The Conservative Approach to Environmentalism

BestView has been critical of the fraudulent climate change (nee warming) propaganda, but this should not construed as opposition to all such efforts. Instead, we should direct efforts toward:

(1) Combating general forms of pollution, (2) cutting energy bills, (3) reducing dependence on energy imports from rogue regimes and (4) increasing the diversity of our overall energy supply. I'll support almost any 'green measure' that makes significant contributions to those four policy goals.

Obama's Next Trip

President Obama will travel to Copenhagen for one day of climate summitry next month and then proceed to Norway to get his laughable Peace Prize. BestView will follow the trip closely to learn who he finds to bow down to and for on this trip.

Remember this?

P.J. O’Rourke quoted in his book “All The Trouble In The World”, one noted environmentalist who said back in the Eighties;

“We have to strike a balance between offering up scary scenarios- and actually telling the truth.”

The fellow who said that was none other than then U.S. Senator Al Gore.

Fraud in New Zealand Climate Data Revealed

First the incriminating e-mails and now proof that the climate scientists in New Zealand manipulated temperature data to enhance the notion that there has been global warming to an extent that suggests man contributed to the phenomenon. Read it all here. Soon we will all be forced to concede that the science of climatology is as sound as the science of astrology or phrenology.

Sympathy for Liberal Press

BestView has profound sympathy for the New York Times, the liberal TV networks, and other outlets which have been duped by Al Gore and fraudulent scientists who have perpetuated the anthropogenic global warming (now change) myth. It will be tres painful to climb back off that limb which any reasonable person must do now that the e-mails have confirmed there is no there there in the climate change data. In an earlier day, the flat earth proponents had a similar problem. Don't look for idiots like Barbara Boxer and John Kerry to give up easily as they try to tax carbon as a pollutant, however. The interesting situation to watch is fellow travelers like John McCain and Lindsey Graham climb off the wagon. It will be fun to watch.

Gold

Demand for gold is growing faster than supply. In London, market makers are trying to settle gold futures contracts with more contracts, not bullion, because there's not enough gold to deliver. Buyers who elect to forego payment in gold are offered cash premiums for doing so. If you really want the bullion, you can buy the ZKB Gold ETF on the Zurich Stock Exchange and take it to the Zurich Cantonal Bank, owned by the Canton of Zurich. There you are given the actual bullion, which can then be stored in Zurich. This situation could lead to what is known as a short squeeze in gold. If there is enough demand for physical gold (instead of paper with promised gold) the price of gold will be bid up just to satisfy the demand and if the commodity is scarce, the price could be truly fantastic. That would not be good, but if it happens, you want to own some gold. This situation has come about due to the loss of confidence in the dollar and the budget deficits in U.S.'s future which will lead hedge funds and countries to put their money into something that will not lose its value over time. Evidence? We're seeing demand for gold all over the world. Pension funds allocate about 5% as protection against the weakening dollar. Chinese citizens are encouraged by their government to hold gold, not dollars. On Nov. 18, Russia's central bank announced it would buy any and all gold its sister organization, the State Depositary for Precious Metals and Gems, was willing to sell. Now the Vietnamese central bank has granted quotas to import 10 tons of gold for use by its banking system and gold traders. India just bought 200 tons of gold and announced it is in the market for more.

BestView has U.S. gold coins in the safe deposit box and will be adding more with an intention of having 5% of assets in gold. If you think Obama is going to reduce spending, forgo his plans to pass new taxes, and defend the dollar, buying gold is not a good idea. If you want to buy some gold coins, the company I use to buy coins online is Coast to Coast Coins at http://www.coastcoin.com/
They have reasonable prices, good communication and reliable delivery of quality coins which are as advertised. Can't ask for more than that.

