2008: the year global warming was disproved

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

By Christopher Booker

Polar bears will be fine after all Photo: AP

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

Come back, ugly American consumers....

Grow Up!
An Obamafied American Idol Christmas.

By Mark Steyn

I was at the mall two days before Christmas, and it was strangely quiet. So quiet that, sadly, I was able to hear every word of Kelly Clarkson bellowing over the sound system “My Grown-Up Christmas List.” Don’t get me wrong — I love seasonal songs. “Winter Wonderland” — I dig it. “Rudolph” — man, he’s cool, albeit not as literally as Frosty. But “Grown-Up Christmas List” is one of those overwrought ballads of melismatic bombast made for the American Idol crowd. It’s all about how the singer now eschews asking Santa for materialist goodies — beribboned trinkets and gaudy novelties — in favor of selfless grown-up stuff like world peace.

Which is an odd sentiment to hear at a shopping mall.

But it seems to have done the trick. “Retail Sales Plummet,” read the Christmas headline in the Wall Street Journal. “Sales plunged across most categories on shrinking consumer spending.”

Hey, that’s great news, isn’t it? After all, everyone knows Americans consume too much. What was it that then Senator Obama said on the subject? “We can’t just keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at 72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the desert and keep consuming 25 percent of the world’s resources with just 4 percent of the world’s population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead, we’ll be fine.”

And boy, we took the great man’s words to heart. SUV sales have nosedived, and 72 is no longer your home’s thermostat setting but its current value expressed as a percentage of what you paid for it. If I understand then Senator Obama’s logic, in a just world Americans would be 4 percent of the population and consume a fair and reasonable 4 percent of the world’s resources. And in these last few months we’ve made an excellent start toward that blessed utopia: Americans are driving smaller cars, buying smaller homes, giving smaller Christmas presents.

And yet, strangely, President-Elect Obama doesn’t seem terribly happy about the Obamafication of the American economy. He’s proposing some 5.7 bazillion dollar “stimulus” package or whatever it is now to “stimulate” it back into its bad old ways.

And how does the rest of the world, of whose tender sensibilities then Senator Obama was so mindful, feel about the collapse of American consumer excess? They’re aghast, they’re terrified, they’re on a one-way express elevator down to Sub-Basement Level 37 of the abyss with no hope of putting on the brakes unless the global economy can restore aggregate demand. What does all that mumbo-jumbo about “aggregate demand” mean? Well, that’s a fancy term for you — yes, you, Joe Lardbutt, the bloated disgusting embodiment of American excess, driving around in your Chevy Behemoth, getting two blocks to the gallon as you shear the roof off the drive-thru lane to pick up your $7.93 decaf gingersnap-mocha-pepperoni-zebra mussel frappuccino, which makes for a wonderful cool refreshing thirst-quencher after you’ve been working up a sweat watching the plasma TV in your rec room all morning with the thermostat set to 87. The message from the European political class couldn’t be more straightforward: If you crass, vulgar Americans don’t ramp up the demand, we’re kaput. Unless you get back to previous levels of planet-devastating consumption, the planet is screwed.

“Much of the load will fall on the US,” wrote Martin Wolf in the Financial Times, “largely because the Europeans, Japanese and even the Chinese are too inert, too complacent, or too weak.” The European Union has 500 million people, compared with America’s 300 million. Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain are advanced economies whose combined population adds up to that of the United States. Many EU members have enjoyed for decades the enlightened progressive policies Americans won’t be getting until January 20th. Why then are they so “inert” that their economic fortunes depend on the despised moronic Yanks?

