Overthrowing Environmentalism

By Alan Caruba

In 1517 Martin Luther set off the Protestant revolution against the Catholic Church that led to the spread of the then-new movement as a response to the corruption of the Church. It took time for it to establish itself as an alternative and was greatly aided by the invention of printing and spread of literacy, but mostly because ordinary people had grown weary of the Church’s extravagance, poor governance, and resistance to change.

The selling of worthless “indulgences” as a means to wipe one’s sins clean was the final straw.

Environmentalism has become a modern religion and its “cap and trade” scheme to sell worthless permission slips for the emission of so-called “greenhouse gases”—based on United Nations Kyoto Protocol calling for a reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere—is being rejected by many nations .

As it has become common knowledge that CO2 is vital to all life on Earth and plays no role in affecting the climate, ordinary people have concluded that global warming in particular and environmentalism in general is a giant fraud.

No one argues that nations should not attend to the basic maintenance of clean air and water. That view predates the environmental movement, but the stranglehold on nation’s economies and the ability to engage in any form of commerce has reached a breaking point. The fact is, the U.S. has made great strides over the years and there are limits to how “clean” the air and water can or even should be. The EPA wanted to regulate “dust” at one point until Congress put an end to that insanity.

The lies required to maintain environmentalism and its vast matrix of laws and regulations are being publicly rejected and a recent example is a letter sent to NASA administrator by fifty present and former astronauts, scientists, and engineers who work for NASA is a seminal moment, not unlike Martin Luther’s 95 theses nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.

The NASA employee’s letter demanded that its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) “refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe that the claims of NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data.”

It should be noted that the global warming hoax can be dated to testimony by James Hansen before Congress in 1988 and he is still the GISS administrator! His apocalyptic predictions helped launch a U.S. response currently seen in the Environmental Protection Agency power-grab, based on the false CO2 claims, that will eliminate one fifth of the coal-fired plants providing electricity to a large swath of the nation and likely end the building of new comparable facilities.

On April 9th, Rasmussen Reports, a polling organization, release the results of a poll that found that 52% of likely voters “think there’s a conflict between economic growth and environmental protection, thoough 31% disagreed." Rasmussen stated that “support for investing in fossil fuels like oil and gas is also at a new high amidst near-record gas prices and the on-going development of the Keystone XL pipeline which President Obama blocked for environmental reasons.”

The following day, April 10th, Rasmussen released results of another poll that found that 44% of likely voters “believe, generally speaking, that the EPA’s regulations and actions hurt the economy. Just 17% disagree.”

On February 21st, Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com, was published in The Washington Times in an opinion about EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s testimony before Congress writing that “Over the past three years, the Obama EPA has conducted a scorched earth campaign against fossil fuel producers and users, especially the coal-fired power industry, with multibillion-dollar rules that provide no meaningful environmental or public health benefits.”

The environmental revolution—a Communist agenda—is being resisted piece by piece by scientists and others who no longer will submit to its utterly false “science” and its UN-inspired Agenda 21 plans to impose control over all aspects of life on planet Earth. A June Rio conference will largely abandon the fear-mongering of global warming in favor of “sustainability”, a matrix of controls that will enslave the world’s population with the worst totalitarian precepts since the rise of Communism and Nazism in the last century.

Agenda21 has been at work in America for decades at this point and few have any idea what it represents. It is destroying property rights in America and that’s just for starters.

On Earth Day—April 22nd—the birthday of Vladimir Lenin, the dictator who imposed Communism on Russia in 1917, the various elements of the environmental movement will flood the world with propaganda. The connection between these two events should not be ignored.

Environmentalism should be soundly rejected and the emerging movement to overthrow it should redouble its efforts.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

A Trip to the Moon

By Alan Caruba

Sometime in the 1980s I found myself on assignment at Cape Kennedy visiting the launch site for all the trips to the moon and the various shuttle voyages to the International Space Station. The shuttle was the size of a small building and the notion that it could be lifted beyond the pull of gravity, flown about in outer space, and return, staggers the imagination.

