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Say What?

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence — it is force.

Said George Washington.

The state is the coldest of all cold monsters that bites with stolen teeth.

Said Nietzsche.

Government is solely an instrument or mechanism of appropriation, prohibition, compulsion, and extinction; in the nature of things it can be nothing else, and can operate to no other end…. Seen in this light, government is so horrific — and its actual operations in the past have been so horrible at times — that there is some excuse for a failure to realize its necessity.

Said Isabel Paterson.

Take care, you who call yourself my judge. Take care what you do. For the truth is that I have my mission from God, and you put yourself in great danger.

Said Joan of Arc (aged 17) to her chief Inquisitor.

They rowed her in across the rolling foam —
The cruel, crawling foam — to her grave beside the sea.

Wrote the English author Charles Kingsley (1819 – 1875) — in response to which the pedantic John Ruskin said:

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl.

Unquote.

We talk about our assholes, and we talk about our cocks, and we talk about who we fucked last night, or who we’re going to fuck tomorrow, or when we got drunk, or when we stuck a broom in our ass in the Hotel Ambassador in Prague — anybody tell one’s friends about that.

Said “poet” Allen Ginsberg, in an anthologized interview.

A writer of something occasionally like English — and a man of something occasionally like genius.

Said Swinburne of Walt Whitman.

A man standing up to his neck in a cesspool — and adding to its contents.

Said Thomas Carlyle of Swinburne.

Quoting Noam Chomsky, in Language and Politics (p. 293):

I’ve never considered myself a ‘Marxist,’ and in fact regard such notions as ‘Marxist’ as belonging more to the domain of organized religion than of rational analysis.

Then, quoting Noam Chomsky on p. 113 of the exact same book:

In my opinion, a Marxist-anarchist perspective [on politics] is justified quite apart from anything that may happen in linguistics.

And on p. 153 of this self-same book:

I wouldn’t abandon Marxism.

Unquote.

In his ideological fanaticism [Noam Chomsky] constantly shifts his arguments and bends references, quotations and facts, while declaring his ‘commitment to find the truth.’

Said Leopold Labedz.

Everything vital in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded religions and composed our masterpieces.

Said Proust.

God, if there is one, please save my soul, if I have one.

Prayed Voltaire.

Human life is an unceasing sequence of single actions.

Said Ludwig von Mises.

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Easter And Its Origins

A reader writes:

Dear Sir: Why do rabbits and eggs represent Easter, which also celebrates the resurrection of Christ?

— Peter

Dear Peter: Easter primarily represents the advent of springtime, just as Christ’s resurrection does. The Old-English word Eastre derives from an Anglo-Saxon Pagan goddess named Eostre, about whom very little is known. What we do know about her comes to us from the Benedictine monk Bede (672-735), also sometimes referred to as the Father of English History.

In Bede’s On the Reckoning of Time, he mentions a goddess named Eostre, and he tells us that the Anglo-Saxons had at one time worshiped this goddess during the spring equinox.

Apart from Bede, no other reference to Eostre exists. Indeed, even in Bede’s time, she had long since faded away. The fact, however, that Eostre was worshiped during the spring equinox does suggest something significant:

Quoting the genius Catholic priest-poet Gerard Hopkins:

What is spring?
Growth in everything.

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod and sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing
Mary sees, sympathizing
With that world of good,
Nature’s motherhood.

(Gerard Manly Hopkins, “May Magnificat”)

As you of all people would know, Peter, rabbits and hares are notorious breeders, and no doubt you are familiar with the saying “to fuck like bunnies.” This venerable expression comes about because lagomorphs mature sexually at very young ages; they are also capable of superfetation, which means they can conceive a second time while still pregnant, and thus they are able to give birth to two litters. This actually happens many times throughout the year, although spring seems to make these little girls and guys particularly crazy. The females are extraordinarily fertile, and that is eggsactly why they symbolize springtime.

Rabbits and hares represent breeding and birth. Eggs also have obvious fertility-birth-and-blood connotations, and for this reason, they have represented fertility and spring since the dawn of humankind.

Do rabbits produce eggs? No. The good lady Eostre did, however, once allegedly save a freezing bird at the end of winter, by turning this bird into a hare, which hare because it had once been a bird could then lay eggs, whereas I can only suck them, as you can see.