Ah, well. To return to Kelly Clarkson — and Barbra Streisand and Michael Buble and Amy Grant — the striking thing about their “Grown-Up Christmas List” is how childish it is. The concerned vocalist tells Santa that what she wants for Christmas is:

“No more lives torn apart,
That wars would never start…”

Whether wars start depends on the intended target’s ability to deter. As to “lives torn apart,” that, too, is a matter of being on the receiving end. If you’re in an African dictatorship, your life can be torn apart. If you’re in a society that values individual liberty, you’ll at least get a shot at tearing your own life apart — you’ll make bad choices, marry a ne’er-do-well, blow your savings, lose your job — but these are ultimately within your power to correct. The passivity of the lyric — the “lives” that get “torn apart” is very revealing. A state in which lives aren’t torn apart will be, by definition, totalitarian: As in The Stepford Wives or The Invasion Of the Body Snatchers, we’ll all be wandering around in glassy-eyed conformity. “Lives” will no longer be “torn apart” because they’re no longer lives, but simply the husks of a centrally controlled tyranny. To live is messy but liberating: Free societies enable the citizenry to fulfill their potential — to innovate, to create, to accumulate — while recognizing that some of their number will fail. But to attempt to insulate free peoples from moral hazard is debilitating and ultimately fatal. To Martin Wolf’s list of a Europe “too inert, too complacent, too weak,” we might add “too old”: Healthy societies recharge their batteries by the aged and wealthy lending their savings to the young and eager. But Germany is a population of prosperous seniors with no grandchildren to lend to. Japan is a society of great invention with insufficient youth to provide a domestic market. That’s why if you’re Sony or Ikea or any other great global brand, you want access to America for your product. That’s why economic recovery will be driven by the U.S., and not by Euro-Japanese entities long marinated in Obamanomics.

One final thought on “My Grown-Up Christmas List.” The first two lines always give me a chuckle:

“Do you remember me?
I sat upon your knee…”

When was the last time you saw a child sit upon a Santa’s knee? Rod Liddle in the British Spectator reports that at a top London department store Santa sits at one end of the bench while a large “X” directs the moppet to a place down the other end, well out of arm’s reach. For even Santa Claus is just another pedophile in waiting. Naughty or nice? Who really knows? Best not to take any chances. That’s another way societies seize up — by obsessing on phantom threats rather than real ones.

Are free peoples now merely vulnerable infants in need of protection from the pedophile Santa of global capitalism? This is the issue that will determine the future: Euro-style state-directed protectionist sclerosis vs. individual liberty in all its messiness. I know what I want on my “Grown-Up Christmas List.”

A Story of Christmas Past, and Christmas Future?

Courtesy of Dr. John Rossi, as shared with Glenn Beck

Every once in a while, a very special story comes along to remind us how blessed we’ve been in our Republic -- and how threatened it is as we rack up bills totaling trillions of dollars in IOUs and the spectre of massive inflation, socialism and the systematic destruction of personal freedoms continues to grow like a cancer in America.

Glenn Beck read this on his radio program on December 8th. It was written by Dr. John Rossi, who handed it to Glenn while he was making his book tour rounds in Florida earlier this month. Here it is:

“Once upon a time there was a very happy couple. Their names were Freedom and Capitalism.

They married and had many wonderful children. Their names were Independence, Self-worth, Hard-work, Dignity, Charity, Faith and Hope. They all lived happily for many years and the children respected their parents and loved them both very much.

But Freedom and Capitalism later had several naughty children, very naughty. They weren't so respectful and never appreciated their parents.

Their names were Wealth-envy, Environmentalism, Animal-rights Activism, Racism, Feminism, and Ultra-liberalism.

These evil children blamed their parents for everything and hated their parents Freedom and Capitalism. In fact, these unappreciative children began to hate their parents, since they didn't realize their parents gave them everything they had and didn't realize that they wouldn't even exist without their parents.

They hated their parents so much that they began to plot with their neighbors to kill their parents and to keep their home.

Their neighbors' names were Socialism and Communism, whoon the outside were a very lovely couple, but inside they were very, very ugly.

They and their children, whose names were Despair, Poverty, Suffering, and Repression had been welcomed into every neighborhood they had lived in. Eventually, they were thrown out of each neighborhood after years of suffering and the loss of many lives.

So late one night in total darkness -- because Socialism and Communism did everything in darkness and away from the light of the truth -- while everyone was asleep, Wealth-envy, Environmentalism, Feminism, Animal-rights, and their younger obnoxious brother, Hollywood, disguised Socialism and Communism from recognition and let them into the house of Freedom and Capitalism.

It wasn't hard to sneak in, for the two parents, Freedom and Capitalism, always left their gate and their door open for everyone.

