We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
For the founders or our nation, the preamble to our Constitution meant providing an environment where free men could strive and succeed, or they could also fail. In our modern day, that leads us to the question of entitlements. The U.S. Constitution (considered by many Leftists an annoying anachronism rather than the legal core of this Nation), contains the word "entitled" four times. Three of those refer to representation of the several States. Only one refers to individuals: “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” There is nothing said about free anything. And the Bill of Rights (Amendments 1 thru 10 for those who slept through class) enshrine our Civil Rights, but they also say nothing about entitlements. The only "entitlements" that I recognize are Social Security/Medicare, and only because we’re forced to pay into the system during our working lives, along with VA benefits, which are paid for in advance, all too often in blood. There are also municipal and state services that our elected representatives have instituted. Thus, if you don't want fire protection, start objecting at your city council meetings. As to access to health care, we are entitled to access I’m sure, but nothing says it’s got to be free. In fact, you’re completely free to charge whatever you want for your services. And if the customer doesn’t want to pay what you charge, he’s equally free to go elsewhere in search of that service. But it all costs money, and that’s where the rub comes in.
Money is defined as anything that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services. It’s nothing more than medium of exchange and a store of value. Essentially it’s an indicator of work, in that, if I do an hours work at something, I will receive an agreed upon amount of “money” in exchange. Then, I can trade that money for the fruit of someone else’s work. (In this day and age however, an awful lot of work doesn’t seem to go very far!) The concept of “money” immediately leads to “Debt”, or “that which is owed”, usually referring to some sort of assets owed to someone. Debt is a means of using future purchasing power before the work has been done and the money for that work is received. A debt is created when a creditor lends a value to a debtor, in expectation of repayment, usually including interest. Debt allows people and organizations to do things that they would otherwise not be able to do with the cash on hand. Most folks commonly use debt to purchase fancy houses, SUV’s, big screen TV’s, and many other things too expensive to readily buy with whatever cash they have on hand. Business often uses debt to enable business expansion. For both companies and individuals, the cost of servicing the debt (paying the interest) can grow beyond the ability to pay due to either external events (income loss) or internal difficulties (poor management). Excess debt normally causes both individuals and governments to reduce their consumption of products and services, and utilizing the available money to pay off that debt and its interest.
Then however we often find those folks that think money grows on trees, or at least in one way or another is inexhaustible. Sometimes those folks get control of the government, where they spend the national treasure on assorted hairbrained schemes, and then raise the taxes to generate even more treasure that they can spend, and completely forget that debt HAS to be paid off, one way or another. That said, about 40% of the people in this country believe they're entitled to health care, food, shelter, and clothing, and that the government should provide it whatever the cost to the nation. Wrong, they’re entitled to access those things, but whether that access is easy or difficult depends on their life style, where they choose to live, what work they seek, and how well they perform it. After all, once you're an adult, you are solely responsible for those choices.
Historically, debt was responsible for the creation of debtor’s prisons, indentured servitude, and in worst case situations, the debtor was sold into chattel slavery. More commonly the debtor became a “wage slave”. Wage slavery refers to a situation where a person is dependent for a livelihood on the wages earned, particularly when the dependency is total and immediate. When government gets too far into debt, really bad things happen. Governments can, and do, collapse economically, which leads to the fall of the government, civil wars, assorted foreign invasions, starvation, and a lot of death and destruction. Just ask the Romans.
Louis XIV's finance minister was once asked what to do about the severe national deficit, to which he replied, "Nothing, it's too serious." Well, history shows us that nothing got done, the deficit got worse, and ninety years later the French Revolution put an end to the problem… along with the French nobility and the government.
Our current leaders really need to recognize the one immutable law of economics, namely, the TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) law.
In the spirit of the season, I’ll wish everyone a Merry Christmas. If, due to “political Correctness”, you object to the word “Christmas”… tough. Have a Merry Christmas anyway.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Climategate
Surprise, Surprise, scientists are disagreeing on the severity, causes, and eventual outcome of what's now called "climate change", or even if it exists at all. The idea of “Global Warming” seems to be based on our apparent global climatic change, a lot of junk science, the wistful thinking of the far left gloom and doom set, and research data modified to produce the desired outcome. There’s hardly any agreement among scientists with some knowledge of global warming, or of humanity's possible role in producing it, but you wouldn't know that if you listen to the Obama administration. As the Climate-gate controversy continues to grow amid numerous charges of manipulating data and suppressing research by opposition scientists who challenge the theory, there is one often repeated “defense”, in that other data-sets all show the same thing. "I think everybody is clear on the science. I think scientists are clear on the science ... I think that this notion that there's some debate . . . on the science is kind of silly," claims Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, when asked about the president's response to the University of East Anglia dataset that’s being questioned. In fact, Mr. Gibbs seems to be mostly angry with the hackers who exposed the scandal, but not at the scientists who falsified the data his statements hinge on! Despite the ongoing scandal, Britain's National Weather Service claims: "we remain completely confident in the data. The three independent data sets show a strong correlation is highlighting an increase in global temperatures."