Dying Easter eggs and the source of this eggsellent tradition is a mystery, though the Ancient Greeks did color eggs green (to symbolize new grass) and red (to symbolize blood).

Birth. Blood. Death. Winter. Resurrection. Rebirth. Spring. Life.

“There is nothing greater than life,” said Voltaire.

That is what Easter is about.

The early Christians understood this. So they kept many of the Pagan symbols of spring; they absorbed them, as it were, in part, perhaps, because these symbols are so primal and so beautiful.

It is, after all, a beautiful world we live in.

Happy Easter, Peter.

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Make Every Day Earth Day — But Do It The Right Way

Earth Day is upon us again. It all began on April 22, 1970, when a United States Senator named Gaylord Nelson founded “an environmental teach-in” which he called, somewhat inauspiciously, Earth Day.

The first Earth Day was confined to the United States, but the first Earth Day national coordinator, one Denis Hayes, soon made it international, organizing events in approximately 140 nations.

This year rather than celebrating Earth Day by advocating still more government bureaus, which will then determine for the rest of us what we can do with our property, I suggest we instead celebrate the only real way to clean up and beautify the planet: private property rights and private stewardship.

The right to property is, as James Madison said, “the guardian” of every other right. Freedom and private property are inseparable. Property is freedom: you cannot be free if you are not free to produce, use, and dispose of those things necessary to your life.

“Control the property, control the person,” said Lenin, whose birthday, not quite coincidentally, is April 22nd.

Property, like every other right, is first and foremost the right to act: specifically, it is the right to produce, exchange, and use.

“Property is not only money and other tangible things of value, but also includes any intangible right considered as a source or element of income or wealth…. It is the right to enjoy and to dispose of certain things in the most absolute manner” (Electric Law Library).

Money is property.

The only alternative to private property is government or communal ownership of property, both of which amount to the same thing in the end: a bureau of centralized planners controlling the property.

“That alone is a just government which impartially secures to every man whatever is his own,” said James Madison.

If you desire to know precisely what someone’s political viewpoint is, all you need do is find out his or her stance on property; for it is through the stance on property that the entire political philosophy is disclosed. You needn’t listen to anything anyone says about “freedom” or “liberty” or any of these other easy platitudes: no one in her or his right mind will go against those things. Instead, simply check the stance on property. If someone doesn’t believe in full private property rights, that person is, to the exact extent he or she denies private property rights, a statist.

Property is the sine-qua-non of human freedom.

To defend freedom, therefore, you must start by defending the unalienable right to property.

The diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to a uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government (James Madison, Federal Papers 10).

Government is instituted no less for protection of the PROPERTY, than of the persons (James Madison, Federalist Paper #54, emphasis in the original).

The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management (Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval).

A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings (Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours).

The political institutions of America, its various soils and climates, opened a certain resource to the unfortunate and to the enterprising of every country and insured to them the acquisition and free possession of property (Thomas Jefferson: Declaration on Taking Up Arms).

The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence (John Adams).

Environmentalism has so thoroughly permeated world culture that the saving-the-planet rhetoric is accepted even by those who don’t really regard themselves as dyed-in-the-skein environmentalists. It is taught as holy writ in public schools, and it’s espoused by poets, priests, and politicians alike.

This monstrous ideology would, given the first opportunity, destroy humankind, a fact of which the leaders of this movement make no secret.

It is therefore of great importance to expose this ideology for what it actually is: a neo-Marxist philosophy that masquerades as something benevolent and life-affirming, but which in reality explicitly calls for humans to be subordinated to nature, via an elite bureau of centralized planners who, as you would suspect, are the ones that get to decide for the rest of us how we must live.

It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who first began propounding the immanent-goodness-of-nature-untouched-by-man ideology. Rousseau also deplored “the corrupting influence of reason, culture, and civilization.” In fact, Rousseau, like many of our current politicians, also preached economic egalitarianism and tribal democracy, the “collective will,” and the primacy of the group over the individual. In a great many ways, Rousseau is the founder of present-day environmentalism.

His so-called Eden Premise was picked up by all the pantheists and transcendentalists, such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir (founder of Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold (who helped found the Wilderness Society), and of course the propagandist Rachel Carson.

