When the Inmates are in Charge

By Alan Caruba

If you ever wondered what it would be like if seriously deranged people were close to the seat of power in America, you can stop wondering.

In January, the Competitive Enterprise Institute issued a three-page memorandum. William Yeatman, the author of the memorandum, had serious concerns about the nomination of Dr. John P. Holdren to be the White House Science Adviser.

This position heads the Office of Science and Technology Policy which, in official lingo, “serves as a source of scientific and technological analysis and judgment for the President with respect to major policies, plans and programs of the Federal Government.”

“John Holdren’s 40-year record of outlandish scientific assertions, consistently wrong predictions, and dangerous public policy choices make him unfit to serve as White House Science Adviser,” warned Yeatman.

Just how crazy is Holdren? On April 8, according to the Associated Press, Holdren said that “global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.” Holdren suggested that one option includes “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.”

The last time anything of this nature was discussed, it was called “a nuclear winter” in which the debris from a nuclear war would fill the atmosphere and keep the Sun’s warming and nourishing rays from getting through.

According to Holdren, “It’s got to be looked at. We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.” Holdren believes that the Earth is in the grip of global warming, but the difference between belief and science is that the latter demands proof. Take, for example, the data our weather satellites have been sending back since 1998 all of which points to a cooling Earth.

Twice during the interview, Holdren compared global warming to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in a fog.” The truth, however, is that Holdren is a genuine cuckoo who probably checks under the bed every night to make sure the bogyman isn’t there.

Yeatman described him more charitably as a “chronic alarmist”, citing just a few of his paranoid fantasies. In 1971, Holdren predicted that “some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century.” We are now safely into a new century and the only catastrophe is the Obama administration.

The really neat thing about making catastrophic predictions is that they always take place way into a future. In 1986, Holdren was predicting that global warming would cause the deaths of one billion people by 2020. This is eight years beyond 2012 when devotees of the ancient Mayan calendar predict the end of the world will occur. Neither are likely to occur.

In 1998 Holdren warned that we just can’t go on using energy fuels like oil, natural gas, and coal that represent nearly one hundred percent of everything we and everyone else uses now and will into the future. These days we hear President Obama blathering away about “clean energy”, but there is reality and there is the increasingly weird world of the White House.

In a recent article, Robert Bryce, one of the nation’s leading authorities on energy, pointed out that “Oil now provides nearly 40 percent of America’s total primary energy use. It also provides nearly all of the energy needed for the transportation sector. Coal and natural gas together provide about 50 percent of America’s primary needs.”

That leaves “clean energy”, solar and wind power, “but together,” Bryce notes, “these sources currently provide about 0.16 percent of Americans total needs.” It should also be pointed out that solar, wind, and ethanol production would not exist were it not for huge government subsidies and mandates for their use.

Both President Obama and Holdren think “clean energy” should receive billions of dollars while the White House does everything in its power to destroy the nation’s oil and coal industries.

The Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, recently said that windmills off the East Coast “could generate one million megawatts of power, roughly the equivalent of 3,000 medium coal-fired power plants, or nearly five times the number of coal plants now in the United States.”

The reality, however, is that there aren’t 3,000 coal fired plants operating. There isn’t even half that number. The Institute for Energy Research estimates that, to achieve Salazar’s insane goal, there would have to be 309,587 giant 3.15 megawatt wind turbines spread over 1,800 miles of coastline or about 172 turbines per mile of coastline. And, of course, the wind would have to blow 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Are these people crazy? You bet! Are the inmates in charge of the asylum? Yes, indeed.

They aren’t the only ones. The American Meteorological Society and several other otherwise respected science groups have completely lost their wits. The AMS wants to explore “geoengineering’s potential to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”

Geoengineering? Remember that Star Trek movie that featured the “Genesis” machine that could convert a dead planet into one with grass and trees, rivers and oceans? When the AMS starts talking about geoengineering, it is strictly into cloud cuckoo land.

Absolutely nothing humans can or should do to mess with the unimaginably huge forces that determine the Earth’s atmosphere should even be contemplated. It is insane! It’s beyond science fiction. It is global genocide. Holdren has been urging “population control measures” since the 1960s.

