TAX THE RICH (Plus: CEO Pay vs. Worker Pay)

Updated (Originally posted in March 2014)

Debt Ramirez

(Pic has relevant link in it)

The first set of videos show the main point for quick and easy consumption. The rest is the larger case made that by taking or taxing the rich excessively ends up hurting the poor just as excessively, even more. Other topics related:

Enjoy.

Video Description:

  • The Left Keeps talking about the Gap between CEOs and Minimum Wage Employees…. I will analyze these salaries and break it down…. (about 10-mins):

Video description:

  • Is America really broke? Michael Moore (and others) tells us that there are oceans of cash being hoarded by the wealthy. But Iowahawk (iowahawk.typepad.com // Twitter) did a little addition, and armed with these statistics Bill and the ‘Hawk blow a hole in the “hoarding” lie big enough to fit a documentary filmmaker through (about 9-mins):

Video description:

  • Do the rich pay their fair share of taxes? It’s not a simple question. First of all, what do you mean by rich? And how much is fair? What are the rich, whoever they are, paying now? Is there any tax rate that would be unfair? UCLA Professor of Economics, Lee Ohanian, has some fascinating and unexpected answers (about 5-mins):


A Case Study


Big corporations WANT a medical device tax because it thins out the herd (the competition). Why? Because the little guy cannot compete with the high costs and so the giants worry less about competition and thus large corporations who corner the market become the rule.

Stryker Corporation has announced that it will close its facility in Orchard Park, New York, eliminating 96 jobs next month. It will also counter the medical device tax in Obamacare by eliminating 5% of their global workforce, an estimated 1,170 positions.

Jon Stryker is heir to the Stryker Corporation, one of the largest medical device and equipment manufacturers in the world. Stryker’s grandfather was the surgeon who invented the mobile hospital bed. The company now sells $8.3 billion worth of hospital beds, artificial joints, medical cameras, and medical software every year.

Stryker, a member of the Forbes 400 list, was one of the top five donors to the Obama campaign. Having donated $2 million to the Priorities USA Action super PAC, Stryker also gave $66,000 in contributions to Obama and the Democrat Party.

[….]

Stryker’s corporation is part of an industry that has been a big loser at the hands of Obamacare. Having refused to get on board with the White House and the Senate Finance Committee when the law was being crafted in 2009, the medical device industry was punished with an excise tax of 2.3% of their revenues, regardless of whether they make a profit.

Republicans in the House have attempted to repeal the excise tax with a bill called the Protect Medical Innovation Act. The Democrat-led Senate, however, has refused to cooperate, saying that withdrawing the tax would cause Obamacare to come unraveled.

Last June, while the nation awaited the Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, Stryker Corp. announced that it was tying plans to slash 5% of its global workforce to the tax if the law was upheld.

★ ATTENTION ★★ 

The medical device tax is hurting women

even more than it’s hurting men

USA TODAY notes the job losses in the medical Device Tax ACA implementation:

WASHINGTON — Even as the new health care law adds millions of insured customers to the paying pool, medical device manufacturers say a tax on their product could cost them billions.

The tax came as the government looked for ways to fund the new law. Insurers agreed to pay a tax beginning in 2013 because they would gain new customers.

Hospitals agreed to lower Medicare payments because they would have fewer uninsured customers and therefore, would not be left with the bill.

And the government looked to higher-earning citizens — those who make more than $200,000 a year — to also contribute. In industry, the government focused on the $130 billion-a-year medical device manufacturing industry.

But the manufacturers say the tax will force money away from research, send jobs overseas and stop them from expanding in the U.S.

Analysts say the industry will easily make the money back in profits from overseas sales — where there’s a growing market of individuals with diabetes and heart disease — and that more insured customers mean more devices.

[….]

Steve Ubl, CEO of AdvaMed, the trade organization that represents the industry, said the tax would force companies to cut 43,000 jobs and will cost the industry $30 billion in the next 10 years.

“It’s very concerning to us,” he said. “It’s a tax on revenue, and it translates to a very deep cut in the bottom line.”

Ubl said the companies won’t look for more efficient products, contrary to what advocates of the law say.

Denny’s is the latest to admit that this will make them raise costs, hurting those who depend on their services using allotted retirement funds for eating (the retired elderly), as well as those single mothers the Left profess to love… no work.

President Obama’s election victory ensured his Affordable Care Act would remain the centerpiece of his first term in power – but that has left some business owners baulking at the extra cost Obamcare will bring.

Florida based restaurant boss John Metz, who runs approximately 40 Denny’s and owns the Hurricane Grill & Wings franchise has decided to offset that by adding a five percent surcharge to customers’ bills and will reduce his employees’ hours.

With Obamacare due to be fully implemented in January 2014, Metz has justified his move by claiming it is “the only alternative. I’ve got to pass on the cost to the customer.”

…read more at Mail Online…

Lately, a lot of people who are in the restaurant business have said the same, here are a couple of short videos on the matter:

NY Applebee’s CEO Zane Tankel

A Papa John’s Pizza franchise owner

Rermember my old story about the Burbank Country Club and how liberal city councils feel good in passing legislation without second thought to those they hurt in the process — whom they profess to be helping. Here it is used in a reponse to a small paper near my town:

Here is the answer with a great example from a few years back, right down the road a bit from both John and I… it comes from an article I have saved from the June 26, 2002 Daily News, Editorial Section, entitled “Killing Jobs”:

Billingsley’s Restaurant at the Van Nuys Golf Course may soon fall victim to the economic illiteracy of the Los Angeles City Council [almost all liberals by the by].

Five years ago, the council pandered to organized labor by passing a measure requiring all businesses that contract with the city to pay their employees a “living wage,” an hourly salary tied to the Consumer Price Index that tends to run about three dollars more than the California minimum wage.

The measure, intended to bolster economic status of the city’s working families, was a classic example of arrogant politicians thinking they could magically legislate wealth into existence.

But grandiose schemes have consequences. Extra money for salaries has to come from somewhere. Usually from customers, workers or taxpayers who end up paying the bill.

Billingsley’s is a case in point of what’s wrong with this scheme [which Santa Monica has made policy].

Because the restaurant’s lease on the city-owned golf course is up for renewal, it will soon have to start paying the living wage, which owner Drew Billingsley says will cost him $100,00 a year [keep in mind this is not only in wages, but the time and money spent on the mountains of new paperwork to make sure he is following this new regulation]. In an effort to meet that expense, he has laid off as many employees as possible, but its not enough.

Thus Billingsley now has two choices: Either he can raise prices and alienate his loyal clientele (which consists largely of retirees on fixed incomes), or he can close up shop altogether.

Either way, the community will suffer. That’s what happens when feel-good posturing, not sound policy, governs lawmaking.

City Hall has done its best to chase away well-paying jobs, and public schools have done their worst at educating people so they aren’t qualified for well-paying jobs. Artificial living wages won’t solve real people’s problems.

Chasing Alternative Energy Companies OUT of California

Loss of jobs and customer dissatisfaction are the result of government interference. Here are more examples noted by Dennis Prager:

C.S. LEWIS hits the nail on the head when he said:

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”

What did Reagan say? Oh Yeah. Well, many business owners are feeling this fear right now.

This story comes from the Orange County Register and documents yet another company leaving the sunshine state:

California has changed dramatically since 1941, when Carl and Margaret Karcher scraped together about 325 bucks to start a hot dog cart in Los Angeles – a precursor to a drive-through restaurant they opened in Anaheim and which grew into the Carl’s Jr. fast-food empire. The Karchers were household names in Southern California, not just for their restaurants but for their activism in conservative politics and Catholic charities.

Whatever you think of the Karchers’ politics, you’ve got to love the entrepreneurial story that surrounds their success and what it said about California in its heyday. The Karchers – he died in 2008 and she in 2006 – came to the Land of Opportunity from the staid backwater of Upper Sandusky, Ohio.

California has beckoned many Midwesterners – and people from every part of America and the globe – not just because of its pleasant weather, but because of a culture of openness that allowed creative people to go as far as their ideas would take them. Unfortunately, people with energy and creativity are now likely to go elsewhere, to places where the state government has different attitudes toward the private sector.

Indeed, CKE Restaurants, parent of Carl’s Jr., is likely to move its headquarters from Carpinteria, near Ventura, to Texas and is undergoing a rapid expansion of restaurants in the Lone Star State. Right before the budget circus got going Wednesday, CKE CEO Andrew Puzder spoke at the California Chamber of Commerce, blocks from the Capitol dome. Like most of us, Puzder loves California and has no interest in leaving it, but he told harrowing tales about doing business in a state that has gone from an entrepreneurial heaven to a bureaucratic nightmare.

It costs us $250,000 more to build one California restaurant than in Texas,” he said. “And once it is opened, we’re not allowed to run it.” This explains why Carl’s is opening 300 restaurants in Texas and only maintaining its presence in California. Texas has lower taxes than California, but the reason for the shift has more to do with regulation and with the attitude of the respective governments.

Puzder complained about the permitting process here, where it takes eight months to two years to open a new restaurant compared to an average of 1 1/2 months in Texas. In California, restaurants have to provide new curb cuts, new traffic lights, you name it. The company must endure so many requirements and must submit to so many inspections that it becomes excessively costly – and the bureaucrats are in charge of the project.

Once the restaurant is open, Puzder said, the store’s general managers are not allowed to run the business as if they own it. That’s the key to the company’s customer service approach – allowing general managers to do whatever it takes to make customers happy. But California’s inflexible, union-designed work rules, for instance, classify general managers as regular employees. They must be paid overtime for any work beyond an eight-hour day. They must take mandated breaks at specified times.

…(read more)…

Andy Pudzer, CEO of Carls Jr. Restaurants on over regulation from Dan Logue on Vimeo.

California is the micro of the growing Federal Government. Obama-Care is just another layer of the boot of government on the backs of business owners, who hire a lions share of people in the U.S. The reporter above says “the regulations are well-intended, but piled-on…” And do take note, we (as a body politik) add layers and layers of laws. Here is an old quote I often use:

  • This is most evident in the fact that Americans today must obey thirty times as many laws as their great-grandfathers had to obey at the turn of the century. Federal agencies publish an average of over 200 pages of new rulings, regulations, and proposals in the Federal Register each business day. That growth of the federal statute book is one of the clearest measures of the increase of the government control of the citizenry… (adapted from: James Bovard, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty [St. Martins Griffen; 1994], p. 1.)

All these private people want, really, is for the boot to be lifted. But not for 4-more years. Sad. Which brings me to another quote that explains the egalitarian thinking behind legislation based on feelings:

There is a Liberal sentiment that it should also punish those who take more than their “fair share.” But what is their fair share? (Shakespeare suggests that each should be treated not according to his deserts, but according to God’s mercy, or none of us would escape whipping.)

The concept of Fairness, for all its attractiveness to sentiment, is a dangerous one (cf. quota hiring and enrollment, and talk of “reparations”). Deviations from the Law, which is to say the Constitution, to accommodate specifically alleged identity-group injustices will all inevitably be expanded, universalized, and exploited until there remains no law, but only constant petition of Government.

We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law’s treatment.

But “fairness” is not only a nonlegal but an antilegal process, for it deals not with universally applicable principles and strictures, but with specific cases, responding to the perceived or proclaimed needs of individual claimants, and their desire for extralegal preference. And it could be said to substitute fairness (a determination which must always be subjective) for justice (the application of the legislated will of the electorate), is to enshrine greed—the greed, in this case, not for wealth, but for preference. The socialistic spirit of the Left indicts ambition and the pursuit of wealth as Greed, and appeals, supposedly on behalf of “the people,” to the State for “fairness.”….

….But such fairness can only be the non-Constitutional intervention of the State in the legal, Constitutional process—awarding, as it sees fit, money (reparations), preferment (affirmative action), or entertainment (confiscation)….

….”Don’t you care?” is the admonition implicit in the very visage of the Liberals of my acquaintance on their understanding that I have embraced Conservatism. But the Talmud understood of old that good intentions can lead to evil—vide Busing, Urban Renewal, Affirmative Action, Welfare, et cetera, to name the more immedi­ately apparent, and not to mention the, literally, tens of thousands of Federal and State statutes limiting freedom of trade, which is to say, of the right of the individual to make a living, and, so earn that wealth which would, in its necessary expenditure, allow him to provide a living to others….

…. I recognized that though, as a lifelong Liberal, I endorsed and paid lip service to “social justice,” which is to say, to equality of result, I actually based the important decisions of my life—those in which I was personally going to be affected by the outcome—upon the principle of equality of opportunity; and, further, that so did everyone I knew. Many, I saw, were prepared to pay more taxes, as a form of Charity, which is to say, to hand off to the Government the choice of programs and recipients of their hard-earned money, but no one was prepared to be on the short end of the failed Government pro­grams, however well-intentioned. (For example—one might endorse a program giving to minorities preference in award of government contracts; but, as a business owner, one would fight to get the best possible job under the best possible terms regardless of such a pro­gram, and would, in fact, work by all legal and, perhaps by semi- or illegal means to subvert any program that enforced upon the pro­prietor a bad business decision.)*

Further, one, in paying the government to relieve him of a feeling of social responsibility, might not be bothered to question what in fact constituted a minority, and whether, in fact, such minority con­tracts were actually benefiting the minority so enshrined, or were being subverted to shell corporations and straw men. †

______________________________________________
*No one would say of a firefighter, hired under rules reducing the height requirement, and thus unable to carry one’s child to safety, “Nonetheless, I am glad I voted for that ‘more fair’ law.”

† As, indeed, they are, or, in the best case, to those among the applicants claiming eligibility most capable of framing, supporting, or bribing their claims to the front of the line. All claims cannot be met. The politicians and bureaucrats discriminating between claims will neces­sarily favor those redounding to their individual or party benefit—so the eternal problem of “Fairness,” supposedly solved by Government distribution of funds, becomes, yet again and inevitably, a question of graft.

  • David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), 116-117, 122, 151, 154.

One might say that the politician, the doctor, and the dramatist make their living from human misery; the doctor in attempting to alleviate it, the politician to capitalize on it, and the dramatist, to describe it.

But perhaps that is too epigrammatic.

When I was young, there was a period in American drama in which the writers strove to free themselves of the question of character.

Protagonists of their worthy plays had made no choices, but were afflicted by a condition not of their making; and this condition, homosexuality, illness, being a woman, etc., was the center of the play. As these protagonists had made no choices, they were in a state of innocence. They had not acted, so they could not have sinned.

A play is basically an exercise in the raising, lowering, and altering of expectations (such known, collectively, as the Plot); but these plays dealt not with expectations (how could they, for the state of the protagonist was not going to change?) but with sympathy.

What these audiences were witnessing was not a drama, but a troublesome human condition displayed as an attraction. This was, formerly, known as a freak show.

The subjects of these dramas were bearing burdens not of their choosing, as do we all. But misfortune, in life, we know, deserves forbearance on the part of the unafflicted. For though the display of courage in the face of adversity is worthy of all respect, the display of that respect by the unaffected is presumptuous and patronizing.

One does not gain merit from congratulating an afflicted person for his courage. One only gains entertainment.

Further, endorsement of the courage of the affliction play’s hero was not merely impertinent, but, more basically, spurious, as applause was vouchsafed not to a worthy stoic, but to an actor portraying him.

These plays were an (unfortunate) by-product of the contemporary love-of-the-victim. For a victim, as above, is pure, and cannot have sinned; and one, by endorsing him, may perhaps gain, by magic, part of his incontrovertible status.

  • David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), 134-135.

And of course, the SNOOKY TAX example:

Take note that the persons opposed to tanning altogether are the ones who got this 10% tax added. They know that even a 10% tax (just like all the taxes added to smoking) dissuades someone from that action. Similarly, all the taxes coming down the pike will do what exactly to consumers wanting to go out and spend??

POLITICO:

In one scene, Snooki — with her impressively orange tan — broke the shocking news that she’s been staying away from her home away from home: Tanning salons.

“I don’t go tanning anymore because Obama put a 10% tax on tanning. McCain would never put a 10% tax on tanning. Because he’s pale and would probably want to be tan,” she said.

Snooki was referring to a provision in the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act that mandates tanning salons impose a 10 percent tax on UV-ray sessions.

McCain and Jersey Shore team up. Why would a President who is concerned about jobs and people (supposedly) put a 10% on small business owners that would do nothing but hinder job growth. Many of his policies hinder this.

UPDATED!

Via Libertarian Republican

Excerpted, column by Howard Rich, Investor’s Business Daily, “ObamaCare Mandate To Cut Worker Hours, Leaving The Poor Worse Off”:

Having secured another four years in the White House, Obama can now block any effort to overturn his socialized medicine law — although states can (thankfully) still stop much of its new spending if they reject ObamaCare’s “exchanges” and refuse its Medicaid enrollment expansions. For the sake of our future deficits, let’s hope they do so en masse.

One provision of ObamaCare that can no longer be stopped, however, is its “employer mandate.” While nowhere near as infamous as the “individual mandate” compelling citizen participation in the health insurance market, ObamaCare’s requirement that companies provide coverage to all employees working more than 30 hours a week will be a job killer nonetheless.

Not only will this mandate prevent job growth among small businesses, it will also result in fewer hours and less income for workers at larger companies. These are people struggling to make ends meet on limited income — people who cannot afford to lose these hours.

Last month Darden Restaurants — which employs 185,000 people at nearly 2,000 Olive Garden, Longhorn Steakhouse and Red Lobster restaurants — revealed that it was scaling back many of its employees’ workweeks to 28 hours. Ordinarily such a move would result in high turnover and an influx of less-competent employees — but not in Obama’s economy.

This month Kroger — the grocer that employs 350,000 people — announced that existing part-time workers and new hires would be limited to working 28 hours per week. “Kroger is doing this to avoid paying for full-time health care for employees who currently only receive part-time benefits,” one employee explains. “And (so) they will not get hit with the $3,000 penalty.”

 

We Spend More on Education than the Military (UPDATED STATS)

UPDATED STATS!!

Total GDP Expenditures on education from 2011 (source): 6.9%

Total GDP Expenditures on the military from 2014 (source): 3.5%

Total GDP Expenditures on health from 2011 (source): 17.7%

(The below was originally Posted April 4th, 2011)

I posted a link to the following audio of Michael Medved [as a response to a challenge from a youngster in conversation elsewhere on the WEB] taking a challenge from a caller on how much we spend on education versus the military.

He challenged the stats used by Michael Medved. I enjoy challenges like these if only it makes me work a bit harder to understand the minutia of the figures involved:

I wanted to post some of the stats here for my future use and set up the discussion as it went on FaceBook:

Young Man

  • Or……. We could just do away with the whole military industrial complex. Sounds allot better to me.

Me

  • How bout the “Educational Industrial Complex?” Your terms are meaningless. We spend more on education than we do on military.

Young Man

  • I’m not sure where you get your facts Sean, but last time I checked The Federal Government spends more on defense than anything else, Espically now sice we are running 3 wars and aid efforts to Japan.

Me

  • Here is a great example of a real world challenge. I have posted this to you in a previous discussion… but i doubt you actually take the time to stop and think critically on these issues, which demand time and reflection. This is only 5-minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV8ITndPp0A

Young Man

  • Yeah i’m sure Medvid gets his stats from Fox as well. Idk, why you gave me a vid of some guy droning on about Bush its really besides the point. Medvid does nothing to further your point either.

I wish to intercede here and mention the derangement syndrome often mentioned  inregards to a few people/organizations. Of course we had versions of this with most Presidential candidates, like Reagan. But I think it really hit a crescendo with President George W. Bush

Some terms for knowledge:

  • BDS – Bush Derangement Syndrome;
  • PDS – Palin Derangement Syndrome;
  • FDS – Fox Derangement Syndrome.