When, in 1860, Thoreau wrote that forests untouched by humans grow toward “the greatest regularity and harmony,” he inadvertently changed the life of a biologist named George Perkins Marsh, who in 1864 wrote a book called Man and Nature. In this extraordinarily influential book, George Marsh also tried to convince us that, absent humans, mother nature and her processes work in perfect harmony:

“Man” (said Marsh) “is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discord…. [Humans] are brute destroyers … [Humans] destroy the balance which nature had established.”

“But” (he continued) “nature avenges herself upon the intruder, [bringing humans] deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction.”

Just as Thoreau influenced George Marsh, so George Marsh influenced a man named Gifford Pinchot, and also a man named John Muir.

Gifford Pinchot was a utilitarian who loathed private ownership of natural resources. He was also the first chief of the United States Forest Service under Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

Gifford Pinchot was a collectivist who believed in sacrificing individuals and their property for the sake of “the greatest number.”

It was in large part because of Pinchot that the United States’ federal government increased its land holdings dramatically, so that today over one third of America is owned by the federal government — which holdings comprise over half of America’s known resources, including “a third of our oil, over 40 percent of salable timber and natural gas, and most of the nation’s coal, copper, silver, asbestos, lead, and other minerals.”

In his excellent account of American environmentalism, Philip Shabecoff says this:

“Pinchot wanted the forests managed for their usefulness, not for their beauty… He was not interested in preserving the natural landscape for its own sake.”

At the very least, Pinchot, a conservationist, was, however, still semi pro-human.

John Muir, on the other hand, Pinchot’s nemesis, was not pro-human. In fact, he was the diametric opposite.

It was John Muir, a Scottish immigrant, who introduced misanthropy into the environmental pseudo-philosophy, which misanthropy reigns supreme to this very day.

“How narrow we selfish, conceited creatures are in our sympathies!” said John Muir, also an unapologetic racist. “How blind to the rights of all the rest of creation! Well, I have precious little sympathy for the selfish propriety of civilized man, and if a war of races should occur between the wild beasts and Lord Man, I would be tempted to sympathize with the bears.”

From John Muir, it was only a short step to one Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919), a German zoologist, who told us that individuals don’t actually exist. Human individuals do not possess an individual consciousness, he said, because humans are only a part of a greater whole, and 1866 Haeckel coined that fated term “ecology,” which he defined as “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment.”

It was an Oxford botanist named A. G. Tansley who, in 1935, introduced the word “ecosystem.”

According to this same Tansley, individual entities don’t exist but are merely part of “the basic units of nature on the face of the earth.”

Aldo Leopold’s wildly popular Sand County Almanac was published in 1948. It preached “the pyramid of life,” and in order to preserve this pyramid, Leopold told us that federal governments must “enlarge the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals [which] changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

A Norwegian named Arne Naess (1913 – 2009) also believed that human individuals don’t actually exist. Only ecosystems do. It was Naess who first argued that the “shallow ecology,” as he called it, “of mainstream conservation groups” benefits humans too much. Thus, Naess began calling for “deep ecology” — i.e. “biospheric egalitarianism with the equal right [of all things] to live and blossom.”

These are just a small handful of the phrases and catchphrases that have now frozen into secular dogma, and which Rachel Carson, with her puerile pen, brought to the mewling masses. Her book Silent Spring opens like this:

There once was a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchard where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall morning… The town is almost devoid of robins and starlings; chickadees have not been present for two years, and this year the cardinals are gone too… ‘Will they ever come back?’ the children ask, and I do not have the answer.

Most sane people see through this pablum like a fishnet. It’s the insane people who have swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.

The rest, of course, is history.

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Atlas Shrugged The Movie

Actress Taylor Schilling
It was good.

It was not brilliant, but it was good. There were flaws — things I would have done differently and a few scenes that annoyed me — but the movie was sincere, and I thought that on a certain level it succeeded.

The left, meanwhile, is in a cold sweat over the impact this movie might have on the American people and on Barack Obama’s chances at reelection, and so the leftwing media has embarked upon a propaganda campaign: savaging this movie — and Ayn Rand — so severely that I had to see for myself what the movie was actually like. So I drove by myself eighty miles (one way) to watch it, and when it was all over, I didn’t regret it.

The real star of the show is the actress Taylor Schilling, who manages to make the not-entirely-convincing Dagny Taggart into a convincing and, from my perspective, entirely likable character. My leftist readers will be throwing up their hands over this, but that means nothing to me.