The jobless demographics

Copy and paste.

http://cohort11.americanobserver.net/latoyaegwuekwe/multimediafinal.html

The California Budget

In California the current budget is $6.3 billion out of balance and the 2010-11 budget has another $14.4 billion hole. If some of the bleaker economic forecasts kicking around are accurate and/or the state doesn't act quickly to close the gap, the $20.7 billion problem could easily balloon to $25 billion or more. As temporary tax increases expire and deferred spending promises come due, the state faces annual deficits in the $20 billion range for many years to come. What to do? Raise taxes, cut spending or create more budget gimmicks? The California Teachers Association-led Education Coalition fired a salvo of complaints about past cuts on schools, and the powerful Service Employees International Union declared, "Budget solutions must include new revenue." February's temporary tax increases have already stirred a backlash, and hitting taxpayers again in the midst of this record-deep recession would be politically almost impossible. They've scraped the bottom of the gimmick barrel, voters are livid and new taxes are functionally off the table. This will be one of the bloodiest skirmishes the Capitol has ever seen – with the only option being that the most populous state in the nation default on its debts.

Read it all here and remember this when you see unions asking for more power.

Climate fraud analysis

Summary of the best analysis of the climategate fraud. Read it all here

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money-Phil Jones has raked in a total of £13.7 million in grants from the British government-which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It's the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being "confused" by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.

This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.

Get a set, Bush

When G.H.W. Bush was President the liberal press tagged him with the "wimp" label. BestView now concludes that his son is disgustingly wimpy as manifested by his silence. Day after day Obama goes on television and utters degrading appraisals of his performance as President. It is perhaps understandable that Bush wait a year or so, but the time has come for George to stand up for himself. Staying silent is not justified by any measure. Man up, George.

World's Greatest Scientific Scandal

BestView was wrong the other day when it was posited that the world would ignore the damning evidence that anthropogenic global warming was a hoax, but evidently, and thankfully, this is not to be. The world has taken note and conclusions such as this one in the U.K. is beginning to shake up the Al Gore crew. Read the entire article here.

These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:

Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

Sad wealth transfer

From IBD: Read it all to confirm how the young people in the U.S. are being scammed by us old folks and their government. The sad thing is the young are too distracted, too unsophisticated, and even too poorly educated to realize what is happening to them as they fall for the glib Obama message that "change" and a new way of doing business in Washington will accrue to them during his administration. In fact their future will be severely compromised by the socialist they helped elect.

In fiscal 2008 — the last "normal" year before the economic crisis — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (programs wholly or primarily dedicated to the elderly) totaled $1.3 trillion, 43% of federal spending and more than twice military spending.

Because workers, not retirees, are the primary taxpayers, this spending involves huge transfers to the old.

Comes now the House-passed health care "reform" bill that, amazingly, would extract more subsidies from the young. It mandates that health insurance premiums for older Americans be no more than twice the level of younger Americans. That's much less than the actual health spending gap between young and old.

Spending for those aged 60-64 is four to five times greater than those 18-24. So, the young would overpay for insurance which — under the House bill — people must buy: 20- and 30-somethings would subsidize premiums for 50- and 60-somethings. (Those 65 and over receive Medicare.)

Saturday Night Live skewers Obama

This segment of SNL is really telling. When he loses the liberal comedy folks, Obama is not winning. Listen here.

The British Press on Scientific Fraud

From the London Times. Read it all.

Last week an apparent hacker obtained access to their computers and published in the blogosphere part of their internal e-mail traffic. And the CRU has conceded that the at least some of the published e-mails are genuine.

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.

Fraudulant Science Revealed

Any scientist who had looked at the data for 5 minutes knew immediately that the science behind anthropogenic climate change claims was bogus and didn't make sense. Al Gore, of course, called the science "settled". Well, now a series of E-mails between some of the scientists responsible for the hoax has been obtained via computer hacking. A very good rundown of these e-mail exchanges is given here, but the important thing to look for is how long---if ever--- the scam remains out of the main stream media which has bought so completely into the story. As of right now, the bloggers have it to themselves, but maybe Fox News will blow the thing open and others will not be able to avoid it. Should be interesting.