….Of course Sarah Palin felt this recent wave of hatred, but there is also this liberal transfer of emotion onto whole erganizations. Here I speak of Fox News. In order for this young man to reject facts… all he needed to do was connect the stated facts from Medved to Fox News, and wallah! the facts as well as myself are wrong. So I found the following to back the stats mentioned by Medved. The first comes from Wikipedia — I highly recommend the researcher at heart following the many links involved in this article — and it deals with the total expenditure as % of GDP by country spent on their military:

Rank Country 2009 Spending ($ b.) Share of 2008 GDP (%) World Share (%)
1 United States United States 661 4.3 43
2 People's Republic of China Chinaa 100 2.0 6.6
3 France France 63.9 2.3 4.2
4 United Kingdom United Kingdom 58.3 2.5 3.8
5 Russia Russiaa 53.3 3.5 3.5
6 Japan Japan 51.0 0.9 3.3
7 Germany Germany 45.6 1.3 3.0
8 Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabiab 41.3 8.2 2.7
9 India India 36.3 2.6 2.4
10 Italy Italy 35.8 1.7 2.3
11 Brazil Brazil 26.1 1.5 1.7
12 South Korea South Korea 24.1 2.8 1.6
13 Canada Canada 19.2 1.3 1.3
14 Australia Australia 19.0 1.8 1.2
15 Spain Spain 18.3 1.2 1.2

This next section deals with the total expenditure as % of GDP by country spent on education:

# 1 United States: 7 % of GDP
# 2 Denmark: 6.7 % of GDP
# 3 Sweden: 6.5 % of GDP
# 4 Canada: 6.4 % of GDP
# 5 France: 6.1 % of GDP
# 6 Australia: 6 % of GDP
# 7 Norway: 5.9 % of GDP
# 8 New Zealand: 5.8 % of GDP
= 9 Switzerland: 5.7 % of GDP
= 9 Austria: 5.7 % of GDP
# 11 Finland: 5.6 % of GDP
# 12 Belgium: 5.5 % of GDP
= 13 Germany: 5.3 % of GDP
= 13 United Kingdom: 5.3 % of GDP
# 15 Italy: 4.9 % of GDP

And this final section deals with total expenditure as % of GDP by country spent on health services:

# 1 United States: 13.9 % of GDP
# 2 Switzerland: 10.9 % of GDP
# 3 Germany: 10.8 % of GDP
= 4 Canada: 9.4 % of GDP
= 4 France: 9.4 % of GDP
= 4 Greece: 9.4 % of GDP
# 7 Portugal: 9.3 % of GDP
# 8 Iceland: 9.2 % of GDP
# 9 Australia: 9.1 % of GDP
# 10 Belgium: 9 % of GDP
# 11 Sweden: 8.8 % of GDP
# 12 Denmark: 8.6 % of GDP
# 13 Netherlands: 8.5 % of GDP
# 14 Italy: 8.3 % of GDP
# 15 Norway: 8.1 % of GDP

So let us do some addition and subtraction. Without the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military spending would be around 3.2% of the total total expenditure of GDP. Let us now add health and educational services: it would equal 20.9% of the total total expenditure of GDP.  Obviously the “Industrial Complex” lays more in education and health worker/government unions than in the military! One article makes the following comparison and then asks where he can sign up to this free stuff:

….Medicare spending in 2010 was five times the amount it was just thirty years ago. Medicaid spending is up six fold – as a percentage of GDP. In 1971 the federal government spent 1% of GDP providing health care to the elderly and the poor; now they are spending 5.5%. That is not a sustainable growth trend.

Year Medicare Medicare Medicaid Medicaid

% GDP Spending % GDP Spending

1971 0.7% $7.5 billion 0.3% $3.4 billion

2010 3.6% $520 billion 1.9% $273 billion

Once you add in Social Security and income security (welfare) spending, entitlements now account for 13.2% of GDP compared to just 6.7% in 1971. How, when the country is wealthier today than it was in 1971, can more people be entitled to more free stuff than ever before? The sense of entitlement is astounding. Plenty of people in the US believe they are entitled to other people’s money by merely gracing the country with their presence. The bottom 40% of income earners already faces no federal income tax liability, yet they feel entitled to free stuff. Seniors feel entitled to generous Medicare payments, but they didn’t contribute enough money during their working years to even come close to paying for their own medical bills in retirement. Again, they feel entitled to other people’s money.

All play and no work will make the US a poor country. At what point are the actual US taxpayers entitled to expect others to work and help pay the bills? Is there a section of society that is permanently entitled to sponge off of everyone else with no strings attached? If so, where can I sign up?

…(read more)…

What needs to change is the U.S. getting out of security issues Europe should worry about more than we should!

We need to clean our own fiscal house and not worry about others.

Wealth Creation IS NOT a Zero-Sum Game ~ Mantras

See Also: “Why Capitalism Works

Capitalism, the exchange of markets did this:

  • Since Deng Xiaoping began instituting market reforms in the late 1970s, China has been among the most rapidly growing economies in the world, regularly exceeding 10 percent GDP growth annually. This growth has led to a substantial increase in real living standards and a marked decline in poverty. Between 1981 and 2008, the proportion of China’s population living on less than $1.25/day is estimated to have fallen from 85% to 13.1%, meaning that roughly 600 million people were taken out of poverty.

Wealth and Wealth Creation IS NOT a zero sum game!

The Zero-Sum Game Myth

There are three kinds of games: win-lose, lose-lose, and win-win. Win-lose games, like basketball, are sometimes called “zero-sum games.” When the Celtics and the Bulls compete, if the Celtics are up, then the Bulls are down, and vice versa. The scales balance. It’s a zero-sum.

Besides lose-lose games, which most of us avoid, there are positive-sum or win-win games. In these games, some players may end up better off than others, but everyone ends up at least the same if not better off than they were at the beginning.

Millions of people think that free trade is a dog-eat-dog competition, where winners always create losers. This is the zero-sum game myth, which leads many to think that the government should somehow redistribute wealth. While some competition is a part of any economy, of course, an exchange that is free on both sides, in which no one is forced or tricked into participating, is a win-win game. When I pay my barber $18 for a haircut, I value the haircut more than the $18. My barber values the $18 more than the time and effort it took her to cut my hair. We’re both better off. Win-win….

Forbes:

…This leads nicely into the third point: wealth is not a zero sum game. This is economist jargon meaning everyone can win. Look again at the chart Gary Burtless put together. You will note that all segments of American society saw their incomes rise except the top one percent. If we had the data to do the chart again through 2014, we would see that everybody had higher incomes than fifteen years ago.

And this win-win idea is not just in terms of income. In a capitalist society, people get rich by making somebody else better off. J. K. Rowling became one of the richest women in the world by writing the Harry Potter series of books. All the people who bought the books believed that the books were worth more than the sale price otherwise they would not have bought it. Thus, J.K. Rowling wins and all her readers win. Both sides of a voluntary transaction are made better off. As long as government coercion is not involved, when you see someone getting rich, you know a lot of people are being made happy….

Rich Get Poorer | Poor Get Richer (+More Mantras Destroyed)

A JOHN STOSSEL UPDATE:



I changed the very beginning of this Yahoo News article to include both the headlines of the NYTs:

…The New York Times headline of Oct. 26 even more dubious and deceptive, “Top Earners Doubled Share of Nation’s Income, Study Finds”. The subhead announces “The top 1 percent of earners more than doubled their share of the nation’s income over the last three decades,” but readers must make their way to the sixth paragraph to find that the referenced “report” is actually a historical analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, covering a 28-year span between 1979 and 2007, and pointedly concluding before the economic meltdown of 2008.

Figures from the IRS, however, demonstrate that since the recession began the rich hardly got richer:  the number of Americans earning $1 million or more fell a staggering 40 percent between 2007 and 2009 (declining to 236,883), while their combined incomes fell by nearly 50 percent—a vastly greater loss than the 2 percent drop in total incomes of those making $50,000 or less. Could anyone make a plausible case for how a massive reduction in the number of top earners (with nearly 200,000 fewer million-dollar incomes) could conceivably benefit the economy, or count as good news for anyone?

Nevertheless, the Times chose to stress the inflammatory finding that in the 29 years preceding the Great Recession the top 1 percent of earners (those pesky millionaires and billionaires) boosted their average, inflation-adjusted, after-tax income by 275 percent. 

Surely worried readers might conclude that such “obscene” enrichment by the greediest would inevitably impoverish the neediest, leaving only miserable crumbs for the beleaguered middle class. But the CBO numbers actually showed that big gains for top earners did nothing to prevent simultaneous (if more modest) improvements by every other income group. For instance, the middle class (the 60 percent of the population in the 21st through 80th percentiles), raised their average inflation-adjusted, after-tax household income by a healthy 40 percent. Even the bottom 20 percent of the population moved ahead during the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush booms, lifting their earnings 18 percent….

…read it all…

Here is another visual help:

This next section shows that when Presidents are in office that support unions, the income disparity gap-widens.

Investors Business Daily makes some key points that are hard to ignore:

Income Inequality Rose Most Under President Clinton

…But it turns out that the rich actually got poorer under President Bush, and the income gap has been climbing under Obama.

What’s more, the biggest increase in income inequality over the past three decades took place when Democrat Bill Clinton was in the White House.

The wealthiest 5% of U.S. households saw incomes fall 7% after inflation in Bush’s eight years in office, according to an IBD analysis of Census Bureau data. A widely used household income inequality measure, the Gini index, was essentially flat over that span. Another inequality gauge, the Theil index, showed a decline.

In contrast, the Gini index rose — slightly — in Obama’s first two years. Another Census measure of inequality shows it’s climbed 5.7% since he took office.

Meanwhile, during Clinton’s eight years, the wealthiest 5% of American households saw their incomes jump 45% vs. 26% under Reagan. The Gini index shot up 6.7% under Clinton, more than any other president since 1980…

[….]

As University of Michigan economist Mark Perry notes, while the income gap has grown since 1979, almost the entire increase occurred before the mid-1990s: “There is absolutely no statistical support for the commonly held view that income inequality has been rising recently.”

A similar analysis found that income inequality has fallen among individuals since the early 1990s, but risen among households due to factors such as more marriages of people with similar education levels and earnings potential.

Others argue that income mobility matters more than equality.

One study found that more than half of the families who started in the lowest income bracket in 1996 had moved to a higher one by 2005. At the other end of the spectrum, more than 57% of families fell out of the top 1%.

…read more…

Another smaller post points out nearly the same:

BUSTING THE 1% VS. 99% MYTH

The left says current levels of income inequality echo the late 1920s and the Gilded Age. They’ve zeroed in on the richest 1%, citing Census Bureau data showing these top earners “grabbing” more income than the bottom 90%.

But the census stats are misleading.

For one, they are a snapshot of income distribution at a single point in time. Yet income is not static. It changes over time. Low-paying jobs from early adulthood give way to better-paying jobs later in life.

And income groups in America are not fixed. There’s no caste system here, really no such thing even as a middle “class.” The poor aren’t stuck in poverty. And the rich don’t enjoy lifetime membership in an exclusive club.

A 2007 Treasury Department study bears this out. Nearly 58% of U.S. households in the lowest-income quintile in 1996 moved to a higher level by 2005. The reverse also held true. Of those households that were in the top 1% in income in 1996, more than 57% dropped to a lower-income group by 2005.

Every day in America, the poor join the ranks of the rich, and the rich fall out of comfort.

So even if income equality is increasing, it does not mean income mobility is decreasing. There is still a great deal of movement in and out of the richest and poorest groups in America.

…READ MORE…

The Republicans are the Party of the rich, and run by old, rich white guys who like to say “no” all the time.

Thinking through leftist mantras:

✪ Average age of Democrat’s in the House (average age): 74

“I could run 20 years from now and still be about the same age as the former Secretary of State (Hillary Clinton) is right now” ~ Rep. Governor Scott Brown

✪ Average age of House Republicans? 53

Seven of the top ten richest people in Congress are Democrats. The top five donors to unrestricted super PACs reads like a billionaire boys club and are Democratic donors/supporters. Heres more:

(Politifact)

Nor are we the party of “NO”


ERGO: the Democratic Party are run by old, rich, white, obstructionist, men. Not the Republican Party.


In fact, the richest 8-of-10 counties voted for Obama… and consistently when the states are separated by red-and-blue, the most charitable states are red, the most stingy (greedy) are blue states. And the richest Congressmen are typically Democrats.

(You can enlarge the article by clicking it.) This is a local, small town magazine, and John Van Huizum writes a regular piece that I will critique here-and-there. Here is my first installment:

I wish to write a response to a recent Concepts article by John Van Huizum, entitled “What Does ‘Free’ Mean?” There are a couple issues worth responding to or in-the-least offering a differing viewpoint on. The first of Mr. Huizum’s positions that needs de”concept”ualizing is the idea of “greed.” Mr. Huizum spoke of history, something Dr. Sowell reminds us of in the telling of Richard Sears ferocious greed in wanting to overtake Montgomery Ward.[1] This type of greed leads to lower prices. Alternatively the Fords, Rockefellers, and the Carnegies found ways to offer goods at lower prices. This type of greed leads to Carnegie — for instance — becoming a “prodigious philanthrop[ist] – building more than 3,000 public libraries in 47 states…, founding Carnegie-Mellon University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology (C.I.T.), establishing Carnegie Hall in New York, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and much more.”[2]

In a wonderful response to Donahue’s 1979 challenge to Milton Freidman on the issue of greed and if greed has ever caused Dr. Friedman to doubt capitalism. Milton Friedman responded that “the world runs on individuals pursuing their own interests, the great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory from an order of a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of the grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history are where they have had capitalism and free trade.”[3] So I wish to proffer another history that maybe, just possibly Forbes is taking into account and Mr. Huizum is not.

Another point worth politely rejecting is the definition given to Forbes by Mr. Huizum on freedom: “free from ANY government regulation.”[4] This is a fallacy of straw-man.[5] Mr. Huizum does not show a full knowledge of Forbes understanding on this matter. Nor does the facile dealing with this complex issue and the putting forth of a false definition as if-it-were Forbes do this topic justice.

One last point, the most important. Unlike big business when it makes mistakes, big government cannot go out of business. Unlike corrupt government, corrupt business cannot print money and thereby devalue a nation’s currency. Businesses cannot coerce you by force (tax liens, garnishing of wages, or armed IRS officials, etc) into an action. So the “greed” of the corporation pales in comparison to the greed of government.[6] Which is why our Founders stated that, “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government” (Patrick Henry); “Government is not reason; it is not eloquence. It is force. And force, like fire, is a dangerous servant and a fearful master” (George Washington).

Footnotes:

[1] Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2004), 361.
[2] Michael Medved, The 10 biggest Lies About America (New York, NY: Crown Forum, 2008), 132; see also, “What Did He Get for That Money?
[3] youtu.be/RWsx1X8PV_A
[4] John Van Huizum, Agua Dulce/Acton Country Journal, Vol. XXII, Issue 21 (May 26, 2012), 19.
[5] a) Person A has position X; b) Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X); c) Person B attacks position Y; d) Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
[6] Dennis Prager, Still the Best Hope (New York, NY: Broadside Books, 2012), 35-36.

“We Supplied Most Of Iraq’s Weapons” ~ Mantra

Of course the Left charges us (the United States)with quite a few provably false, or at most, inflated charges in regards to the the United States arming Iraq.

Weaponry

A quick refutation of another familiar “mantra” we hear connected to this topic, and one most at the rally in the video above most assuredly accept, is that the U.S. supplied the bulk of weapons that Iraq has and used. This just isn’t the case, the the graphic below points out (click it to enlarge it for better viewing):

Iraqi Weapons

Agents of Mass Destruction

The story goes that the United States provided chemical weapons to Iraq. The proof is the photo of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983. In an excellent Yahoo Answers question:

  • Did we really sell or give Iraq chemical or biological weapons, or is that something the liberals made up?

Some reasonable parameters were added to this original question. Here they are:

  • Update: If you’re going to tell me that we did, show me some proof of it. Don’t just make more baseless accusations and repeating what you heard from other ignorant people and bogus sources.
  • Update 2: Shaking hands with our allies does not mean we provided them with biological or chemical weapons! Iraq was our ally back before the gulf war.
  • Update 3: If you’re going to include links to your research, make sure somewhere on there it says that we gave or sold Iraq the WMDs. I’m not even going to bother looking at the “propaganda” websites. Show me something from a legitimate source.
  • Update 4: Connie G, I don’t see anything relevant to my question on your links. Did you not understand the question?
  • Update 5: The Iran Chamber Society is not as far as I’m concerned a legitamate source. This is a country that hates the United States and isn’t known for their honesty and fairness. Is this where you get your info, Connie G.?
  • Update 6: How about citing some legitimate sources like CNN, 60 minutes, or FoxNews. I don’t trust obscure websites that I’ve never heard of before. Who knows what their agenda is

When these requests are added, the best answer certainly is the best answer: handshake300

  • I have never seen one present any sort of proof what so ever. They just parrot it. Notice how they just declare it true but offer nothing of proof at all.

This comes from my afterword of my WMD Page:

… A similar myth, that the U.S. provided Iraq with chemical and biological weapons is equally off base. Iraq requested Anthrax samples from the US government, as do nations the world over, for the purpose of developing animal and human vaccines for local versions of Anthrax. Nerve gas doesn’t require technical help, it’s a variant of common insecticides. European nations sold Iraq the equipment to make poison gas.

Here is some on-depth info on the hand-shake:

Shaking Hands with Saddam Hussein: The U.S. Tilts toward Iraq, 1980-1984

….His December 1983 tour of regional capitals included Baghdad, where he was to establish “direct contact between an envoy of President Reagan and President Saddam Hussein,” while emphasizing “his close relationship” with the president [Document 28]. Rumsfeld met with Saddam, and the two discussed regional issues of mutual interest, shared enmity toward Iran and Syria, and the U.S.’s efforts to find alternative routes to transport Iraq’s oil; its facilities in the Persian Gulf had been shut down by Iran, and Iran’s ally, Syria, had cut off a pipeline that transported Iraqi oil through its territory. Rumsfeld made no reference to chemical weapons, according to detailed notes on the meeting [Document 31].

Rumsfeld also met with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz, and the two agreed, “the U.S. and Iraq shared many common interests.” Rumsfeld affirmed the Reagan administration’s “willingness to do more” regarding the Iran-Iraq war, but “made clear that our efforts to assist were inhibited by certain things that made it difficult for us, citing the use of chemical weapons, possible escalation in the Gulf, and human rights.” He then moved on to other U.S. concerns [Document 32]. Later, Rumsfeld was assured by the U.S. interests section that Iraq’s leadership had been “extremely pleased” with the visit, and that “Tariq Aziz had gone out of his way to praise Rumsfeld as a person” [Document 36 and Document 37].

Rumsfeld returned to Baghdad in late March 1984. By this time, the U.S. had publicly condemned Iraq’s chemical weapons use, stating, “The United States has concluded that the available evidence substantiates Iran’s charges that Iraq used chemical weapons” [Document 47]. Briefings for Rumsfeld’s meetings noted that atmospherics in Iraq had deteriorated since his December visit because of Iraqi military reverses and because “bilateral relations were sharply set back by our March 5 condemnation of Iraq for CW use, despite our repeated warnings that this issue would emerge sooner or later” [Document 48]. Rumsfeld was to discuss with Iraqi officials the Reagan administration’s hope that it could obtain Export-Import Bank credits for Iraq, the Aqaba pipeline, and its vigorous efforts to cut off arms exports to Iran. According to an affidavit prepared by one of Rumsfeld’s companions during his Mideast travels, former NSC staff member Howard Teicher, Rumsfeld also conveyed to Iraq an offer from Israel to provide assistance, which was rejected [Document 61].

Although official U.S. policy still barred the export of U.S. military equipment to Iraq, some was evidently provided on a “don’t ask – don’t tell” basis. In April 1984, the Baghdad interests section asked to be kept apprised of Bell Helicopter Textron’s negotiations to sell helicopters to Iraq, which were not to be “in any way configured for military use” [Document 55]. The purchaser was the Iraqi Ministry of Defense. In December 1982, Bell Textron’s Italian subsidiary had informed the U.S. embassy in Rome that it turned down a request from Iraq to militarize recently purchased Hughes helicopters. An allied government, South Korea, informed the State Department that it had received a similar request in June 1983 (when a congressional aide asked in March 1983 whether heavy trucks recently sold to Iraq were intended for military purposes, a State Department official replied “we presumed that this was Iraq’s intention, and had not asked.”) [Document 44]

During the spring of 1984 the U.S. reconsidered policy for the sale of dual-use equipment to Iraq’s nuclear program, and its “preliminary results favor[ed] expanding such trade to include Iraqi nuclear entities” [Document 57]. Several months later, a Defense Intelligence Agency analysis said that even after the war ended, Iraq was likely to “continue to develop its formidable conventional and chemical capability, and probably pursue nuclear weapons” [Document 58]. (Iraq is situated in a dangerous neighborhood, and Israel had stockpiled a large nuclear weapons arsenal without international censure. Nuclear nonproliferation was not a high priority of the Reagan administration – throughout the 1980s it downplayed Pakistan’s nuclear program, though its intelligence indicated that a weapons capability was being pursued, in order to avert congressionally mandated sanctions. Sanctions would have impeded the administration’s massive military assistance to Pakistan provided in return for its support of the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.)

In February 1984, Iraq’s military, expecting a major Iranian attack, issued a warning that “the invaders should know that for every harmful insect there is an insecticide capable of annihilating it whatever the number and Iraq possesses this annihilation insecticide” [Document 41]. On March 3, the State Department intervened to prevent a U.S. company from shipping 22,000 pounds of phosphorous fluoride, a chemical weapons precursor, to Iraq. Washington instructed the U.S. interests section to protest to the Iraqi government, and to inform the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that “we anticipate making a public condemnation of Iraqi use of chemical weapons in the near future,” and that “we are adamantly opposed to Iraq’s attempting to acquire the raw materials, equipment, or expertise to manufacture chemical weapons from the United States. When we become aware of attempts to do so, we will act to prevent their export to Iraq” [Document 42].

The public condemnation was issued on March 5. It said, “While condemning Iraq’s chemical weapons use . . . The United States finds the present Iranian regime’s intransigent refusal to deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government of neighboring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behavior among nations and the moral and religious basis which it claims” [Document 43].