I was already in my early 30s by the time the United States of America put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon on July 20, 1969. I can recall when President John F. Kennedy spoke of sending men to the moon in 1961.

The subject was primarily the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States that already involved building an arsenal of missiles. That rivalry had sparked the Cold War that began at the end of World War Two in 1945. It was the focus of Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. In 1957, the Soviets had launched Sputnik, a small device that circled the Earth emitting a beeping noise. It confirmed that the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. The space program was a cover for the acceleration of missile technology.

There is a cruel irony in the fact that, with the last launch of the shuttle program, the U.S. no longer has the means to put humans in space and must, in fact, secure the assistance of the Russian Federation to send or return its astronauts from the International Space Station.

The Apollo program was an extraordinary achievement in many ways, but the reason the U.S. sent men to the moon was to demonstrate it could also launch a devastating response to the Soviet Union in the event of a missile attack or even a preemptive attack of our own. The message was not lost on the Russians.

So, we put men on the moon, collected a bunch of moon rocks, confirmed it is entirely inhospitable to habitation, and have not returned since December 1972.

Indeed, all of space is inhospitable to mankind. We are Earth-bound creatures and can exist in space only in obscenely expensive vehicles. Meanwhile, unmanned satellites of every description perform a myriad of services including the exploration of lifeless planets far, far away.

On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy, speaking at Rice University, said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

“Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” This was a quintessentially American attitude and explains how in those years and earlier, Americans achieved so much. It explains why Americans pushed beyond the western borders of the original Thirteen States until they reached the Pacific Ocean. It explains how and why they built a vast system of railroads, turned fertile plains into a breadbasket for the nation and vast engine of export. It is why we developed so many technologies we and the rest of the world now take for granted.

Capitalism built this nation. Socialism is destroying it.

The generation of the 1960s and since has also managed to spend themselves into horrendous debt. President Johnson who replaced an assassinated JFK not only expanded a war in Vietnam, but instituted a “Great Society” program in “a war on poverty.” It was a precursor of recent “stimulus” programs. In the process, the nation wasted billions, along with more than 50,000 lives of a generation of young men. President Reagan restored the economy to balance in the 1980s, but since then the profligate spending has not ceased.

The trip to the moon was an exciting adventure, but its purpose was to deter the Soviet Union from gaining too great an advantage over our national security. Today, the present administration stands by idly as Iran develops its own missile and nuclear weapons programs. The Iranians have done so with assistance from the Russians.

Our financial crisis has left Americans feeling defeated in our own eyes and looking weak in the eyes of our allies and our enemies. We have done this to ourselves with “entitlement” programs that began in the 1930s and by allowing an “environmental” movement to strangle domestic development and thwart access to our own vast reserves of energy.

The people whose parents and grandparents put men on the moon stand by as the present national leadership fails and refuses to come to grips with the present challenges. They stand by as their schools turn out new generations that cannot spell, don’t like to read, have little grasp of their nation’s history or values, and rank lower and lower among other nations as educated people.

A tea party in Boston helped launch a war that established our sovereignty and our ascendance among all other nations. A Tea Party today, a movement of patriotic Americans, is all that stands between a nation that sent men to the moon and one that is headed hell-bent to the poorhouse.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Unemployment, NASA-Style

NASA's Mission to the Muslims

By Alan Caruba

I felt like this back in the days when the Watergate scandal slowly, painfully unraveled, revealing the most appalling stupidity and criminality emanating from the Oval Office. From the night when the burglars were arrested in the Democrat Committee headquarters on June 17, 1972 to the day Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, Americans were forced to witness and endure something unthinkable.

The news that NASA administrator, Charles Bolden, had been dispatched to the Middle East to fulfill what he said was its “foremost” mission, “to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science…and math and engineering” was so appallingly stupid that it defied any legitimate reason for NASA to exist.

The other mission objectives Barack Obama charged Bolden with were to “re-inspire children to want to get into science and math” and to “expand our international relationships.”