Wealth-envy led the way because he knew the house oh, so well. The evil children then led Socialism and Communism throughout the house, one room at a time.

And one at a time they killed Hard-work, then Dignity, then Independence, Self-worth, Charity and Faith.

They finally found the room of Freedom and Capitalism and killed them as well. It wasn't hard to do, since Freedom and Capitalism always left their door unlocked and open for everyone.

Only Hope survived. Hope survived hiding in the closet. She ran out during the ensuing celebration.

After Socialism and Communism moved in, things went well for a while, but then they decided they didn't like Freedom and Capitalism's evil children, either. They wanted their own children to have the rooms in their new house.

So late one night in total darkness -- because Socialism and Communism did everything in darkness and away from the light of the truth -- they sent their children to kill Freedom and Capitalism's remaining evil children.

Poverty and Suffering killed Environmentalism and Animal-rights first, for they were so hungry, they had to kill all the animals for food and the trees for their wood. And besides, why should animals have rights if people don't?

Hopelessness killed Liberalism, the retarded brother of Communism. Then Poverty, Suffering, and Repression killed Feminism, the retarded sister of Liberalism.

And Hollywood, the young obnoxious son of Freedom and Capitalism, was also killed.

Finally, Wealth-envy, who had originally led the attack on his parents, died at the hands of Poverty since there was nothing left to envy.

So Socialism and Communism and their children, Poverty, Despair, Hopelessness, Suffering, Repression lived in the once beautiful home of Freedom and Capitalism which was now in great disrepair and they all lived sadly ever after.

All that was left of the family of Freedom and Capitalism was Hope, who was quietly hiding in the woods.”

A Lovely Christmas Story 4 U

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123008300586132083.html

The Most Politically Incorrect Topic: Porn

'Tis the Season for Porn
Cultural Poison

By Mona Charen


I will be called names for writing this column. It always happens. Raise the issue of the pornification of the culture and its fanatical devotees will come gunning for you. If they hope to be intimidating, they’ve forgotten what delete keys are for.

It’s Christmastime and the Fox News Channel, the most conservative of the major media outlets, is running an ad for PajamaGrams, “the only gift guaranteed to get your wife or girlfriend to take her clothes off.” The ads feature soft porn images of women disrobing and tossing slips and bras to the floor. The ads run at all times of the day and night. Thus do we usher in the season supposedly devoted to the Prince of Peace and the Festival of Lights.

We all know how far the pornification has gotten. A mainstream movie apparently treats the subject as cute and fun (Zack and Miri Make a Porno) and it runs at the multiplex next to Four Christmases and Madagascar. Hotels offer pornographic movies and omit the titles from the final bill. Victoria’s Secret graces every mall — and its windows resemble the red light district of Amsterdam. Viagra and its imitators are hawked ceaselessly. Television, music videos, and supermarket checkout magazines contain the kinds of suggestive words and images that would once have been labeled soft porn.

We know this. But what is less well understood is the world of hard-core porn that was once the province of dingy “adults only” stores in the harsher parts of town but is now available to everyone at the click of a mouse.

Last week the Witherspoon Institute convened a conference on pornography at Princeton University and invited scholars from a variety of fields to contribute. The statistics are mind-numbing. Pamela Paul, author of Pornified, reported that “Americans rent upwards of 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs per year. About one in five rented videos is porn. … Men look at pornography online more than they look at any other subject. And 66 percent of 18-34 year old men visit a pornographic site every month.”

They are not, Paul and others explained, looking at Playboy magazine-like images of naked women. Instead, they are descending into darker and darker realms where sadism, fetishes, and every imaginable oddity are proffered. Sex and violence are offered together. Women are presented in a degraded — not to say disgusting — fashion.

Surely only people with peculiar sexual tastes are drawn to this sort of thing, right? Not exactly. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, author of The Brain That Changes Itself, noted that pornography use actually changes the brains of consumers. Like other addictions, pornography use breeds tolerance and the need for more intensity to get the desired result. He quoted Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, in which a college kid asks casually, “Anybody got porn?” He is told that there are magazines on the third floor. He responds, “I’ve built up a tolerance to magazines … I need videos.” Tolerance is the medically correct term, Doidge notes, which is why pornography becomes more and more graphic.