Later in the month, the State Department briefed the press on its decision to strengthen controls on the export of chemical weapons precursors to Iran and Iraq, in response to intelligence and media reports that precursors supplied to Iraq originated in Western countries. When asked whether the U.S.’s conclusion that Iraq had used chemical weapons would have “any effect on U.S. recent initiatives to expand commercial relationships with Iraq across a broad range, and also a willingness to open diplomatic relations,” the department’s spokesperson said “No. I’m not aware of any change in our position. We’re interested in being involved in a closer dialogue with Iraq” [Document 52]….

Offering Critical Thinking on Global Warming

This grew from a discussion with an acquaintance from work. It is not meant as a slam but as an opportunity to see if one’s accepted beliefs can withstand the heat.

A person I dig, would love to see play the banjo, and generally support gives me articles from time-to-time. The above is one of them (click to enlarge). While I like tremendously the person, his biases are so evident that it never ceases to amaze me he accepts one position without knowing the opposition to such a belief. And it is a belief — mind you — based on what the person accepts from “authoritities”… which is, the legacy media. Or better yet, what makes it to the front-page of a paper and not what is the op-ed portions of the paper which typically offer debate. Because merely accepting a position without critical thinking is the worse kind of faith there is. Even if of the Christian faith:

“I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition.”

Morimer J. Adler, “A Philosopher’s Religious Faith,” in, Kelly James Clark, ed., Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 207.

I was going to refute point-for-point the above article, however, I will concentrate mainly on the conversation that ensued over the article. I will, however, deal merely with one paragraph at the end of this post, and it is this one:

THIS MAY SEEM ODD BECAUSE, AS OBAMA’S NEW National Climate Assessment makes clear, the U.S. is already feeling the effects of global warming. The first 13 years of the 21st century were among the 14 hottest on record. California is enduring a historic drought. Wildfires are getting worse throughout the West. And while it’s premature to blame climate change for any particular storm—that stock phrase seemed to appear in every story about Superstorm Sandy—our weird weather trends are consistent with expectations for a warmer world.

I will return to this later. Continuing.

Chit-chat over the above article provided context on what exactly my friend knew (or didn’t know), and is yet another example of his bias hand-fed to him by headlines. The topic of global warming “stalling” (LA Times words: Global warming ‘hiatus’ puts climate change scientists on the spot) over the last 17-years (almost 18 years now) was unknown to him. The LA Times article states that it may last 30-years.

Truth be told, they have NO IDEA. Why? Because they rely on computer models, not the actual climate.

Computer Models?

Yes, most of the headlines we read are driven by computer models or cherry-picking from one data set and not taking ACTUAL temperatures into account. For instance:

See more on this @ Dr. Roy Spenser’s site. (BIO):

Roy W. Spencer received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He has provided congressional testimony several times on the subject of global warming.

Dr. Spencer’s research has been entirely supported by U.S. government agencies: NASA, NOAA, and DOE. He has never been asked by any oil company to perform any kind of service. Not even Exxon-Mobil.

(CNSNEWS) Global temperatures collected in five official databases confirm that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the past 17 years, according to Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH).

Christy’s findings are contrary to predictions made by 73 computer models cited in the United Nation’s latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (5AR).

Christy told CNSNews that he analyzed all 73 models used in the 5AR and not one accurately predicted that the Earth’s temperature would remain flat since Oct. 1, 1996. (See Temperatures v Predictions 1976-2013.pdf)

“I compared the models with observations in the key area – the tropics – where the climate models showed a real impact of greenhouse gases,” Christy explained. “I wanted to compare the real world temperatures with the models in a place where the impact would be very clear.” (See Tropical Mid-Troposphere Graph.pdf)

Using datasets of actual temperatures recorded by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (NASA GISS), the United Kingdom’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of East Anglia (Hadley-CRU), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), satellites measuring atmospheric and deep oceanic temperatures, and a remote sensor system in California, Christy found that “all show a lack of warming over the past 17 years.”

All 73 models’ predictions were on average three to four times what occurred in the real world,” Christy pointed out. “The closest was a Russian model that predicted a one-degree increase.”

(read more)

German Meteorologist Says Climate Models Have Gotten 11 Of The Past 12 European Summers Wrong!

German meteorologist Dominik Jung writes at wetter.net that the first preliminary forecast for Central Europe for the upcoming summer issued by the NOAA does not look very favorable. Expect a “grisly summer”, he writes.

He writes that over the last 10 years spring has generally been on the warm and sunny side, but that Central Europeans have had to pay a price for that by having to put up with wet and variable summer weather.

Models wrong 11 out of 12 years!….

more on this later. One thing you will notice in reading the LA Times article, every pro anthropogenic [man-caused] global warming person named has a professor, or scientist in front of their name or description. Those who disagree with “man-caused” global warming are merely described as skeptics. ALTHOUGH, you at least get this:

Climate scientists, meanwhile, have had a different response. Although most view the pause as a temporary interruption in a long-term warming trend, some disagree and say it has revealed serious flaws in the deliberative processes of the IPCC.

One of the most prominent of these critics is Judith Curry, a climatologist who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was involved in the third IPCC assessment, which was published in 2001. But now she accuses the organization of intellectual arrogance and bias…

In case you are out of the loop, no warming has occurred in 16-years from when this article appeared in the Mail Online:

Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it

The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures

This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years….

There will always be those who cannot admit the obvious, for obvious reasons (CFACT):

1. The concentration of CO2 in the global atmosphere is lower today, even including human emissions, than it has been during most of the existence of life on Earth.

2. The global climate has been much warmer than it is today during most of the existence of life on Earth. Today we are in an interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age that began 2.5 million years ago and has not ended.

3. There was an Ice Age 450 million years ago when CO2 was about 10 times higher than it is today.

4. Humans evolved in the tropics near the equator. We are a tropical species and can only survive in colder climates due to fire, clothing and shelter.

5. CO2 is the most important food for all life on earth. All green plants use CO2 to produce the sugars that provide energy for their growth and our growth. Without CO2 in the atmosphere carbon-based life could never have evolved.

6. The optimum CO2 level for most plants is about 1600 parts per million, four times higher than the level today. This is why greenhouse growers purposely inject the CO2-rich exhaust from their gas and wood-fired heaters into the greenhouse, resulting in a 40-80 per cent increase in growth.

7. If human emissions of CO2 do end up causing significant warming (which is not certain) it may be possible to grow food crops in northern Canada and Russia, vast areas that are now too cold for agriculture.

8. Whether increased CO2 levels cause significant warming or not, the increased CO2 levels themselves will result in considerable increases in the growth rate of plants, including our food crops and forests.

9. There has been no further global warming for nearly 18 years during which time about 25 per cent of all the CO2 ever emitted by humans has been added to the atmosphere.

I doubt it.

Here is a Patrick Moore quote that shows how the left has politicised the issues we are dealing with above and below:

“I now find that many environmental groups have drifted into self-serving cliques with narrow vision and rigid ideology…. many environmentalists are showing signs of elitism, left-wingism, and downright eco-fascism. The once politically centrist, science-based vision of environmentalism has been largely replaced with extremist rhetoric. Science and logic have been abandoned and the movement is often used to promote other causes such as class struggle and anti-corporatism. The public is left trying to figure out what is reasonable and what is not.”

BIAS

Lets address this BIAS issue, as it came up in discussion. I made the point that in the media you have a culture that is committed to this idea that the earth is getting warmer-and-warmer. In the scientific community however… it has turned into a machine that feeds off the government payroll. Not just our government payroll but the schillings ($$) the U.N. funds such ideas with, and doesn’t fund others with. For instance, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lead author, Dr. Richard Tol admits no global warming for 17 years ~ rips bias in ipcc ~ the U.N’s “inbuilt alarmism made me step down.” By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years. In the report we find items like this:

….The report also illustrates just how outmoded the IPCC has become since it was founded in 1988. Its reports are written over a period of three years, and finished months before publication.

When preparations started on AR5, the world hadn’t warmed for 13 years. That is a bit odd, if you believe the models, but not odd enough to merit a lot of attention.

By the time the report was finished, however, it hadn’t warmed for 17 years. That is decidedly odd, but hard to accommodate in a near-final draft that has been through three rounds of review.

After the report was finalized, but before it was published, a number of papers appeared with hypotheses about the pause in warming. AR5 was out of date before it was released.

The IPCC model… is broken.

[….]

Authors who want to see their long hours of IPCC work recognized should thus present their impact as worse than the next one.

It was this inbuilt alarmism that made me step down from the team that drafted the Summary for Policy Makers of Working Group 2. And indeed, the report was greeted by the four horsemen of the apocalypse: famine, pestilence, war, death all made headlines.

Now, Dr. Tol is not a “climatologist” per-se, but thought of as important enough to contribute to the most recent release of the IPCC report that the Obama admin pumps out Executive Orders over. But here is a small sampling of others who dissent:

“We’re not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” — UN IPCC’s Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004 and listed as one of the lead authors and serves as the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.

“Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong!!” — NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein who worked 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center and finished his career there as a Senior Research Scientist. Weinstein is presently a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace.

“Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself — Climate is beyond our power to control…Earth doesn’t care about governments or their legislation. You can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” — Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“In essence, the jig is up. The whole thing is a fraud. And even the fraudsters that fudged data are admitting to temperature history that they used to say didn’t happen…Perhaps what has doomed the Climategate fraudsters the most was their brazenness in fudging the data” — Dr. Christopher J. Kobus, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oakland University, specializes in alternative energy, thermal transport phenomena, two-phase flow and fluid and thermal energy systems.

“The energy mankind generates is so small compared to that overall energy budget that it simply cannot affect the climate…The planet’s climate is doing its own thing, but we cannot pinpoint significant trends in changes to it because it dates back millions of years while the study of it began only recently. We are children of the Sun; we simply lack data to draw the proper conclusions.” — Russian Scientist Dr. Anatoly Levitin, the head of geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“Hundreds of billion dollars have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that is not supported by physical world evidences…AGW has been forcefully imposed by means of a barrage of scare stories and indoctrination that begins in the elementary school textbooks.” — Brazilian Geologist Geraldo Luís Lino, who authored the 2009 book “The Global Warming Fraud: How a Natural Phenomenon Was Converted into a False World Emergency.”

“I am an environmentalist,” but “I must disagree with Mr. Gore” — Chemistry Professor Dr. Mary Mumper, the chair of the Chemistry Department at Frostburg State University in Maryland, during her presentation titled “Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming, the Skeptic’s View.”

“I am ashamed of what climate science has become today.” The science “community is relying on an inadequate model to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming in order to generate funding and to gain attention. If this is what ‘science’ has become today, I, as a scientist, am ashamed.” — Research Chemist William C. Gilbert published a study in August 2010 in the journal Energy & Environment titled “The thermodynamic relationship between surface temperature and water vapor concentration in the troposphere” and he published a paper in August 2009 titled “Atmospheric Temperature Distribution in a Gravitational Field.” [Update December 9, 2010]

“The dysfunctional nature of the climate sciences is nothing short of a scandal. Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” The global warming establishment “has actively suppressed research results presented by researchers that do not comply with the dogma of the IPCC.” — Swedish Climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring, of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics Unit at Stockholm University. [Updated December 9, 2010. Corrects Jelbring’s quote.]

“Those who call themselves ‘Green planet advocates’ should be arguing for a CO2- fertilized atmosphere, not a CO2-starved atmosphere…Diversity increases when the planet was warm AND had high CO2 atmospheric content…Al Gore’s personal behavior supports a green planet – his enormous energy use with his 4 homes and his bizjet, does indeed help make the planet greener. Kudos, Al for doing your part to save the planet.” — Renowned engineer and aviation/space pioneer Burt Rutan, who was named “100 most influential people in the world, 2004″ by Time Magazine and Newsweek called him “the man responsible for more innovations in modern aviation than any living engineer.”

“Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytizing the new faith…My skepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.” — Atmospheric Physicist Dr. John Reid, who worked with Australia’s CSIRO’s (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) research.

“We maintain there is no reason whatsoever to worry about man-made climate change, because there is no evidence whatsoever that such a thing is happening.” — Greek Earth scientists Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis of the National Technical University of Athens’ Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering.

“There are clear cycles during which both temperature and salinity rise and fall. These cyclesare related to solar activity…In my opinion and that of our institute, the problems connected to the current stage of warming are being exaggerated. What we are dealing with is not a global warming of the atmosphere or of the oceans.” — Biologist Pavel Makarevich of the Biological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“Because the greenhouse effect is temporary rather than permanent, predictions of significant global warming in the 21st century by IPCC are not supported by the data.” — Hebrew University Professor Dr. Michael Beenstock an honorary fellow with Institute for Economic Affairs who published a study challenging man-made global warming claims titled “Polynomial Cointegration Tests of the Anthropogenic Theory of Global Warming.”

“The whole idea of anthropogenic global warming is completely unfounded. There appears to have been money gained by Michael Mann, Al Gore and UN IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri as a consequence of this deception, so it’s fraud.” — South African astrophysicist Hilton Ratcliffe, a member of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa (ASSA) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and a Fellow of the British Institute of Physics.

(More than a 1,000 international scientists dissent)

Dr. Tol has been smeared though in what many call “climate McCarthyism.” Why? Because the “architects of such policies know they have failed, but they have no alternative except more of the same. Maybe it’s because their argument is weak that they resort to climate McCarthyism. The cost, apart from higher energy bills, is to democracy, and free speech” (Green ‘smear campaign’ against professor who dared to disown ‘sexed up’ UN climate dossier). Even if you believe man is throwing harmful gases into the air, the question becomes this: Can naturally occurring processes selectively buffer the full brunt of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities?

  • Science Daily answers ~ Yes, find researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins University in the US and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

This doesn’t matter to the left… it is “settled science” — or — “the debate is over”

SETTLED?

PowerLine knocks another this out of the park! ~ “‘The debate is over’ Is A Core Progressive Tenet”

Joel Kotkin writes about the spread of “debate is over” syndrome. It’s a good article, but marred by the author’s surprise that this “embrace homogeneity of viewpoint” finds expression by the American left, “the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech.”

Actually, “debate is over” syndrome expresses a core tenet of American progressivism, and one that has been present from the beginning. It stems from the historicism of the German philosopher Hegel.

Hegel maintained that history unfolds through a “dialectical” process, in which each stage is the product of the contradictions inherent in the ideas that defined the preceding one. Within these tensions and contradictions, Hegel believed, the philosopher can discern a comprehensive, evolving, rational unity. He called that unity “the absolute idea.”

History consists of an inevitable and progressive march to that idea. The modern State is the final fruit of that progressive march.

It is natural for a Hegelian to pronounce a debate “over” even as it continues to rage. Having discerned the comprehensive rational unity — the absolute idea — positions contrary to that idea can be written off as things of the past.

Hegel’s place in Marxist thought is well known. But if anything, the German holds an even more central position in American Progressive thought, thanks mainly to Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual father of American Progressivism. (Theodore Roosevelt was also influenced by the German philosophy of Hegel’s day, as Jean Yarbrough has shown).

Ronald Pestritto demonstrated the connection in his book Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism, which Scott Johnson and I discussed in this Weekly Standard article. Hegel’s historicism was irresistible to Wilson, who wrote, “the philosophy of any time is, as Hegel says, ‘nothing but the spirit of the time expressed in abstract thought.’”

Wilson took Hegel so much to heart that, in a love letter to his future wife, he observed that “Hegel used to search for–and in most cases find, it seems to me–the fundamental psychological facts of society.” And Wilson’s writing about the State, about administration, and about the U.S. Constitution all are founded in Hegel’s historicism.

As Scott and I argued, one can draw a straight line from Wilson’s Hegelianism to liberal constitutional theory. Wilson endorsed the emerging, Darwinian-inspired theory of a “living Constitution” under which that document’s original meaning must take a back seat whenever it stands in the way of the march of History.

Sound familiar?….

A great article by Charles “the Hammer” Krauthammer, can be found over at the Washington Post. In it, Krauthammer shows that science advances… and really… science is screaming at the climate deniers (the anthropogenic global warming crowd) to “advance.”

…”The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge. Take a non-climate example. It was long assumed that mammograms help reduce breast cancer deaths. This fact was so settled that Obamacare requires every insurance plan to offer mammograms (for free, no less) or be subject to termination.

Now we learn from a massive randomized study — 90,000 women followed for 25 years — that mammograms may have no effect on breast cancer deaths. Indeed, one out of five of those diagnosed by mammogram receives unnecessary radiation, chemo or surgery.

So much for settledness. And climate is less well understood than breast cancer. If climate science is settled, why do its predictions keep changing? And how is it that the great physicist Freeman Dyson, who did some climate research in the late 1970s, thinks today’s climate-change Cassandras are hopelessly mistaken?

They deal with the fluid dynamics of the atmosphere and oceans, argues Dyson, ignoring the effect of biology, i.e., vegetation and topsoil. Further, their predictions rest on models they fall in love with: “You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real.” Not surprisingly, these models have been “consistently and spectacularly wrong” in their predictions, write atmospheric scientists Richard McNider and John Christy — and always, amazingly, in the same direction.

Settled? Even Britain’s national weather service concedes there’s been no change — delicately called a “pause” — in global temperature in 15 years. If even the raw data is recalcitrant, let alone the assumptions and underlying models, how settled is the science?

But even worse than the pretense of settledness is the cynical attribution of any politically convenient natural disaster to climate change, a clever term that allows you to attribute anything — warming and cooling, drought and flood — to man’s sinful carbon burning.

Accordingly, Obama ostentatiously visited drought-stricken California last Friday. Surprise! He blamed climate change. Here even the New York Times gagged, pointing out that far from being supported by the evidence, “the most recent computer projections suggest that as the world warms, California should get wetter, not drier, in the winter.” ….

(WaPo)

BIAS or COVER-UP?

“The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders…. Dr. Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furor over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.” (David Rose, The Daily Mail, January 24, 2010)

David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (New York, NY: Sentinel Publishing, 2011), [FN] 161.

Uncovered emails show not merely a bias but a guided attempt to disseminate falsehood in order to push a political agenda. A good synopsis of this “Climate-Gate” comes from Conservapedia, I will include the footnotes as well for people to follow them and read the source material for this synopsis:

The Climategate scandal erupted on November 19, 2009, when a collection of email messages, data files and data processing programs were leaked from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) located in the UK, revealing scientific fraud and data manipulation by scientists concerning the Global Warming Theory.[1] The scandal that the suffix –gate implies is the state of climate science over the past decade, revealed by more than a thousand emails, documents, and computer code sets between various prominent scientists.[2] The released information is evidence of deceit by climate scientists, which was kept a secret or hidden from the public until the data was leaked from the CRU. The CRU’s apparent obstruction of freedom-of-information requests, as revealed by the leaks, was only the tip of the iceberg.[3] Climategate is said to have revealed the biggest scientific hoax in world history as the worst scandal of this generation.[4][5]

The Climategate emails and climate data became the subject of intense debate, calling to question assumptions on anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. The legitimacy of climate science, and the charges leveled by the CRU and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which claim humans cause climate change, was severely shaken by Climategate. Evidence revealed told the truth about man-made global warming: it’s a fraud.[6][7][8][9][10]

Despite the significance of the scandal and its impact on the theory suggesting humans cause climate change, in a profoundly bizarre situation the Mainstream media attempted to bury the Climategate story.[11] At the same time, liberal Wikipedia quickly censored Climategate and referred to it as an illegal “incident,” as the work of computer hackers stealing data — contrary to Freedom of Information Act requests. In spite of the liberal media’s bias attempt to hide the scandal, news of Climategate quickly spread because many other more notable sources of media covered the story. Commentators and others in the media covered news on Climategate, many of which outlined important takeaways about specific information valuable to the public.[12]

↑ Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released, Watts Up With That?, November 19, 2009.

2.0 2.1 Iain Murray. Three Things You Absolutely Must Know About Climategate, Pajamas Media, November 24, 2009.

↑ The global-warming scandal is bigger than one email leak. The Tip of the Climategate Iceberg, Wall Street Journal, December 08, 2009.

↑ Christopher Booker. Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation, Telegraph.co.uk, November 28, 2009.

↑ Glenn Beck. The Biggest Scam In History (Video), The Glenn Beck Program, December 01, 2009.

↑ James Delingpole. Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?, Telegraph.co.uk, November 20, 2009.

↑ Rush Limbaugh. Universe of Lies: Big Warmers Try to Whitewash ClimateGate Fraud, RushLimbaugh.com, November 30, 2009.

↑ Marc Sheppard. CRU’s Source Code: Climategate Uncovered, American Thinker, November 25, 2009.

↑ Steve McIntyre. Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem, climateaudit.org, September 27, 2009.

↑ Andrew Orlowski. One Of The Scandals In The CRU Emails, Sweetness & Light, September 29, 2009.

↑ Allie Duzett. Media Ignore Climate Science Scandal, Accuracy In Media, November 23, 2009.

↑ Larrey Anderson. Revenge of the Computer Nerds, American Thinker, December 09, 2009.