The three most relied-on data series used by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report came from the University of East Anglia, NASA, and the British Met Office. Even better, the Met Office apparently depends on the other two organizations to provide the hard research date they use, which is kept a deep dark secret from everybody else. Why are global warming advocates so secretive about their data? So far, the spotlight has been on the University of East Anglia and its refusal to release their surface temperature data, by far the most comprehensive long-term worldwide surface data available. Unfortunately, the problem of secretiveness is hardly limited to the UEA. Queens University in Belfast has amassed one of the longest-running data collections on tree rings, spanning 7000 years and covering 1,500 sites around the world. How much a tree grows each season can tell us a lot about temperatures and other climate related variables. You would expect that institute to be proud of all this data they have so diligently created, and expect them to share the data with anyone who is interested. Not so apparently, as some scholars have been trying for two-and-a-half years through the UK's Freedom of Information Acts to force Queen's University to release the data, all to no avail. Even NASA, which has been caught in other embarrassing “mistakes” regarding climate research, refuses to release its data so that others can figure out past temperature estimate inconsistencies. All that researchers really wanted from both Queen’s University and NASA, was the temperature data used in numerous papers that global warming advocates had already published. One of the most disturbing elements of the ongoing scandal suggests an worldwide organized effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics. It is not clear if any data was destroyed, but at least two U.S. researchers have denied that suggestion.
The purloined e-mails show that several mainstream scientists repeatedly suggested keeping their research materials away from opponents who sought it under American and British public records law. That raises a science ethics question because free access to information is important to other scientists who can repeat experiments as a part of the scientific method. "I believe none of us should submit to these 'requests,'" declared the university's Keith Briffa. The center's chief, Phil Jones, wrote: "Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them." When one skeptic kept filing FOI requests, Jones told another scientist, Michael Mann: "You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting FOI requests for all e-mails Keith (Briffa) and Tim (Osborn) have written."
NASA faces a particularly embarrassing situation. Steve McIntyre, who runs ClimateAudit.org pointed out in 2007 that thru serious math errors in NASA’s published work, 1998 was not the warmest year on record, 1934 was. And the third hottest year was 1921, not 2006. Instead of the 10 hottest years occurring since 1990, six of the 10 had occurred before 1940. NASA finally released the corrected temperature estimates, but later recalculated yet again and somehow 1934 is again reported to be cooler than either 1998 or 2006. As with all these “errors”, how many more might be lurking in other estimates made at these institutions? On the other hand, perhaps the latest NASA revision was a merely a statistical "adjustment," similar to what apparently happened at East Anglia. Nobody outside a small group at NASA knows, but given the leftist political advocacy of James Hansen, NASA’s top climatologist, we might be somewhat suspicious. OK, so they’re “adjusting” scientific data to fit a set of predetermined conclusions. In my rather crude and un-scientific manner, I’d call that “cooking the books”, and if ‘ya do that at home the IRS gets really upset!
So why all the insistence on human caused global warming, to the extent of apparently falsifying research data? We could make a real good “conspiracy theory” out of this one! Socialist political theory demands the existence of a “one world” planet wide government to be successful. (So does the UN, but that’s a different theory.) This means that more and more government control of the world’s population is required, which is exactly what the Copenhagen accord is all about. In the guise of handling the “global warming” problem, government can control our energy usage (coal, oil, gas, nuclear energy, and probably firewood as well), to the extent of regulating us back to a medieval sustenance type economy, where we can all share equally in the soon to be nonexistent wealth... with of course our socialist leaders being the Lord of the Manor and getting the lions share.