The men (and they are overwhelmingly men) who become hooked on this bilge are often miserable about it. They know that it affects their capacity to love and be loved by real women. As Doidge explained, “Pornographers promise healthy pleasure and a release from sexual tension, but what they often deliver is an addiction, tolerance, and an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male patients I worked with often craved pornography but didn’t like it.” Hugh Hefner, the godfather of mainstream porn, apparently does not have normal sex with his many girlfriends. Despite the presence of up to seven comely young women in his bed at a time, he uses porn for sexual satisfaction. Think about that.

Internet pornography truly is, as one researcher put it, “a hidden public health hazard.” It isn’t cute or funny. Relationships are crashing, women are suffering in silence, and men and boys are becoming entrapped by it. The Witherspoon Institute has done a valuable thing by starting a more public conversation about this cultural poison.

Hope you're enjoying global warming these days :)

Climate Crisis = Logic Crisis
Larry Anderson
Dec 19

Al Gore is right! Sort of. The current debate over climate change is over. At least, it is over in terms of a logical and unbiased inquiry.

The debate over "climate change" is no longer a matter of science. In the past forty years, the proponents of "climate change" have written and rewritten their hypotheses to fit the empirical facts. In logic this is sometimes called "The fallacy of saving the hypothesis." There is no honest discussion when the topic of a debate is constantly controlled, and occasionally altered, by the proponents of one side of the argument. Climate change proponents have been doing this for years.

I distinctly remember the first time I had an argument with someone about "climate change." It was a warm spring day in April of 1975. I was walking across the campus at Harvard headed for lunch. A fellow classmate (we were both juniors) ran up to me. He was really excited. He hollered out:

"Have you heard? The ice age is coming. They've proven it with computer studies at MIT."

"How did they prove that there is an ice age coming with computers?" I asked my friend.

"The planet is getting colder. They have the data. And it is going to keep getting colder. They have these computer models --"

I stopped him right there. I knew enough about computers to understand that they were not up to accurately predicting short-term weather patterns -- let alone an ice age.

"No way. Computers aren't that powerful. "

"But they have the data and they have computers!"

"I know they do. But computers spit out whatever they are programmed to spit out. Load a computer with the data that the world has been getting colder; ask it what the weather will be tomorrow, and what do you think the computer is going to tell you? The world is getting hotter? If it does you'd better get a better computer. You hungry?" I replied and I continued on my way to lunch.

The original "climate change" hypothesis was that the planet was getting colder and that it would continue getting colder. That was a very simple hypothesis and was easily proven or refuted. Planet keeps getting colder = hypothesis correct. Planet gets warmer = hypothesis incorrect.

The world got warmer instead of colder. The "climate change" hypothesis was rewritten. This time the planet was facing a catastrophic meltdown. The world was not only getting warmer -- it was going to keep getting warmer at an ever increasing and life-threatening rate.

I remember this hypothesis too. It was scary. Computers were fed information that the world was now heating up and asked, again, "what will the weather be tomorrow?" This time the computers spit out: "hotter." Good computers.

The computers said it would be even hotter the day after tomorrow. Hotter still next week, and next month. And in a few years? Forget about it.

The hypothesis predicted, and the computers affirmed, an exponential increase in temperatures was being caused by the exponential increase in man made green house gases. Al Gore's famous (and refuted) "hockey stick graph" proved it. In other words, the earth would heat fast, then faster, then faster still. Man made global warming was predicted to be a run away train on a steep downhill incline that had to be stopped and stopped immediately.

That was the hypothesis. It was simple. And it was just as easily proved or refuted as the global cooling hypothesis. World gets steadily and increasingly warmer = hypothesis correct. Planet gets colder = hypothesis incorrect.

But while concentrations of CO2, the culprit behind man made global warming, continued to rise -- the temperature did not. The empirical data refused to cooperate with the hypothesis. In the last few years the earth's temperature has leveled off. It may be dropping.

Oops. Another hypothesis bites the dust. Not to worry. The hypothesis has been rewritten, once again. Now we have a "climate crisis." Long term global warming is causing short term global cooling that will, eventually, result in long term global warming. Really. That is the new hypothesis.