There was a “Climate-Gate 2.0,” where more emails showed strong collusion to fool the public. The Daily Mail in the UK says this in their headline:

Climategate scientists DID collude with government officials to hide research that didn’t fit their apocalyptic global warming

  • 5,000 leaked emails reveal scientists deleted evidence that cast doubt on claims climate change was man-made
  • Experts were under orders from US and UK officials to come up with a ‘strong message’
  • Critics claim: ‘The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering’
  • Scientist asks, ‘What if they find that climate change is a natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us all’

More than 5,000 documents have been leaked online purporting to be the correspondence of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia who were previously accused of ‘massaging’ evidence of man-made climate change.

Following on from the original ‘climategate’ emails of 2009, the new package appears to show systematic suppression of evidence, and even publication of reports that scientists knew to to be based on flawed approaches.

And not only do the emails paint a picture of scientists manipulating data, government employees at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) are also implicated.

One message appeared to show a member of Defra staff telling colleagues working on climate science to give the government a ‘strong message’. The emails paint a clear picture of scientists selectively using data, and colluding with politicians to misuse scientific information….

I will venture a guess that my friend has never heard about this either. Why? Bias… collusion… culture… money from government… on and on. But the above is always swept away with monikers like “extreme view,” “deniers,” “climate-skeptics,” etc.

Here is Richard A. Muller, professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, explaining the issue with Climate-Gate:

If its not in Time or other sources considered to be the “Legacy-Media,” it must be extreme. (“Extremism” will conclude this rather long post.) To wit, lets deal with two claims from that paragraph from Times near the top. The first one (topic a) I wish to deal with is the statement that “our weird weather trends are consistent with expectations for a warmer world.” The author sorta rejected Superstorm Sandy as being caused by global warming but then attributed it to a warming world. A few things about this.

TOPIC A

First, we haven’t been warming. A simple enough fact.

Secondly, weather, especially tornadoes and hurricanes have lessened over the years. In other words, if Michael Grunwald (the author of the Time article) says weird weather is a indicator, an evidence for, that warming weather is something we should be fearful of and act on, what is normalizing weather and no warming suppose to indicate… OTHER THAN the whole premise of the article in a major magazine is undermined.

  • 2a) Hurricanes

This candid admissions from the New York Post:

The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.

Warmist claims of a severe increase in hurricane activity go back to 2005 and Hurricane Katrina. The cover of Al Gore’s 2009 book, “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis,” even features a satellite image of the globe with four major hurricanes superimposed.

Yet the evidence to the contrary was there all along. Back in 2005 I and others reviewed the entire hurricane record, which goes back over a century, and found no increase of any kind. Yes, we sometimes get bad storms — but no more frequently now than in the past. The advocates simply ignored that evidence — then repeated their false claims after Hurricane Sandy last year.

And the media play along. For example, it somehow wasn’t front-page news that committed believers in man-made global warming recently admitted there’s been no surface global warming for well over a decade and maybe none for decades more. Nor did we see warmists conceding that their explanation is essentially a confession that the previous warming may not have been man-made at all.

That admission came in a new paper by prominent warmists in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics. They not only conceded that average global surface temperatures stopped warming a full 15 years ago, but that this “pause” could extend into the 2030s.

…read more…

But keep in mind, our total Co2 (carbon) emissions is no laughing matter:

Even the IPCC and British Meteorological Office now recognize that average global temperatures haven’t budged in almost 17 years. Little evidence suggests that sea level rise, storms, droughts, polar ice and temperatures or other weather and climate events and trends display any statistically significant difference from what Earth and mankind have experienced over the last 100-plus years…

~Via, John Kerry vs. the World (as in earth)

Besides the Global Warming crowd blaming everything on it (even the violence in the “arab spring“!), its failed predictions about no ice in the north-pole, no more snow in europe, islands drowning, polar bear numbers, and the like… Al Gore’s claims about Hurricanes is [again], laughable, to wit: when you even lose Jeraldo Rivera, your leftist stance may be very laughable:

Via Breitbart:

Al Gore was recently taken to task for exaggerating claims involving the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. The latest weather news makes his misrepresentations look all the more ridiculous.

For the first time since 2002, this year there will be no hurricane activity before September 1.

Reports indicate this is only the 25th time in 161 years that has happened.

The first hurricane of the season has formed on or after September 1 only 25 times in the past 161 years. Since the satellite era began in the mid-1960s, there have only been five years without a hurricane by August 31. The last time a hurricane failed to form before September 1 was in 2002 when Hurricane Gustav formed on September 11.

It would be foolish to make fun of anything involving such potentially dangerous storms and it’s also possible we could still see many late developing storms. However, given all the misleading information passed off on the topic by Gore, his allies and a fawning media, hopefully any lack of serious storm activity won’t be buried by the media for political reasons.

…read more…

  • 2b) Tornadoes

UPDATE! March [2015] ties 1969 record for fewest tornadoes – With only 8:

Eight tornadoes hit the United States last month, tying the record for the fewest tornadoes in March, according to preliminary data from the Storm Prediction Center.

The last time there were so few tornadoes in March was in 1969, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist with the prediction center in Norman, Okla. Accurate tornado records began in 1950.

A typical March sees about 80 twisters in the United States, the National Climatic Data Center said.

The only notable outbreak of tornadoes this March was last week, when several twisters formed in Oklahoma and Arkansas, killing one person in Tulsa. That’s the only tornado death this year.

Overall, it’s been a rather quiet year so far for tornadoes, with just 30 hitting the United States. Again, 1969 is the only year that was calmer, when 16 twisters were reported in January, February and March, Carbin said…..

To be clear, this is a 60-year low… and we have increased carbon output in the past 15-years almost as much as the previous 60-years.

Via WUWT (the below and above):

….Figure 1 [top] shows all tornadoes above EF1. (See here, why EF1’s are excluded.) The 10-Year Trend is significantly below the level consistently seen up to 1991, although the high totals in 2011 have inevitably caused a small upwards blip.

We see a similar pattern with the stronger EF3+ tornadoes.

I do not claim to know what will happen to tornado numbers in coming years. And anyone who does is lying.

NOAA sums up the situation neatly in their FAQ.

Does “global warming” cause tornadoes? No. Thunderstorms do. The harder question may be, “Will climate change influence tornado occurrence?” The best answer is: We don’t know….

.…read more…

ALL THIS WHILE WE PRODUCE THE MOST CO2 EVA!

Another indicator the main premise of the theory is wrong.

So I will restate more clearly: C02 follows temperature change… it doesn’t lead it. That big giant ball-o’-flame in the sky has much more to do with climate change than Exxon… who has less impact on the enviro than volcanic activity (mankind that is). Below is another recent advancement in understanding out climate (more here):

The next issue I want to challenge is the idea that the 21st century has been the hottest string of years on record. It has not. Take this two sets of data that many reporters and the general public draw from (to the right).

Even the Wall Street Journal chose the higher temperature reading to say that July of 2012 was July was the “hottest month in the contiguous U.S. since records began in 1895.” WUWT found this on accident and it has led to quite a few other revelations as we will see. Here is description in part of what we looking at:

Glaring inconsistencies found between State of the Climate (SOTC) reports sent to the press and public and the “official” climate database record for the United States. Using NCDC’s own data, July 2012 can no longer be claimed to be the “hottest month on record”.

[….]

I initially thought this was just some simple arithmetic error or reporting error, a one-off event, but then I began to find it in other months when I compared the output from the NCDC climate database plotter. Here is a table of the differences I found for the last two years between claims made in the SOTC report and the NCDC database output.

[….]

In almost every instance dating back to the inception of the CONUS Tavg value being reported in the SOTC report, there’s a difference. Some are quite significant. In most cases, the database value is cooler than the claim made in the SOTC report. Clearly, it is a systemic issue that spans over two years of reporting to the press and to the public.

It suggests that claims made by NCDC when they send out these SOTC reports aren’t credible because there are such differences between the data. Clearly, NCDC means for the plotter output they link to, to be an official representation to the public, so there cannot be a claim of me using some “not fit for purpose” method to get that data….

The Wall Street Journal made a graph showing this record setting month (left). The more accurate temperature for July likewise is shown in the same graph (right):

This looking at the data sets chosen and what is used and isn’t used to support an idea that fails in every way. Combine this obvious cherry-picking with the bias, collusion, and charges against the report that the President used to route Congress, all show we have a problem Houston! But this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It seems the NOAA has been skewing these temps for some time. Why? Because the left uses this as a way to promote an ever growing government and the scientists get more-and-more funding. This data fudging story is newer, and it is evolving quickley, including this newest post via Real Science where Steve Goddard notes that More Than 40% Of USHCN Station Data Is Fabricated. Here is Dr. Judith carry’s synopsis (excerpted), in which she critiques a bit Goddard’s post… but then bows to the evidence:

OK, acknowledging that Goddard made some analysis errors, I am still left with some uneasiness about the actual data, and why it keeps changing. For example, Jennifer Marohasy has been writing about Corrupting Australian’s temperature record.

In the midst of preparing this blog post, I received an email from Anthony Watts, suggesting that I hold off on my post since there is some breaking news. Watts pointed me to a post by Paul Homewood entitled Massive Temperature Adjustments At Luling, Texas. Excerpt:

So, I thought it might be worth looking in more detail at a few stations, to see what is going on. In Steve’s post, mentioned above, he links to the USHCN Final dataset for monthly temperatures, making the point that approx 40% of these monthly readings are “estimated”, as there is no raw data.

From this dataset, I picked the one at the top of the list, (which appears to be totally random), Station number 415429, which is Luling, Texas.

Taking last year as an example, we can see that ten of the twelve months are tagged as “E”, i.e estimated. It is understandable that a station might be a month, or even two, late in reporting, but it is not conceivable that readings from last year are late. (The other two months, Jan/Feb are marked “a”, indicating missing days).

But, the mystery thickens. Each state produces a monthly and annual State Climatological Report, which among other things includes a list of monthly mean temperatures by station. If we look at the 2013 annual report for Texas, we can see these monthly temperatures for Luling.

Where an “M” appears after the temperature, this indicates some days are missing, i.e Jan, Feb, Oct and Nov. (Detailed daily data shows just one missing day’s minimum temperature for each of these months).

Yet, according to the USHCN dataset, all ten months from March to December are “Estimated”. Why, when there is full data available?

But it gets worse. The table below compares the actual station data with what USHCN describe as “the bias-adjusted temperature”. The results are shocking.

In other words, the adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013. Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C. So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming.

Note as well, that the largest adjustments are for the estimated months of March – December. This is something that Steve Goddard has been emphasising.

It is plain that these adjustments made are not justifiable in any way. It is also clear that the number of “Estimated” measurements made are not justified either, as the real data is there, present and correct.

Watts appears in the comments, stating that he has contacted John Nielsen-Gammon (Texas State Climatologist) about this issue. Nick Stokes also appears in the comments, and one commenter finds a similar problem for another Texas station.

Homewood’s post sheds light on Goddard’s original claim regarding the data drop out (not just stations that are no longer reporting, but reporting stations that are ‘estimated’). I infer from this that there seems to be a real problem with the USHCN data set, or at least with some of the stations. Maybe it is a tempest in a teacup, but it looks like something that requires NOAA’s attention. As far as I can tell, NOAA has not responded to Goddard’s allegations. Now, with Homewood’s explanation/clarification, NOAA really needs to respond….

(H/T to Climate Realist ~ See WUWT and Hockey Schtick for more)

So here is a post of mine [from last week] that shows the outcome of correcting the information WITH THEIR OWN DATA!


  • The NASA US historical temperature record has changed significantly since 1999, to create the appearance of warming. Previously the NASA records showed the US cooling since the 1930s.

This comes with a h/t to Drudge!

When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century….

…read more…


Which is why this will be known as the hoax of the century:

UNLESS, that is, the masses believe more-and-more that climate skepticism is truly evil, as David Suzuki believes, jail will soon await:

Richard Tol, Leslie Woodcock, James Lovelock, and others all feel the sting of the machine they were a part of. A part of because these and other men-and-women specialists have abandoned what they previously supported as being true. But this machine they helped build has a way of growing too large to fail. And it is biting them in the ass!

This comes way of WUWT, and highlights the tendency of the Left towards totalitarian thinking in order to make their vision “work.

Scientists who don’t believe in catastrophic man-made global warming should be put in prison, a US philosophy professor argues on a website funded by the UK government.

Lawrence Torcello – assistant professor of philosophy at Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, writes in an essay at The Conversation that climate scientists who fail to communicate the correct message about “global warming” should face trial for “criminal negligence”. (H/T Bishop Hill)

What are we to make of those behind the well documented corporate funding of global warming denial? Those who purposefully strive to make sure “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” is given to the public? I believe we understand them correctly when we know them to be not only corrupt and deceitful, but criminally negligent in their willful disregard for human life. It is time for modern societies to interpret and update their legal systems accordingly.

More @Breitbart

What next, numbers tattooed on our arms because we hold an opinion different from Torcello?

Reason.org ends with a great commentary on this freedom restricting idea of the above lunatic:

In 2012, in a proceeding straight out of the Inquisition, an Italian court convicted six scientists for providing “inexact, incomplete and contradictory information” in the lead-up to the earthquake. Now, a philosophy professor says that case may provide a worthwhile example for the treatment of scientific dissenters—specifically, “climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.”…

…He ultimately allows that he wouldn’t actually criminalize poor scientific communication—just anybody who might support dissenting scientists, or receive such support.

If those with a financial or political interest in inaction had funded an organised campaign to discredit the consensus findings of seismology, and for that reason no preparations were made, then many of us would agree that the financiers of the denialist campaign were criminally responsible for the consequences of that campaign. I submit that this is just what is happening with the current, well documented funding of global warming denialism….

We have good reason to consider the funding of climate denial to be criminally and morally negligent. The charge of criminal and moral negligence ought to extend to all activities of the climate deniers who receive funding as part of a sustained campaign to undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus.

If you’re trying to figure out how that doesn’t threaten the free exercise of speech, Torcello assures us, “We must make the critical distinction between the protected voicing of one’s unpopular beliefs, and the funding of a strategically organized campaign to undermine the public’s ability to develop and voice informed opinions.”

InquisitionSo…You can voice a dissenting opinion, so long as you don’t benefit from it or help dissenters benefit in any way?

By the way, according to RIT, Torcello researches “the moral implications of global warming denialism, as well as other forms of science denialism.” Presumably, his job is a paid one. But this is OK, because…the majority of scientists agree with his views on the issue?

Let’s allow that they do—and that a majority of scientists agree about man-made climate change and a host of other issues. Just when does the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition meet to decide what is still subject to debate, and what is now holy writ? And is an effort to “undermine the public’s understanding of scientific consensus” always criminally negligent?…

More @Reason

Its funny how the left HATES profit.


CONSENSUS (97%)

Below is another item we spoke of, and it is that of “consensus.” I have previously posted on it, of which a portion of what is below is from THAT post, which was born from a debate via FaceBook. But I also recommend the Wall Street Journal article by Dr. Roy Spencer [remember his bio was up this page a bit] as well as WUWT topic on the matter. Climate Depot has a list of his posts as well.

(Click Graph To See Previously Hidden Data)

We’ve all been subjected to the incessant “97% of scientists agree …global warming…blah blah” meme, which is nothing more than another statistical fabrication by John Cook and his collection of “anything for the cause” zealots. As has been previously pointed out on WUWT, when you look at the methodology used to reach that number, the veracity of the result falls apart, badly. You see, it turns out that Cook simply employed his band of “Skeptical Science” (SkS) eco-zealots to rate papers, rather than letting all authors of the papers rate their own work (Note: many authors weren’t even contacted and their papers wrongly rated, see here). The result was that the “97% consensus” was a survey of the SkS raters beliefs and interpretations, rather than a survey of the authors opinions of their own science abstracts. Essentially it was pal-review by an activist group with a strong bias towards a particular outcome as demonstrated by the name “the consensus project”.

[….]

Dr. Judith Curry writes:

Look at the views in column 1, then look at the % in the rightmost column: 52% state the the warming since 1850 is mostly anthropogenic. One common categorization would categorize the other 48% as ‘deniers’.

So, the inconvenient truth here is that about half of the world’s largest organization of meteorological and climate professionals don’t think humans are “mostly” the cause of Anthropogenic Global Warming the rest will probably get smeared as “deniers”

(Read More at WUWT)

[….]

I wish to note, that, the truth was not a 97% consensus, but that about half disagreed with man causing it. Which is about the same percentage Dr. Happer says on CNBC:

Warming has stopped longer than that! About 17-years. So, Sen. Inhofe asked the EPA for any stats to back up this claim… the predictable outcome is seen below, and shows how the reasoning displayed by politicians in this debate are circular

Not only is the consensus wrong, and even the EPA cannot answer simple questions to defend Obama’s statement that the earth has warmed at an alarming rate over the past decade when it has “stalled” or cooled over more than a decade. But below (linked in the cartoon) are peer reviewed counter claims or challenges to the consensus that the 97% claim ignored.

† The list has been cited by Scientists (1, 2) and Professors (3)

“Wow, the list is pretty impressive …It’s Oreskes done right.”

Luboš Motl, Ph.D. Theoretical Physics

“I really appreciate your important effort in compiling the list.”

Willie Soon, Ph.D. Astrophysicist and Geoscientist

“A tour de force list of scientific papers…”

Robert M. Carter, Ph.D. Palaeontology

“…it’s a very useful resource. Thanks to the pop tech team.”

Joanne Nova, Author of The Skeptics Handbook

“I do confess a degree of fascination with Poptech’s list…”

John Cook, Skeptical Science

A BAD DREAM

WASHINGTON (WNB) – As radical Islamic forces continue to rapidly overtake Iraq, Secretary of State John Kerry gave an impassioned speech today about the dire threat facing the world.

“Our country and the world must take immediate and decisive action to safeguard the lives and welfare of literally millions of people,” said Kerry. “At the rate we’re going, climate change could conceivably raise the temperature of the oceans to a point where the additional sweat from overheating fish will make the oceans too salty to sustain life. We must act – now.”

Later, when asked about the situation in Iraq, Kerry replied, “We’re closely monitoring the effect on the climate and fish in the area.”

“Never Before” Mantra about the 47-Republicans Letter…

Via NewsBusters:

…”The idea that this is unprecedented or new is preposterous. The only thing wrong with the letter is it should have come EARLIER and should have included references to IRAN and AL QAEDA.“… (emphasis added)

Vice President Biden said this about the letter to Iran signed by 47 Republican senators:

“In 36 years in the United States Senate, I cannot recall another instance in which senators intervened in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy.” 

Before continuing with The Weekly Standard article, consider this via Forbes:

Picking his way through the Soviet archives that Boris Yeltsin had just thrown open, in 1991 Tim Sebastian, a reporter for the London Times, came across an arresting memorandum. Composed in 1983 by Victor Chebrikov, the top man at the KGB, the memorandum was addressed to Yuri Andropov, the top man in the entire USSR. The subject: Sen. Edward Kennedy.

“On 9-10 May of this year,” the May 14 memorandum explained, “Sen. Edward Kennedy’s close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow.” (Tunney was Kennedy’s law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) “The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov.”

Kennedy’s message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. “The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations,” the memorandum stated. “These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign.”

Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

First he offered to visit Moscow. “The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA.” Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. “A direct appeal … to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. … If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. … The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side.”

Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time–and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.

Kennedy’s motives? “Like other rational people,” the memorandum explained, “[Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations.” But that high-minded concern represented only one of Kennedy’s motives.

“Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988,” the memorandum continued. “Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president.”

…read it all…

Now, let’s add some items of interest to the above by continuing with TWS article:

But in fact, a number of U.S. senators, including then-Senator and now Secretary of State John Kerry, have contacted unfriendly governments, in opposition to the policies of the White House at the time.

Senator James Abourezk (D-South Dakota) secretly met with Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat in 1973, and arranged for Adlai Stevenson III (D-Illinois) to do likewise. This violated both American government policy and U.S. law, which prohibited such contacts because of the PLO’s involvement in terrorism and refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

In December 1979, Sen. Abourezk undertook a secret trip to Tehran, at the behest of his colleague Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts). The Iran hostage crisis was generating public sympathy for President Jimmy Carter, making it difficult for Kennedy to gain traction in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Kennedy hoped Abourezk, an Arab-American, could negotiate a release of the hostages, and thus deprive Carter of the political advantage.

The episode became public only in 1986, when congressional candidate Joseph (son of RFK) Kennedy rejected a $100 contribution from Abourezk, because of the latter’s extreme animus toward Israel. Abourezk took revenge by writing Kennedy a letter — and making it public — in which he announced, “I risked my life and my career” by going to Tehran in response to a request from Sen. Ted Kennedy. The request was conveyed by Kennedy aide Jan Kalicki, former JFK aide Theodore Sorensen, and Kennedy’s close colleague, Sen. John Culver (D-Iowa). Abourezk explained to the Los Angeles Times that he did not speak directly to Sen. Kennedy, in order “to give him an element of deniability.”