What does this have to do with falsifying scientific data? Well, most scientific research survives on government grants, and it’s always best to keep your employer happy if you like your comfortable high-paying job…
The three most relied-on data series used by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report came from the University of East Anglia, NASA, and the British Met Office. Even better, the Met Office apparently depends on the other two organizations to provide the hard research date they use, which is kept a deep dark secret from everybody else. Why are global warming advocates so secretive about their data? So far, the spotlight has been on the University of East Anglia and its refusal to release their surface temperature data, by far the most comprehensive long-term worldwide surface data available. Unfortunately, the problem of secretiveness is hardly limited to the UEA. Queens University in Belfast has amassed one of the longest-running data collections on tree rings, spanning 7000 years and covering 1,500 sites around the world. How much a tree grows each season can tell us a lot about temperatures and other climate related variables. You would expect that institute to be proud of all this data they have so diligently created, and expect them to share the data with anyone who is interested. Not so apparently, as some scholars have been trying for two-and-a-half years through the UK's Freedom of Information Acts to force Queen's University to release the data, all to no avail. Even NASA, which has been caught in other embarrassing “mistakes” regarding climate research, refuses to release its data so that others can figure out past temperature estimate inconsistencies. All that researchers really wanted from both Queen’s University and NASA, was the temperature data used in numerous papers that global warming advocates had already published. One of the most disturbing elements of the ongoing scandal suggests an worldwide organized effort to avoid sharing scientific data with critics. It is not clear if any data was destroyed, but at least two U.S. researchers have denied that suggestion.
The purloined e-mails show that several mainstream scientists repeatedly suggested keeping their research materials away from opponents who sought it under American and British public records law. That raises a science ethics question because free access to information is important to other scientists who can repeat experiments as a part of the scientific method. "I believe none of us should submit to these 'requests,'" declared the university's Keith Briffa. The center's chief, Phil Jones, wrote: "Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them." When one skeptic kept filing FOI requests, Jones told another scientist, Michael Mann: "You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting FOI requests for all e-mails Keith (Briffa) and Tim (Osborn) have written."
NASA faces a particularly embarrassing situation. Steve McIntyre, who runs ClimateAudit.org pointed out in 2007 that thru serious math errors in NASA’s published work, 1998 was not the warmest year on record, 1934 was. And the third hottest year was 1921, not 2006. Instead of the 10 hottest years occurring since 1990, six of the 10 had occurred before 1940. NASA finally released the corrected temperature estimates, but later recalculated yet again and somehow 1934 is again reported to be cooler than either 1998 or 2006. As with all these “errors”, how many more might be lurking in other estimates made at these institutions? On the other hand, perhaps the latest NASA revision was a merely a statistical "adjustment," similar to what apparently happened at East Anglia. Nobody outside a small group at NASA knows, but given the leftist political advocacy of James Hansen, NASA’s top climatologist, we might be somewhat suspicious. OK, so they’re “adjusting” scientific data to fit a set of predetermined conclusions. In my rather crude and un-scientific manner, I’d call that “cooking the books”, and if ‘ya do that at home the IRS gets really upset!
So why all the insistence on human caused global warming, to the extent of apparently falsifying research data? We could make a real good “conspiracy theory” out of this one! Socialist political theory demands the existence of a “one world” planet wide government to be successful. (So does the UN, but that’s a different theory.) This means that more and more government control of the world’s population is required, which is exactly what the Copenhagen accord is all about. In the guise of handling the “global warming” problem, government can control our energy usage (coal, oil, gas, nuclear energy, and probably firewood as well), to the extent of regulating us back to a medieval sustenance type economy, where we can all share equally in the soon to be nonexistent wealth... with of course our socialist leaders being the Lord of the Manor and getting the lions share.
What does this have to do with falsifying scientific data? Well, most scientific research survives on government grants, and it’s always best to keep your employer happy if you like your comfortable high-paying job…
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Another Surge
A man named Fehrenback once said that “you can fly over a territory, you can bombard it, you can blow it to hell, you can even sterilize it, but you don’t own it until you stand a seventeen year old kid with a rifle on top of it.” That statement is very true, and unfortunately it’s something that our nation’s leaders appear to have either forgotten, or that they never learned. As a result of that lapse, we’re today paying the butchers bill in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two days before Mr. Obama gave the speech at West Point in which he announced that we would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, a Senate Committee report was released that blames an insufficient number of troops for bin Laden’s escape from American forces in 2001. The committee chairman, Sen. John Kerry, implied that it was a lack of soldiers under the Bush administration that was responsible for “laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.” Yet it was our democratic Congress who repeatedly refused the troop buildup that would have given us the necessary soldiers today.