From the blog:

A CEO is going to hire a new accountant and summons a series of candidates. He asks each applicant, "What is two plus two?" The first two candidates answer, "Four." They don't get the job. The third responds, "What do you want it to be?" He gets hired. The climate alarmists' attitude toward data appears to me much the same as that fictional accountant's attitude toward arithmetic.

Climate change causes prostitution

Since there never has been prostitution before, this must be right: Read the rest of this nonsense here.

The effects of climate change have driven women in communities in coastal areas in poor countries like the Philippines into dangerous work, and sometimes even the flesh trade, a United Nations official said.

Suneeta Mukherjee, country representative of the United Nations Food Population Fund (UNFPA), said women in the Philippines are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the country.

“Climate change could reduce income from farming and fishing, possibly driving some women into sex work and thereby increase HIV infection," Mukherjee said during the Wednesday launch of the UNFPA annual State of World Population Report in Pasay City.

Youtube test

BestView is looking into putting videos up, but until this is done, copy the following and paste in the address line of a web page to see the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysKAVyXi0J4&feature=player_embedded

World's Biggest Idiot?

Al Gore may not be the world's biggest idiot, but BestView has him in first place right now. This clown recently claimed, in support of geothermal energy, that the core of the earth was "several million degrees" and thus a good source of alternative energy. (Read about it here)

The temperature at the earth's core, 4,000 miles down, is usually quoted as 5,000 degrees Celsius, while some contrarian geophysicists have posted claims up to 9,000 degrees. The temperature at the surface of the Sun is around 6,000 degrees Celsius, while at the center, where nuclear fusion is going on, things get up over 10 million degrees.

This the same grasp of science this moron brings to the global warming situation.

Obama's loss of vision

During his campaign for the White House President Obama said, “We have seen Afghanistan worsen, deteriorate. We need more troops there. We need more resources there… I would send two to three additional brigades to Afghanistan.”
He promised to send another ten to fifteen thousand troops to help those already there. He also declared that the war in Afghanistan was the proper front in the war against terror. Now that he is Commander-in-Chief, his vision seems to be less clear. The military commanders gave the President four troop deployment options earlier this week but he refused all four. Not for military reasons but because of some hooey about the corruption of the government in Kabul and their inability to run a fair election. Mr. President, if our support for governments was based on whether they are corrupt or not and could run a fair election, we would have pulled federal funding from Chicago years ago. The problem with pulling out of Afghanistan, or Chicago for that matter, is that they would fall into violent anarchy.
Read it all here.

Kangaroo Court?

If you bring a terrorist to trial in a U.S. court and promise that he will be convicted and executed, does that lend credibility to your claim that the world will look with favor on our system of jurisprudence or does it suggest to the world that we have a President and Attorney General who openly advocate kangaroo courts?

Jobs according to Obama

More evidence we need them in charge of our health care:

In Arizona's 9th Congressional District, 30 jobs have been saved or created with just $761,420 in federal stimulus spending. At least that's what the website set up by the Obama Administration to track the $787 billion stimulus says.

There's one problem, though: There is no 9th Congressional District in Arizona; the state has only eight Congressional Districts.

There's no 86th Congressional District in Arizona either, but the government's recovery.gov Web site says $34 million in stimulus money has been spent there.

In fact, Recovery.gov lists hundreds of millions spent and hundreds of jobs created in Congressional districts that don't exist.

In Oklahoma, for example, the site lists more than $19 million in spending -- and 15 jobs created -- on Congressional districts that don't exist. In Iowa, it shows $10.6 million spent  and 39 jobs created -- in non-existent districts.

In Connecticut's 42nd District (which also does not exist), the website claims 25 jobs created with zero stimulus dollars.

New infection?

As a former practicing microbiologist, the following caught my eye and I'll be following it.

Read the whole article here.

