The St. Croix Review speaks for middle America, and brings you essays from patriotic Americans.
Thomas Martin teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. You may contact Thomas Martin at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Laurel S. Marsh, executive director of ACLU Nebraska, begins her December 8 "Midlands Voices" piece, in the Omaha World-Herald, by stating, "I think we can all agree: Healthcare reform should improve people's lives."
She then proceeds to argue that the Stupak-Pitts Amendment added to an Affordable Healthcare for America Act, which does not pay for abortions:
. . . interfered with a woman's ability to get the healthcare she needs . . . [and] interferes with the private, personal healthcare decisions of millions of women.
Ms. Marsh is sure President Barack Obama does not support the bill and concludes:
Let's make sure that the president gets to sign a measure that recognizes the importance of respecting everyone's right to make personal healthcare decisions without government interference. Isn't that the kind of healthcare we all want for ourselves and our families?
The answer to her rhetorical question is "no." It is not an acceptable healthcare reform act.
There is a contradiction in Ms. Marsh's article. She clearly denies the sanctity of life of the unborn baby as a person whose rights are to be upheld, and sees abortion as a means of improving some peoples' rights.
Janet Smith, author of The Right to Privacy, states:
The rights language that undergirds abortion also falsifies the relationship between mother and child in the womb, and one of the most natural, loving relationships becomes characterized as a relationship involving competing rights -- the right to choose versus the right to life.
The sanctity of life is an unalienable right stated in the Declaration of Independence. The word "unborn" is a misnomer because it makes a distinction between the life of the baby in the womb and the life of the baby outside the womb.
It is important to remember that man is not the author of life, though he is essential for the procreative act that brings forth the life of a child who is, as every living person is, a vessel for life.
At the heart of the debate over healthcare rights is the question of when life begins. In answering this question, it is important to make the distinction between the four levels of being -- "kingdoms," as they used to be called -- mineral, plant, animal, and human.
The plant is higher than the mineral by the power (using the philosophical term) of life, the animal is higher than the plant by the power of consciousness, and man is higher than the animals by the power of self-awareness.
No one knows how inanimate matter became animate. So, while many scientists will argue for a theory of life as metaphorically being like a "big bang," they have no idea who lit the fuse, of how life came to be, nor can they move between the levels of being by taking that which is inanimate to life, consciousness and, finally, self-awareness.
Human life differs from the life of plants and animals by being endowed with a soul.
Animals instinctively mate to reproduce and make offspring that are the same kind as them. Human beings do not reproduce in the sense of making offspring of a like kind, a copy of themselves. Human beings are involved in procreation, bringing forth the creation of a living soul that is unique in personhood, unlike any other person who is, was, or ever will be. Every child is one of a kind.
Finally, it is not simply a question of pro-choice versus pro-life. It is a question of the procreation, of human life containing a spiritual element, a soul that is not confined by the restraints of matter.
Citizens would be denied life through the establishment of a healthcare program for American citizens that funds abortions.
Furthermore, using taxpayer money to fund abortions denies the sanctity of human life and the moral obligations of the taxpayers who see that the life they have is not their own but a gift that they are called upon to give back to God, the very Creator of our unalienable rights.
Christmas is one week from New Years, and, paradoxically, while January 1 will mark the beginning of a new year, the cycle of minutes, hours, days, and seasons will remain the same, and will not be celebrated with the same exuberance. No one will exclaim happy new Monday or "happy new" to any given moment.
The cyclical movement of time is like one gigantic boulder compressing everything in its path into layers of lifeless sediment.
Within this sediment, there is the notion that through the advancement of years, man has moved beyond his ancestors. This is readily seen in the marvels of science passed on to shoppers each Christmas in the form of iPhones or high-definition televisions promising to make life even more enjoyable and entertaining.
Sometime after New Years, we will find there is nothing novel in the novelties, and like children who have raced through opening gifts, we will wonder if there is anything more.
Meanwhile, time rolls along, and each year seems more nemesis than friend. There is never enough time to complete assignments, keep all the appointments, get children where they belong, plant corn, or put those tired feet up before it is time to get moving again. Time flies, as the saying goes, entering us in a race in which we are locked into a daily grind measured by clocks. Time is elusively tick-tocking through our fingers: We cannot hold on to a moment.
That our lives are rolling by in the cycle of time cannot be denied; however, before we are rolled under, Christmas again comes upon us. This is the season to remember that while it is natural to think the past is a memory and the future is like a formless fog, the present moment is the place to be alive.
G. K. Chesterton thought Christmas is best understood as a boomerang: The greatest of all blessings is the boomerang. And all the healthiest things we know are boomerangs -- that is, they are things that return. Sleep is a boomerang. We fling it from us at morning, and it knocks us down again at night. Daylight is a boomerang. We see it at the end of the day disappearing in the distance; and the beginnings of the next day we see it come back and break the sky.
Christmas is the apex in the arc of the flight of man's return to God. As a boomerang is designed to return to its thrower, this is the memorial festival when God became man, when the infinite became finite; it is the point from which time now is measured as Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord.
Christmas redeems the times; it frees man from the cyclical wheel and breaks him out of an accidental world where everything is dying and decomposing without resurrection.
Now is the time to remember that while we are "in" the world we are not "of" the world.
We return to old things in new times.
This is the season, in words of Thomas Merton, to see that, what is really new is what was there all the time. I say, not what has repeated itself all the time; the really "new" is that which, at every moment, springs freshly into new existence. This newness never repeats itself. Yet it is so old it goes back to the earliest beginning. It is the very beginning itself, which speaks to us.
This is why G. K. Chesterton enjoyed Christmas more when he was older than when he was a child. The joy of being older at Christmas brings back the memories of Christmas past, of remembering the dead in our lives, of the eyes that shone in every cheerful image and suggestion that the season brings with the cards and letters to and from old friends, the ritual hanging of the greens and wreaths, and the stringing of lights to create a mystical world that removes us from time. It is the joy and the hope that the bright star that shone over the manger of the entire Christian world still shines over the world and speaks to us of a new life where each moment is as festive as New Year's. So, while the cycle of minutes, hours, days, and seasons seems to remain the same, we know that each moment is a present freshly given to us in a time that does not die. *
"I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office." --Thomas Jefferson
Robert T. Smith is an environmental scientist who spends his days enjoying life and the pursuit of happiness with his family. He has guest lectured at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania, and is a guest commentator for The Center for Vision & Values. This article is from V & V, a web site publication of Vision and Values.
As a poster child for liberal energy policies throughout the country, Pennsylvania's Governor Ed Rendell has issued the edict to grow the state's energy resources greener. Huge sums of taxpayer-supplied subsidy and stimulus have been funneled into the greening of Pennsylvania's energy supply. These funds are artificially diverted by the governor from other more practical uses by the state's citizens, who are already staggering under the weight of a bloated state and federal government, including a government-driven, mortgage debacle, economic downturn.