Increased troop numbers was Bush’s policy, and since we all know Bush was evil (just ask the mainstream media), the opposite policy must be good. The aggressiveness that we associate with President Bush is actually, in Mr. Obama’s hands, the righteous corrective to Bush’s evil actions. (Perhaps a Democrat can explain that one to me?) Mr. Obama is proving himself an expert manipulator of public opinion, capitalizing on the McChrystal and Eikenberry leaks to give the impression of deep deliberations over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. He’s playing the old “good cop/bad cop” routine, with VP Joe Biden, who dutifully argued against more troops, overall a rather cynical act. And it’s almost uncanny to hear from the liberal Obama the same tales about nation-building and creating democratic institutions that led us into an undemocratic Iraq in the first place. Warlord-run Afghanistan is nothing like Iraq either, or any other civilized country for that matter. It’s more like warlord-run Somalia. Ahh… remember Somalia, with Bill Clinton’s hesitation to provide the military with the needed strength, and of course our rather hurried withdrawal? Today however the media is still using the word “surge” to describe the troop increase as if it’s only a temporary boost, when in truth it’s just another name for minimal “reinforcements”, which immediately brings to mind the image of a lost cause. Since the first day of combat action in Afghanistan we’ve heard calls for troop increases, with the latest being for forty to eighty thousand additional troops. Instead Mr. Obama decides to send only thirty thousand, with a large number of these being civilian contractors. One pundit commented, tongue-in-cheek I hope, that it’s too bad China isn’t in NATO, as their Army is big enough to stand shoulder to shoulder and march from Afghanistan to Iraq, cleaning up the whole mess! Quite so, but how do we get ‘em to go home afterwards?
Political writer Jacob Weisberg claims that one of Obama’s great accomplishments has been that, “after a much-disparaged period of review, he has announced a new strategy in Afghanistan.” But then, Weisberg praises Obama for “preventing a depression, remaking America's global image, and winning universal health insurance.” Never mind that unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades, and that any Democratic president with a Democratic majority in Congress could have passed a similar stimulus package. “Universal health care” is far from a done deal, and as for remaking America’s global image, well, images are made with actions, not words. But Obama is not Bush we are told, the people who dislike him are dreadful racists, the opposition is fierce, and, well, he’s the only game in town, etc, etc. No, Mr. Obama is not President Bush. If anything, he is solidly convinced that his radical liberalism is divinely guided, and that he holds “the truth” in his hands. Unlike President Bush however, Mr. Obama seems to withdraw into a blue funk whenever he fails to convince Americans that his is the truth of the ages.
It’s easy to say “pull out all the troops and let the Afghani’s deal with their own problems”. So if those issues spill over into America, what then? American troops cannot just pack up and leave with the snap of a finger. "Failure in Afghanistan would mean a Taliban takeover of much, if not most, of the country and likely a renewed civil war," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Taliban-ruled areas could in short order become, once again, a sanctuary for al-Qaeda as well as a staging area for resurgent militant groups on the offensive in Pakistan." (And Pakistan has nuclear weapons.) I'm sure that if we pulled out tomorrow, the people who strap bombs to themselves to blow up anyone who doesn't think that women are property, and that Jews and Christians should be wiped out, would happily join us in hammering our arms into plowshares. Ahh… our arms, not theirs.
But Obama has tied his decision ordering more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to a pledge that they'll start returning home in 2011. But he was rather quiet on his plans for the growing Afghan army, which still remains the best way to bring American soldiers home. As the 219th poorest nation in the world, Afghanistan simply can't afford to pay for a big military. Afghan forces today are largely slipshod and corrupt, professional U.S. officers say, capable of doing little more than basic operations. In fact, many U.S. officers say that Afghans have a "God-willing” mentality that "delays progress for all routine and major actions", and such tendencies “freeze subordinates into doing nothing until specifically ordered”.
One lesson we should learn from history is that soldiers seldom have much say in how their efforts are applied. Armed force is but a blunt instrument of politics, quite liable to do more harm than good unless aimed with exquisite precision. At best, all the military can do is buy time for the politicians to repair the political mistakes that left no choice but armed violence in the first place. Isn’t it nice to know that our man in the driver’s seat has absolutely no military experience, and apparently won’t listen to his advisors who do have that experience.