Sen. Kennedy himself was no stranger to the world of friendly contacts with hostile governments. In 1991, a London Times reporter combing through newly released Soviet archives found an internal KGB memorandum reporting a remarkable communication to the Soviet leadership from Kennedy, via his close friend ex-Sen. John Tunney, in May 1984.

According to the memo, Kennedy proposed to visit Moscow in order to help Soviet leaders craft more effective “explanations” to use against the Reagan administration concerning nuclear disarmament issues. He also offered to arrange U.S. television appearances for Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov to make a “direct appeal” to the American people that would undermine the administration. Kennedy evidently hoped these efforts would increase the Democrats’ chances of retaking the White House that year.

Senator Charles Percy (R-Illinois) had a Moscow connection of his own. In November 1980, he traveled to the USSR for private meetings with then-Premier Leonid Brezhnev, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov. During the talks, Percy advocated the creation of a Palestinian state headed by Soviet client Arafat — essentially taking the Soviet position, as against the position of both the outgoing Carter administration and the incoming Reagan administration.

Percy’s remarks were reported to Washington by the American ambassador in Moscow, Thomas Watson. What Percy said so alarmed U.S. officials that one of them leaked Watson’s classified cables to the New York Times.

“Arafat has a compelling desire to be a chief of state, no matter how small it is,” Percy said in Moscow, according to the cables. “He is a terrorist, he has done same dastardly things; but he is a fact of life, he exists.” His Soviet interlocutors must have been very pleased.

Each of these contacts was shrouded in secrecy, arguably a far more serious undermining of the executive branch than this week’s Iran letter, which was crafted as an open, public letter, not a private communication to any particular Iranian leader. At least nobody at the White House can accuse of the 47 GOP senators of going behind the president’s back.

And while the 47 Republicans merely issued a public statement, some other senators have gone the extra mile by visiting hostile capitals in opposition to U.S. policy.

In 1985, for example, then-freshman Senator John Kerry traveled to Nicaragua for a friendly get-together with the Sandinista president, Daniel Ortega. The position of the Reagan administration was to support the opposition Contras. Kerry wasn’t much interested in the administration’s position. Upon his return to the United States, Kerry met with President Reagan to convey a message from Ortega. Reagan “wasn’t thrilled,” Kerry later told the New York Times. This week, it’s Kerry’s turn to be less than thrilled.

In late 2006, Democratic senators Kerry, Chris Dodd (Connecticut), and Bill Nelson (Florida), as well as one Republican who later became a Democrat, Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), traveled to Damascus. That is, at a time when the policy of the Bush administration was to isolate the Bashar Assad regime because of its aggression in Lebanon support for terrorism, the senators decided to show their support for renewed U.S. relations with Syria…

…read both pages (one and two)…

One should take note as well that like Goldberg said, the letter didn’t go far enough, here is National Review on the matter:

Time for a primer on international agreements, thanks to the controversy over Senator Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran.

Joined by almost all Republican senators, the missive warned Tehran that any nuclear deal with President Obama would not last unless it went to Congress for approval:

★ We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei. The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.

As a description of American constitutional law, Senator Cotton has it exactly right. It was as if he were just informing Iran about the text of the Constitution. There are three types of international agreements under U.S. law:

a. Treaties: These require two-thirds of the Senate for approval. The U.S. has generally used treaties for the most serious commitments of American sovereignty, such as alliances and arms control.
b. Congressional-Executive agreements: These require approval by the House and the Senate. Although unmentioned in the Constitution, they are nothing more than regular laws passed by Congress. These have been used for deals such as trade agreements.
c. Sole executive agreements: These are made by the president alone. They are constitutional only because they represent promises by the president on how to exercise his constitutional power.

The Cotton letter is right, because if President Obama strikes a nuclear deal with Iran using only instrument (c), he is only committing to refrain from exercising his executive power — i.e., by not attacking Iran or by lifting sanctions under power delegated by Congress. Not only could the next president terminate the agreement; Obama himself could terminate the deal.

In fact, the Cotton letter could have gone farther and pointed out that Obama may make promises that he cannot keep. Since a sole executive agreement is only a commitment for the use of the executive’s authority, it cannot make promises about Congress. Under the Constitution’s Foreign Commerce Clause, only Congress has the authority to impose international economic sanctions….

…read it all…

OVERPOPULATION! Another Mantra of the Left ~ Destroyed

This is a statement made recently on my Facebook, so I respond:

“Go forth and be fruitful “. I think mankind has been more than “fruitful”. Earth overpolulated. Birth control a no brainer, and I’m not not talking condoms.Nobody is “pro-abortion .The “pill” negligible in health care costs. Never should have let some companies opt out of the pill. Stone-agers…. I’m sure God loves watching 30,090 of his children starve to death every day. We are over-populated, despite the garbage that “study” foments. Great thing about the medieval era, they slaughtered folks by the thousands Genocide just part of “nation building” for the crown.

I will omit the name of the person out of respect:

We are not overpopulated? That is one of the dumbest things I hear from the left (hence, you). Firstly, children dying of starvation has N O T H I N G to do with overpopulation. Do you think it does?

WORLD FOOD PRODUCTION

Right now the world produces enough food for 10-billion people. [We have about 7.2 billion right now.] And every year we find new ways to produce, irrigate, and the like to produce even more. Why most children die of starvation in the world is because of regimes typically based on regimes either Islamic in nature of far-left (socialist, Communist, Marxist — for the most part they are not shining examples of the free-market).

STATISTICS USED

I want you to especially respond to this question: where did you get your number from? That is, where are you getting your number 30,090 starve to death every day? I mean:

★ approximately 153 thousand people die every day. 30 thousand people would be 19% of this number, and I find it highly unlike that 19% of the world is dying every day from starvation.

GREEN ENERGY

IF — [India-Foxtrot] — you are soo concerned about starvation [aside from your fictitious numbers], you would be against GREEN ENERGY. Why? Because green energy raises the price of food, dramatically. (You really are not concerned about starvation, but Leftism.)

POPULATION GROWTH

Between 1950 and 2000, the world population grew at a rate of 1.76%. Between 2000 and 2050, it is expected to grow by 0.77 percent.

ALASKA

Example: If you put all 7 billion Earth Inhabitants in the State of Alaska, each person would have an average of 2,271.60 square feet of land. That area would be large enough to build a 4 bedroom house for each of the World’s 7 billion inhabitants!

NATION STATES

You could also put all 7 billion inhabitants in nearly any of the World’s Nation States–except perhaps the smallest island or nation states–without running out of room. Any one of the four largest countries–after Russia–China, USA, Canada, and Brazil could provide more than 16,000 square feet per person. In USA, it would be 16,502 average square feet of land for each of the 7 billion world inhabitants if all moved to the NEARLY 100 Trillion square feet of land in the United States of America, excluding the US Territories.

This is the pat response I got

Maybe in Utopia, Sean. Or Atlantis. Good luck with that. Too many man-made barriers. Put down your Bibles and come back to the real world. Idjets! [see note below] …. And let’s not even get into the starving and malnourished. God does not provide for all. There is more than enough food produced in the world to feed the world. 

The commentator corrected his stats to 21,000 people dying of malnutrition/starvation per day. However, it is primarily the Left who want more death versus less of it. They are the one’s worried about overpopulation. It is the Left who blocks such things as GOLDEN RICE, DDT, pushes bio-fuels which drives up food costs which affect the poor communities especially [etc, etc]. Not conservatives.

[You should say] “Government models do not provide for all.” Then Parents [are next in line]. [Again] There is more than enough food produced in the world to feed the world.

Texas has 7,494,271,488,000 Sq. Ft.

There are 7,200,000,000 people in the world.

That means each person would get almost 1041 Sq. Ft. apiece. Some families are large, some are small. Let us even it out with 4-per family. That means each family would get 4,163 Sq. Ft.

That is a house and lot to make food. OR, spread those people out in one country and irrigation, food production, etc. are in full swing.

The other person wraps up his naked-emperor side of the discussion:

Let’s close this out. Water…..(1% of available water on this planet is freshwater. L.A. can’t even find enough water. And you guys are “semi-developed”. What are you going to do? Move everyone to Minnesota? Good luck!

I give a final response:

[No luck, just common sense] …desalination plants and not high-speed rail. If you believe the governments OFFICIAL reports and Al Gore… RICH greenies can build these so we could drink away the rise of the seas.

Take HAITI, the top in the category of starvation/malnutrition. They have 298,689,177,600 Sq. Ft. Haiti’s population is 10.32 million. Each person gets 226,280 Sq. Ft. Government is said to be VERY corrupt and at time tyrannical.

Number two in starvation/malnutrition is ANGOLA. Angola has 13,419,379,353,600 Sq. Ft. Their population is 24,383,301. Every person in Angola gets 550,205 Sq. Ft. Angola’s government is corrupt and almost all the parties “voted” into power are Marxist, socialist, Communist, and the like.

I could go on, but “overpopulation” is not the issue here.

Here is the side-note:

BTW, the Judeo-Christian construct [esp. the Christian theistic worldview] is the best worldview to operate from in order to search well for AND to test truth by. In ALL matter of faith and non-faith.

All 10,000 [+] religions in the world break down into just 7-worldviews (actually, most into three BIGGIES). The Judaic/Christian worldview is the most coherent model to form a working epistemology from. SO, I will N-O-T put my Bible down thank you very much. My worldview responds to what every worldview should, except better than others:

1) Ultimate Reality ~ What kind of God, if any, actually exists?
2) External Reality ~ Is there anything beyond the cosmos?
3) Knowledge ~ What can be known, and how can anyone know it?
4) Origin ~ Where did I come from?
5) Identity ~ Who am I?
6) Location ~ Where am I?
7) Morals ~ How should I live?
8) Values ~ What should I consider of great worth?
9) Predicament ~ What is humanity’s fundamental problem?
10) Resolution ~ How can humanity’s problem be solved?
11) Past / Present ~ What is the meaning and direction of history?
12) Destiny ~ Will I survive the death of my body and, if so, in what state?

WORLDVIEW

  • American Heritage Dictionary: 1) The overall perspective from which one sees and interprets the world; 2) A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group.
  • “A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our well being.” James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept, 122
  • “Ours is an age of religious cacophony, as was the Roman Empire of Christ’s time. From agnosticism to Hegelianism, from devil-worship to scientific rationalism, from theosophical cults to philosophies of process: virtually any worldview conceivable is offered to modern man in the pluralistic marketplace of ideas. Our age is indeed in ideological and societal agony, grasping at anything and everything that can conceivably offer the ecstasy of a cosmic relationship or of a comprehensive Weltanschauung [worldview].” Faith Founded on Fact: Essays in Evidential Apologetics (Newburgh, IN: Trinity Press, 1978), 152-153.
  • People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By “presuppositions” we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. ‘As a man thinketh, so he is,’ is really profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who “lives in the mind” and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought world determines the outward action. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, ‘not many men are in the room’ — that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions. Quoted from, Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1976), 19-20.
  • Alexander W. Astin dissected a longitudinal study conducted by UCLA started in 1966 for the Review of Higher Education [journal] in which 290,000 students were surveyed from about 500 colleges. The main question was asked of students why study or learn? “Seeking to develop ‘a meaningful philosophy of life’” [to develop a meaningful worldview] was ranked “essential” by the majority of entering freshmen. In 1996 however, 80% of the college students barely recognized the need for “a meaningful philosophy of life” and ranked “being very well off financially” [e.g., to not necessarily develop a meaningful worldview] as paramount.

 [back]

WMDs and the Myths of the Left (Mantras 2.0) ~ UPDATED

New Introduction (5-2015)

Why this post? Originally this was a debate in a forum involving a professor of history from the University of Michigan during the beginning years of the Iraq War. The forum this particular debate took place in shut down and so I lost a bulk of my responses to the professor. No matter, what i did save has transformed into a continuing response to the many past [and still popular] mantras from the left regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).

While I have updated this post rececently, there shouldn’t be too many more updates needed for it. You see, when the New York Times (NYTs) caves on the issue, the Left is then forced — yes forced — to reason through the issue. Voltaire said “once the people begin to reason, all is lost.” And it is because the progressive democrat lives by emotion… simple, rudimentary, brutish responses to their environment. Deep thinking is a hand in cards they will never get.

Enjoy this rework of one of my most classic posts. It looks NOTHING like the previous version.

The NYTs

The NYT’s has written two major articles on the Iraq war in the past couple years. (See also Yahoo News.) The only reason they would ever consider going back on their previous position that Bush lied, people died, is for the simple reason they can still blame the Bush administration for improperly handling the WMDs they did find. I happen to agree with the NYTs on this… in the rush to secretly dispose of these weapons, safety was not an issue, and many of our troops that handled and disposed of them have fallen ill.

Simply put, the State Department/Department of Defense had insurgents streaming into the country with deep terrorist ties. And they did not want these “questionable” characters getting their hands on and smuggling out of the country very dangerouse ordinance. So the Defense Department had the top brass (from Bush down) play dumb on WMDs so there wasn’t a mad-rush on these weapons.

The operation code name was “Avarice.” Here is a snippet from the article (h/t The Blaze) showing that there were in fact WMDs in Iraq… as does the rest of this in-depth post!

The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.

The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

[….]

Neither the C.I.A. nor the soldiers persuaded the man to reveal his source of supply, the officials said. “They were pushing to see where did it originate from, was there a mother lode?” General Zahner said.

Eventually, a veteran familiar with the purchases said, “the guy was getting a little cocky.”

At least once he scammed his handlers, selling rockets filled with something other than sarin.

Then in 2006, the veteran said, the Iraqi drove a truckload of warheads to Baghdad and “called the intel guys to tell them he was going to turn them over to the insurgents unless they picked them up.”

Not long after that, the veteran said, the relationship appeared to dry up, ending purchases that had ensured “a lot of chemical weapons were destroyed.”

…read it all…

NewsMax comments on the above and below NYT’s articles:

The New York Times reported for the first time in October that during a seven-year time frame, from 2004 to 2011, soldiers serving in Iraq encountered the abandoned chemical weapons, calling it “a largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.”

When the NYT’s eats crow… the case is made!

Larry Elder & the NYTs

Larry Elder reads from the NYT’s article, mentioned above and below, and he really gives this issue a thorough going through. Following Larry Elder is a Breitbart snippet on the topic:

Here is Breitbart’s excerpt:

In Wednesday’s edition of The New York Times, a report from C.J. Chivers, which is accompanied by a video, details U.S. forces in Iraq finding thousands of chemical weapons during the Iraq war.

“From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule,” Chivers wrote. “In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Chivers report details “a pattern of secrecy” and raises concern of the possibility of other hidden chemical weapons leftover from Hussein’s rule possibly falling into the hands ISIS.

Below is the New York Times short documentary detailing many of these soldiers talking about improperly disposing of these chemical weapons.

NYTs Video

I only have one issue with the video worth mentioning. The video asserts that the U.S. supplied biological and major munitions to Iraq… A chart near the end of this post shows the amount of weaponry sold to Iraq from 1973-to-1990 by country.

(This and other mantras can be quickly linked to in the “Contents” area above.)

The dislike for Rumsfeld came out as the video was talking about this arming of Iraq while showing even Rumsfeld’s “hand shake” with Saddam Hussein. In other words, the impression given in the short documentary was that the U.S.A. sold Saddam these weapons because Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam. That’s their evidence.

Here is the NYT’s video:

Islamic State Aquisitions

The below includes some pictures of sites and weapons caches that have recently been acquired by the Islamic State (I.S.). The following picture is a picture of the four main WMD manufacturing sites captured by I.S. in Iraq:

CH5

The jihadist group bringing terror to Iraq overran a Saddam Hussein chemical weapons complex Thursday, gaining access to disused stores of hundreds of tons of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin.

(Gateway Pundit) ISIS terrorists showed off a captured SCUD missile today in Raqqa, Syria (to the right, click to enlarge). Scud is a series of tactical ballistic missiles developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The name Scud has been widely used to refer to these missiles and the wide variety of modern variants.

Libertarian Republican emboldens the above evidence with the newest report that undermines many of the characters he deals with on his site and political world:

…Let’s cue up our friendly left-libertarian, shall we. Choose your favorite lefty-libertarian from Cato, Reason, Libertarian Party, LewRockwell.com, Ron Paul movement, antiwar.com, Jesse Ventura-ite, Alex Jones-iac, whichever.

“Bh-bh-bh-bh-bbbbbbb-but, Saddam never had WMD, Bush lied, people died… Cheney, Halliburton… Bbbbush, warmonger, No WMD… Building 9… Building 9… what about Building 9…”

And now this, breaking news from the AP, via PJ Media, “ISIS has seized thousands of rockets with Chemical Warheads”:

Iraq has informed the United Nations that the Islamic State extremist group has taken control of a vast former chemical weapons facility northwest of Baghdad where 2,500 chemical rockets filled with the deadly nerve agent sarin or their remnants were stored along with other chemical warfare agents. (Emphasis added.)

Iraq’s U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Ali Alhakim said in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon circulated Tuesday that “terrorist” groups entered the Muthanna site June 11 and seized weapons and equipment from the protection force guarding the facility.

Did You Catch That?

  1. A “vast former chemical weapons facility.”
  2. Not a small chemical weapons facility.
  3. Not a medium-sized weapons facility.
  4. But a vast chemical weapons facility.

I will ask again, for LR’s sake, Did You Catch That?

WikiLeaks!

This comes mainly by way of Wired Magazine, However, the picture they show in their article I have had for YEARS! And the cunundrum is this for the left. WIKI Leaks is loved by the left, mainly, because “the WikiLeaks cables because they make America look bad” (Daily Caller).

But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.

[…..]

In August 2004, for instance, American forces surreptitiously purchased what they believed to be containers of liquid sulfur mustard, a toxic “blister agent” used as a chemical weapon since World War I. The troops tested the liquid, and “reported two positive results for blister.” The chemical was then “triple-sealed and transported to a secure site” outside their base.

Three months later, in northern Iraq, U.S. scouts went to look in on a “chemical weapons” complex. “One of the bunkers has been tampered with,” they write. “The integrity of the seal [around the complex] appears intact, but it seems someone is interesting in trying to get into the bunkers.”

THAT BEING SAID, the Left is now having to admit that there were WMDs in Iraq if they believe Wiki Leaks. It is a double edged sword in other words. This is a thorn in the side of the activist Left! They support Julian Assange releasing classified, United States [and other government] information ~ B-U-T ~ at the same time it refutes their long-held position on the reasons behind the Iraq war:

Newsbusters explains how the “WikiLeaks” massive dump of classified documents show that WMDs were found.

But at Wired Magazine’s Danger Room (HTs to Ace and Gateway Pundit via an e-mail), Noah Shachtman identifies substantial contrary evidence in the WikiLeaks docs to add that what has already been accumulated. Shachtman tries to minimize the impact by overstating the Bush administration’s actual position, but that doesn’t change what the WikiLeaks docs contain:

WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results

[….]

An initial glance at the WikiLeaks war logs doesn’t reveal evidence of some massive WMD program by the Saddam Hussein regime — the Bush administration’s most (in)famous rationale for invading Iraq. But chemical weapons, especially, did not vanish from the Iraqi battlefield. Remnants of Saddam’s toxic arsenal, largely destroyed after the Gulf War, remained. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict — and may have brewed up their own deadly agents.

…The WMD diehards will likely find some comfort in these newly-WikiLeaked documents. Skeptics will note that these relatively small WMD stockpiles were hardly the kind of grave danger that the Bush administration presented in the run-up to the war.

Sorry, Mr. Shachtman, the “diehards” are those on the left who have never backed away from “no WMDs” claim, which has once again (previous examples here, here, here, and here, to identify just a few) been proven to be demonstrably false.

[….]

Gateway Pundit wonders: “Do you suppose this will make any headlines?” Prognosis: Doubtful. There’s too much at stake in protecting the left’s folklore.

I want to comment on the picture Wired Magazine used in their article. This is a picture of some viles. In reading the CIA report on them from years ago these were recovered from a safehouse in the initial months of sweeping homes in the suburbs of the capital. I used “it” in concert with a Daily News article found in their Sunday Viewpoint entitled, “Altered Reality: Look Past The Dogma and You’ll See the WMDs” (October 26, 2003, p. 3):

Picture Used

1) A clandestine network of laboratories and safe houses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.

2) A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.

3) Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist’s home, one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.

4) New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF), and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.

5) Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists’ homes, that would have been useful in resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).

6) A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.

7) Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles, a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists have said they were told to conceal from the UN.

8) Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km – well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed Iraq to threaten targets throughout the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.

9) Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles –probably the No Dong — 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles, and other prohibited military equipment.

Shells

May I can also add here that 750 shells with sarin gas were found. As well as 500 shells with mustard gas in them. Some say that these were old and abandoned. This doesn’t mean, however, that they were harmless. One sites discussion about this topic has a commentator astutely noting: “These are 500 shells, 15 shells like this killed 5,000 Kurds. There is a difference between degraded and harmless.” Only in the Left’s vernacular does this equal no WMDs. Scurrilous politics on display if there ever were. Two things come to my mind, and they are two slogans I heard all the time.