The Pennsylvania governor's signature efforts appear designed to lead the way into the wilderness that is the energy debacle of our times. Like many of the rest of the country's liberal leaders, the governor has disfavored established, economically abundant energy sources in favor of alternative "green" options. In typical fashion for his political party, the governor surrounded himself with eco-activist leftists and teamed with a state legislature to deliver Pennsylvanians to the job-killing, consumer-taxing, greening of today's energy for tomorrow. Two laws highlight what has happened:
Pennsylvania's Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard (a.k.a. Alternative Energy Law) was passed in November 2004. This law requires each electric-distribution company or electric-generation supplier to supply 18 percent of its electricity using alternative-energy sources by year 2020. These alternative sources include economically unviable options such as solar, wind, and landfill methane gas, among many other even more bizarre and specialty sources of energy, such as wood pulp.
One does not have to be a geography, climate, or Northeast-states expert to recognize the impracticality of these alternative sources in Pennsylvania. Yet, the lack of economic viability for these alternative sources was determined to be insignificant by the powers that be, because electric distributors and generators can recover the reasonable and prudently incurred cost of complying from businesses and residential consumers. Predictably, the pain of the compliance costs is deferred, with a deadline of 2020 -- i.e., well after these brave statesmen have stepped aside for the next crop of ruling elites.
To follow up on this bit of legal wizardry, in October 2008 Act 129 became law. Act 129 requires the state's utilities to not just stop power usage from rising, but to begin to cut power usage in 2011. There is no definitive, legislated means to reduce energy-consumer usage. Reduced power usage is simply up to the utilities, who are required to devise ways to have their consumers reduce their electric usage through energy efficiency and conservation plans.
This is the liberal version of a free market: You dream up a dictate that you wish were true, and then you freely try to make the dream a reality, whether possible or not. The downside for the utilities is that if reductions in their customers' usage aren't realized to the state's satisfaction, the utility can be fined up to $20 million in penalties. Expensive, yes, but acceptable to the lawmakers because the utilities can pass these costs on to businesses and residential consumers.
Unfortunately, it seems like nobody alerted the governor to the fact that Pennsylvania's abundant, clean energy resource isn't the intermittently spinning windmill eyesores now atop the once beautiful rolling hills of its Somerset County. Pennsylvania has an abundant supply of natural gas locked up in the geology of the Marcellus Shale, thousands of feet below two-thirds of its land surface.
The Marcellus Shale natural gas resource is readily available for use for the entire nation's energy independence and security; estimates are that there is as much as 516 trillion cubic feet of Marcellus Natural Gas. That is enough natural gas to serve the entire needs of the nation for well over 15 years, and at the current National Gas Consumption Rate.
The Marcellus Shale gas development can be a great relief to Pennsylvania's rural landowners, many of whom are farmers and have difficulties getting by even when times are good. Lease payments and royalties are a great benefit to rural Pennsylvanians. Many direct jobs in drilling, site preparations, pipelines, etc., and all the supporting jobs of natural gas development follow as development moves forward. The Marcellus Shale natural gas development benefits not only Pennsylvania's citizens, but the entire country.
The Pennsylvania example of liberal policies and approaches to green energy will hopefully come to an end in the near term. Until then, natural-gas development creeps forward in the face of the Pennsylvania governor's dictate of green energy. *
"Fear is the foundation of most governments." --John Adams
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla) is Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. The emails in this article are those that have caused the scandal about unethical practices of scientists at and associated with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) based at the University of East Anglia, UK. This sampling of emails was compiled by the staff of Senator Inhofe's office. Contact staff are: Matt Dempsey, Matt This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (202) 224-9797; and David Lungren, David This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (202) 224-5642. The Senator's web site is: www.epq.senate.gov/inhofe.
These emails are reproduced in the original, including grammar and punctuation mistakes. In the interest of brevity, these are excerpts of the CRU emails. Go to Appendix A in the report at the senator's web site for more complete reproduction of the emails.
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re[garding] AR4 [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report]? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment -- minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil
Phil Jones, Climatic Research Unit (CRU)
Hi Phil,
laughable that CA would claim to have discovered the problem. They would have run off to the Wall Street Journal for an exclusive were that to have been true. I'll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: *********@*****.com
talk to you later, Mike
Michael Mann, Penn State University
This is the sort of "dirty laundry" one doesn't want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try to distort things . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
I had some emails with him a few years ago when he wanted to get all the station temperature data we use here in CRU. I hid behind the fact that some of the data had been received from individuals and not directly from Met Services through the Global Telecommunications Service (GTS) or through GCOS.
Phil Jones, CRU
I did this knowing that Phil and I are likely to have to respond to more crap criticisms from the idiots in the near future, so best to clean up the code and provide to some of my close colleagues in case they want to test it, etc. Please feel free to use this code for your own internal purposes, but don't pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people.
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
From their wording, computer code would be covered by the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act]. My concern was if Sarah is/was still employed by UEA. I guess she could claim that she had only written one tenth of the code and release every tenth line.
Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)
If FOIA does ever get used by anyone, there is also IPR [intellectual property rights] to consider as well. Data is covered by all the agreements we sign with people, so I will be hiding behind them.
Phil Jones, CRU
Make sure he documents everything better this time! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp [file transfer protocol] sites -- you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone.
Phil Jones, CRU
PS I'm getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don't any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act!
Phil Jones, CRU
You likely know that McIntyre will check this one to make sure it hasn't changed since the IPCC close-off date July 2006! Hard copies of the WG1 report from CUP have arrived here today. Ammann/Wahl -- try and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with.
Phil Jones, CRU
The FOI line we're all using is this. IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI -- the skeptics have been told this. Even though we (MOHC, CRU/UEA) possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don't have an obligation to pass it on.
Phil Jones, CRU
I'm hoping that no-one there realizes I have a US DoE grant and have had this (with Tom W.) for the last 25 years.
Phil Jones, CRU
I think the skeptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set paleo[climatology] back a number of years if it goes unchallenged. I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.
Phil Jones, CRU
This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature." Obviously, they found a solution to that -- take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
How to deal with this is unclear, since there are a number of individuals with bona fide scientific credentials who could be used by an unscrupulous editor to ensure that "anti-greenhouse" science can get through the peer review process (Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Balianas, Soon, and so on). The peer review process is being abused, but proving this would be difficult.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
One approach is to go direct to the publishers and point out the fact that their journal is perceived as being a medium for disseminating misinformation under the guise of refereed work. I use the word "perceived" here, since whether it is true or not is not what the publishers care about -- it is how the journal is seen by the community that counts. . . . Mike's idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work -- must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!