Increased troop numbers was Bush’s policy, and since we all know Bush was evil (just ask the mainstream media), the opposite policy must be good. The aggressiveness that we associate with President Bush is actually, in Mr. Obama’s hands, the righteous corrective to Bush’s evil actions. (Perhaps a Democrat can explain that one to me?) Mr. Obama is proving himself an expert manipulator of public opinion, capitalizing on the McChrystal and Eikenberry leaks to give the impression of deep deliberations over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan. He’s playing the old “good cop/bad cop” routine, with VP Joe Biden, who dutifully argued against more troops, overall a rather cynical act. And it’s almost uncanny to hear from the liberal Obama the same tales about nation-building and creating democratic institutions that led us into an undemocratic Iraq in the first place. Warlord-run Afghanistan is nothing like Iraq either, or any other civilized country for that matter. It’s more like warlord-run Somalia. Ahh… remember Somalia, with Bill Clinton’s hesitation to provide the military with the needed strength, and of course our rather hurried withdrawal? Today however the media is still using the word “surge” to describe the troop increase as if it’s only a temporary boost, when in truth it’s just another name for minimal “reinforcements”, which immediately brings to mind the image of a lost cause. Since the first day of combat action in Afghanistan we’ve heard calls for troop increases, with the latest being for forty to eighty thousand additional troops. Instead Mr. Obama decides to send only thirty thousand, with a large number of these being civilian contractors. One pundit commented, tongue-in-cheek I hope, that it’s too bad China isn’t in NATO, as their Army is big enough to stand shoulder to shoulder and march from Afghanistan to Iraq, cleaning up the whole mess! Quite so, but how do we get ‘em to go home afterwards?
Political writer Jacob Weisberg claims that one of Obama’s great accomplishments has been that, “after a much-disparaged period of review, he has announced a new strategy in Afghanistan.” But then, Weisberg praises Obama for “preventing a depression, remaking America's global image, and winning universal health insurance.” Never mind that unemployment is the highest it’s been in decades, and that any Democratic president with a Democratic majority in Congress could have passed a similar stimulus package. “Universal health care” is far from a done deal, and as for remaking America’s global image, well, images are made with actions, not words. But Obama is not Bush we are told, the people who dislike him are dreadful racists, the opposition is fierce, and, well, he’s the only game in town, etc, etc. No, Mr. Obama is not President Bush. If anything, he is solidly convinced that his radical liberalism is divinely guided, and that he holds “the truth” in his hands. Unlike President Bush however, Mr. Obama seems to withdraw into a blue funk whenever he fails to convince Americans that his is the truth of the ages.
It’s easy to say “pull out all the troops and let the Afghani’s deal with their own problems”. So if those issues spill over into America, what then? American troops cannot just pack up and leave with the snap of a finger. "Failure in Afghanistan would mean a Taliban takeover of much, if not most, of the country and likely a renewed civil war," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "Taliban-ruled areas could in short order become, once again, a sanctuary for al-Qaeda as well as a staging area for resurgent militant groups on the offensive in Pakistan." (And Pakistan has nuclear weapons.) I'm sure that if we pulled out tomorrow, the people who strap bombs to themselves to blow up anyone who doesn't think that women are property, and that Jews and Christians should be wiped out, would happily join us in hammering our arms into plowshares. Ahh… our arms, not theirs.
But Obama has tied his decision ordering more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to a pledge that they'll start returning home in 2011. But he was rather quiet on his plans for the growing Afghan army, which still remains the best way to bring American soldiers home. As the 219th poorest nation in the world, Afghanistan simply can't afford to pay for a big military. Afghan forces today are largely slipshod and corrupt, professional U.S. officers say, capable of doing little more than basic operations. In fact, many U.S. officers say that Afghans have a "God-willing” mentality that "delays progress for all routine and major actions", and such tendencies “freeze subordinates into doing nothing until specifically ordered”.
One lesson we should learn from history is that soldiers seldom have much say in how their efforts are applied. Armed force is but a blunt instrument of politics, quite liable to do more harm than good unless aimed with exquisite precision. At best, all the military can do is buy time for the politicians to repair the political mistakes that left no choice but armed violence in the first place. Isn’t it nice to know that our man in the driver’s seat has absolutely no military experience, and apparently won’t listen to his advisors who do have that experience.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Plague
“Realpolitik” is defined as the belief that a pragmatic pursuit of self-interest and power, backed up by force when convenient, is the only realistic option for a great state. The term was coined in 1859 to describe German chancellor Bismarck’s policies. “Practical politics” are those based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations. That term comes from H.L. Mencken's definition: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." OK, I’ll agree that not all threats exploited by political leaders are imaginary, with a number of them being quite real, but generally they’re blown all out of proportion to where they become caricatures of reality. The current "public health crisis" over the prospect of a swine flu "pandemic" appears to fall into that category.