You need a bit of history to lend some clarity to this. NASA was the direct result of the Cold War scare when the Russians put Sputnik into orbit over the Earth in October 1957, thereby demonstrating they had missiles powerful enough to launch a nuclear attack on the nation. It galvanized the U.S. government into passing the National Defense Education Act in order to get more young Americans to go into the fields of science and math, and it prompted the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for the purpose of demonstrating American scientists and engineers could create bigger and better missiles.

Muslims had nothing to do with it then and nothing to do with it now.

In February, President Obama proposed that NASA abandon its Constellation program. As the New York Times reported at the time, it would involve abandoning “the rockets and spacecraft that NASA has been working on for the past four years to replace space shuttles.” It would impose a mandate “that any future exploration program will be an international collaboration”, not an American one.

NASA made news again in mid-June when it was announced that Obama’s amended budget request would slash $100 million from its operating funds in order to “spur economic growth and job creation along Florida’s Space Coast and other affected regions.” According to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this somehow “revitalizes NASA and transitions to new opportunities in the space industry and beyond.” How many NASA engineers and scientists will now transition to jobs at Disneyworld?

Islam has not been “hijacked” by the likes of Osama bin Laden. Islam has always been about the conquest of the world and its greatest “scientific” breakthroughs since the 1980s have been the development of truck bombs and suicide bombers who have attacked targets from Bali to London, Madrid to Manhattan.

Obama’s Cairo speech on June 4, 2009 was filled with the kind of lies that portray Islam as a peaceful religion and one responsible for all manner of scientific breakthroughs from the invention of the magnetic compass to the printing of books.

Neither is true. What is true is that the Chinese had developed the compass and Islam had resisted printing books for a thousand years following its rise after 632AD.

Those under the oppression of Islam did not contribute to or experience the rise of science and the arts as both were rejected as un-Islamic. Many forms of music, for example, were banned in Islam. While the West was producing Galileo, Isaac Newton, Nicolaus Copernicus, Aristotle, Rene Descartes and Albert Einstein, not one single scholar of comparable stature was produced in the Islamic world.

Contrary to Obama’s mission to reach out to Muslims, they "reached out" to the West and, in America on September 11, 2001, destroyed the Twin Towers and attacked the Pentagon, killing some 3,000 victims.

Typical of the arrogance of Islam is the proposal to build a mosque within a block of ground zero in New York City!

Building mosques over sites held sacred to non-Muslims is an long tradition of Islam, from the mosque built over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, to the countless other mosques in converted Christian churches, Buddhist and Hindu temples, as a demonstration of their intention to replace Western and Asian religions.

Permitting the building of the proposed New York mosque would signal submission to Islam.

Perverting and defunding NASA’s mission is evidence of Obama’s commitment to Islam.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

America's Global Warming Terrorists

By Alan Caruba

It should tell you something about the federal government’s puerile efforts to advance the global warming (now called climate change) fraud that it had to cancel a scheduled press conference at the National Press Club on February 8th because a huge blizzard had shut down the entire city.

Instead, the announcement of a proposed new bureaucracy, a “Climate Service”, had to be made via a telephone conference call to those reporters either too stupid or too determined to maintain the hoax.

The fact that the Obama administration would attempt to set up a NOAA Climate Service reveals that the same cabal of warmists within the administration are determined to keep the global warming fraud alive and to make U.S. taxpayers pick up the tab. These people constitute a relentless enemy of scientific truth.

Joe D’Aleo, a respected meteorologist, reacted to the news saying, “This was expected. A climate super agency was talked about for years. Could NOAA and NASA have been competing by seeing who could be warmest and take home the prize? NOAA’s statements showed how this whole climate nonsense is politically driven…”

NOAA, for example, is warning of “earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons”, but Steven Goddard points out that “what NOAA isn’t saying is that snow is falling earlier and heavier in the Northern Hemisphere. Rutgers University Global Snow Lab has reported that January was the sixth snowiest on record, and that six of the last eight Januaries were above normal snowfall.” February is set to break former record snowfalls.

NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is, according to Jane Lubchenco, PhD, an administrator, “committed to scientific integrity and transparency; we seek to advance science and strengthen product development and delivery through user engagement.”