Phil Jones, CRU
Dear All,
Just a heads up. Apparently, the contrarians now have an "in" with GRL [Geophysical Research Letters]. This guy Saiers has a prior connection w/ the University of Virginia Dept. of Environmental Sciences that causes me some unease. I think we now know how the various Douglass et al papers w/ Michaels and Singer, the Soon et al paper, and now this one have gotten published in GRL, . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
Mike,
This is truly awful. GRL has gone downhill rapidly in recent years. If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU [American Geophysical Union] channels to get him ousted.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
I'm not sure that GRL can be seen as an honest broker in these debates anymore, and it is probably best to do an end run around GRL now where possible. They have published far too many deeply flawed contrarian papers in the past year or so. There is no possible excuse for them publishing all 3 Douglass papers and the Soon et al paper. These were all pure crap. There appears to be a more fundamental problem w/GRL now, unfortunately . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
If the RMS [Royal Meteorological Society] is going to require authors to make ALL data available -- raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations -- I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.
Ben Santer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
I'm having a dispute with the new editor of Weather. I've complained about him to the RMS Chief Exec. If I don't get him to back down, I won't be sending any more papers to any RMS journals and I'll be resigning from the RMS.
Phil Jones, CRU
Obviously the editor and reviewers need to also be taken to task here.
Kevin Trenberth, UCAR
I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.
Phil Jones, CRU
I feel rather uncomfortable about using not only unpublished but also unreviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions). . . . but the fact is that in doing so the rules of IPCC have been softened to the point that in this way the IPCC is not any more an assessment of published science (which is its proclaimed goal) but production of results.
Giorgi Filippo, International Centre for Theoretical Physics
M&M claim that when they used that procedure with a red noise spectrum, it always resulted in a "hockey stick." Is this true? If so, it constitutes a devastating criticism of the approach; if not, it should be refuted.
David Rind, NASA GISS
If we go to a more recent one the anomalies will seem less warm -- I know this makes no sense scientifically, but it gives the skeptics something to go on about!
Phil Jones, CRU
I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards "apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data" but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.
Keith Briffa, CRU
Bradley still regards the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] as "mysterious" and "very incoherent" (his latest pronouncement to me) based on the available data. Of course he and other members of the MBH [Mann, Bradley, Hughes] camp have a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP, so I tend to view their evaluations as starting out from a somewhat biased perspective, i.e. the cup is not only "half-empty"; it is demonstrably "broken.". . . I just don't want to get into an open critique of the Esper data because it would just add fuel to the MBH attack squad. They tend to work in their own somewhat agenda-filled ways.
Edward Cook, Columbia University
As Tom W. states, there are uncertainties and "difficulties" with our current knowledge of Hemispheric temperature histories and valid criticisms or shortcomings in much of our work. This is the nature of the beast -- and I have been loathe to become embroiled in polarized debates that force too simplistic a presentation of the state of the art or "consensus view."
Keith Briffa, CRU
I have just read the M&M stuff criticizing MBH [Mann, Bradley, Hughes]. A lot of it seems valid to me. At the very least MBH is a very sloppy piece of work -- an opinion I have held for some time. Presumably what you have done with Keith is better? -- or is it? I get asked about this a lot. Can you give me a brief heads up? Mike [Mann] is too deep into this to be helpful.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
Bottom line -- there is no way the MWP [Medieval Warm Period] (whenever it was) was as warm globally as the last 20 years. There is also no way a whole decade in the LIA [Little Ice Age] period was more than 1 deg C on a global basis cooler than the 1961-90 mean. This is all gut feeling, no science, but years of experience of dealing with global scales and variability.
Phil Jones, CRU
. . . given what we know about the ability to reconstruct global or NH [Northern Hemisphere] temperatures in the past -- could we really in good conscience say we have the precision from tree rings and the very sparse other data to make any definitive statement of this nature (let alone accuracy)? While I appreciate the cleverness of the second sentence, the problem is everybody will recognize that we are "being clever" -- at what point does one come out looking aggressively defensive?
David Rind, NASA GISS
I think that trying to adopt a time frame of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP' [Medieval Warm Period], even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back. . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
I'm still not convinced about the AO recon [Arctic Oscillation reconstruction], and am worried about the late 20th century "coolness" in the proxy recon that's not in the instrumental, but it's a nice piece of work in any case.
Jonathan Overpeck, University of Arizona
There is a preference in the atmospheric observations chapter of IPCC AR4 to stay with the 1961-1990 normals. This is partly because a change of normals confuses users, e.g. anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted.
David Parker, UK Met Office
What an idiot. The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn't statistically significant. . . . IPCC, me and whoever will get accused of being political, whatever we do. As you know, I'm not political. If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn't being political, it is being selfish.
Phil Jones, CRU
. . . In any case, if the sulfate hypothesis is right, then your prediction of warming might end up being wrong. I think we have been too readily explaining the slow changes over past decade as a result of variability -- that explanation is wearing thin. I would just suggest, as a backup to your prediction, that you also do some checking on the sulfate issue, just so you might have a quantified explanation in case the [warming] prediction is wrong. Otherwise, the Skeptics will be all over us -- the world is really cooling, the models are no good, etc. And all this just as the US is about ready to get serious on the issue.
Mike McCracken, Climate Institute
I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office press release with Doug's paper that said something like -- half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998! . . . I know the warming is on the decadal scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away. . . . Maybe because I'm in my 50s, but the language used in the forecasts seems a bit over the top re[garding] the cold. Where I've been for the last 20 days (in Norfolk) it doesn't seem to have been as cold as the forecasts.
Phil Jones, CRU
The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Kevin Trenberth, UCAR
Subject: LAND vs OCEAN
We probably need to say more about this. Land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming -- and skeptics might claim that this proves that urban warming is real and important.
Tom Wigley, UCAR
"I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same."
Keith Briffa, CRU
In my view, it is the responsibility of our entire community to fight this intentional disinformation campaign, which represents an affront to everything we do and believe in. I'm doing everything I can to do so, but I can't do it alone -- and if I'm left to, we'll lose this battle . . .
Michael Mann, University of Virginia
Apart from my meetings I have skeptics on my back -- still, can't seem to get rid of them. Also the new UK climate scenarios are giving govt ministers the jitters as they don't want to appear stupid when they introduce them (late June ?).
Phil Jones, CRU
As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations . . .
Michael Mann, Penn State University
I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO [meteorological codes] and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight.
One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMO codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up -- but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!
Here, the expected 1990-2003 period is MISSING -- so the correlations aren't so hot! Yet the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah -- there is no "supposed," I can make it up. So I have :-)
OH F**K THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.
You can't imagine what this has cost me -- to actually allow the operator to assign false WMO codes!! But what else is there in such situations? Especially when dealing with a "Master" database of dubious provenance (which, er, they all are and always will be).
So the "duplicated" figure is slightly lower . . . but what's this error with the ".ann" file?! Never seen before. Oh GOD if I could start this project again and actually argue the case for junking the inherited program suite!!
