Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

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Two years ago.

It was my granddaughter's second birthday on Sunday. Here are a few pictures from the party.

A first step?

The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to drive up the cost of energy on Friday. There’s really no other way that this should be said, unless you believe in or are invested in the propaganda regarding anthropogenic climate change.

The legislation, which passed despite deep divisions among Democrats, could lead to profound changes in many sectors of the economy, including electric power generation, agriculture, manufacturing and construction.

The bill passed 219 to 212. It still has to go through the Senate, but there too there’s a majority of Democrats and we know that the President would happily sign anything that cripples the economy.

President Obama hailed the House passage of the bill as “a bold and necessary step.” He said in a statement that he looked forward to Senate action that would send a bill to his desk “so that we can say, at long last, that this was the moment when we decided to confront America’s energy challenge and reclaim America’s future.”

That’s not what this bill will do. Instead it will take an already struggling economy and cripple it. Rather than confronting the energy challenge, it will exacerbate it. Rather than reclaiming America’s future, it will smother it under a blanket of bureaucratic regulation.

Considerably more than half of the energy that we use in this country comes from the burning of carbon based fuels. We all saw what precipitated our current economic “crisis” last summer. As the price of petroleum (a carbon based fuel used by the “working” class to get to and from work, as well as by the transportation industry to move groceries from the farm to store shelves) rose to record levels we watched as first there was a slowdown in the economy and then a virtual collapse of other sectors of our government’s “carefully managed” plans for our “free market” economy (it’s much closer to a “state run” economy when you look at it).

Taxing the use of carbon based fuels through cap-and-trade policies will bring back those prices. We’ll shut down entire industries in our zeal to avert a .25° rise in “average” global temperature…

The final bill has a goal of reducing greenhouse gases in the United States to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and 83 percent by midcentury.

Good luck with that. 17 percent of 2005 levels isn’t likely to bring that much of a change, especially when you consider that returning to pre-1990 levels won’t bring much measurable change either.

We know about alternative energy sources, but they make up a miniscule portion of our energy economy, and they’re not cheap. Nor are they exactly “environmentally friendly.” Take solar power for example. If we’re talking about the use of semiconductors to directly convert solar energy into electricity, they’re not very efficient, they require a large amount of surface area exposed to the sun, don’t work well on cloudy or rainy days, and their production involves the use of massive amounts of toxic chemicals. If we’re talking about using solar energy to heat water, it requires a large surface area again, and much of the captured “warming” is re-radiated back into the environment.

What about wind power? Well, I suppose the return to 16th century technologies might not be such a bad thing. The Dutch managed to reclaim a lot of land from the sea using windmills. And who can forget The Man from La Mancha? And if sails were good enough for the navies of the world all those centuries, surely we can use them to propel our cars to and from work – unless we live in an area that doesn’t happen to be favored by high winds. Oh wait… we can’t use wind power either. It requires vast tracts of land in order to work. And those huge propellers are so unsightly – just ask Ted Kennedy.

How about nuclear energy? Oh wait… that’s just so incredibly dangerous – just ask Jane Fonda. Why, we can’t even find a place to dispose of the waste products that people will agree on.

Biofuels? Not very efficient in the end. Ethanol for example, produces less energy per gallon than gasoline. Racing engines make more power on ethanol than on gasoline, but that’s because they consume nearly four times as much ethanol as a similarly sized gasoline engine would gasoline.

Biofuels aren’t exactly environmentally friendly either. After all, it takes a lot of energy to grow the plant material in the first place. And consider how much land must be dedicated to the production of that plant material. Oh, I suppose we could convert our farms to growing feedstock for biofuels, but then what would we eat? Check out this quote from the Washington Post…

“Anybody that knows anything about the marketing of corn knows that when you raise the price of corn you are going to create problems in all of the markets that use corn,” said Ronald W. Cotterill, director of the Food Marketing Policy Center at the University of Connecticut.

How about waste oil from cooking? Sorry Charlie, there’s just not enough of it.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think that it’s a good idea to pursue alternative energy sources. It’s not even an exclusively “Democratic” idea either. Remember, it was George W. Bush (you know the “selected, not elected” President) that called for a fourfold increase in alternative energy supplies. And he took a lot of heat for that from the “objective, non-partisan” media…

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Ever since President Bush proposed a four-fold increase in “alternative fuels” during this year's State of the Union address, the media has been abuzz with doomsday reports…

“Fossil” fuels won’t be around forever – not if they’re truly “fossil” fuels. Finding environmentally friendly energy sources is a good thing. After all, we all live in the environment. We’ve yet to create a closed system that separates us from it for a significant period of time, despite the best work of space researchers.