In 1969, Holdren wrote that it was necessary “to convince society and its leaders that there is no alternative but the cessation of our irresponsible, all-demanding, and all-consuming population growth.” This is another way of saying that there are too many people sharing the planet with Holdren and he has been thinking about that “problem” for a very long time.

So have others in the Obama White House and, in terms of energy use, their “solution” is to make energy so expensive that people will stop driving, starting using mass transit, or just telecommute without going anywhere ever again. Forget about air conditioning and other aspects of modern life.

They intend to achieve this by scaring everyone with global warming talk and by claiming carbon dioxide is a “pollutant”. Then they intend to have the Environmental Protection Agency regulate it. Then they will tax it in the form of cap-and-trade “carbon credits” that must be purchased by all forms of industry and business in America. The costs will be passed along to consumers.

Billions would flow to a government that already is spending trillions in a mad scheme to fix the financial crisis.

What ever happened to just doing nothing? Sometimes when there is no problem, doing nothing is the most brilliant answer. There is no global warming. And, left alone, the financial crisis would correct itself in time. Everything the government is currently doing was tried in the 1930s and it just prolonged the Depression and made it worse!

In the meantime, loonies like Dr. John Holdren will be whispering into Obama’s ear about “shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.”

A Dangerous New Global Warming Law

By Alan Caruba

Let us begin by understanding that the entire basis for declaring the second most vital gas on Earth, carbon dioxide, a “pollutant” that requires regulation and is the object of a proposed elaborate “cap-and-trade” scheme is the generation of enormous amounts of money for the government while allowing it to exercise complete control over the use of any energy for any purpose.

Carbon dioxide is said to be the chief cause of “global warming”, but there is NO global warming. The Earth continues to COOL—ten years since the completely natural cycle began in 1998.

Nor is the Earth running out of energy sources such as oil, natural gas or coal. Here in the United States, however, Americans have long since run out of access to the extraction of the vast amounts that reside under the states and the offshore continental shelf.

Since around the 1970s, America has been systematically starved for access to its own energy reserves and forced to rely on imports, most notably of oil. Politicians and Greens who keep calling for “energy independence” are lying through their teeth. No nation on Earth is energy independent,

When you control energy, you control people’s lives and the entire economy. Simple example; a blizzard causes power lines to fail. All of a sudden people served by those lines are at risk of freezing to death. Another example, power fails during a heat wave. The elderly and ill are at risk of death for lack of air conditioning or even an electric fan. In 1995, a heat wave in Chicago killed over 600 people.

So, when House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman, Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, and Rep. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, conjure up an energy/climate bill designed to curb carbon dioxide emissions alleged to be causing “global warming”, they are perpetrating a massive fraud on Americans.

When that bill includes a provision that would permit anyone, absolutely anyone, to sue the government as victims of global warming and in anticipation of suffering as the result of global warming, Waxman-Markey have opened the door wide to a deluge of lawsuits that have no merit whatever in scientific fact or truth.

As reported in The Washington Times, “The measure sets grounds for anyone ‘who has suffered, or reasonably expects to suffer, a harm attributable in whole or in part’ to government inaction to file a ‘citizen suit.’ The term ‘harm’ is broadly defined as ‘any effect of air pollution (including climate change) occurring or at risk of occurring.’”

In practical terms, this means everyone with shorefront property can sue the government for a predicted loss due to rising sea levels. The fact that they have been rising naturally at a rate of a few insignificant millimeters a year for centuries will surely be ignored.

The law as currently written—but subject to change as it goes through the standard legislative practice when the two houses of Congress seek to achieve agreement—would allow citizens to seek up to $75,000 in damages from the government each year, but would cap the total amount paid out each year at $1.5 million.

It is a little known fact that many environmental organizations reap vast amounts of money suing the government over the enforcement of various laws affecting clean air, clean water, and endangered species.

The Western Environmental Law Center is just one example. It just sent “an urgent letter to Lisa Jackson, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, asking her to “speed issuance of regulations aimed at restricting greenhouse pollution to include black carbon, or soot, among climate forcing agents to be regulated.” Soot!

The Greens are now prattling about “unmanageable and calamitous disruption of the climate system.”

Can anyone cite a single example of how human activity could possibly cause or prevent “unmanageable and calamitous disruption of the climate system”?