That is hogwash!

A visit to NOAA’s new website, www.climate.gov, reveals how the same old lies about global warming are being trotted out to scare the heck out of a public that has long since concluded it is a vast pile of steaming hot lies.

It’s worth asking why a new climate bureaucracy is needed when, if you think about it, climate trends are measured in centuries!

Do we need a “Climate Service” to tell us that the climate will change a thousand years from now? The proposal is absurd, but not if you see if from the point of view of an administration desperate to expand the federal government until it literally implodes.

The proposed agency would be led by Thomas Karl, the director of the current National Climatic Data Center, headquartered in Washington, D.C., and would have six regional directors across the country. All this to predict what the climate will be in 3010 and beyond!

Consider that we already have a National Weather Service that has the best computer models available and a vast array of satellites with which to analyze the weather. At best it can only accurately predict what will likely occur over the next four days. Predicting next week’s weather is a roll of the weather dice.

Given the reports of how the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change devoted decades to fudging and jiggering the data on “global warming”, why would Congress even consider authorizing such a “climate service”? Some of those involved included IPCC scientists from academic meteorological centers in the U.S. and some are already under investigation for their role in the fraud, both here and in England.

NOAA and NASA consistently issued statements and reports intended to support the global warming hoax. Leading the effort was James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute, who kicked off the entire hoax back in the 1980s by warning Congress of a completely invented scenario of an Earth endangered by human beings using energy resources from oil to coal.

Al Gore, a former Vice President, has massively enriched himself by scare mongering of the worst kind, aided and abetted by NASA and NOAA, along with determined effort to foist the worst kind of energy sources, wind and solar, on the nation with billion dollar subsidies to these and other “clean” energy entrepreneurs. He is part of an international cabal selling worthless “carbon credits.”

The “Cap-and-Trade” Act, still waiting action in the Senate, would impose a massive tax on Americans for the crime of using energy for any reason. It would destroy what’s left of our economy.

The Climate Service demonstrates that the most thoroughly discredited information and individuals within our government are still determined to push ahead with the global warming fraud. It not only needs to be stopped, but all those involved with it need to be investigated by Congress.

Memories of Apollo and the Moon

By Alan Caruba

It tells us something about our limitations that the latest effort to send a new batch of nameless, faceless astronauts to the International Space Station was delayed several times by nothing more than some inclement weather bearing down on Cape Kennedy.

Oh yes, you can go to the Moon, but only if it isn’t raining.

I recall the excitement that President Kennedy’s announcement created when he said the U.S. would go to the Moon, but the real reason we went was to get there before the Soviet Union. It was about two empires butting heads and, of course, the U.S. won and the Soviet Union is no more.

So there is some irony to be had in the fact that, with the retirement of the current fleet of space shuttles, the only way to get to the Space Station will be via the Russian vehicle, the Soyuz.

There was even more excitement when Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Apollo lunar module onto the Sea of Tranquility. “One great leap for mankind,” said Armstrong who thereafter leaped into anonymity, rarely granting interviews because this courageous test pilot is painfully shy. It was left to the ebullient Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step foot on the Moon, to keep the memory alive.

The U.S. has never returned to the Moon. Why?

Because, other than the demonstration of American technological superiority, there simply is no good reason to return. There isn’t a damned thing on the Moon worth the bother. The Moon, it seems, is best left to the poets.

In truth, NASA’s unmanned probes have visited all of the solar system’s planets and the agency has most certainly engaged in a lot of serious science, but it is also true that there is not much reason for humans, so utterly dependent on Earth, to leave.

If a few rain clouds can delay a shuttle, travel to planets where water doesn’t even exist seems an odd, exorbitant, and futile project.

There is a scene in Tom Wolfe’s book, “The Right Stuff”, in which the initial Apollo crew demands that the lunar module have windows. They were all test pilots and they all understood the need to be able to visually orient the craft if anything went wrong. As it turned out, Armstrong had to manually fly the module to its landing on the Moon because its instruments went a bit cockeyed on him.