A cocktail of three flu viruses are reported to have mutated into a single pneumonic plague, which it is believed may be far more dangerous than swine flu. The death toll has reached 189 and more than 1 million people have been infected, most of them in the nine regions of Western Ukraine.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko has called in the World Health Organisation and a team of nine specialists are carrying out tests in Kiev and Lviv to identify the virus. Samples have been sent to London for analysis.

President Yushchenko said: “People are dying. The epidemic is killing doctors. This is absolutely inconceivable in the 21st Century.”

In a TV interview, the President added: “Unlike similar epidemics in other countries, three causes of serious viral infections came together simultaneously in Ukraine – two seasonal flus and the Californian flu

“Virologists conclude that this combination of infections may produce an even more aggressive new virus as a result of mutation.”

Disgraceful

Guess the party affiliation

From the Washington Post:

The jury of nine women and three men chosen for Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon's trial on theft charges will begin work Thursday, but first a judge will weigh new allegations involving another batch of gift cards said to have been donated by a developer not previously named in the case.

Read the whole article here and see if you can find where the good mayor was identified as a democrat.

Wrong Again

In 2005, global warming worriers warned, as they tend to do after all adverse or anomalous environmental events, that Hurricane Katrina was caused by global warming and foreshadowed an increase in the number and destructiveness of hurricanes.

As this year's Atlantic hurricane season ends, only three hurricanes have formed — half the average of the last 50 years — and none has hit the United States.

Read the entire George Will column here.

Upshot of the Kelo Decision by liberal Supreme Court

From the Wall Street Journal:

The Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London stands as one of the worst in recent years, handing local governments carte blanche to seize private property in the name of economic development. Now, four years after that decision gave Susette Kelo's land to private developers for a project including a hotel and offices intended to enhance Pfizer Inc.'s nearby corporate facility, the pharmaceutical giant has announced it will close its research and development headquarters in New London, Connecticut.

The aftermath of Kelo is the latest example of the futility of using eminent domain as corporate welfare. While Ms. Kelo and her neighbors lost their homes, the city and the state spent some $78 million to bulldoze private property for high-end condos and other "desirable" elements. Instead, the wrecked and condemned neighborhood still stands vacant, without any of the touted tax benefits or job creation.

That's especially galling because the five Supreme Court Justices cited the development plan as a major factor in rationalizing their Kelo decision. Justice Anthony Kennedy called the plan "comprehensive," while Justice John Paul Stevens insisted that "The city has carefully formulated a development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community, including, but not limited to, new jobs and increased tax revenue." So much for that.

If Sowell is worried we should all be

Even if this country can survive intact and unharmed after the Obama administration-- or, heaven help us, two terms of Obama-- the gullibility that led to his being elected in the first place will still be there for some other slick demagogue to come along and get the power to put the American way of life, and even our physical safety, at risk again.

Read it all here.

Liberal Speak

One must work hard to keep up with changes in the way liberals refer to their cherished notions that the world at large has rejected. When it became obvious that the worry over global warming was bunk since the world is actually getting colder, they started to worry about climate change as if the climate has ever done anything else. The latest is a liberal demand that the tax payers cough up their tax money for reproductive health care. They are certain this sounds better than subsidizing the woman's ability to abort a living baby.

Health Reform

Misplaced worries?

From the Washington Post

Law enforcement officials also faced questions about whether they had missed possible warning signs. Six months ago, investigators came across Internet postings, allegedly by Hasan, that indicated sympathy for suicide bombers and empathized with the plight of Muslim civilians killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a federal official briefed on the situation. The official, and another source, said investigators never confirmed whether Hasan was the author of the postings and did not pursue the matter.

The postings were among a handful of possible red flags that preceded Thursday's rampage, in which 13 people were killed and 38 were wounded in the deadliest mass shooting on a U.S. military installation to date. Friends and acquaintances said Hasan had been increasingly agitated over the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he reportedly said the U.S. "war on terror" was a "war on Muslims." Officials have seized Hasan's computer to determine his role in the blog posts and other writings.