As this is written, Mount Redoubt in Alaska is threatening a huge volcanic explosion and there is nothing the good citizens of Alaska can do about it. In Italy, whole villages were wiped out by a recent earthquake and there was nothing they could do about it. A tsunami hit Indonesia some years ago, killing thousands, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

At the White House, the new science advisor to the President is proposing an utterly crazed scheme to shoot “pollution” into the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect back the Sun’s rays to stave off global warming. The Sun, meanwhile, has gone scarily “quiet” for several years with virtually no magnetic storms (sunspots), thus reducing its production of solar energy to warm the Earth.

Yet there is a new law making its way through Congress that posits that the federal government can do something about a “global warming” that is not occurring and permits any one of the 310 million Americans to sue the government for failing to take action.

The end result of the Waxman-Markey law would be to vastly enrich the many environmental organizations that would be filing hundreds of thousands of suits and ultimately collecting millions, if not billions, of dollars on the basis of something that is not occurring and the alleged inaction of the government to stop it!

Only the collected stupidity and indifference of the American people will permit this new law to reach the desk of the President who will surely sign it. It is a death warrant for our lives, our economy, and our nation.

USN Destroyer Versus Somalis in a small Boat

The longer it takes the United States to dispatch Naval personnel to rescue the captain of a U.S. flagged merchant ship, particularly since it is standing off in clear view of the Somali pirates, the faster our reputation to respond to such insults to our nation will suffer.

Above is a photo of a USN destroyer. Either it has orders to do nothing but observe or it has orders to take action. Just how fast would the pirates surrender given the fire power and the other resources of a destroyer?

Doing nothing is not an option.

If a rag-tag bunch of Somali pirates are permitted to "negotiate" with us, it will be open season on every American in any nation on Earth.

Axing the Air Force

By Alan Caruba

Not long ago, a friend with whom I went all through grade and high school sent me a video about the F-22, one of the most remarkable fifth generation fighter jets I have ever seen. He is now a retired Air Force General.

You can see the video at http://vimeo.com/3437045.

What I know about military affairs you could put in a bug’s ear. I served in the U.S. Army so long ago that the last crisis I recall gearing up for was a possible 1962 invasion of Cuba because of the missile crisis.

The latest news from Cuba is that a delegation from the Congressional Black Caucus, eager to embrace Fidel Castro, just returned with glowing words for his communist dictatorship. That should send a chill up your spine.

The reason I thought of the video was a recent statement by Michael M. Dunn, president of the Air Force Association, in which he took note of how that branch of our Armed Forces is being hung out to dry by the Obama administration and, in the process, leaving America and our allies that much more vulnerable to our enemies.

Production of the F-22 has been terminated. It is a fighter jet that would give us complete domination of the skies. Fortunately, most of the contract has been fulfilled, but it’s worth noting that such cutbacks also mean layoffs and lost jobs at a time when the nation is in a recession.

Production of the C-17 has also been terminated.

Production of the Combat Search and Rescue Helicopter has also been terminated.

Production of the Multiple Kill Vehicle has also been terminated.

F-15s, F-16s, and A-10s will all leave the Force with no replacements.

The budget of the Missile Defense Agency has been reduced by $1.4 billion.

“This budget guarantees that the oldest Air Force in the history of our nation will get even older,” said Dunn, adding that “B-52s, built in the 1950s, will have to be kept on duty for a minimum of another 15-20 years.”

Did I mention that the missile defense cuts mean that there will be no increase of ground-based interceptors and that the Airborne Laser program has been terminated?

“The decisions,” said Dunn, “are not just programic nuance, but will impact core Air Force functions to include Air Force ability to deter, to conduct an air campaign, and to rescue our downed airmen.”

These cuts come at the same time that North Korea just tested a missile that could hit the West Coast of the United States. One would think that a robust missile defense, to include the anti-ballistic laser, would be a good idea.

We are all learning that President Obama is strong on tough talk, but the evidence suggests he is weak in respect to dealing with the hardware of defense.

If you’re thinking that the United States has become more vulnerable to attack in an era of non-state terrorism as well as places like Iran that keeps testing their missiles, you’re right.

Our Gangster Government

By Alan Caruba

There was a time when our government was responsive to the public will. They actually paid attention to what individuals or groups of citizens said. The government was limited by the Constitution and the individual States were understood to be sovereign republics as well.