But, our economy is already suffering from a “prolonged recession.” Leave it to our Congress to pass legislation that “could lead to sweeping changes in the economy,” all in the name of “climate change.”

Protect your wallets folks, the government’s coming after them again. This legislation is indeed a first step. A first step back to the stone age – when life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Three quarters of us are idiots

That’s right. Three quarters of us are apparently idiots, duped by politicians and an alarmist media into believing that by reducing our so-called “greenhouse gas” emissions we can do something about “climate change.” That’s according to a Washington Post – ABC poll of 1,001 American adults.

One of the sharpest dividing lines in attitudes toward climate legislation was age, with younger adults more receptive to cap and trade and federal regulation of greenhouse gases. Nearly two-thirds of those younger than 30 said they support cap and trade, and eight in 10 support federal limits on emissions. Among seniors, about four in 10 said they back a cap-and-trade proposal, and half favor federal intervention on emissions.

What this really means is that younger adults are more gullible about the environment than older adults. This is most likely due to propagandized “education” about anthropogenic global warming, or the more politically correct term these days “climate change,” which can even cover the possibility of global cooling.

Have we really forgotten that even if we somehow managed to cut back our emissions of so-called “greenhouse gasses” back to the level of emissions in 1990 that there would only be a marginal effect? Are we really alarmed by graphs that show exaggerated rises in the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, when the real rate of increase is so small as to practically be insignificant? We’re still only talking about a few hundred parts per million after all. Does no one pay attention to the fact that recent evidence shows that there is no correlation whatsoever between global “average” temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions? Or that there is a much closer correlation between global “average” temperatures and solar magnetic activity? Or that “average” global temperature measurements are incredibly tricky to obtain when we only sample a miniscule portion of the world – mostly the part near our cities? Or even that “average” global temperatures have fallen in the twenty-first century compared to the last decade of the twentieth?

Oh wait… that last is most likely the reason why it’s called “climate change” instead of “global warming” now.

When three quarters of us are so alarmed by propaganda about the so-called “settled science” of “climate change” (Think about it, how settled can the science be when we have to change the terminology to distract from the fact that “global warming” isn’t a steadily increasing phenomenon?) that we think the government must eliminate our choices and reduce the energy available to drive our economy we’re really in trouble. Abdicating our freedom to the government seems inevitable when so many of us can’t even think for ourselves.

David and Santayana are right. Sorry about that Mr. Jacob. We just aren’t ready for direct democracy yet.

Common Sense

I think that today's Founders Quote Daily from the Patriot Post should stand as an indictment to our generation…

“As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight.”
-- Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776

Trillion dollar deficits? Our founders knew that saddling the next generation with debt was a bad thing. We've not only saddled the next generation with debt, but the generation following that one. The left has tried to make the founders irrelevant. They’ve all but excised them from our history, instead teaching multiculturalism and the evils of our nation, all the while ignoring this truly great evil.

The national debt now averages out to a million dollars for a family of four. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median family income in the United States currently stands at about $58,500 per year. Assuming an average working lifetime from 20 year of age to 65 years of age, that amounts to a bit more than a third of the lifetime income per family. With the nation running trillion dollar deficits for the foreseeable future, the national debt will only rise. With unemployment on the rise in our shrinking economy, the family income will only fall.

I have to ask. At the rate we’re going, how long will it be before the national debt (averaged out per family) exceeds the total lifetime income of the average American family? And what do you think the consequences of that will be? Our governors (i.e. our elected representatives and their masters the federal bureaucracy) have abandoned common sense. When will the American people pick it up?

Will the U.S. end up supporting al Qaeda?

That’s what might happen if we continue to pursue the “two state” solution to the Palestinian – Israeli conflict. It turns out that al Qaeda has an active cell in Gaza. Strangely, these “Palestinians” don’t seem to even recognize one of their staunchest allies – Jimmy Carter.

Perhaps one of the few things that work in our favor in the current war on terrorism (I am still allowed to use that term, even if it has fallen out of official favor) is the fact that many of these terrorist groups don’t seem to understand the old maxim “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Perhaps they’ve been instructed by some of the imbeciles on the left that don’t understand it either. You know the ones – they complained about our supporting dictators and the like during Reagan’s presidency – when we were opposing the expansion of Soviet style communism.

As long as the “Palestinians” are fighting each other though, they’ve got less energy and resources to fight us. Now if only we’d stop funding them.

In the last two years, the US has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building and training a 1,500-strong PA special force…

That’s money well spent isn’t it? That 1,500-strong special force couldn’t even provide security for Mr. Peanut (apologies to Planters).

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