I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before my head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections -- to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. *
"The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government." --Thomas Jefferson
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla) is Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. His web site is www.epw.senate.gov/inhofe. His contact person is Matt Dempsey, and Matt's email address is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
Editor's note: The emails referred to in this article were discussed by Tim Ball in the February issue of the St. Croix Review ("The Death Blow to Climate Science"). He wrote: "Someone hacked into the files of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) based at the University of East Anglia. A very large file (61 megabites) was downloaded and posted to the web. Phil Jones, Director of the CRU, has acknowledged the files are theirs. They contain papers, documents, letters, and e-mails. The latter are the most damaging and contain blunt information about the degree of manipulation of climate science in general and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in particular." The Senate Report is over 80 pages long. The following is an overview and selection of its contents.
Hello, I'm Senator Jim Inhofe, the Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. I want to give you a sneak-peek into a major new Senate report on my Committee's investigation into the scandal commonly known as Climategate.
What emerges from our review of the emails and documents, which span a 13-year period from 1996 through November 2009, is much more than, as EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson put it, scientists who "lack interpersonal skills." Rather, the emails show the world's leading climate scientists discussing, among other things:
* Obstructing the release of damaging data and information;
* Manipulating data to reach preconceived conclusions;
* Threatening journal editors who published work questioning the climate science "consensus"; and
* Assuming activist roles to influence the political process.
The correspondence also reveals a fractured consensus on the state of climate science. Contrary to repeated assertions that the "science is settled," the emails show the world's leading climate scientists arguing over critical issues, questioning key methods and statistical techniques, and doubting whether there is "consensus" on the causes and the extent of climate change.
If you're interested in reading key passages of the report released February 23, visit my website at www.epw.senate.gov/inhofe.
We knew they were cooking the science to support the flawed UN IPCC agenda. As I said on the Senate floor back in 2005 that:
. . . the IPCC has demonstrated an unreasoning resistance to accepting constructive critiques of its scientific and economic methods, even in the report itself . . . this is a recipe for de-legitimizing the entire endeavor in terms of providing credible information that is useful to policy makers.
And back in 2003 I said blaming global warming on CO2 and other man made gases is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American People." I was right.
(Posted by Matt Dempsey This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
The emails (and the data and computer code released to the public) were written by the world's top climate scientists, many of whom had been lead authors and contributing lead authors of various sections of the IPCC reports and were thus intimately involved in writing and editing the IPCC's science assessments. This is no small matter. As noted science historian Naomi Oreskes wrote, the "scientific consensus" of climate change "is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." According to one top Obama Administration official, the IPCC is "the gold standard for authoritative scientific information on climate change because of the rigorous way in which they are prepared, reviewed, and approved. . . .
These scientists work at the most prestigious and influential climate research institutions in the world. For example, Dr. Phil Jones was director of the CRU until he was forced to temporarily resign because of his role in the scandal. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), CRU is "among the renowned research centers in the world" on key aspects of climate change research. It also has "contributed to the scientific assessments of climate change conducted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." CRU's CRUTEM3 is one of the key datasets of surface temperatures utilized by the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report . . .
The IPCC's work serves as the key basis for climate policy decisions made by governments throughout the world, including here in the United States . . .
In short, the utility and probity of the IPCC process and its results are crucial to policymaking with respect to climate change here in the United States.
As noted, the CRU controversy features emails from the world's leading climate scientists -- emails that show disturbing practices contrary to the practice of objective science and potentially federal law . . .
The emails also raise a fundamental question: What, if any, are the boundaries between science and activism? Wherever one draws the line, many scientists confront, and engage in, the political process at some level. As the National Academy of Sciences wrote in "On Being a Scientist: Responsible Conduct in Research," "science and technology have become such integral parts of society that scientists can no longer isolate themselves from societal concerns". . .
Along with apparently hiding data and information, the scientists complained that mainstream scientific journals were publishing work by so-called "skeptics" who disagreed with their views about the causes of climate change . . .
These emails do not read as a group of scientists in full agreement about the fundamental issues in paleoclimatology. Rather, they put the lie to the notion that the science is "settled," and that key facets of the climate science debate are no longer in dispute. As one pulls back the veil, and gets beneath the "nice, tidy story," one sees serious disagreement over the extent of 20th century warming and whether it was anomalous over the past millennium. As Phil Jones admitted to the BBC recently, "There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global in extent or not." "Of course," he continued:
. . . if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today (based on an equivalent coverage over the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere) then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.
The scientists involved here played key roles in shaping and editing the very IPCC reports adduced as dispositive proof of a scientific consensus on catastrophic global warming. The emails and documents reveal, among other things, an insular world of scientists working within the IPCC to generate reports that reflected their biased conclusions on the causes of climate change. In this section, we describe the IPCC in more detail, and try to explain its somewhat opaque inner workings. We also show the links between this controversy and the IPCC, specifically by identifying the scientists in the CRU scandal who exercised great influence over the IPCC assessment reports.
The released CRU emails and documents display potentially unethical, and illegal, behavior. The scientists appear to discuss manipulating data to get their preferred results. On several occasions they appear to discuss subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication. Moreover, there are emails discussing unjustified changes to data by federal employees and federal grantees.
These and other issues raise questions about the lawful use of federal funds and potential ethical misconduct. Discussed below are brief descriptions of the statutes and regulations that the Minority Staff believe are implicated in this scandal. In our investigation, we are examining the emails and documents and determining whether any violations of these federal laws and policies occurred . . .
As we noted in the introduction, the significance of the CRU scandal potentially affects domestic climate change policy. We are investigating the extent to which the CRU scandal reveals flaws in the IPCC's Assessment Reports, as many of the scientists at the center of this scandal drafted and edited those reports (for more on this point, see Section 2). In turn, we are examining whether flaws in the IPCC's work weaken or undermine the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) "Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act." *
"Posterity -- you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it." --John Quincy Adams
V&V Q&A is an e-publication from The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College, in Grove City, Pennsylvania. This article is from V & V. In this latest Q&A, Dr. Paul Kengor, executive director of the Center, interviews Dr. Guido Hulsmann, chairman of the economics department at the University of Angers in France, and author of an acclaimed biography of Ludwig von Mises, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism.
Dr. Paul Kengor: Dr. Guido Hulsmann, you're speaking at 7:00 this evening at Sticht auditorium in the Hall of Arts and Letters at Grove City College. Your topic is "Outrageous Public Debt." Give us a glimpse of your thesis.
Dr. Guido Hulsmann: Public debt helps politicians to pretend that they are solving problems, while in fact they create more problems. It shifts decision-making into the future, while burdening the present and the future. It reduces the funds available for investment, and entails excessive consumption. When public debt is high, it makes the economy more prone to be hit by financial crises, and it also poses a great threat to the stability of all savings. But even when it is low, public debt undermines the economic foundation of a free republic and thus paves the way for tyranny.
Kengor: Tell us about the European debt problem. Perhaps you can start with some data.