Let me also say, just for the record, that I am neither an Objectivist, nor a disciple or devotee of Ayn Rand. But I do have one very vital thing in common with her:

I do not believe that it is legitimate for any government or any person to initiate the use of force or aggression against any other human being.

The left is, as mentioned, in hysterics over this movie, though for no very intelligible reason. It is the left, you see, that traditionally prides itself upon tolerance and peacefulness, and yet it’s the left that finds itself in the horribly awkward position of having to defend now the indefensible notion that the initiation of force is okay: we may expropriate your property and we may take your money by force because, understand, it is for the good of the poor, and the state may enforce the morality that the state deems appropriate, agree or disagree.

But the initiation of force is not okay — ever — and Atlas Shrugged The Movie captures this.

As an addendum, let me say one final thing:

I’ve read now several accounts of this movie, and there isn’t a single one I know of that’s done an accurate or fair job of recapitulating Ayn Rand’s actual views. By far, the most widespread and misbegotten error in every recapitulation I’ve come across is the banal belief that capitalism caused the current financial crisis.

This popular piece of propaganda is so painfully easy to disprove that the only real wonder here is how anyone could actually believe it in the first place. The economist Dr. George Reisman demolished that rubbish in an article he wrote over two years ago, which article he graciously gave me permission to reprint in my book Leave Us Alone. His essay is a brief but unanswerable piece, and I reprint it here in response to all those journalists and bloggers out there who don’t have a clue what capitalism actually is, and who don’t have the wherewithal to find out:

The Myth that Laissez Faire is Responsible for Our Financial Crisis

by George Reisman

The news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth. This is the myth that our present financial crisis is the result of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism.
The attempt to place the blame on laissez faire is readily confirmed by a Google search under the terms “crisis + laissez faire.” On the first page of the results that come up, or in the web entries to which those results refer, statements of the following kind appear:

“The mortgage crisis is laissez-faire gone wrong.”

“Sarkozy [Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France] said ‘laissez-faire’ economics, ‘self-regulation’ and the view that ‘the all-powerful market’ always knows best are finished.”

“America’s laissez-faire ideology, as practiced during the subprime crisis, was as simplistic as it was dangerous,” chipped in Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister.”
“Paulson brings laissez-faire approach on financial crisis.”

“It’s au revoir to the days of laissez faire.”

Recent articles in The New York Times provide further confirmation. Thus one article declares, “The United States has a culture that celebrates laissez-faire capitalism as the economic ideal….”

Another article tells us, “For 30 years, the nation’s political system has been tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.”

In a third article, a pair of reporters assert, “Since 1997, Mr. Brown [the British Prime Minister] has been a powerful voice behind the Labor Party’s embrace of an American-style economic philosophy that was light on regulation. The laissez-faire approach encouraged the country’s banks to expand internationally and chase returns in areas far afield of their core mission of attracting deposits.”

Thus even Great Britain is described as having a “laissez-faire approach.”

The mentality displayed in these statements is so completely and utterly at odds with the actual meaning of laissez faire that it would be capable of describing the economic policy of the old Soviet Union as one of laissez faire in its last decades. By its logic, that is how it would have to describe the policy of Brezhnev and his successors of allowing workers on collective farms to cultivate plots of land of up to one acre in size on their own account and sell the produce in farmers’ markets in Soviet cities. According to the logic of the media, that too would be “laissez faire” – at least compared to the time of Stalin.
Laissez-faire capitalism has a definite meaning, which is totally ignored, contradicted, and downright defiled by such statements as those quoted above. Laissez-faire capitalism is a politico-economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and in which the powers of the state are limited to the protection of the individual’s rights against the initiation of physical force. This protection applies to the initiation of physical force by other private individuals, by foreign governments, and, most importantly, by the individual’s own government. This last is accomplished by such means as a written constitution, a system of division of powers and checks and balances, an explicit bill of rights, and eternal vigilance on the part of a citizenry with the right to keep and bear arms.

Under laissez-faire capitalism, the state consists essentially just of a police force, law courts, and a national defense establishment, which deter and combat those who initiate the use of physical force. And nothing more.

The utter absurdity of statements claiming that the present political-economic environment of the United States in some sense represents laissez-faire capitalism becomes as glaringly obvious as anything can be when one keeps in mind the extremely limited role of government under laissez-faire and then considers the following facts about the present-day United States.