More on this later.

Intelligence & First Hand Knowledge

This next section will have subheading and deal with some solid information dealing with or adding to the already water-tight screed above. It will deal with those with first hand knowledge of operations of hiding and smuggling out of Iraq WMDs. Or intelligence known through reporters from the area.

Senior Syrian Journalist

A senior Syrian journalist reports Iraq’s WMD located in three Syrian sites:

(Debka… link dead, preserved at Free Republic) Nizar Nayuf is a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper “De Telegraaf,” that he knows the three sites where Iraq’s WMD are kept. The storage places are:

✦ Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral part of an underground factory, built by the North Koreans, for producing Syrian Scud missiles.

✦ Iraqi chemical weapons and long-range missiles are stored in these tunnels.

✦ The village of Tal Snan, north of the town of Salamija, where there is a big Syrian airforce camp. Vital parts of Iraq’s WMD are stored there.

✦ The city of Sjinsjar on the Syrian border with the Lebanon, south of the city Homs.

Najoef writes that the transfer of Iraqi WMD to Syria was organized by the commanders of Saddam Hussein’s Special Republican Guard, including General Shalish, with the help of Assif Shoakat, Bashar Assad’s cousin. Shoakat is the CEO of Bhaha, an import/export company owned by the Assad family.

In February 2003, a month before America’s invasion in Iraq, DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly were the only media to report the movement of Iraqi WMD, the efforts to bring them from Iraq to Syria, and the personal involvement of Bashar Assad and his family in the operation.

Najoef, who has won prizes for journalistic integrity, says he wrote his letter because he has terminal cancer.

#2 Man

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein’s air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.

(The New York Sun) Hussein’s air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed. The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, “Saddam’s Secrets,” released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.

“There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Mr. Sada said. “I am confident they were taken over.”

Mr. Sada’s comments come just more than a month after Israel’s top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam “transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria.”

Democrats have made the absence of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a theme in their criticism of the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in 2003….

Below  is Larry Elder interviewing General Sada (3-31-2011). Don’t you see this is information that undermines heavily the idea that WMDs didn’t exist? They were being moved to Syria… what was being moved? Lies? Myths?

Jordan

Quite a few years ago Jordanian officials thwarted a chemical attack on their soil. In fact, it would have been successful minus faulty equipment giving authorities time enough to discover the plot. (AMMAN, Jordan [CNN]) ~ Jordanian authorities said Monday they have broken up an alleged al Qaeda plot that would have unleashed a deadly cloud of chemicals in the heart of Jordan’s capital, Amman.

The plot would have been more deadly than anything al Qaeda has done before, including the September 11 attacks, according to the Jordanian government. Among the alleged targets were the U.S. Embassy, the Jordanian prime minister’s office and the headquarters of Jordanian intelligence. U.S. intelligence officials expressed caution about whether the chemicals captured by Jordanian authorities were intended to create a “toxic cloud” chemical weapon, but they said the large quantities involved were at a minimum intended to create “massive explosions.” Officials said there is debate within the CIA and other U.S. agencies over whether the plotters were planning to kill innocent people using toxic chemicals.

At issue is the presence of a large quantity of sulfuric acid among the tons of chemicals seized by Jordanian authorities. Sulfuric acid can be used as a blister agent, but it more commonly can increase the size of conventional explosions, according to U.S. officials. Nevertheless, U.S. intelligence officials called the capture of tons of chemicals that together could create several large conventional explosions “a big deal.” The plot was within days of being carried out, Jordanian officials said, when security forces broke it up April 20.

In a nighttime raid in Amman, Jordanian security forces moved in on the terrorist cell. After the shooting stopped, four men were dead. Jordanian authorities said. They said at least three others were arrested, including Azmi Jayyousi, the cell’s suspected ringleader, whom Jordanian intelligence alleges was responsible for planning and recruiting. On a confession shown on state-run Jordanian television, Jayyousi said he took orders from Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a suspected terrorist leader who has been linked to al Qaeda and whom U.S. officials have said is behind some attacks in Iraq.

“I took explosives courses, poisons high level, then I pledged allegiance to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, to obey him without any questioning,” Jayyousi said. Jordanian intelligence suspects Jayyousi returned from Iraq in January after a meeting with al-Zarqawi in which they allegedly plotted to hit the three targets in Amman. In a series of raids, the Jordanians said, they seized 20 tons of chemicals and numerous explosives. Also seized were three trucks equipped with specially modified plows, apparently designed to crash through security barricades.

The first alleged target was the Jordanian intelligence headquarters. The alleged blast was intended to be a big one. “According to my experience as an explosives expert, the whole of the Intelligence Department will be destroyed, and nothing of it will remain, nor anything surrounding it,” Jayyousi said….

….A Jordanian government scientist said the plot had been carefully worked out, with just the right amount of explosives to spread the deadly cloud without diminishing the effects of the chemicals. The blast would not burn up the poisonous chemicals but instead produce a toxic cloud, the scientist said, possibly spreading for a mile, maybe more.

The Jordanian intelligence buildings are within a mile of a large medical center, a shopping mall and a residential area. “And there is no one combination of antidote to treat nerve agent, choking agent and blistering agent,” the scientist said. Al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, has been accused of plotting chemical attacks before, and authorities said it would not be his first attempt to strike Jordan. In 2000, a Jordanian court charged him in absentia with planning to blow up a hotel and attack tourist destinations.

U.S. officials have said he was behind the 2002 assassination of American diplomat Lawrence Foley, who was gunned down outside his home in Amman. According to the televised confessions, $170,000 came from Zarqawi via messengers from Syria.

20 Plane Loads

Relief Web is the global hub for time-critical humanitarian information on Complex Emergencies and Natural Disasters connected with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. They reported in an article, “Iraq sends 20 planeloads of aid to Syrian victims of dam collapse,” the following on June 9th, 2002:

(BAGHDAD, June 9 [AFP]) – Iraq said Sunday it has sent 20 planeloads of humanitarian assistance to Syria to help victims of Tuesday’s Zeyzoun dam collapse in the north of the neighboring country. “Iraqi Airways planes have made 20 flights to Damascus until today to take foodstuffs and pharmaceutical products to the victims,” Transport Minister Ahmad Murtada Ahmad told the official INA news agency.

Planes continued to take off from Baghdad’s international airport on Sunday in the airlift put in place on Thursday at the request of President Saddam Hussein, Ahmad said.

Iraq’s Health Minister Omid Medhat Mubarak added that the sanctions-hit country would also send teams of specialized doctors, surgeons and chemists to Syria….

Twenty planeloads containing “humanitarian aid” while he [Saddam] was under U.N. Sanctions and he didn’t have enough food for his own people who dies of malnutrition and lack of medical assistance. How gullible are we ~ well, the Left is VERY gullible. Come on. We know from the previous three stories that these plane loads were likely something else.

Defining WMDs

Question: what was Faisal Shahzad (the “Time-Square Bomber”) and Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab (the “Dingaling Bomber”) charged with?

  1. (CBS Source) A Pakistani-born U.S. citizen admitted involvement in the failed Times Square car bombing and will face terrorism and weapons of mass destruction charges, Attorney General Eric Holder said.
  2. (CNN Source) The seven-page indictment charges AbdulMutallab with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

They were charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction! If we found WMDs in New York and Detroit… surely we found them in Iraq. What I have attempted above is a pretty airtight case that WMDs did exist, maybe not in the form found in the movie Spies Like Us, with a Iraqi standing over a mobile ICBM control panel with a nuclear warhead… about to press the launch button. WMDs nonetheless.

I believe the Bush administration could have made a better case in arguing that one of the reason we were going in were for Agents of Mass Destruction (AMDs). But this is neither here-nor-there since I feel the case above is sound for there being WMDs as well as AMDs. I will also point out a reason or two for us to enter Iraq even if WMDs were not part of the argument.

Reasons for Entering Iraq

This next portion is taken from a series I do in responding to a local writer in a small journal. The original post is entitled, “Concepts: Are We Insane? Nope, Just You Van Huizum.

U.N Resolutions

Yet another unfounded swipe at the Iraq War. John Van Huizum lives in a bubble where if he has come to a conclusion years ago… that’s it! History forever stays right where John wants it to stay. Here is an excerpt of John’s (click to enlarge it) article shows a complete lack of history.

I doubt he think any differently about Vietnam based on his 1970’s conclusions. It wouldn’t matter that after 1990 — the fall of the Wall — 100,000 of thousands of Soviet era documents were now being translated and reviewed by military historians and good books based on MORE historical documents. Because these new documents support the traditional (and not the Left’s reasoning) for entering and fighting this proxy war of WWIII (the Cold War), this new information is rejected from the matrix of the left’s consciousness. But that is neither here-nor-there.

So, let’s deal with some of the contentions in John’s excerpted article. Firstly he notes that there were insufficient reasons for going to war.

May I remind him there were many U.N. Resolutions against Iraq that were almost all not met:

  1. UNSCR 678 – November 29, 1990
  2. UNSCR 686 – March 2, 1991
  3. UNSCR 687 – April 3, 1991
  4. UNSCR 688 – April 5, 1991
  5. UNSCR 707 – August 15, 1991
  6. UNSCR 715 – October 11, 1991
  7. UNSCR 949 – October 15, 1994
  8. UNSCR 1051 – March 27, 1996
  9. UNSCR 1060 – June 12, 1996
  10. UNSCR 1115 – June 21, 1997
  11. UNSCR 1134 – October 23, 1997
  12. UNSCR 1137 – November 12, 1997
  13. UNSCR 1154 – March 2, 1998
  14. UNSCR 1194 – September 9, 1998 (“Condemns the decision by Iraq of 5 August 1998 to suspend cooperation with” UN and IAEA inspectors, which constitutes “a totally unacceptable contravention” of its obligations under UNSCR 687, 707, 715, 1060, 1115, and 1154.)
  15. UNSCR 1205 – November 5, 1998
  16. UNSCR 1284 – December 17, 1999

….See Additional UN Security Council Statements…

Official U.N. resolutions aside, Bush went to Congress and made his case with these and many other points. One point being that Iraq was firing almost everyday on our fighter pilots in the no-fly zone. In the cease fire of the First Gulf War, this was enough — under international law — to RESUME aggression….

…read it all…

Regime Change

This next audio is a challenging call into the Michael Medved Show when his guest, Paul Wolfowitz, gets into some of the history that started with Bush Sr., was ignored by Bill Clinton, and finally considered reasonable by “Dubya’s” team:

Terrorist Connections

This next section deals with the idea that we heard a lot of during the war, and it is this: “there were no connections with Al Qaeda and Saddam.” Alternatively, there is a weaker version of this, “there were no support [state sponsored terrorism] given to terrorism/terrorists by Saddam/Iraq.”

This next section will deal with these mantras from the Left. The first example being very simple.

Al-Zarqawi

Here is a WIKI bio excerpt explaining who Al-Zarqawi is to catch the younger generation up with history:

…[he] was a militant Islamist from Jordan who ran a paramilitary training camp in Afghanistan. He became known after going to Iraq and being responsible for a series of bombings, beheadings, and attacks during the Iraq War.

He formed al-Tawhid wal-Jihad in the 1990s, and led it until his death in June 2006. Zarqawi took responsibility, on several audio and video recordings, for numerous acts of violence in Iraq including suicide bombings and hostage executions. Zarqawi opposed the presence of US and Western military forces in the Islamic world, as well as the West’s support for the existence of Israel. In late 2004 he joined al-Qaeda, and pledged allegiance to Osama bin Laden. After this al-Tawhid wal-Jihad became known as Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, also known as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and al-Zarqawi was given the al-Qaeda title, “Emir of Al Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers”.

In September 2005, he declared “all-out war” on Shi’ites in Iraq, after the Iraqi government offensive on insurgents in the Sunni town of Tal Afar. He dispatched numerous suicide bombers throughout Iraq to attack American soldiers and areas with large concentrations of Shia militias. He is also thought to be responsible for the 2005 bombing of three hotels in Amman, Jordan. Zarqawi was killed in a targeted killing by a Joint US force on June 7, 2006, while attending a meeting in an isolated safehouse approximately 8 km (5.0 mi) north of Baqubah. One United States Air Force F-16C jet dropped two 500-pound (230 kg) guided bombs on the safehouse.

Again, he was hiding out in and training terrorist fighters in, and eventually killed in… wait for it… in Iraq!

The Weekly Standard reports that, before the invasion of Iraq, Zarqawi ran a “terrorist haven” in Kurdish northern Iraq.[33] According to a March 2003 British intelligence report, Zarqawi had set up “sleeper cells” in Baghdad before the Iraq war. The report stated “Reporting since (February) suggests that senior al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has established sleeper cells in Baghdad, to be activated during a U.S. occupation of the city…These cells apparently intend to attack U.S. targets using car bombs and other weapons. (It is also possible that they have received [chemical and biological] materials from terrorists in the [Kurdish Autonomous Zone]),…al Qaeda-associated terrorists continued to arrive in Baghdad in early March.”[34]

(Replaced WIKI’s dead links with good ones)

CONNECTIONS

These news items show that Saddam was very busy on the Syrian border, and that some chemical weapons made it into Jordan from Syria via a network of Al Qaeda that led right to Iraq. The Telegraph explains in a bit more detail:

THE United States once described Abu Nidal as “the world’s most dangerous terrorist”. It was not an exaggeration. In a grisly campaign stretching over two decades and three continents, his Fatah Revolutionary Council (FRC) was responsible for the deaths of perhaps 1,000 people in 20 countries, usually at the behest and in the pay of this or that Middle East regime. (The Economist)

Abu Nidal, the Palestinian terrorist, was murdered on the orders of Saddam Hussein after refusing to train al-Qa’eda fighters based in Iraq, The Telegraph can reveal.

Despite claims by Iraqi officials that Abu Nidal committed suicide after being implicated in a plot to overthrow Saddam, Western diplomats now believe that he was killed for refusing to reactivate his international terrorist network.

According to reports received from Iraqi opposition groups, Abu Nidal had been in Baghdad for months as Saddam’s personal guest, and was being treated for a mild form of skin cancer.

While in Baghdad, Abu Nidal, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna, came under pressure from Saddam to help train groups of al-Qa’eda fighters who moved to northern Iraq after fleeing Afghanistan. Saddam also wanted Abu Nidal to carry out attacks against the US and its allies.

When Abu Nidal refused, Saddam ordered his intelligence chiefs to assassinate him.

A Conversation

In one forum a detractor starts out a thread with the following:

There’s no evidence Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaida, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence that Democrats say undercuts President Bush’s justification for invading Iraq. Bush administration officials have insisted on a link between the Iraqi regime and terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Intelligence agencies, however, concluded there was none…

But another responded with this to again, set the historical record straight:

Except for the following from the 9/11 Report… Hmm..someone isn’t telling the truth.

What was the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda?

The Commission specifically finds that Saddam’s regime “tolerated and may have even helped” Ansar al-Islam, an al Qaeda sponsored group in northern Iraq affiliated with senior al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who continues to be responsible for terrorist attacks inside Iraq today. The Commission’s mandate did not include a more thorough examination of Zarqawi, his pre-war activities in Baghdad , or his activities and his associates’ activities in Iraq until the present day. Some of the extensive, known pre-9/11 contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda catalogued by the Commission are:The Commission catalogs some of the extensive contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. The report demonstrates that there were “friendly contacts” and, at different times, both Iraq and al Qaeda proactively sought to develop closer ties. Before 9/11, the Commission believes this relationship had not yet grown into a “collaborative operational relationship” for “carrying out attacks against the United States .” (chapter 2, § 2.5, page 66)

  • “Bin Ladin was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq.” (chapter 2, § 2.4, page 61)
  • Saddam’s regime “tolerated and may have even helped” al Qaeda sponsored groups in northern Iraq including Ansar al-Islam. (chapter 2, § 2.4, page 61)
  • “Bin Ladin himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995.” (chapter 2, § 2.4, page 61)
  • Bin Ladin proposed cooperation to Saddam Hussein’s regime in 1997 but was rebuffed. “In mid-1998, the situation reversed: it was Iraq that reportedly took the initiative” during a time of “intensifying U.S. pressure.” (chapter 2, § 2.5, page 66)
  • The Commission report documents a March 1998 visit to Iraq by two al Qaeda members to meet with Iraqi intelligence. It also documents a July 1998 Iraqi delegation that traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with Bin Ladin. (chapter 2, § 2.5, page 66)
  • Iraqi officials offered Bin Ladin “a safe haven in Iraq ” in 1999. (chapter 2, § 2.5, page 66)

Abu Nadil’s “hit” list from the same forum:

The CIA failed to note that Abu Nidal, terrorist chief responsible for well over 100 attacks against western and Israeli interests, was alive and well and in Baghdad as late as August, 2002. Here are a few of his more memorable operations:

  • the wounding of Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, in June 1982, which triggered Israel’s invasion of Lebanon;
  • the hijacking of EgyptAir Flight 648 at Malta in November, 1985, resolved when Egyptian commandos stormed the plane on the next day at about 8 p.m., slaying the hijackers, with 58 of the 91 passengers also dying;
  • the Rome and Vienna Airport attacks on December 27, 1985, which left 18 people dead and 120 injured;
  • the hijacking of Pan Am Flight 73 on September 6, 1986 in Karachi, Pakistan;
  • a gun attack that left 22 people dead and six wounded inside the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul during Sabbath services;
  • a car bomb outside the Israeli embassy in Cyprus in 1988, which killed three people (and for which the organization claimed responsibility);
  • the attack on the cruise ship City of Poros on July 11, 1988, which killed nine people and wounded 98;
  • Abu Nidal’s organization is believed to be responsible for the bombing of TWA Flight 841 in 1974 and Gulf Air Flight 771 in 1983.

Stephen Hayes

Stephen Hayes compiled much of the above connections in his book, The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America.

Almost two years after his writing it, some more information came out that supported his position.

(Arrggh! I will first post here the appearance of Stephen Hayes from Hannity and Colmes <<This video is gone.)

Replacements for the above missing video can be found at a C-SPAN has an extended book interview where Stephen Hayes takes calls. There is also a full manuscript of this missing video which was Stephen Hayes appearance on Hannity and Colmes at Fox News one can read. Hayes was also on Special Report with Brit Hume.

There is also this audio of Lt. Col. Buzz Patterson responding to a question. It is bad audio (hard to find and very old), so I apologize. PLEASE check you audio levels BEFORE listening to this… it is very loud and tinny sounding.

Here is an excellent interview of Stephen Hayes by National Review (or, a portion thereof) reagrding his book:

NRO: Your new book is on connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Isn’t that all a neocon myth? Isn’t bin Laden on record dissing Saddam? Secular Saddam, meanwhile, was no Islamic fundamentalist or extremist? Did anti-American hatred trump all?

Stephen F. Hayes: If the Iraq-al Qaeda connection is a neocon myth, those neocons are even more resourceful than the conspiracy theorists suggest and they sure have got a lot of unlikely people making their arguments. Evan Bayh, Democrat from Indiana, has described the Iraq-al Qaeda connection as a relationship of “mutual exploitation.” Joe Lieberman said, “There are extensive contacts between Saddam Hussein’s government and al Qaeda.” George Tenet, too, has spoken of those contacts and goes further, claiming Iraqi “training” of al Qaeda terrorists on WMDs and provision of “safe haven” for al Qaeda in Baghdad. Richard Clarke once said the U.S. government was “sure” Iraq had provided a chemical-weapons precursor to an al Qaeda-linked pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Even Hillary Clinton cited the Iraq-al Qaeda connection as one reason she voted for the Iraq War.

Saddam was, for a time, an avowed secularist. He began to use Islamist language during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and stepped it up during the first Gulf War. By the mid-1990s, when his son-in-law Hussein Kamel defected (and was later killed when he foolishly returned to Iraq), Saddam was interrupting Baath-party meetings for prayers.

Bin Laden has dissed Saddam several times. And I would certainly never argue that they were buddies. It was an on-again, off-again relationship based, as Bayh says, on mutual exploitation and a common enemy.

NRO: Who is Ahmed Hikmat Shakir?

Hayes: Shakir is one of the most intriguing and puzzling potential links between Iraq and al Qaeda. He was present at the January 2000 al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where U.S. intelligence officials believe the planning for the attacks on the U.S.S. Cole and September 11 took place. Shakir was working, ostensibly, for Malaysian Airlines as a VIP greeter. He told associates that he got the job through a contact at the Iraqi embassy and the same contact determined his schedule. Shakir escorted one of the 9/11 hijackers (Khalid al Mihdhar) to the meeting and left his airport “job” days after the meeting broke up. Making things even more interesting, Defense Department investigators recently found Shakir’s name — with a slight spelling discrepancy — on three separate lists of Saddam Fedayeen officers. He was captured twice after September 11 — once in Qatar, once in Jordan — and let go. The Iraqi government reportedly showed a keen interest in his release. What was he doing at the meeting? How did he know the hijackers? And what, exactly, was his relationship to the Iraqi regime? He may have been a bit player, but it sure would be nice to know more. I hope the 9/11 Commission includes a discussion of Shakir in its final report.