Although eight years have passed since 9-11, we need no reminder of the shock value of mass terrorism on the American population. 9-11 left us shocked and enraged, but it was still incidental to the everyday concerns of most Americans. It was an atrocity that didn't threaten the existence of American society, despite the efforts of political opportunists to describe the attack as apocalyptic. However, our political leaders have drawn tremendous political valuata from that attack, in that a major (and completely unnecessary) revolution in American political, legal, and strategic affairs was brought on by that one incident. Ten years ago, it would have been unimaginable that today’s mass media and our politicians would accept the idea that the President of the United States has the quasi-medieval authority to issue orders that have the effect of law, to lock-up people at will, and even have them tortured. But because of the practical politics of post-9/11 America that is what we now see. The possibility of nuclear annihilation is difficult to make real to the individual, unless it's part of a larger picture such as a war between superpowers, or the prospect of nukes in the hands of terrorists. With that said, The Bomb has little to offer in terms of "practical politics." The same can be said of the practical political value of environmentalism or “the collapse of the global biosphere” through various sorts of contamination. The “revenge of a poisoned planet” might make interesting science fiction stories, but other than that it’s little more than a certain political career crowned by the Nobel Peace Prize. Relatively few people other than those most likely to profit from it share Gore’s insistence that saving the environment should be the "central organizing principle" of human society. And despite the fact that they would force the rest of us to live like medieval serfs, they're willing to sacrifice none of the goodies that give them a huge "carbon footprint." Unlike the above threats, the prospect of a plague is completely terrifying in a personal sense. We all have memories of what it feels like to be sick and helpless, and likely have witnessed death from disease at one time or another. So, as a weapon of practical politics, microbes are far more serious than nuclear weapons. All of this should be kept in mind as we evaluate the seriousness of the "public health emergency" declared on April 26 by the UN's World Health Organization and shortly thereafter by the Obama administration over what is being described as the potential swine flu pandemic. Considering that over 30,000 people die in the US every year from the flu, it’s rather amusing to see all the panic over a relative handful of deaths. Still, most "public servants" are in jobs that thrive on alarmism, so we really shouldn't expect any sober risk assessments from them. It’s quite likely that what concerns the medical community is the genetic makeup of this new H1N1 virus that carries swine, avian, and spanish flu DNA. The question is, where did it come from? It is extremely unlikely that three different strains of flu virus could accidentally share genetic material without some sort of outside help in the process. Two strains perhaps, but I’d seriously doubt three. This leaves us with the possibility that the H1N1 virus, which, according to several well-credentialed medical experts appears to have been synthesized in a laboratory, and was deliberately released on the public. This would not necessarily have been the work of the US government; as it could have easily been carried out by any one of numerous other parties. I think the medical community is honestly concerned as they still don’t know what will happen if swine flu reached China and India, "where populations are so dense and health infrastructure is still insufficient.” The "Spanish Flu" epidemic of 1918 killed 583,000 Americans (approximately one tenth of one percent of the American population), and an estimated 20-50 million people worldwide, an overall figure that rivals the Black Death of the 14th Century. The virus causing the 1918 outbreak was quite similar to the H5N1 virus, better known as the "Bird Flu", and has been the center of a multi-billion-dollar international effort of development and store of what is hoped to be an effective vaccine.
Well, how many of these do you remember? The Oil Crisis (70's), the New Ice Age (70's), the Killer Bee invasion, the Ozone hole, Mad Cow Disease, SARS, Avian Flu, Y2K, Global Warming ... and now Swine Flu. The result is always the same - ever growing Statism. How many billions of dollars have we spent on these non-events? How many more billions are we going to spend on this latest event, and how much more freedom are we willing to lose?
Whatever else may occur we can expect the Obama administration to assume greater control over the emergency medical system. In the event that this emergency does turn into a legitimate pandemic, the “Obamatrons” will have the justification to mobilize Homeland Security. A memo issued by the DHS notes that "The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines." Quarantine of course means disarming the public as we saw happen in New Orleans, and "isolating" us in our new confinment centers.