Another manned flight is estimated to cost somewhere in the area of $100 billion and, considering the way the present administration is running up the national debt, that’s still a lot of money. Strip away the romance of manned flight and the truth is that space probes have long since sent back more information about our little galaxy than putting some human space puppet in jeopardy.

What does the fortieth anniversary of Apollo II tell us?

It says we had more guts, more smarts, more need to prove ourselves to the world in 1969 than we do today.

It says we have an illusive, asymmetrical, new enemy on Earth who’s more interested in blowing up office buildings in lower Manhattan, trains in Spain, and hotels in Indonesia than reaching for the Moon.

In 2009, America needs to prove it will outlast a desert cult, keep pace with the rise of Asian nations, prop up a dying Europe, and get its own people back to work as soon as possible.

The Moon’s not going anywhere.

When Almost Everyone is Lying to You

By Alan Caruba

In March of this year I attended a conference on climate change sponsored by The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based free market think tank. Some five hundred people attended to hear three days of lectures and seminars on the true science, the known science, regarding the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind, global warming.

How can it be that millions can be led to believe the Earth is warming when, in fact, the warming that occurred following the end of the last Little Ice Age in 1850 was completely natural? Nothing “forced” it to occur as is the claim about the Industrial Revolution, the use of so-called fossil fuels, and an utterly false assertion that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the primary factor for the warming. Like all periods of warming (and cooling) the Sun was and is the primary factor. Everything else pales in comparison.

My eye was caught by a report on Saturday in a British newspaper, the Daily Mail, that took note of “a surreal scientific blunder last week that raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming.”

The reporter, Christopher Booker, noted that “On Monday, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr. James Hansen, and is one of the four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.”

The announcement, of course, was based on the same “computer models” that have been the basis for the global warming hoax. These models, scientists will tell you, are significantly flawed. For example, they are unable to account for a major weather factor, clouds. To this day, clouds remain a mystery to scientists because they form and disappear often in seconds or minutes, yet they play a very real role in determining the weather. Just consider, for example, the satellite photos of hurricanes with their huge circulating cloud formations or just your nightly weather report that show you the movement of clouds in your area.

“Across the world,” noted Booker, “there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand.”

“In the U.S., the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperature for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th warmest October in 114 years.”

The erroneous NASA report was caught and reported by the blogs of a U.S. meteorologist, Anthony Watts, and a Canadian computer analyst, Steve McIntyre. Some excuse was offered by NASA, but the fact remains that anything that is announced by Dr. James Hansen’s agency must be immediately suspect.

It was Hansen who told Congress back in the 1980s that global warming was a huge threat and who has prospered mightily for his protestations that seas will rise and the land will be scorched unless we shut down everything that generates CO2. This, of course, is the mantra of Al Gore, also prospering with the sale of bogus “carbon credits” and other “sustainable” energy schemes.

At about the same time that NASA was putting out false data, the United Nations was announcing that clouds of soot, particles and chemicals stretching from the Persian Gulf to Asia threatened health and food supplies in the world, citing what it called the newest threat to the global environment, neglecting to mention that clouds of soot, dust, and other things have always circulated around the globe.

Now connect the dots. If you want to know why we continue to hear about alleged new threats to the global environment and false assertions of a warming that is not happening, you need begin with the United Nations—in particular its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—and then factor in the deliberate machinations of various U.S. government (and other nation’s) agencies that are committed to maintaining the global warming hoax.

This is not about the climate! It is about the private gain of many people, some of them the world’s wealthiest already, and the need by various governments to keep people frightened and distracted from the simple truth that the Earth is now fully a decade into a distinct, identifiable, and verifiable cooling cycle.

As Lord Monckton wrote in a letter to John McCain, “Not for a single moment longer must you allow yourself to be distracted by the murderous foolishness of the climate alarmists.” This is good advice for all of us.

The problem for Americans is that the next administration will be as green, if not more green, than ever before. You can expect to hear that blizzards that leave entire states and regions under several feet of snow are the result of global warming.

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