NRO: What is the Feith memo and how important is it?

Hayes: The Feith Memo is a report that Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee last fall, in response to a request by that panel to see information the Pentagon gathered on Iraq-al Qaeda connections. Analysts in the DoD policy shop pored over old intelligence, gathered by U.S. intelligence agencies, and unearthed some interesting nuggets — some of them from raw intelligence reports and others from finished intelligence products. CIA Director George Tenet was asked about the Feith Memo at a Senate hearing in March and distanced his agency from the Pentagon analysis. He submitted another version of the document to the committee with some “corrections” to the Pentagon submission. My understanding is that there were but a few such adjustments and that they were relatively minor (although my book challenges two of the most interesting reports in the memo). Some of the stuff — telephone intercepts, foreign-government reporting, detainee debriefings, etc. — is pretty straightforward and most of the report tracks with what Tenet has said publicly; it just provides more detail. That said, there were two items that seemed to require more explanation and, when weighed against available evidence, seem questionable.

NRO: Mike Isikoff from Newsweek and others have tried to discredit some of your reporting on these connections. Do you concede any of their points?

Hayes: Well, Isikoff is a very good investigative reporter and I have long respected his work. We simply disagree on much of this. Intelligence reporting is quite subjective, of course, and lends itself to various interpretations. My problem with so much of the media reporting on this issue is that most journalists have chosen not to investigate the connection, and seem too eager to dismiss them. Why? This wasn’t the case in the late 1990s, when Iraq-al Qaeda connections were more widely reported in the establishment press. After I first wrote about the Feith Memo, the Pentagon put out a statement designed to distance itself from any alleged leak of classified intelligence. It was a classic non-denial denial — virtually devoid of content. It was something any veteran Washington reporter would dismiss without a second thought. But reporters at the New York Times and Washington Post, typically quite cynical about anything that comes from the Pentagon’s public- affairs shop, suddenly found it a remarkably credible source.

NRO: It’s been suggested by Isikoff and others that some of the evidence turns up nowadays is forged, that you can’t take it on its face value. To what extent is the evidence you present corroborated by other evidence, other documented meetings, etc?

Hayes: I think they’re right on that point — and it’s almost never a good idea to take these things at face value. There was a report that surfaced in December 2003 that suggested that Mohammed Atta had been in Baghdad during the summer of 2001. And, a little too conveniently, the very same document claimed that the U.S. was seeking uranium from Niger. There’s little question that the three-page report was forged. (An interesting side note: That document came not from Ahmed Chalabi, but from CIA favorite Iyad Allawi, the new Iraqi interim prime minister. Allawi has long argued that there was a significant relationship between Saddam’s Mukhabarat and al Qaeda.)

Much of the evidence in the book comes from open sources — media reporting, court documents, interviews, etc. With respect to the information from the Feith Memo, many of the bullet points corroborate one another or previous intelligence on the relationship. For instance, the U.S. intelligence community has long believed that bin Laden met with the deputy director of Iraqi intelligence, Faruq Hijazi, in the mid-1990s. When we captured Hijazi, we asked him about the meeting. Bin Laden, he reported, asked for anti-ship limpet mines and training camps in Iraq.

NRO: Did Mohammed Atta meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague — multiple times?

Hayes: I wish we knew. Atta was in Prague under very strange circumstances in May 2000. What’s unclear is whether he returned, as initially reported, in April 2001. If he did, it wasn’t under his own name. But news reports claiming that the meeting couldn’t have taken place because U.S. intelligence has documentation placing him in the U.S. are not accurate. One of the things I report in the book is that both George Tenet and Condoleezza Rice say privately that they believe the April 2001 meeting took place.

NRO: What is the strongest evidence that Iraq was a collaborator in the Sept. 11 attacks?

Hayes: Probably the Shakir story, which is far from conclusive. But it seems to me that the presence of a suspected Saddam Fedayeen officer at a key 9/11-planning meeting can’t be dismissed. There have been additional recent developments in the Atta story reported by Edward Jay Epstein. If those turn out to be true, they would be significant. I’m trying, but as yet have been unable to prove or disprove them.

NRO: What’s the deal with Richard Clarke? Why is he so adamant to defend Iraq vis-à-vis al Qaeda?

Hayes: I put that question to a top Bush-administration official not long ago. This person said: “If Iraq was involved with al Qaeda, whether they were involved with 9/11 or not, the whole counterterrorism policy of the 1990s was a failure.” And we all know who was responsible for the counterterrorism policy of the 1990s. One thing that perplexes me about Clarke was his expressed certainty that there was an Iraqi hand in al Qaeda chemical weapons production in the Sudan in the late-1990s. (Top Clinton advisers — several of them now working for John Kerry — continue to believe that today.) And Clarke’s current views (no connection) certainly put him at odds with CIA Director George Tenet. …

From this we can see that the typical bumper sticker statements/mantras we heard projected from street corners in close proximity to the Whole Foods market I worked at just never took into account much of anything, except, that is, these persons almost crazed dislike of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush (BDS: Bush Derangement Syndrome).

Impeachment

An example comes from an almost elated exclamation about Kucinich’s “attempt” to start impeachment of Bush and friends, via a friend of mine on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Actually, this comes from a friend who is a local blogger and “political nemesis.” (Every good guy [me] has to have a villain [Kimba] in his life.):

(The World According to Kimba) Breathtaking in that I believe some, if not most of the charges to be true. Although certainly not all of the charges constitute or necessitate a call for impeachment (as was the case when [Kucinich] offered up articles of impeachment for Dick Cheney last year), they do add up to quite a record for a sitting administration, and I for one, am glad he got them on the record…. Obviously, the political climate these days in Washington are such that they will not touch this hot potato and let King George II serve out his full second term without incident. But, what does it say for our regard for the law, not to mention the constitution, when we refuse to prosecute for wrongs committed against the public good? (emphasis added)

Often times people don’t follow their logic to the end… for instance, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski reads from a NYT’s op-ed that slams the Bush-Iraq war. The problem is, as Joe Scarborough points out, that every intelligence agency and a well-respected CIA head (not to mention leading Democrats) — and even Saddam himself… said they had WMDs. And they did, as this extensive post clearly shows. Unfortunately the file was corrupted near the end so when Joe was making his best points there is a bit of audio missing (around the 13:37 mark). This video segues into the next section nicely to support the points Joe Scarborough was making :

Bush Lied/People Died

  • LIE: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive. [So the person knows what they are stating is false, and say it to deceive.]

One thing I have heard and gave an example of is the Left saying and truly believing that Bush lied about WMDs. If this is the case, what about these other politicians?

If Bush lied about WMDs, then what did President Bill Clinton do when he said: “If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program” (Feb. 17, 1998).

Or how about Madeline Albright, John F. Kerry, Ted Kennedy, and the like? Here is an article via the L.A. Daily News (2-21-2004)

Democrats Lied

MAYBE I’ve been living in a time warp — a Rip Van WinkIe who fell asleep and missed the past four years.

The Democratic candidates running to replace President George W. Bush, including the front runner, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., claim Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction — that Iraq was Bush’s war and that he got us into it for purely personal political purposes. Saddam was never a threat to the United States.

Did I misread or misunderstand what Democrats said prior to the current campaign for the White House? Note the following pronouncements and the people who uttered them:

a) “Iraq is a long way from the USA but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.” ~ Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Feb. 18, 1998

b) “We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.” ~ Former Vice President Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

c) “In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.” ~ Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct. 10, 2002

d) “Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime. He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation. And now he is miscalculating America’s response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction. So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real.” ~ Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23, 2003

e) “We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.” ~ Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002

f) “The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons…” ~ Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002

g) “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.” ~ Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998

h) “He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.” ~ Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

So now these Democrats say President Bush lied about Iraq and about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction, that there never were any such weapons and that he took us to war for his own political interests?

In the two years since Sept. 11, President Bush has liberated two countries, crippled the Taliban and al-Qaida, forced Libya to open its doors to inspectors without firing a shot, and captured a terrorist who slaughtered 300,000 of his own people at a cost of 600 American lives, while preventing another 9-11 terrorist attack here in the United States.

Now who’s credible and who’s not? The record speaks for itself.

So now these Democrats say President Bush lied about Iraq and about Saddam having weapons of mass destruction, that there never were any such weapons and that he took us to war for his own political interests?

Restated

In other words, German, Italian, Saudi, Jordanian, Australian, the CIA, MI6, French, Russian, Israeli, and most other intelligence agencies all lied. So did, then, Bill Clinton, Madeline “Anti-Semite” Albright, Al “Internet” Gore, Hillary “What Difference Does It Make” Clinton, John “Reporting for Winter Soldier Duty” Kerry, Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy, Robert “KKK” Byrd, Nancy “See What’s In the Bill” Pelosi, and Sandy “Socks” Berger. Not to mention the head of the operation to get rid of WMDs to Syrian, Saddam’s 2nd in command of his air-force. Or the Jordanians who foiled a chemical attack many years ago, tracing these WMDs (really AMDs) through Syria back to Iraq. How bout the head of Saddam’s nuclear program hiding stuff under his garden?

And ISIS getting their hands on WMDs must also be a lie by the Bush admin… deep into Obama’s presidency… that is, his imperial presidency.

Ohh the mantras that still fly from the professional left today (my head hurts). Imperialist presidencies only happen if you have an “R” after your name (liberal professors be damned); and WMDs designation in Iraq only count in the media if the President has a “D” after his name.

Bob Woodward

Here is Bob Woodward, a legend in investigative reporting, pointing out that while one can argue if going to ware in Iraq intially was a bad idea, one could not say that Bush lied:

HOST CHRIS WALLACE: I want to turn to a different subject in the time we have left and that is the politics of Iraq which has gotten a lot of attention in the last couple of weeks with Jeb Bush, with Marco Rubio and with a bunch of other people and these questions of was it was a mistake to go in in 2003, was it a mistake to get out in 2011, and what impact this could have both in the Republican race and also the Democratic race. …

WOODWARD: Iraq is a symbol and you certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake but there’s a kind of line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq and lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD and he (Bush) was the one who was skeptical. And if you tried to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier and finally at that end people were saying, hey look, it’ll only take a week or two and early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months and so Bush pulled the trigger.

A mistake, certainly, can be argued and there’s an abundance of evidence but there was no lie in this that I could find.

(NewsBusters)

This next section will reintroduce some more information on WMDs being found in Iraq as a support for my point to be found about Bush lying… and it will show just how bad the logic of the Left is. Again, these positions the Left holds to are emotional in there basis, and so, are not typically drawn out to their logical conclusion. I will do that.

WMDs II

So what are some of the examples that counter the Left’s claims and bolster the Bush administration as well as the intelligence agencies from Germany, Russia, France, Israel, Britain, China, Jordan, as well as others showing that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (Saddam even saying he had them)? Well let’s see… the following short list below is from the book, Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror, by Richard Miniter:

  • Found: 1.77 metric tons of enriched uranium;
  • Found: 1,500 gallons of chemical weapons;
  • Found: Roadside bomb loaded with sarin gas;
  • Found: 17 chemical warheads–some containing cyclosarin, a nerve agent five times more powerful than sarin.
  • Found: 1,000 radioactive materials–ideal for radioactive dirty bombs;

Mahdi Obeidi

How about the fact that Mahdi Obeidi (Saddam’s head nuclear scientist) buried a prototype of his gas centrifuge, the most direct and efficient route to enriching uranium, in his backyard in Baghdad. Hence the name of his book, The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind. You can see a two part presentation from Dr. Obeidi in PART 1, there are many more that follow.

So the question becomes, if the belief is that Bush knowingly mislead the American public in order to get us into war. First, lets revisit what a lie is:

  • LIE: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive. [So the person knows what they are stating is false, and say it to deceive.]

Which Is It?

But this poses a problem for the Left. Why? Well, because the Left repeatedly says that Bush is dumb. But wait. Was Bush and his administration soo clever as to trick/deceive Democrat leaders, Western and Middle-East based intelligence agencies, Saddam Hussein, and the like?

So:

a) IS BUSH AN IDIOT?

b) OR DID HE LIE?

AGAIN, Bush, while being called a dunce or ignoramus by the left is s-o-o-o-o intelligently diabolical that he got every United States intelligence agency and every major intelligence agency in the world ~ not to mention every Democrat ~ to lie for him as well. So is Bush still the “dunce of the class,” as the Left paints him; or is he so intelligent that he fooled the world, as the Left paints him. Which is it? Or are both views partisan?

If Bush lied, then he must have known there were no weapons in Iraq.  However, if you say you believe something to be true, and it ultimately becomes false, that’s not called a “lie,” that’s called a “mistake” – a mistake that would have been made by the CIA (and the world) that was beyond the Bush’s control.

If Bush was as diabolical as the some of the Left made him out to be… why don’t we have evidence of him “planting” evidence in Iraq so he could go out and point to the examples to tell the Media and Democrats to “speak to the hand”? Instead, as the NYTs points out, he kept his mouth shut in the onslaught of his detractors so that the Defense Department could destroy WMDs as they found them so they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands.

Instead of being diabolical, or dumb, or of questionable character… Bush sounds pretty damn noble! However, I have shown there was no mistake. I have yet for someone to show me that this cumulative case can be taken from its lofty place here at my blog. And may I say that I have not seen such a case made yet on this World Wide Web.

#2 Man ~ a Second Time

Let’s hear how the above issues play out in real conversation, and I would entreat the reader to listen to the entire call. One may not like the term “little girl,” but this gets explained near the end.

(Video Description) This broadcast was made before we declared war on Saddam Hussein. The caller is an Iraqi who asks a anti-war organizer a pointed question about leaving Saddam in power. The clip is 6 minutes long and she never answers the question.

According to Georges Hormis Sada, an Iraqi General who served under Saddam Hussein, Saddam is the only world leader to use weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He also states that the WMD’s were flown to Syria before the Invasion of Iraq began. He states that in his book “Saddam’s Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied and Survived Saddam Hussein.”

The U.S. was ready to pull out once the new Iraqi government was established and elections were up and running, but once it was evident that surrounding factions and civil war threatened to collapse the new republic, the U.S. decided to stay in and eliminate all threats to the new freedom that they fought so hard to allow the Iraqi citizens to live under. That is the point of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The sooner we get the job done, the sooner we can pull out without any trouble. Support our troops, why don’t you?

Iraq is Not Bush’s Fault

Larry Elder gives “10 Reasons Why Iraq’s Bloodbath Is Not ‘W’s’ Fault.” In this article he goes through some of the convoluted thinking that Voltaire preferred. I only import over a few of his points, however, I also import one of Elder’s videos that compliment his article well. This video can be found over at his blog, The Elder Statement:

2) Nearly everybody assumed Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Of the newspaper editorials that opposed the war, not one challenged the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.

President George W. Bush relied on the same intelligence — and on the same CIA director — as did President Bill Clinton. Kenneth Pollack, Clinton’s Persian Gulf adviser, said not one government intelligence analyst disagreed with the assumption that Iraq possessed stockpiles of WMD.

“The intelligence community,” said Pollack, “convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the U.N. inspectors in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. … The U.S. intelligence community’s belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction predated Bush’s inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. … Germany … Israel, Russia, Britain, China and even France held positions similar to that of the United States. … In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”

3) Saddam Hussein did possess stockpiles of WMD. James Clapper, the current director of National Intelligence, said in 2003 that materials for WMD had “unquestionably” been moved out of Iraq, to Syria or perhaps other countries, in an effort to “destroy and disperse” evidence just before the war began.

One of Saddam’s top generals, Georges Sada, in his book called “Saddam’s Secrets,” said truck convoys and 56 airplane flights moved tons of WMD into Syria.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in December, 2002, said, “Chemical and biological weapons which Saddam is endeavoring to conceal have been moved from Iraq to Syria.”

4) Had we not invaded, Saddam Hussein would have soon restarted his chemical and biological program — and resumed his pursuit for a nuclear capability. After the war started, Bush sent David Kay, a weapons hunter, to locate the assumed stockpiles of WMD. Kay found no stockpiles, but he did find that Saddam had the intent and the ability to restart his WMD program as soon as the heat was off.

5) George Bush did not “rush” America into the war. He obtained a consensus — a resolution from the House, a resolution from the Senate and a resolution from the United Nations. There was a 15-month run-up before the war, during which time Saddam could have declared what he did or did not do with the WMD.

6) Americans supported the Iraq War, overwhelmingly at least at first. Gallup found 76 percent of Americans supported the Iraq War when the military action began, about the same percentage that supported the first Persian Gulf War.

[….]

8) We were greeted as liberators in Iraq. The New York Times Iraq reporter John Burns said: “The American troops were greeted as liberators. We saw it.” In April, 2003, the New York Daily News reported, “Jubilant crowds chanted, ‘Thank you, Bush’ and showered troops with yellow and pink flowers, exactly as administration hawks had promised.”

Conclusion

What was discovered in Iraq were dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment, chemicals, and specialists to make it happen that Iraqi concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002 and was the final straw in the U.S. military’s back. The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that ISG (Iraq Survey Group) has discovered that should have been declared to the UN.

This caused the United States and a larger coalition than the First Gulf War to resume (not preempt) military operations. Just the fact alone that Iraq was firing on our Air Force jets in the no-fly zones was reason enough to resume (not preempt) operations based on the cease fire agreement brokered by the United Nations via the first war.

There are other peripheral issues that I have already dealt with that touch this issue in some way, like yellow cake uranium, or the cost of the war and contracts given to Halliburton. However, these issues are easily dismissed, at least for those that do not project their psychoses onto Bush and Cheney.

A Facebook Postscript

This was a confrontation via my Facebook. Enjoy the conversation:

HIM

Benghazi, so funny. Your boy starts a fake war which takes over 4000 lives and caused post traumatic things for the rest of their lives and you guys keep talking about Benghazi. The fact that you guys have respect for dick cheney says it all. You can post all you want but the fact remains that the Bush administration was an abomination on every level. Democrats had to vote yes because of the Bush propaganda machine. They would have been called anti- American with all the fake hysteria the right created. I did not watch the Benghazi video you posted because there is no need, Do you guys not have any memory of Reagan and all his dealings with terrorists, I guess not.

ME

How was the war fake [John Doe]?

HIM

Saddam was not the enemy, Bush Jr had to clean up the mess his father started

ME

That is the reason the war was fake?

HIM (3-responses)

ego

wmds never existed

The right loves a war machine because they make money

ME

Ego is the reason you have to say the Iraq war was fake. Are you a psychotherapist? You interviewed Dubya to have this authority to say this?

WMDs did exist, in fact, I am working on rewriting my WMD page right now for smoother reading.

Here is a snippet: “The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein’s air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.”

Here is the interview with him: http://youtu.be/eQ9CgDEPlHE

You love bumper stickers that are nothing more than a reflection of ego:

  • “The right loves a war machine because they make money”

That isn’t an argument, that is a t-shirt.

HIM

Sean, post all you want the fact is they are liars.

ME

Y-O-U can ignore facts, but ISIS (as reported by CNN) has captured and gained access to disused stores of hundreds of tons of potentially deadly poisons including mustard gas and sarin. This was last week.

They exist now… as I type. They were found by our men in Dubya’s action, and there is first hand eyewitness evidence WMDs existed. But go to your bumper sticker statements.

HIM

The Bush administration called it Operation Iraq Liberation which stands for OIL, They later changed it after everyone realized the lies. There is a reason he has stayed out of the spotlight, he has no answer for his lies.

Bumper sticker, funny. The right only has comical comebacks

ME

We didn’t get any oil, or paid back for the operation?

I have shown you this in the past [John Doe], which is that other countries, like China, got the contracts with Iraq.

That was it… these guys paint themselves into a corner with motivations that they think was behind the war and none of it is true… so you end up with them fantasizing positions and they bow out of the conversation because there is no evidence to back up their slogans.

Dispelling The “CIA Trained-Funded Bin Laden/Taliban” Myth/Mantra

Politicians and leaders from both sides of the aisle make mention of this myth that we funded/created Al Qaeda via weapons, training, and money to the likes of Osama Bin Laden. The Daily Caller in 2013 notes:

…in just a one-month span, Sen. Paul has — not once, but twice — advanced a conspiracy theory that says that during the Reagan era, the U.S. funded Osama bin Laden.

During John Kerry’s secretary of state confirmation hearing, Paul said ”We funded bin Laden” — a statement that prompted Foreign Policy magazine’s managing editor, Blake Hounshell, to fire off a tweet saying: “Rand Paul tells a complete falsehood: ‘We funded Bin Laden.’ This man is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”

But that didn’t discourage Paul. During a much anticipated foreign policy speech at the Heritage Foundation today, Paul doubled down, saying: “In the 1980’s the war caucus in Congress armed bin Laden and the mujaheddin in their fight with the Soviet Union.”

The only problem is that this is, at best, highly speculative — and, at worst, the perpetuation of an outright myth.