Hulsmann: In all European countries, public debt has greatly increased in the past two years. But already before the outbreak of the present crisis, public debt was as high as 1.5 trillion euros or 65 percent of GDP in Germany (2007), and 1.3 trillion euros or 68 percent of GDP in France (2008). Similar conditions existed, in 2007, in Portugal (64 percent) and Hungary (66 percent). In other places, public debt was even higher, in particular, in Belgium (83 percent), Greece (95 percent), and Italy (104 percent). Compare these figures to those of the United States (80 percent in 2008) and of Japan (150 percent in 2007). Notice that all of them do not include off-budget liabilities such as social-security payments and credit guarantees. Thus the public debt on record is just a part of the actual total, and in some cases it is just the tip of an iceberg.
Kengor: What are the reasons? To what extent have massive social-welfare systems contributed to this?
Hulsmann: The basic reason is that governments like to spend money, and that they will spend unlimited amounts if nobody gets in the way. Thus your question boils down to asking why there was no effective opposition. Here we touch upon a very important and fundamental political problem that plagues all Western democracies. In the traditional conception, parliament was supposed to be the opposition that controls executive spending. But Members of the European Parliament have their own expensive agendas. As a consequence, there has emerged some connivance between the legislative and executive, at the expense of those who were not sitting at the table, that is, the taxpayers. This general tendency is very pronounced in Europe, where government spending is heavily focused on social welfare, but you also see it in the United States, where we have a greater focus on military spending.
Kengor: Are these social-welfare systems sustainable, especially given Europeans' unwillingness to reproduce and give birth to a subsequent generation of producers? Who, or what, will produce the revenue to pay for, say, the pension systems of France and Italy?
Hulsmann: This is a good question, and politicians in Europe have no convincing answers. Unlike private insurance schemes, our public social-security systems operate on a pay-as-you-go basis; that is, there is never any capital accumulation out of which future payments could be made. These systems work only as long as there are enough workers paying their dues. However, as you point out, their number is steadily declining, and they already pay very high rates. In France, each employee pays some 21 percent of his gross income into the social-security system, and his employer has to match this sum.
Kengor: Some of these nations had debt ratios so high that they should have been disqualified from the European Union, or, more specifically, the single currency. This seemed true for a country like Greece. How were they able to squeeze in despite their incredibly high debt ratios?
Hulsmann: To join the European Monetary Union, and to remain a member thereof, countries have to fulfill three criteria defined in the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht: (1) total public debt no higher than 60 percent of GDP; (2) annual new debt no higher than 3 percent of GDP; and (3) annual inflation rate no higher than 2 percent. These criteria have been violated by most member countries ever since the inception of the EMU in 1999. For example, France and Germany have been violating the first criterion since 2003, and also the two other criteria for several years. Moreover, some countries have joined the EMU without ever having fulfilled all three criteria. This is most notably the case of Greece. Her government has forged the national accounts, sometimes omitting important expenditures while at other times concealing the true amount of public debt. Clearly, the case of Greece is blatant, but all in all it is also representative of politics in the European Union.
Kengor: On the plus side, is there any country in Europe that has done well in terms of debt? Can others learn from this country?
Hulsmann: Luxemburg has done very well, with a debt ratio of some 10 percent (2007), and Estonia even better (5 percent in 2007). A straightforward explanation of this fact is that both countries are small. Therefore, the political negotiation tables are not that much removed from the taxpaying population.
Kengor: Let's bring this to America. President Bush, in his final year in office, left an all-time record budget deficit of at least $400 billion. That's not the overall debt, but the budget deficit, which, of course, feeds the debt. President Obama, in just one year -- actually, mainly in his first weeks -- quadrupled that deficit to some $1.4-1.6 trillion. We in America have never seen anything like this kind of spending, especially in peacetime.
Hulsmann: Crises of any sort -- whether economic or military -- are a mainspring of government growth, and thus of strongly increasing government expenditure. This is unavoidable as long as the public perceives government intervention as a suitable means to address the crisis. President Bush might have increased his spending if he himself, or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, had been more popular, but that was not the case. President Obama has benefited from widespread veneration of his person and from the perceived gravity of the economic situation. Congress has authorized him to spend so much more than his predecessor.
Kengor: The U.S. Congress recently approved a higher debt ceiling in light of this inconceivable debt accumulated by President Obama and the Democratic Congress in only a year. What's your response to that move?
Hulsmann: This is a symptom of a general tendency. Parliaments all over the world have degenerated into handmaidens of the executive. Congress is no exception. Its members are not representatives of the people against the government, but part of the governmental decision-making process.
Kengor: On the night of the November 4, 2008 election, Congressman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was asked what he feared most. He replied "the Europeanization of America." By that, he meant social policy, economic policy, secularization, the culture. I don't know if Ryan had debt in mind, but America seems like it might be on that "European" path, too, especially if it follows Europe's social-welfare model. Agree?
Hulsmann: As far as public debt is concerned, the United States is long-since on a par with Europe. More generally, you cannot adopt European ideas about government and hope to keep the minimal government cherished by the American revolutionaries.
Kengor: Dr. Guido Hulsmann, it's a pleasure to once again have you at Grove City College. I hope some of our readers will come to your lecture. This is a critical topic, one that involves -- literally -- national bankruptcy. Thanks for talking to V&V Q&A.
Hulsmann: You're welcome, Dr. Kengor. It's my pleasure to stay at your wonderful college. *
"To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." --Thomas Jefferson
Sir,
Reading the editorial in February's Review ("Double-Dealing Healthcare Reform") is discouraging. It lays out our situation clearly, but does not answer the question -- why do the American people permit this chicanery by Congress?
I must conclude that the answer is that we have become lazy and corrupt. Lazy in every sense of the word. We are intellectually lazy because we are not willing to do the work to understand the activities of our elected representatives, and also not willing to condemn them when they won't even read the 2000-page bills they pass. We are otherwise lazy when we think it normal to seize from our fellow citizens important goods and services (healthcare) that we have not ourselves earned.
We are corrupt because we also no longer hold true to any moral compass that might lead us to condemn our fellows, ourselves, or our leaders when they betray our trust and sell us out for political gain. Instead, condemnation itself is the perceived evil, and is studiously avoided. Without that moral compass, we cannot even find fault with the most blatant of quid pro quo "kickbacks." We call it "politics."
I fear that the real reason we permit our legislators to behave like corrupt small-time gangsters is that we are corrupt ourselves, having abandoned many basic ideas about honor and discipline. Excuses have replaced accountability.
Note this story (http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/02/12/georgia.soldier.mom)
I am reminded of two thoughts. One, that our democratic system of elections is an efficient and effective reflection of the people -- of their values and character. Two, of a quote from John Adams in a 1798 address to the militia of Massachusetts:
We have no government armed in power capable of contending in human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.
If we are to restore limited constitutional government, it will not be done by changing the government, but will come about by restoring the virtue and character of the American people. Only when the people reclaim their freedoms, shoulder their own responsibilities, and insist that others do the same will our limited government be restored.
Our American Experiment is about self-government. If the government is forced to take control from the people to save them, then that experiment has failed. That will not happen on my watch.