When the government’s involved, always ask yourself: qui bono? Who benefits?
Although eight years have passed since 9-11, we need no reminder of the shock value of mass terrorism on the American population. 9-11 left us shocked and enraged, but it was still incidental to the everyday concerns of most Americans. It was an atrocity that didn't threaten the existence of American society, despite the efforts of political opportunists to describe the attack as apocalyptic. However, our political leaders have drawn tremendous political valuata from that attack, in that a major (and completely unnecessary) revolution in American political, legal, and strategic affairs was brought on by that one incident. Ten years ago, it would have been unimaginable that today’s mass media and our politicians would accept the idea that the President of the United States has the quasi-medieval authority to issue orders that have the effect of law, to lock-up people at will, and even have them tortured. But because of the practical politics of post-9/11 America that is what we now see. The possibility of nuclear annihilation is difficult to make real to the individual, unless it's part of a larger picture such as a war between superpowers, or the prospect of nukes in the hands of terrorists. With that said, The Bomb has little to offer in terms of "practical politics." The same can be said of the practical political value of environmentalism or “the collapse of the global biosphere” through various sorts of contamination. The “revenge of a poisoned planet” might make interesting science fiction stories, but other than that it’s little more than a certain political career crowned by the Nobel Peace Prize. Relatively few people other than those most likely to profit from it share Gore’s insistence that saving the environment should be the "central organizing principle" of human society. And despite the fact that they would force the rest of us to live like medieval serfs, they're willing to sacrifice none of the goodies that give them a huge "carbon footprint." Unlike the above threats, the prospect of a plague is completely terrifying in a personal sense. We all have memories of what it feels like to be sick and helpless, and likely have witnessed death from disease at one time or another. So, as a weapon of practical politics, microbes are far more serious than nuclear weapons. All of this should be kept in mind as we evaluate the seriousness of the "public health emergency" declared on April 26 by the UN's World Health Organization and shortly thereafter by the Obama administration over what is being described as the potential swine flu pandemic. Considering that over 30,000 people die in the US every year from the flu, it’s rather amusing to see all the panic over a relative handful of deaths. Still, most "public servants" are in jobs that thrive on alarmism, so we really shouldn't expect any sober risk assessments from them. It’s quite likely that what concerns the medical community is the genetic makeup of this new H1N1 virus that carries swine, avian, and spanish flu DNA. The question is, where did it come from? It is extremely unlikely that three different strains of flu virus could accidentally share genetic material without some sort of outside help in the process. Two strains perhaps, but I’d seriously doubt three. This leaves us with the possibility that the H1N1 virus, which, according to several well-credentialed medical experts appears to have been synthesized in a laboratory, and was deliberately released on the public. This would not necessarily have been the work of the US government; as it could have easily been carried out by any one of numerous other parties. I think the medical community is honestly concerned as they still don’t know what will happen if swine flu reached China and India, "where populations are so dense and health infrastructure is still insufficient.” The "Spanish Flu" epidemic of 1918 killed 583,000 Americans (approximately one tenth of one percent of the American population), and an estimated 20-50 million people worldwide, an overall figure that rivals the Black Death of the 14th Century. The virus causing the 1918 outbreak was quite similar to the H5N1 virus, better known as the "Bird Flu", and has been the center of a multi-billion-dollar international effort of development and store of what is hoped to be an effective vaccine.
Well, how many of these do you remember? The Oil Crisis (70's), the New Ice Age (70's), the Killer Bee invasion, the Ozone hole, Mad Cow Disease, SARS, Avian Flu, Y2K, Global Warming ... and now Swine Flu. The result is always the same - ever growing Statism. How many billions of dollars have we spent on these non-events? How many more billions are we going to spend on this latest event, and how much more freedom are we willing to lose?
Whatever else may occur we can expect the Obama administration to assume greater control over the emergency medical system. In the event that this emergency does turn into a legitimate pandemic, the “Obamatrons” will have the justification to mobilize Homeland Security. A memo issued by the DHS notes that "The Department of Justice has established legal federal authorities pertaining to the implementation of a quarantine and enforcement. Under approval from HHS, the Surgeon General has the authority to issue quarantines." Quarantine of course means disarming the public as we saw happen in New Orleans, and "isolating" us in our new confinment centers.
When the government’s involved, always ask yourself: qui bono? Who benefits?
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