This also puts Paul in the same camp as Michael Moore, who said: ““WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!”….

…read it all…

And this is the crux of the matter.

Truthers took Michael Moore’s non-evidential presentations and statements and ran with themAnother example that shows this myth isn’t necessarily one owned by strictly by politicians, as, this conversation on a friends FaceBook shows:

Antony: failed foreign policy means today’s buddies are tomorrows boogiemen.

Hunlsy: I just love the fact they’re fighting us with the weapons and training that we gave them.

Antony: Oh where oh where did Iran get those P3s and F-14 Tomcats?

Antony: it was the US – we used to be buddies with Iranians too. We played both sides of the Iran/Iraq war, which predicated Gulf I.

Hunsly: Likely from the Russians. Regardless, we’re fighting a group, not a country. This group makes all of its IEDs & buys all of their weapons with the money that we gave them.

Here is my short intercept of the above conversation. More info will follow it:


Weapons

This is somewhat of a myth — that we sold the majority of weapons to the Taliban, to Iraq, and the like. For instance, in the following graph you can see that (in the instance of Iraq, which I was told over-and-over-again was weaponized by the U.S.) you have to combine the U.K. and the U.S. to equal 1%.

Iraqi Weapons

Moral Position

Much like us supporting Stalin in defeating Hitler, we were aligned with people whom we didn’t see eye-to-eye with in order to beat the USSR during the Cold War (WWIII)… a war that was fought from 1947–1991.

History

And thirdly, the Taliban didn’t exist when Reagan said this:

Reagan didn’t say that about the Taliban because the Taliban didn’t exist yet. He said that of the Mujahedin, the same men who would later go on to fight the Taliban under the name “Northern Alliance”

The Afghan Northern Alliance, officially known as the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (Persian: ‏جبهه متحد اسلامی ملی برای نجات افغانستانJabha-yi Muttahid-i Islāmi-yi Millī barā-yi Nijāt-i Afghānistān), was a military front that came to formation in late 1996 after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) took over Kabul. The United Front was assembled by key leaders of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, particularly president in exile Burhanuddin Rabbani and former Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Initially it included mostly Tajiks but by 2000, leaders of other ethnic groups had joined the Northern Alliance. This included Abdul Rashid Dostum, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Abdul Qadir, Sayed Hussein Anwari and others.

The Northern Alliance fought a defensive war against the Taliban government. They received support from Iran, Russia, India, Tajikistan and others, while the Taliban were backed by al-Qaeda. The Northern Alliance was mostly made up of ethnic Tajiks, but later included Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Pashtuns. The Taliban government was dominated by Pashtuns with other groups being the minority. After the US-led invasion and establishment of the Karzai administration in late 2001, the Northern Alliance broke apart and different political parties were formed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Alliance

The mujaheddin fighters who had previously defeated the communist government and formed the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA) came under attack and in 1996 lost the capital to the Taliban. At this juncture the Mujahedin resorted to the creation of UIF because Rashid Dostum and other warlords who belonged to various tribes but to no specific political party did not want to recognize the ISA as a legal entity, so the defeated government devised a military strategy to utilize these forces while not offending their political sensibilities.

In October 1996 in Khinjan, Ahmed Shah Massoud and Dostum came to an agreement to form the anti-Taliban coalition that outside Afghanistan became known as the Northern Alliance.


CNN was doing a special on Afghanistan and Peter Bergen asked for questions from viewers that he would answer. One of the questions is as follows: “If it’s true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn’t still?”~ Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada

Peter Bergen responds:

This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.

The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There’s no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn’t have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn’t have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.

The real story here is the CIA didn’t really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.

One person in a forum that was similarly challenged pointed out that this surely wasn’t the Taliban because they hated women in any position of authority — look at the pic at the top again.

As you read on, keep in mind Mr. Bergen was not a fan of conservatives, or Republicans. With that in mind, enjoy the rest, it is posted here so it will never disappear on me:

Northern Alliance (WIKI)

U.S. government officials and a number of other parties maintain that the U.S. supported only the indigenous Afghan mujahideen. They deny that the CIA or other American officials had contact with the Afghan Arabs (foreign mujahideen) or Bin Laden, let alone armed, trained, coached or indoctrinated them. Scholars and reporters have called the idea of CIA-backed Afghan Arabs (foreign mujahideen) “nonsense”,[6] “sheer fantasy”,[7] and “simply a folk myth.”[8]

They argue that:

  • with a quarter of a million local Afghans willing to fight there was no need to recruit foreigners unfamiliar with the local language, customs or lay of the land
  • with several hundred million dollars a year in funding from non-American, Muslim sources, Arab Afghans themselves would have no need for American funds
  • Americans could not train mujahideen because Pakistani officials would not allow more than a handful of U.S. agents to operate in Pakistan and none in Afghanistan;[9]
  • the Afghan Arabs were militant Islamists, reflexively hostile to Westerners, and prone to threaten or attack Westerners even though they knew the Westerners were helping the mujahideen.

Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri says much the same thing in his book Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner.[10]

Bin Laden himself once said “the collapse of the Soviet Union … goes to God and the mujahideen in Afghanistan … the US had no mentionable role,” but “collapse made the US more haughty and arrogant.” [11]

According to CNN journalist Peter Bergen, known for conducting the first television interview with Osama bin Laden in 1997,

The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There’s no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn’t have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn’t have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently. The real story here is the CIA did not understand who Osama was until 1996, when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.[8]

Bergen quotes Pakistani Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, who ran the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Afghan operation between 1983 and 1987:

It was always galling to the Americans, and I can understand their point of view, that although they paid the piper they could not call the tune. The CIA supported the mujahideen by spending the taxpayers’ money, billions of dollars of it over the years, on buying arms, ammunition, and equipment. It was their secret arms procurement branch that was kept busy. It was, however, a cardinal rule of Pakistan’s policy that no Americans ever become involved with the distribution of funds or arms once they arrived in the country. No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen, and no American official ever went inside Afghanistan.[12]

Marc Sageman, a Foreign Service Officer who was based in Islamabad from 1987–1989, and worked closely with Afghanistan’s Mujahideen, argues that no American money went to the foreign volunteers.

Sageman also says:[13]

Contemporaneous accounts of the war do not even mention [the Afghan Arabs]. Many were not serious about the war. … Very few were involved in actual fighting. For most of the war, they were scattered among the Afghan groups associated with the four Afghan fundamentalist parties.

No U.S. official ever came in contact with the foreign volunteers. They simply traveled in different circles and never crossed U.S. radar screens. They had their own sources of money and their own contacts with the Pakistanis, official Saudis, and other Muslim supporters, and they made their own deals with the various Afghan resistance leaders.”[14]

Vincent Cannistraro, who led the Reagan administration’s Afghan Working Group from 1985 to 1987, puts it,

The CIA was very reluctant to be involved at all. They thought it would end up with them being blamed, like in Guatemala.” So the Agency tried to avoid direct involvement in the war, … the skittish CIA, Cannistraro estimates, had less than ten operatives acting as America’s eyes and ears in the region. Milton Bearden, the Agency’s chief field operative in the war effort, has insisted that “[T]he CIA had nothing to do with” bin Laden. Cannistraro says that when he coordinated Afghan policy from Washington, he never once heard bin Laden’s name.[15]

Fox News reporter Richard Miniter wrote that in interviews with the two men who “oversaw the disbursement for all American funds to the anti-Soviet resistance, Bill Peikney – CIA station chief in Islamabad from 1984 to 1986 – and Milt Bearden – CIA station chief from 1986 to 1989 – he found,

Both flatly denied that any CIA funds ever went to bin Laden. They felt so strongly about this point that they agreed to go on the record, an unusual move by normally reticent intelligence officers. Mr. Peikney added in an e-mail to me: “I don’t even recall UBL [bin Laden] coming across my screen when I was there.[16]

Other reasons advanced for a lack of a CIA-Afghan Arab connection of “pivotal importance,” (or even any connection at all), was that the Afghan Arabs themselves were not important in the war but were a “curious sideshow to the real fighting.”[17]

One estimate of the number of combatants in the war is that 250,000 Afghans fought 125,000 Soviet troops, but only 2000 Arab Afghans fought “at any one time”.[18]

According to Milton Bearden the CIA did not recruit Arabs because there were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight. The Arab Afghans were not only superfluous but “disruptive,” angering local Afghans with their more-Muslim-than-thou attitude, according to Peter Jouvenal.[19] Veteran Afghan cameraman Peter Jouvenal quotes an Afghan mujahideen as saying “whenever we had a problem with one of them [foreign mujahideen], we just shot them. They thought they were kings.”

Many who traveled in Afghanistan, including Olivier Roy[20] and Peter Jouvenal,[21] reported of the Arab Afghans’ visceral hostility to Westerners in Afghanistan to aid Afghans or report on their plight. BBC reporter John Simpson tells the story of running into Osama bin Laden in 1989, and with neither knowing who the other was, bin Laden attempting to bribe Simpson’s Afghan driver $500 — a large sum in a poor country — to kill the infidel Simpson. When the driver declined, Bin Laden retired to his “camp bed” and wept “in frustration.” [22]

According to Steve Coll, author of “Ghost Wars”, the primary contact for the CIA and ISI in Afghanistan was Ahmed Shah Massoud a poppy farmer and militia leader known as the “Lion of the Panjeer”. During the Afghan Civil War which erupted once the Soviets had left, Massoud’s army was routed by the Taliban (who were being helped by Pakistan’s ISI) and restricted to the northern region of the country. A loose entente was formed with several other native tribal militias which became known as the Northern Alliance who operated in opposition to the Taliban. On September 10, 2001 a camera crew was granted access to Massoud under the premise they were interviewing him for a documentary about the Mujahadeen. The crew members were actually Al Qaeda operatives who detonated a bomb killing themselves and Massoud. The purpose of the assassination was to eliminate a key ally for the US in anticipation of an invasion in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks which were to take place the following day.

And here is another great post responding to the non-evidential/conspiratorial [leftists] on the subject:

Bin Laden trained and funded by the CIA

“Osama bin Laden was trained and funded by the CIA” – you’ll read the claim everywhere, and it’s rarely opposed: everyone just seems to accept that it’s true. But why? How much evidence have you ever seen presented to support this?

The reality is that there are many people who say this is simply a myth. And we’re not just talking about neo-con friendly journalists, either.

Take Jason Burke, for instance, a major contributor to the BBC documentary “The Power of Nightmares”. In his book “Al Qaeda”, he wrote the following:

It is often said that bin Ladin was funded by the CIA. This is not true, and indeed it would have been impossible given the structure of funding that General Zia ul-Haq, who had taken power in Pakistan in 1977, had set up. A condition of Zia’s cooperation with the American plan to turn Afghanistan into the Soviet’s ‘Vietnam’ was that all American funding to the Afghan resistance had to be channeled through the Pakistani government, which effectively meant the Afghan bureau of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), the military spy agency. The American funding, which went exclusively to the Afghan mujahideen groups, not the Arab volunteers [bin Ladin’s groups], was supplemented by Saudi government money and huge funds raised from mosques, non-governmental charitable institutions and private donors throughout the Islamic world. Most of the major Gulf-based charities operating today were founded at this time to raise money or channel government funds to the Afghans, civilians and fighters. In fact, as little as 25 per cent of the monet for the Afghan jihad was actually supplied directly by states.

Page 59, Al Qaeda: The true story of radical Islam, Jason Burke

Steve Coll, former Managing Editor of the Washington Post, also suggests bin Ladin passed largely unnoticed by the CIA, in his book “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001”:

…According to [Ahemd] Badeeb, on bin Ladin’s first trip to Pakistan he brought donations to the Lahore offices of Jamaat-e-Islami, Zia’s political shock force. Jamaat was the Pakistani offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood; its students had sacked the US embassy in Islamabad in 1979. bin Ladin did not trust the official Pakistan intelligence service, Badeeb recalled, and preferred to fund his initial charity through private religious and political networks.From the beginning of the Afghan jihad, Saudi intelligence used religious charities to support its own unilateral operations. This mainly involved funneling money and equipment to favoured Afghan commanders outisde ISI or CIA control… “The humanitarian aid-that was completely separate from the Americans”, Badeeb recalled. “And we insist[ed] that the Americans will not get to that, get involved–especially in the beginning,” in part because some of the Islamist mujahedin objected to direct contact with Western infidels…

In spy lexicon, each of the major intelligence agencies began working the Afghan jihad–GID [General Intelligence Department, Saudi Arabia], ISI and the CIA– began to “compartment” their work, even as all three collaborated with one another through formal liasons…

bin Ladin moved within Saudi intelligence’s compartmented operations, outside of CIA eyesight…

Page 86/ 87, Ghost Wars, Stevel Coll

In a Q&A session following the release of his book, Coll said:

Wheaton, Md.: There have been accusations from the left that have directly accused the CIA of funding and training bin Laden. Is there any truth to this ? Steve Coll: I did not discover any evidence of direct contact between CIA officers and bin Laden during the 1980s, when they were working more or less in common cause against the Soviets. CIA officials, including Tenet, have denied under oath that such contact took place. The CIA was certainly aware of bin Laden’s activities, beginning in the mid- to late-1980s, and they generally looked favorably on what he was doing at that time. But bin Laden’s direct contacts were with Saudi intelligence and to some extent Pakistani intelligence, not with the Americans.

Missouri EDU

Peter Bergen expanded on the supposed CIA/ bin Ladin links in his book, Holy War Inc:

But were the CIA and the Afghan Arabs in cahoots, as recent studies have suggested? One author charges: “The CIA had funded and trained the Afghan Arabs during the war”. Another refers to “the central role of the CIA’s Muslim mercenaries, including upwards of 2,000 mercenaries in the Afghanistan war”. Both authors present these claims as axioms, but provide no real corroboration.Other commentators have reported that bin Ladin himself was aided by the CIA. A report in the respected British newspaper The Guardian states: “In 1986 the CIA even helped him [bin Ladin] build an underground camp at Khost [Afghanistan] where he was to train recruits from across the Islamic world in the revolutionary art of jihad”…Bin Ladin, meanwhile, had expoused anti-American positions since 1982, and thanks to the fortune derived from his family’s giant construction business had little need of CIA money. In fact, the underground camp at Khost was built in 1982 by an Afghan commander, with Arab funding.

A source familiar with bin Ladin’s organisation explains that bin Ladin “never had any relations with America or American officials… He was saying very early in the 1980’s that the next battle is going to be with America… No aid or training or other support have ever been given to bin Ladin from Americans.” A senior offical unequivocally says that “bin Ladin never met with the CIA.”

While the charges that the CIA was responsible for the rise of the Afghan Arabs might make good copy, they don’t make good history. The truth is more complicated, tinged with varying shades of grey. The United States wanted to be able to deny that the CIA was funding the Afghan war, so its support was funneled through Pakistan’s military intelligence agency, Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI). ISI in turn made the decisions about which Afghan factions to arm and train, tending to fund the most Islamist and pro-Pakistan. The Afghan Arabs generally fought alongside those factions, which is how the charge arose that they were creatures of the CIA.

Former CIA officer Milt Bearden, who ran the Agency’s Afghan operation in the late 1980’s, says: “The CIA did not recruit Arabs,” as there was no need to do so. There were hundreds of thousands of Afghans all too willing to fight…

Moreover, the Afghan Arabs demonstrated a pathological dislike of Westerners. Jouvenal says: “I always kept away from Arabs [in Afghanistan]. They were very hostile. They would ask, ‘What are you doing in an Islamic country?” The BBC reporter John Simpson had a close call with bin Ladin himself outside Jalalabad in 1989. Travelling with a group of Arab mujahideen, Simpson and his television crew bumped into an Arab man beautifully dressed in spotless white robes; the man began shouting at Simpson’s escorts to kill the infidels, then offered a truck driver the not unreasonable sum of five hundred dollars to do the job. Simpson’s Afghan escort turned down the request, and bin Ladin was to be found later on a camp bed, weeping in frustration. Only when bin Ladin became a public figure, almost a decade later, did Simpson realise who the mysterious Arab was who had wanted him dead.

Page 67/68, Holy War Inc, Peter Bergen

This level of hostility to Westerners doesn’t suggest a warm working relationship with the US, and there’s some confirmation in a story retold by Richard Miniter:

…the handful of Americans who had heard of bin Ladin in the 1980’s knew him mainly for his violently anti-American views. Dana Rohrabacher, now a Republican congressman from Orange County, California, told me about a trip he took with the mujihideen in 1987. At the time, Rohrabacher was a Reagan aide who delighted in taking long overland trips inside Afghanistan with anti-Communist forces. On one such trek, his guide told him not to speak English for the next few hours because they were passing by bin Ladin’s encampment. Rohrabacher was told, “If he hears an American, he will kill you.” 

Page 16, Disinformation, Richard Miniter

Bin Ladin was himself asked about US funding by Robert Fisk:

Fisk: …what of the Arab mujahedin he took to Afghanistan – members of a guerilla army who were also encouraged and armed by the United States – and who were forgotten when that war was over? bin Ladin: “Personally neither I nor my brothers saw evidence of American help…

Fisk interview, 1996

And Ayman al-Zawahiri, second-in-command of al Qaeda, explains more in his text “Knights under the Prophet’s Banner”. Here he claims the “Afghan Arabs” had plenty of funding from various Arab sources, and points to other indications that they never supported the US:

“While the United States backed Pakistan and the mujahidin factions with money and equipment, the young Arab mujahidin’s relationship with the United States was totally different.”Indeed the presence of those young Arab Afghans in Afghanistan and their increasing numbers represented a failure of US policy and new proof of the famous US political stupidity. The financing of the activities of the Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan came from aid sent to Afghanistan by popular organizations. It was substantial aid. “The Arab mujahidin did not confine themselves to financing their own jihad but also carried Muslim donations to the Afghan mujahidin themselves. Usama Bin Ladin has apprised me of the size of the popular Arab support for the Afghan mujahidin that amounted, according to his sources, to $200 million in the form of military aid alone in 10 years.

Imagine how much aid was sent by popular Arab organizations in the non-military fields such as medicine and health, education and vocational training, food, and social assistance (including sponsorship of orphans, widows, and the war handicapped. Add to all this the donations that were sent on special occasions such as Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha feasts and during the month of Ramadan.”

“Through this unofficial popular support, the Arab mujahidin established training centers and centers for the call to the faith. They formed fronts that trained and equipped thousands of Arab mujahidin and provided them with living expenses, housing, travel, and organization.”

Changing Bin Ladin’s Guard

About the Afghan Arabs’ relationship with the United States, Al-Zawahiri says in his book: “If the Arab mujahidin are mercenaries of the United States who rebelled against it as it alleges, why is it unable to buy them back now? Are they not counted now-with Usama Bin Ladin at their head-as the primary threat to US interests? Is not buying them more economical and less costly that the astronomical budgets that the United States is allotting for security and defense?”

“The Americans, in their usual custom of exaggeration and superficiality, are trying to sell off illusions to the people and are ignoring the most basic facts. Is it possible that Usama Bin Ladin who, in his lectures in the year 1987, called for boycotting US goods as a form of support for the intifadah in Palestine, a US agent in Afghanistan?….

“Furthermore, is it possible that the martyr-as we regard him-Abdallah Azzam was a US collaborator when in fact he never stopped inciting young men against the United States and used to back HAMAS with all the resources at his disposal?

“Is it possible that the jihadist movement in Egypt can be a collaborator movement for the United States when Khalid al-Islambuli and his comrades killed Anwar al-Sadat, even before the phenomenon of the Arab mujahidin in Afghanistan emerged?”

“Is it possible that the jihadist movement in Egypt can be a US collaborator movement when in fact it brought up its children, ever since the movement started, to reject Israel and all the agreements of capitulation to it and to consider making peace with Israel as a contravention of Islamic Shari’ah?”

Book, His Own Words: A Translation of the Writings of Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri

Richard Miniter has a little more on this in “Dispelling the CIA-Bin Ladin Myth“, and while you may not exactly trust the source, there were further comments worth at least a look on the US State Departments “Identifying Misinformation” site.

Insulating Liberal Students To Opposing Views Hurts Them

It makes them easy pickin’ for conservatives though!

Are most college professors liberal? Yes, says Penn State Associate Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Matthew Woessner. Perhaps surprisingly, however, his research shows that liberal bias does not seem to influence right-leaning students. Rather, it insulates left-leaning students, hindering their ability to critically analyze their own ideas. In five minutes, learn more about college liberal bias.

A liberal professor, Michael Berube, interviewed in IndoctrinateU explains that protecting and teaching from one ideological viewpoint insulates students who are liberal to properly defend and coherently explain their views in the real world — outside the classroom. This excerpt is taken from two parts found below. 

  • This is Part-one-of-two, and should be associated with this liberal professor’s remarks saying that because of this ingrained ideology of bias towards one view that when liberal students leave the classroom they have no way to respond to views different from their own.

  • This is Part-two-of-two, and should be associated with this liberal professor’s remarks saying that because of this ingrained ideology of bias towards one view that when liberal students leave the classroom they have no way to respond to views different from their own.