Healthcare Reform Up in Smoke
At times during the Blair House healthcare summit, a gathering designed to embarrass attending Republicans, the President looked like a victim of the exploding cigar gag -- minus the black powder.
All the President's enchanting promises made repeatedly for over a year were exposed as empty rhetoric. For all his efforts the President has failed to win public support, and for good reason.
Recently the President has talked about his "proposal" -- it is a fiction (there is no such legislative language he himself has written) that allows him to promise benefits that can never be delivered. The President said, "My proposal would bring down the cost of healthcare for millions -- families, businesses, and the federal government." He said it is "fully paid for" and "brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion over the next two decades."
At this late date, the House and Senate have each passed different versions of healthcare reform. House and Senate Democrats are wrestling with each other to see who can form to their liking the final healthcare bill. The pressure is on for House Democrats to pass the Senate version, which is unpopular among House Democrats. Democrat leadership in the Senate is promising to fix those aspects of the Senate bill that House Democrats dislike, but the method proposed, "reconciliation," is controversial in the extreme -- the Democrats themselves called reconciliation the "nuclear option" when Senate Republicans considered its use years ago.
For a year Democrats have been fighting amongst themselves to pass healthcare reform. In the House and Senate, Democrats have had overwhelming majorities, but they haven't got the job done. Now they are calling Republicans "obstructionists," even though the Republicans haven't had the votes to stop whatever plan the House and Senate could agree on. The Democrats are using the Republicans as scapegoats to hide the fact that they are squandering their opportunity to change forever the form of American healthcare.
House Democrats distrust Senate Democrats, suspecting that once House Democrats pass the Senate version through the House, Senate Democrats will take no further action, thus the final form of healthcare reform becomes the Senate version.
So, the House Democrats and Senate Democrats assembled at the Blair House summit with the President on February 25. The selected Republicans in attendance were supposed to be props to blame for the failure to yet pass healthcare reform. The Democrats expected the President to pretend that he was listening to their ideas (because that's what the Democrats believe the American people want to see), and thereafter to shame the Republicans for not accepting the final Democrat bill.
The Democrats needed the President to use his eloquence and supposed "charm" at this late date, when the passage of healthcare reform hangs between success and failure, to convince the American people that reform was worthy of support.
But the Democrats met their match in Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan. To be fair, all the present Republicans did a good job, but Paul Ryan was outstanding.
Paul Ryan pointed out that, yes, indeed, the rising costs of healthcare is "driving us off a fiscal cliff," that Medicare has a $38 trillion unfunded liability, amounting to empty promises to future generations. He said Medicaid is
. . . growing at 21 percent each year, and is suffocating states' budgets. It's adding trillions in obligations that we have no means to pay for.
He told the president that he respects the Congressional Budget Office professionals whose task it is to estimate the costs of proposed legislation, but that the score of the Senate version of reform can't be done accurately because of the "gimmicks and smoke-and-mirrors" involved. To say, as the Democrats do, that the bill reduces the deficit $131 billion over the next 10 years is false, because the bill has:
. . .10 years of tax increases, about half a trillion dollars, with 10 years of Medicare cuts, about half a trillion dollars, to pay for six years of spending. . . . Now, what's the true 10-year cost of this bill in 10 years? That's $2.3 trillion.
Paul Ryan said that the Senate bill takes $52 billion in higher Social Security tax revenues and:
. . . counts them as offsets. But that's really reserved for Social Security. So either we're double-counting them or we don't intend on paying those Social Security benefits.
Paul Ryan said:
Now, when you take a look at the Medicare cuts, what this bill essentially does [is treat] Medicare like a piggy bank. It raids a half a trillion dollars out of Medicare, not to shore up Medicare solvency, but to spend on this new government program.
. . . According to the chief actuary of Medicare . . . as much as 20 percent of Medicare's providers will either go out of business or will have to stop seeing Medicare beneficiaries. Millions of seniors . . . who have chosen Medicare Advantage will lose the coverage that they now enjoy. . . . You can't say that you're using this money to either extend Medicare solvency and also offset the cost of this new program. That's double counting.
And so when you take a look at all of this; when you strip out the double-counting and what I would call these gimmicks, the full 10-year cost of the bill has a $460 billion deficit. The second 10-year cost of this bill has a $1.4 trillion deficit.
. . . Probably the most cynical gimmick in this bill is something that we all probably agree on. We don't think we should cut doctors [annual federal reimbursement] 21 percent next year. We've stopped those cuts from occurring every year for the last seven years.
We all call this, here in Washington, the doc fix. Well, the doc fix, according to your numbers, costs $371 billion. It was in the first iteration of all of these bills, but because it was a big price tag and it made the score look bad, made it look like a deficit . . . that provision was taken out, and it's been going on in stand-alone legislation. But ignoring these costs does not remove them from the backs of taxpayers. Hiding spending does not reduce spending. And so when you take a look at all of this, it just doesn't add up.
. . . I'll finish with the cost curve. Are we bending the cost curve down or are we bending the cost curve up? . . . Well if you look at your own chief actuary at Medicare, we're bending it up. He's claiming that we're going up $222 billion, adding more to the unsustainable fiscal situation we have.
This is when the President, and all the assembled Democrats too, looked as if their gag-cigars exploded.
All the nation's assembled media were rolling film and recording audio, but Paul Ryan's words were not widely broadcast, as it would hinder progress of finally passing healthcare reform by revealing the double-dealing features of the Senate bill. The media had been counting on embarrassed Republicans but had instead found embarrassed Democrats.
After a year of effort this President has failed to gain the public's support for healthcare reform, and through the Democrats might just be able to ram it though to passage, it will carry an indelible stain.
According to recent polling done by Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen, 57 percent of voters believe that passage would hurt the economy, while only 25 percent believe it would help; 81 percent of voters say it's likely the plan will cost more than projected, only 10 percent say the official numbers are accurate; 76 percent believe their own coverage is good or excellent, and half of these people believe that if proposed legislation is passed they will be forced to change insurance, much to their displeasure.
At this point, if the Democrats brazen through to passage this perversion of "reform" they will bear the entire burden of blame when the plan's many terrible aspects become manifest for all to see. *
"I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious." --Thomas Jefferson
Some of the quotes following each article have been gathered by The Federalist Patriot at: http://FederalistPatriot.US/services.asp.