The official reason being given is that the "weather is not the climate." For those readers not skilled in dialectical huckstering, the argument seems to be that the weather can get colder while the climate gets warmer.

Proponents of global warming finally have an irrefutable, because incoherent, theory guaranteed to win any debate. This hypothesis cannot be refuted. If the "weather" cools it proves that the "climate" is getting warmer. If the weather gets warmer then the climate gets warmer. As the barker shouts out at the carnival,
"Winner! Winner! Winner!"

This latest hypothesis is a violation of the most basic of the laws of logic: the principle of non-contradiction. Something cannot be both A and not A. The weather cannot get colder while the climate gets hotter anymore than the earth can be flat while the world is round. This is not science, or logic; this is unabashed nonsense.

Yes. Climate science has come to this: We are now being told, in effect, to ignore the data and believe the hypothesis. I have recently written that global warming is not a science -- it is a religion. I take it back. Global warming, aka climate crisis, is now a crisis of logic. In other words, it is insanity.

Larrey Anderson is a writer, a philosopher, and submissions editor for American Thinker. His latest award-winning novel is The Order of the Beloved. His memoir, Underground: Life and Survival in the Russian Black Market, has just been released.

Obama's friend in big trouble: Governor of Illinois aka Blago

A cornucopia of corrupt crapulence.

By Jonah Goldberg

There are so many things to love about the Rod Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

Wait. That’s not right. There are so many bleeping things to love about this bleeping-bleep Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

For starters, the folks at the Chicago Tribune are Christmas Pony Happy because Blago tried to strong-arm the Trib’s owners to fire members of the editorial board. Instead, Trib editors will get to have a big tailgate party outside Blago’s cell window.

Newspaper people love that sort of thing.

For the more historically minded, it’s a time for nostalgia. The past comes alive as Chicago’s grand tradition of corruption is sustained for another generation. As the Chicago Tribune once wrote, “corruption has been as much a part of the landscape as corn, soybeans and skyscrapers.” According to the Chicago Sun-Times, as of 2006 — when Blago’s predecessor, George Ryan, was sent to prison for racketeering — 79 elected officials had been convicted of corruption in the past 30 years. Among the perps: 27 aldermen, 19 judges, 15 state legislators, three governors, two congressmen, one mayor, two turtledoves, and a partridge in a stolen pear tree. Especially in this holiday season, it’s so very important to keep traditions alive for the kids. In a sense, Blago did it for the children.

Obama's friend in big trouble: Governor of Illinois aka Blago

A cornucopia of corrupt crapulence.

By Jonah Goldberg

There are so many things to love about the Rod Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

Wait. That’s not right. There are so many bleeping things to love about this bleeping-bleep Blagojevich scandal it’s hard to know where to begin.

For starters, the folks at the Chicago Tribune are Christmas Pony Happy because Blago tried to strong-arm the Trib’s owners to fire members of the editorial board. Instead, Trib editors will get to have a big tailgate party outside Blago’s cell window.

Newspaper people love that sort of thing.

For the more historically minded, it’s a time for nostalgia. The past comes alive as Chicago’s grand tradition of corruption is sustained for another generation. As the Chicago Tribune once wrote, “corruption has been as much a part of the landscape as corn, soybeans and skyscrapers.” According to the Chicago Sun-Times, as of 2006 — when Blago’s predecessor, George Ryan, was sent to prison for racketeering — 79 elected officials had been convicted of corruption in the past 30 years. Among the perps: 27 aldermen, 19 judges, 15 state legislators, three governors, two congressmen, one mayor, two turtledoves, and a partridge in a stolen pear tree. Especially in this holiday season, it’s so very important to keep traditions alive for the kids. In a sense, Blago did it for the children.

9/11 Conspiracy theories: was it Bin Laden? or Bush?

There's a ton of "documentaries" and internet conspiracy theories claiming that not Bin Laden, but Bush is the real evil genius behind 9/11.