We now have a gangster government whose elected Representatives and Senators—at least a majority of them—no longer care what Americans think and are indifferent to the Constitution.

We have a President eager to cede our national sovereignty to international organizations, giving them the right to tell us how to run our affairs.

I don’t frankly care how many “Tea Parties” are held around the nation. The only one that will count will be a million or more Americans showing up in Washington, D.C. and demanding that the Constitution be obeyed and demanding an end to the insane borrowing and spending that will render the dollar less useful than toilet paper.

The Constitution consistently refers to “the people” and that means YOU.

I don’t see much else changing the direction that Congress and the White House is taking. When Newsweek has the audacity of saying “We’re All Socialists Now” on the cover of one of its editions, you know the nation is in serious trouble.

The “catch” is whether younger generations of Americans have the guts to show up. Or the smarts!

The great tide working against the long history of the nation that fiercely protected its sovereignty has been the indoctrination of Americans since the end of World War II to yield to international organizations and, in particular, to the United Nations. Its ceaseless efforts to become a world government are widely documented and even trumpeted by the UN itself.

This indoctrination has been part of the curriculum of every school in America, along with a constant theme of environmentalism and the primacy of the planet over its individual nation states. No one seems to find any irony and danger in the demands that the industrialized and wealthy states of the West punish themselves with “cap-and-trade” taxation of their energy use while China, India and developing nations are exempt.

Perhaps the members of Congress and those in the White House know something that Americans do not? Perhaps they know how polarized the electorate is between those who have swallowed the socialist propaganda in whole and those who oppose its expansion?

Simply put, the generation that venerates Barack Obama has dangerously low skill levels in reading, mathematics and science, vital for the development of a professional class of engineers, physicians, and other jobs that require such knowledge. Comparisons with other nations reveal vast gaps between Americans who have graduated from our nation’s schools since the 1960s to the present.

As two million baby boomers begin to retire, the nation’s education system has only produced about 200,000 qualified replacements. For the past three decades, the United States that used to be in first place worldwide now ranks third for science and engineering graduates.

Too many younger Americans lack the education and skills to separate propaganda from fact, to make judgments that will affect the future and too many older Americans are failing to actively resist the financial burdens being put on them, their children, and their grandchildren by the current Congress and White House.

A gangster government is deliberately destroying America and it is not being challenged in the courts or in the streets.

Who Should Fear Israel?

By Alan Caruba

On Thursday Jews in Israel and around the world will celebrate Passover. It is devoted to the story of their escape from slavery in ancient Egypt.

It took three millennia for the Jews to reestablish Israel as their homeland and they have not enjoyed a day of true peace in sixty years. The world shuns the Israelis, but they have learned the true meaning of “Never again” and it is a lesson the world needs to learn as well.

In December 2008 Hamas felt the sting of retaliation for firing more than six thousand rockets into Israel from Gaza over a period of several years. Then, of course, they declared victory.

To the north, Hezbollah has brought ruin to Beirut and parts of Lebanon by taking on Israel in 2006. Though the Israelis did not perform up to their usual standard, they nonetheless inflicted enough damage to discourage further attacks since then. The exercise in Gaza was masterful, demonstrating they had learned some new tactics.

Both Hamas and Hezbollah have reason to fear Israel.

The Palestine Liberation Organization, also known as Fatah, is kept alive by the Israelis in order to have someone with whom to negotiate, but Fatah, headquartered on the West Bank, barely escaped alive from your typical internecine Arab warfare when Hamas kicked it out of Gaza.

Iran, long on fiery and provocative rhetoric will soon get a taste of what happens when you threaten Israel with nuclear annihilation.

When Syria tried to build some kind of nuclear facility, the Israelis made a parking lot out of the place in September 2007, but Iran’s ayatollahs and its annoying president, Mamoud Ahmadinejad, probably think Israel will not attack their nuclear facilities.

Iran should fear Israel.

The United States will not be consulted, primarily because it cannot be trusted not to tip off the Iranians or anyone else for that matter. The latest blather out of Foggy Bottom, otherwise known as the State Department, is the same old sad stuff about not building more settlements on the West Bank and working harder with Fatah for a two-state solution.

Well, it’s a new day in Israel and two men in particular are going to write some history together. One, of course, is the estimable Benjamin Netanyahu, the new prime minister, and the other is Avigdor Lieberman, the new foreign minister. These are two Jews of a generation that grew up during the many early wars that Israel had to fight for its very survival. They have a very different world view.