We would like to thank the following people for their generous contribution in support of this journal (from 1/16/2010 -- 3/12/2010): John E. Alderson Jr., George E. Andrews, David D. Barbee, William A. Barr, Alexis I. Dup Bayard, Veronica A. Binzley, Fremon Bowne, Frederick A. Breisch, Walter I. C. Brent, Mitzi A. Brown, Patrick J. Buchanan, Price B. Burgess, Dino Casali, Cliff Chambers, Jim Cruit, Michael D. Detmer, Arthur D. Dickson, Jeanne L. Dipaola, Robert M. Ducey, Don Dyslin, Ronald E. Everett, James R. Gaines, John B. Gardner, Gary D. Gillespie, Finis Gillespie, Nancy & Robert Goodman, Joyce Griffin, Daniel J. Haley, Anthony Harrigan, John H. Hearding, Thomas E. Heatley, Norman G. P. Helgeson, William & Barbara Hilgedick, Thomas E. Humphreys, David Ihle, Fredrick R. Joseph, Ken E. Kampfe, Mary A. Kelley, Martin Kellogg, William H. Kelly, Frank G. Kenski, Robert E. Kersey, Ralph Kramer, Reuben A. Larson, William H. Lupton, Gregor MacDonald, Arthur J. May, Roberta R. McQuade, Eugene F. Meenagh, Delbert H. Meyer, Mitzi M. Olson, Harold K. Olson, Clark Palmer, Nancy J. Parise, David Pohl, Marilyn E. Radke, Herbert C. Schneider, Morris R. Scholz, Irene L. Schultz, Harry Richard Schumache, Richard H. Segan, Joseph M. Simonet, Ben T. Slade, John R. Stevens, Michael S. Swisher, Robert M. Thornton, Alan Rufus Waters, Gaylord T. Willett, Charles W. Wilson, W. Raymond Worman, James P. Zaluba.
The following is a summary of the February 2010 issue of the St. Croix Review:
In "Double-Dealing Healthcare Reform," Barry MacDonald outlines pay-offs, mandates, price controls, and accounting gimmicks.
Mark Hendrickson, in "Climategate, Copenhagen and Cap and Trade," reports on the Climategate scandal, the doings of the failed Copenhagen conference on climate change, and the radical, leftist agenda of the green movement; in "The Coming of Caesar," he sees the rise of a crude democracy and the consequent collapse of our system of government; in "Combating Recessions: The Search for the Right Macroeconomic Policy," he believes macroeconomic theories lead to disaster, and he calls for a return to the free market; in "Government Intervention and High Prices," he shows how President Obama's policies are harming the poor and middle class; in "Jefferson's Warnings about Money and Banks," he writes that Jefferson anticipated our present dilemma.
Allan Brownfeld, in "In the Post-Cold War World, U.S. Is Still Searching for the Proper Role," suggests that Conservatives should return to a foreign policy that avoids foreign entanglements; in "Nation-Building in Afghanistan: A War of 'Necessity' or a War of 'Choice?'" he concludes that the time, treasure, and blood required to bring a stable and non-corrupt government to Afghanistan may be too much; in "Examining the Real -- and Largely Ignored -- Causes of Gang Violence in Chicago and Other Major U.S. Cities," he points out the persistent failings of the American underclass: single-parent homes, parents on drugs, a lack of respect for education, and a failure to take responsibility.
Herbert London, in "Fighting Jihadism at Home," explains how we should react to the Fort Hood shooter's killings; in "Tightening the Noose on Foreign Policy," he notes how President Obama's spending spree on domestic policy is restricting foreign policy choices; in "The Triumph of Hope Over Reality," he looks at the results of the President's first years, and sees nothing but false hope; in "'Race to the Top' Merely Another Education Gimmick," he believes public education is failing because of democracy, teachers' unions, and a toxic culture; in "Egyptian Chutzpah," he exposes hypocrisy involved in the construction by the Egyptian government of a wall designed to keep the Palestinians in Gaza from crossing into Egypt.
In "Obama's Plan and the Key Battleground," George Friedman writes of the importance of placing intelligence operatives within the Taliban for the success of the Afghanistan war. Only the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has the capability of inserting such operatives. The trustworthiness of the ISI is problematic.
In "A Candle for Iran? A Reagan Lesson for Obama -- from Christmas 1981" Paul Kengor compares President Obama's lackluster response to the uprising against the tyrants in Iran with a similar situation during Reagan's presidency; in "Who Was Nels Konnerup?" he celebrates the life of an unrecognized American hero.
John Howard answers a columnist from the New York Times in "Emotional Stress on U.S. Troops."
Senator James Inhofe, in "Inhofe in Copenhagen: 'It Has Failed. . . . It's Deja Vu All Over Again,'" reports that the same intractable blocks to binding agreements on carbon emissions that existed at the time of the Kyoto and Milan climate change conferences still exist today. Nothing has been achieved at the climate-change conference in Copenhagen, and the cap-and-trade bill will die in the U.S. Senate.
Tim Ball, in "The Death Blow to Climate Science," shows how the leaking of documents and emails from an elite group of scientists who have been promoting theories of human-caused, catastrophic global warming have exposed manipulated data and dishonest practices.
In "The Future of Energy Policy," Murray Weidenbaum looks at the future of energy policy from the viewpoints of economic, political, environmental, military, and foreign policy concerns.
John D'Aloia Jr., in "Out of Sight Taxes," exposes the growing weight of taxes and regulations that most of us don't know.
In "Healthcare," Harry Neuwirth places most of the blame for rising costs on Congress.
In "1776: A Stirring Year," Jigs Gardner relates the pivotal events of the year following the Declaration of Independence through the work of two historians.
John Ingraham shows how political correctness allowed a fraud a long run of success at Williams College in "A Case of Academic Corruption."
Thomas Martin reviews "Wisdom and the Well-Rounded Life: What Is a University?" by Peter Milward, S. J.
Wisdom and the Well-Rounded Life: What Is a University? by Peter Milward, S. J., Fulcrum Publishing.
Peter Milward's, book rings of Aristotle, Aquinas, and G. K. Chesterton, when he reestablishes the nature of a university as a place dedicated to a course of study for a well-rounded life which culminates in wisdom. He reminds us "all men by nature desire to know" as they have been created with a mind which is made to come to a point in the romantic adventure of man's return to God. Professor Milward sees that the secular university has turned its back on God, thereby cutting itself off from its root and separating man's body from his soul -- his head from his heart -- to establish "diversity," which, having no core, is directed by government funds and the barons of corporations who serve the bodily and external goods of life as though they were the ends of life.
In the modern world, very few universities, if any, offer a liberal education dedicated to teaching the moral and intellectual virtues necessary for the moral formation of a living soul. Today's universities are all about outfitting students with the marketable skills to be clerks, technicians, or wards of the state who must learn to think globally in their information-based workplaces currently on the brink of bankruptcy. What is to be done?
Peter Milward invokes the muse of wonder in his book by asking fifteen philosophical questions, starting with "what is the point of a university?" which he answers by looking into the word university, to see:
. . . it is a place for the study of universal knowledge . . . where students at a university worthy of its name ought to study everything there is to be known under the sun.
From here, he looks into the roots of education, culture, language, literature, science, etc., culminating with the world, to uncover the ancient truths held within these words.
It is important to remember that man is the only creature who is born ignorant, who does not know himself. In fact, G. K. Chesterton notes,
[E]ach one of us is living in a separate cosmos. The theory of life held by one man never corresponds exactly to that held by another. The whole of man's opinions, morals, tastes, manners, hobbies, work back eventually to some picture of existence itself which, whether it be a paradise or a battlefield, or a school, or a chaos, is not precisely the same picture of existence which lies at the back of any other brain.