Cynics are saying ( and BestView agrees) the Obama administration was too worried about Glenn Beck and the Tea Party protesters to pay attention to an islamic time bomb in the military.

Pelosi's way or jail

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

BestView suggests many should go to jail where you get the health care, free room and board and don't have to work a job you can't find anyway. If you make a lot of money, you should just pay the fine ($2,500 maximum) and when you get sick, get insurance which can't be denied and save some $12,500 per year.

No scientific debate

Last month, President Obama gave a somewhat chilling, if somewhat ignored, speech on climate change at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He stated that any scientific debate about the magnitude of global warming is unscrupulous, decrying “those who . . . make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”

Then, the president talked tough, saying, “We’ll just have to deal with those people,” language familiar to anyone who knows the vagaries of Chicago politics.

More jobs according to Obama

From the Wall Street Journal online:

"President Barack Obama's economic recovery program saved 935 jobs at the Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, an impressive success story for the stimulus plan," the Associated Press reports.

Hey, great news! Just one little problem: "Only 508 people work there." The story continues:

The Georgia nonprofit's inflated job count is among persisting errors in the government's latest effort to measure the effect of the $787 billion stimulus plan despite White House promises last week that the new data would undergo an "extensive review" to root out errors discovered in an earlier report.

About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren't saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren't saved.

You read that right: Civil servants got pay raises, and the Obama administration claims credit for "saving" their jobs:

Officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.

"If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job," HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.

Aren't you excited to think that these people may soon be in charge of your health care?

Jobs according to Obama

In an effort to justify the spending of $780 billion on a stimulus package that was supposed to create jobs the Obama boys have begun talking about how many jobs the stimulus money has "saved". So far, they are claiming some 640,000 jobs were saved. Nobody believes this, but now we are reading some things behind the numbers. What they did was send a form to everyone who got stimulus money and asked them to send back an indication of how many jobs were created or saved. One shoe store got about $900 to send some boots to the Army Corps of Engineers. They claimed this order for some 9 pairs of boots saved some 9 jobs.

Other specious examples are given in the Wall Street Journal.

This is just the start

“Gold prices on Tuesday surged to an all-time high after India’s central bank bought 200 tonnes of the precious metal, swapping dollars for bullion as the country’s finance minister warned the economies of the US and Europe had ‘collapsed’. India’s decision to exchange $6.7bn for gold equivalent to 8 per cent of world annual mine production sent the strongest signal yet that Asian countries were moving away from the US currency.”

Iran messing with Israel?

What does this mean in terms of an Israel response?

JERUSALEM — Hamas militants in Gaza have successfully test-fired an Iranian rocket able to reach Israel's largest urban center, the country's military intelligence chief said Tuesday.

Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin told parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee that the rocket could fly 37 miles (60 kilometers), and strike metropolitan Tel Aviv, Israeli media reported.

Until now, rockets fired from Gaza have reached up to 25 miles (40 kilometers), putting one-eighth of Israel's population within rocket range.

Could America go Broke?

Of course. Read the scenario here.

Kerry and Graham

If you vote in South Carolina you already know that your Senator Graham is best known for throwing in with the liberals to support legislation that just boggles your mind. Now he is in bed with John Kerry to support the cap and trade energy taxes which are too extreme for even this dem controlled Senate. Read it here.

Newt advice vs. Palin advice

Newt Gingrich was upset with those of us who agreed with Sarah Palin and prefer voting for a conservative independent than a liberal republican. We are doomed to the wilderness unless we elect anyone who calls themselves a Republican according to Newt. Now that Dede Scozzafava has dropped out of the race for Congress and endorsed the Democrat in the race ( who believes in the same liberal nonsense that she does ) we are left with these comments:

SCOZZAFAVA says: "I have been a Republican my entire life, I will be a Republican until I die. I believe in the Republican party that stands for less government interference in the lives of individuals. I believe in self-sufficiency versus government dependence. I believe in lower taxes, less government regulation, I believe in less government spending."