In taking his new office, Lieberman said, “The fact that we say the word ‘peace’ twenty times a day will not bring peace any closer.”

Lieberman had some advice for the free world. “The Westphalia order of states is dead, replaced by a modern system that includes states, semi-states, and irrational international players.” That is as neat a summation of the way things are as you will hear from any statesman.

As for the irrational players, one has little doubt he is referring to al Qaeda and Iran.

Almost always ignored in any comments directed at Israel are the herculean efforts it has made over decades to engage the Palestinians in an effort to achieve peace and a two-state solution of which the Oslo Accords are perhaps the best known.

Lieberman and Netanyahu are no fans of concessions. They saw what happened after Israel pulled out of South Lebanon and after the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. It did not bring peace. From Lieberman’s point of view, the only thing concessions have brought Israel is further isolation on the world stage and more death to Israelis.

Masterminding and leading that isolation has been the United Nations. We shall watch it in action during Durban II later in April. The first such conference was infamous for its anti-Semitism and the second is likely to be a repeat.

Of the entire world’s population, the Jews represent about 0.03 percent. Israel, a tiny spot on the map of the Middle East with some seven million Jews (and more than a million Muslim citizens as well) will do what it must to survive against enemies that deny the Holocaust, defile them daily with rank condemnation, and want them all dead.

When the Israelis are through ensuring their safety and the smoke clears, the world will pay attention. The most fundamental right of individuals and nations is self-defense.

North Korea 'Nukes' Obama Blather

By Alan Caruba

There’s one thing to be said about North Korea; it knows how to make the United Nations, President Obama, and all talk of ending nuclear weapons a very bad joke.

Presidents since the days of Harry Truman have been talking about a world free of nuclear weapons and that is just not going to happen. They are possibly the best deterrent on Earth when it comes to the potential of being invaded. Like the Colt revolver in the days of the Wild West, nukes are the great equalizer among nations.

Every time India and Pakistan get really angry at each other, someone in the room reminds their respective leaders that the other has nukes. After that, it’s a nice chat between diplomats over a cup of tea and some lovely cookies.

Japan, a nation that knows something about being nuked by two atomic bombs, has been reluctant to add nukes to their arsenal. The increasing belligerence of North Korea, however, is likely to change that. The umbrella of protection that the United States has provided since the end of World War II has been giving way to the realization that Japan needs its own defense capabilities.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations we witness once again how utterly useless it is. When you have China sitting as a permanent member of the Security Council, you’re not likely to get any action regarding North Korea. It provides China with the leverage to make the West and other nations worry a great deal about sales to nasty people in Iran and elsewhere.

It would not have surprised me at all to learn that, after letting the North Koreans begin building a nuclear facility in Syria, the Chinese slipped the map coordinates to the Israelis.

Why no President has ever simply sent in the Air Force to bomb the known North Korean locations of missile launch sites and facilities is answered with one word: China.

What makes this even worse is the long record of “humanitarian” aid that North Korea has received from the United States over the years.

A 2006 State Department report reads as follows:

“Since 1995, the United States has provided over $1.1 billion, about 60% of which was paid for food aid. About 40% was energy assistance [oil] channeled through the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), the multilateral organization established in 1994 to provide energy aid in exchange for North Korea’s pledge to halt its existing nuclear program.”

“U.S. assistance to North Korea has fallen significantly over the past three years, and was zero in FY2006. The KEDO program was shut down in January 2006. Food aid has been scrutinized because the DPRK government restricts the ability of donor agencies to operate in the country. Compounding the problem is that South Korea and China, by far North Korea’s two most important providers of food aid, have little to no monitoring systems in place.”

North Korea is not just “a rogue nation”; it is a gangster nation that has long engaged in every form of criminal activity you can name. In addition to its weapons program, it is a major counterfeiter of U.S. and other currencies. It has imprisoned countless thousands of its own citizens in labor camps.

I am reminded that George W. Bush named it as one of his “Axis of Evil” that everyone got upset about; naming Iraq and Iran as the other two elements. I already miss his refreshing candor.

This is what President Obama will do: NOTHING

This is what the United Nations will do: NOTHING