This ancient idea establishes man as a microcosm which corresponds with the universe, the macrocosm. The universe is ordered by God whom man seeks to know by using the intellect with which he is endowed as a living soul. Everyman starts out on the edge of existence looking out at the world in wonder. It is from this point that Milward departs:
I want to begin with a sense of wonder, according to the older ideal of Aristotle, who said that all philosophy springs out of just such a sense. It is a sense of wonder that opens our eyes to the world around us and elicits questions about the things we find in that world, in the spirit of a child questioning his mother. In this sense, we have to go back, like William Wordsworth and G. K. Chesterton, to the time of childhood, when all true education, truly universal education, begins.
Peter Milward understands that everyman is a philosopher and every student deserves to be asked philosophical questions to learn to think for himself in seeking his end. He moves like Socrates, in the spirit of wonder, mapping fifteen questions that the students and faculty at every university ought to be examining to quicken their minds in pointed discussions toward the pursuit of Truth that will make them free.
Given that the university is the place for the study of universal knowledge, chapter two, "What Is Education?" looks into the word to see its origins as a "drawing out of" something already within the one who receives it. This is the Socratic method of question and answer. The student is thought to possess knowledge, in a cloudy, undigested form; and it is for the teacher, in whom the knowledge is more fully developed, to draw it out of him and make it more explicit. Obviously, all knowledge cannot be drawn out of a student, but what is known by his intellectual ancestors, who have looked out at the world and into themselves, can be placed before him to assist in his search for the Truth which will bring order and direction into his life. "The object," Milward notes, "of education is the mind of the student, and thereby his character and personality."
Jumping ahead, in chapter eight, "What Is Science?" the primary object of science is to investigate the world of nature that surrounds us, of everything that is found. Milward, uncovering the word, notes natura in Latin means what a thing is born to be, from the verb nasci, "to be born"; physis in Greek comes from the verb phyein, meaning "to grow." The physical sciences investigate all livings things, including man, to understand what they were born to be. Aristotle progressed from the study of the world in Physics to the study of philosophy in Metaphysics.
At this point Milward had me digging on my own, and I found that St. Thomas Aquinas, building upon Aristotle, made the distinction between the natural light of reason, and the divine light of reason, which leads to the science of Theology. The physical sciences, which derive their certitude from the natural light of human reason, are subject to err. Aquinas notes that Theology is the science which accepts the principles revealed by the grace of God, permitting man to see creatures of His creation "only so far as they are referable to God as their beginning and end." The purpose of Theology is eternal beatitude, "to which as to an ultimate end, the ends of all the practical sciences are directed."
As you can see, Milward presents ideas that build upon themselves and offer a much-needed outline of an education that is worthy of the name university.
In closing, Milward's concern for the current state of the university mirrors that of G. K. Chesterton, who noted:
There are two things, and two things only, for the human mind, a dogma and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age is, at best, a poetical epoch, an age of prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a prejudice is a direction. . . . it is enough to say that unless we have some doctrine of a divine man, all abuses may be excused, since evolution may turn them into uses. It will be easy for the scientific plutocrats to maintain that humanity will adapt itself to any conditions which we now consider evil.
This book is a must read for students and faculty in the modern university.
John Ingraham writes from Bouquet, New York.
In November 2009, a man named either Bernard or Ernest Moore pled guilty in Federal Court in Washington, D.C. to fraud exceeding $820,000, beginning twenty years ago. Over the last six years he had used ninety false credit cards, and there was a history of aliases and false Social Security numbers in his past, as well as a conviction for credit card fraud in 1987, and a jail term. Without a Bachelor of Arts degree, he had used a false educational history to gain admission to Claremont Graduate University and Howard, where he was granted a Ph. D. last spring. He was hired in September 2008 as a visiting professor of political science at Williams College, and he was also a "visiting researcher" at Yale and a "senior policy fellow" for a Democratic congressman from Chicago. The courses he taught at Williams were Power, Politics, and Democracy in America; Race in the Criminal Justice System; Black Politics; Judicial Politics; and Black Leadership. He was scheduled to teach a course in Constitutional Law. Chiefly known for his Washington connections, where he established a program called "Williams on the Hill," he was active in securing congressional internships for black Williams students (for which the college paid stipends), many of whom looked up to him as a mentor, adviser, and role model. A very poor teacher, he managed things so that his students filled class time with reports (an old dodge of lazy teachers), he took phone calls during classes and went out in the hall to talk, he fell asleep in class, he hardly corrected papers, his grades were inflated, he told anecdotes and name-dropped.
The college fired him after they read about his guilty plea in the Washington Post.
The coverage in the college paper was revealing. Much of the story was about how he got hired in the first place, finally coming to the conclusion that the records of those hired as visiting professors are not so carefully examined as regular faculty. The student reactions were not so evasive. As I noted, the black students looked up to him as a role model, and of course they used each other: if he pushed them forward in Washington, they wrote recommendations for him and flattered him, and they came to his defense, saying he was "real," "genuine," and "sincere." One said:
The CBC [Congressional Black Caucus] "Race and the New Congress" event that Moore organized last November was an overwhelming success. Listening to the leaders of the Caucus and Governor Deval Patrick discuss the future of race in the United States a mere two weeks after Obama's monumental election was one of my most memorable first-year experiences.
A few expressed disgust with his teaching, but only one came close to the truth:
Seeing as the school was celebrating him left and right, there was no way I would speak up. If everyone else is going to turn a blind eye then I will turn a blind eye too and get my good grade and get out.
Why was this crook and conman and incompetent teacher celebrated? Why is there no revulsion now? Because he was black, and because he seemed to put the college in touch with what it thought of as gritty reality, not just with Washington contacts but especially with the radicals of the Congressional Black Caucus. Political correctness may have had much to do with his hiring, but the whiff of Chicago and Washington was the fatal attractant. His hiring was corrupt and dishonest, his career at the college was corrupt and dishonest (scheduled to teach Constitutional Law!), and the response to his exposure was corrupt and dishonest. None of this can be admitted on any level, and I even doubt if it is recognized. How can any of the many, many bureaucrats there admit that he was hired because he was black, and had promising political connections? The Political Science department cannot admit they let him teach because he was black, and because his Washington connections cast the department in a good light. Most of the students cannot express disgust because they have no moral compass in such an expedient environment, and many were complicit in the P.C. benefits of being black, and of advancing their careers.
I am a Williams graduate, but I recognized, even as I was a student there in the 1950s, that it was a bastion of smug conventional thinking. The difference between then and now is that what passes for conventional thinking today is truly poisonous, soul rotting. Its most hapless victims are the students, especially the blacks. *
"In disquisitions of every kind there are certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasoning must depend." --Alexander Hamilton