temperature change. He also has a book out with Nigel Calder called “The Chilling Stars”.
Regards,
Bryan St. James
Blog: The Practical Philospher (http://pracphilosblog.wordpress.com/)
In Minnesota; Current temp: -8 F, windchill -26 F
James M. Mulcahy| 12.18.08 @ 10:32AM
RE: Market Sanity
Mr. Donatelli's make a number of excellent points but misses the fundamental issue. That issue is whether or not the use of MtM accounting in times of financial panic help or hinder the equilibrating process. The idea that using MtM allows investors to get a more accurate picture of a firm's true value is shown to be wrong during gridlocks such as we are currently experiencing. If the goal of MtM is to inform investors then make it mandatory to disclose it in the footnotes to the financial statements and require firms to explain differences between balance sheet amounts and the MtM ones. The investing class will have as much information as before but capital accounts won't be devastated due to a panic situation. The current writedowns imply that the whole subprime market will default and all assets have zero value. Does anyone seriously believe that? While the assets clearly aren't worth 100 cents on the dollar, they are worth much more than they are being carried at.
Making this one simple change: MtM in the footnotes, not on the balance sheets and income statements; would do more to unfreeze the capital markets than everything else done so far, or contemplated doing in the future.