See how engineers and scientists take apart these ridiculous theories:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/3491861.html

Obama's Plan to Transform America

By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama has garnered praise from center to right -- and has highly irritated the left -- with the centrism of his major appointments. Because Obama's own beliefs remain largely opaque, his appointments have led to the conclusion that he intends to govern from the center.

Obama the centrist? I'm not so sure.

Take the foreign policy team: Hillary Clinton, James Jones, and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But the choice was far less ideological than practical. Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about -- his domestic agenda.

Similarly his senior economic team, the brilliant trio of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker: centrist, experienced and mainstream. But their principal task is to stabilize the financial system, a highly pragmatic task in which Obama has no particular ideological stake.

A functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veterans to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so that Obama can address his real ambition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's.

As Obama revealingly said just last week, "this painful crisis also provides us with an opportunity to transform our economy to improve the lives of ordinary people." Transformation is his mission. Crisis provides the opportunity. The election provides him the power.

The deepening recession creates the opportunity for federal intervention and government experimentation on a scale unseen since the New Deal. A Republican administration has already done the ideological groundwork with its unprecedented intervention, culminating in the forced partial nationalization of nine of the largest banks, the kind of stuff that happens in Peronist Argentina with a gun on the table.

Additionally, Henry Paulson's invention of the number $700 billion forever altered our perception of imaginable government expenditure. Another $20 billion for Citigroup? Lunch money.

Moreover, no one in Congress even pretends that spending should be pay as you go (i.e., new expenditures balanced by higher taxes or lower spending), as the Democrats disingenuously promised when they took over Congress last year. Even some conservative economists are urging stimulus (although structured far differently from Democratic proposals). And public opinion, demanding action, will buy any stimulus package of any size. The result: undreamed amounts of money at Obama's disposal.

To meet the opportunity, Obama has the political power that comes from a smashing electoral victory. It not only gave him a personal mandate. It increased Democratic majorities in both houses, thereby demonstrating coattails and giving him clout. And by running on nothing much more than change and (often contradictory) hopes, he has given himself enormous freedom of action.

Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public -- and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history. (I include here the extrasolar planets.)

It begins with a near $1 trillion stimulus package. This is where Obama will show himself ideologically. It is his one great opportunity to plant the seeds for everything he cares about: a new green economy, universal health care, a labor resurgence, government as benevolent private-sector "partner." It is the community organizer's ultimate dream.

Ironically, when the economy tanked in mid-September, it was assumed that both presidential candidates could simply forget about their domestic agendas because with $700 billion drained by financial system rescues, not a penny would be left to spend on anything else.

On the contrary. With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president -- who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in -- to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Don't be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn't get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.

A Professor comments on indoctrination...

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/professors-indoctrinating-students-not-in-our-university/

A bit more on the left and political correctness

The campaigns of the socialist left, under the noble-sounding banners of “social justice” and “equality,” have inflicted catastrophe in many forms—poverty, moral decline, criminality, violence, illness, and death—upon countless millions of people over the course of the past half-century. The programs and policies that led to these disastrous outcomes were unfailingly promoted by the left—under the false flag of “liberalism”—as expressions of a high-minded idealism that promised to spawn an era of unprecedented societal harmony, and to literally create the world anew.

The leftist model holds that non-socialist societies are composed exclusively of dominators and the dominated, oppressors and the oppressed. The alleged cause of this social arrangement is the economic system of free-market capitalism, which the left considers the root of all manner of social ills and vices—racism, sexism, alienation, homophobia, imperialism.In the calculus of the left, capitalism is the agent of tyranny and exploitation that presses its iron boot upon the proverbial necks of a wide array of victim groups—blacks and other minorities, women, homosexuals, immigrants, and the poor, to name but a few.

To eliminate America’s inherent injustices, the left seeks to return to a status society where the power hierarchy is inverted, where the groups now said to be oppressed become the privileged races, classes and gender of the new social order. The left’s quest to transform the “dominated” into dominators, and vice versa, draws its inspiration from the Communist Manifesto, which asserts that “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

The struggle identified by the Manifesto was that of the proletarians and their intellectual vanguard, who, armed with the radical utopian vision of socialism, were expected to launch a series of civil wars in their respective countries -- battles that would topple the “ruling classes” and the illegitimate societies they had established.

According to Marxist theory, these conflicts would rip each targeted society apart and create a new revolutionary world from its ruins. And if the success of such revolutions was contingent upon immense suffering, so be it. No purgative campaign -- whether entirely nonviolent, or the very embodiment of unrestrained savagery -- would be too dear a price to pay for the vaporization of the old order and the creation of a “progressive” future.

Toward the realization of this “progressive” future, the contemporary left has formed a broad alliance, or united front, composed of radicals representing a host of demographic groups that are allegedly victimized by American capitalism and its related injustices.

Each constituent of this alliance -- minorities, homosexuals, women, immigrants, the poor -- contributes its voice to the chorus that aims to discredit the United States as an abuser of the vulnerable. Nor is the left’s list of victim groups limited only to human beings; even certain species of shrubs, trees, insects, and rodents qualify as victims in the worldview of leftwing environmentalists and animal rights activists.

An antidote to political correctness

Click on the image above.

There's a great series of 'Politically Incorrect Guides' that will give you a very interesting perspective on many issues.

I'll add more links here from time to time.

You can visit whenever :)

Thank goodness Canadian students don't have to put up with that political correctness crap...

A student emailed me recently:

Hello Sir,

It's me John, a student of your EAC493 class a few semesters ago. I have now moved on to Ryerson University to pursue a Business degree and Accounting designation. The business school and classes are going well and nothing to complain about.

However, I have to say you were so right on the craziness I have seen in just 5 weeks in my liberal studies class. I got brave and took a politics (power, change, and technology) and now I'm paying for it. In just 5 weeks we've been told on how we need to closely pursue affirmative action and how filling minority quotas is some important in todays work environment.

Also, I've learned how how white technology has marginalized minorities and women, and how technology is built to keep them down and keep the rich in power.......Not to mention on how information technology was built to spy on us and help corporations keep the workforce work harder and faster.

It is fact that America is stealing oil from Iraq, (no explanation because its beyond the scope of the course) and where soon going to find out how we are being spied on by the government.

Nothing what I've stated does our teacher present as fact but as opinion, and we are all open to disagree. The problem is that when someone in the class does disagree, our teacher says the words "well" or "but" and goes back to her original message.

Our book is articles from anti-American, anti technology authors and we need to read and talk about this crap.

Anyway I've gone on to long but just wanted to say, you were right and now I see how big this really is................Not just the teacher, also the students............I feel so out of place when I move from the business building into the other Ryerson buildings.

Merry Christmas, everyone :)

Any thoughts you have about the course will be appreciated...even slightly critical ones :) No extra credits for kissups.

Annoyed with the younger generation....

"I retired from the military a few years ago and now find myself working as a supervisor in an office with a lot of people who are half my age. They ALL voted for Obama, and the one thing they all have in common: NONE of them were in the workforce during the Clinton years. They only became aware of something called "politics" under Bush. They get all of their news from the late night talk shows, Oprah, and morning radio jocks, so their political views are extremely Left, but they don't understand what that means. And, typical of all Lefties, they cannot engage in intelligent conversation about anything because if you don't fully agree with them, then you're wrong and you're an idiot. Their generation represents sad proof of the effects of dumbing down America."

W13 C1 Notes

Below is the last short assignment with questions. I moved the date back two days, till next Sunday. Also, you'll see the exam questions.

By Wednesday, I expect to have Blackboard updated, so all but the final short assignment will be there.

Remember to bring snacks!!!!!!!!

Final exam information

Here are the exam questions. I want you to put thought into prepping for this exam. You may, of course, bring the two articles by Prager and Lind, as well as Bias. A non-electronic dictionary is fine, too. Do not bring notes of any kind.

You'll have two hours, so if you've prepared, that will be plenty of time.

All the best :)

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcmw4842_173hpq3tcfv

Last Short Assignment

The due date is now Sunday, Dec. 7th.

Read and respond to this article about Political Correctness. I will post up a few specific questions for your response.

This will be one of the articles that you'll use for the final exam as well. I'll let you know soon about the exam.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcmw4842_172dz9k8mq6


1. What is political correctness?

2. What are its goals?