1) Government spending in the United States currently equals more than forty percent of national income, i.e., the sum of all wages and salaries and profits and interest earned in the country. This is without counting any of the massive off-budget spending such as that on account of the government enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Nor does it count any of the recent spending on assorted “bailouts.” What this means is that substantially more than forty dollars of every one hundred dollars of output are appropriated by the government against the will of the individual citizens who produce that output. The money and the goods involved are turned over to the government only because the individual citizens wish to stay out of jail. Their freedom to dispose of their own incomes and output is thus violated on a colossal scale. In contrast, under laissez-faire capitalism, government spending would be on such a modest scale that a mere revenue tariff might be sufficient to support it. The corporate and individual income taxes, inheritance and capital gains taxes, and social security and Medicare taxes would not exist.

2) There are presently fifteen federal cabinet departments, nine of which exist for the very purpose of respectively interfering with housing, transportation, healthcare, education, energy, mining, agriculture, labor, and commerce, and virtually all of which nowadays routinely ride roughshod over one or more important aspects of the economic freedom of the individual. Under laissez faire capitalism, eleven of the fifteen cabinet departments would cease to exist and only the departments of justice, defense, state, and treasury would remain. Within those departments, moreover, further reductions would be made, such as the abolition of the IRS in the Treasury Department and the Antitrust Division in the Department of Justice.

3) The economic interference of today’s cabinet departments is reinforced and amplified by more than one hundred federal agencies and commissions, the most well-known of which include, besides the IRS, the FRB and FDIC, the FBI and CIA, the EPA, FDA, SEC, CFTC, NLRB, FTC, FCC, FERC, FEMA, FAA, CAA, INS, OHSA, CPSC, NHTSA, EEOC, BATF, DEA, NIH, and NASA. Under laissez-faire capitalism, all such agencies and commissions would be done away with, with the exception of the FBI, which would be reduced to the legitimate functions of counterespionage and combating crimes against person or property that take place across state lines.

4) To complete this catalog of government interference and its trampling of any vestige of laissez faire, as of the end of 2007, the last full year for which data are available, the Federal Register contained fully seventy-three thousand pages of detailed government regulations. This is an increase of more than ten thousand pages since 1978, the very years during which our system, according to one of The New York Times articles quoted above, has been “tilted in favor of business deregulation and against new rules.” Under laissez-faire capitalism, there would be no Federal Register. The activities of the remaining government departments and their subdivisions would be controlled exclusively by duly enacted legislation, not the rule-making of unelected government officials.

5) And, of course, to all of this must be added the further massive apparatus of laws, departments, agencies, and regulations at the state and local level. Under laissez-faire capitalism, these too for the most part would be completely abolished and what remained would reflect the same kind of radical reductions in the size and scope of government activity as those carried out on the federal level.

What this brief account has shown is that the politico-economic system of the United States today is so far removed from laissez-faire capitalism that it is closer to the system of a police state than to laissez-faire capitalism. The ability of the media to ignore all of the massive government interference that exists today and to characterize our present economic system as one of laissez-faire and economic freedom marks it as, if not profoundly dishonest, then as nothing less than delusional.

Beyond all this is the further fact that the actual responsibility for our financial crisis lies precisely with massive government intervention, above all the intervention of the Federal Reserve System in attempting to create capital out of thin air, in the belief that the mere creation of money and its being made available in the loan market is a substitute for capital created by producing and saving. This is a policy it has pursued since its founding, but with exceptional vigor since 2001, in its efforts to overcome the collapse of the stock market bubble whose creation it had previously inspired….

*Please read the rest of this article here.

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Obama Suddenly Envisions An America Where “We Live Within Our Means”

After adding more to America’s national debt in his first 19 months than all presidents from Washington through Reagan combined, Barack Obama on Wednesday, April 14th, 2011, in a nationally televised speech, said the following:

“This is my vision for America: A vision where we live within our means while still investing in our future”

He was not, I presume, referring to his jaw-droppingly profligate “stimulus package,” which he forced upon us before anyone had actually read what was inside the package — a partial listing of which runs something like this:

• $44 million for construction, repair and improvements at US Department of Agriculture facilities
• $209 million for work on deferred maintenance at Agricultural Research Service facilities
• $245 million for maintaining and modernizing the IT system of the Farm Service Agency
• $175 million to buy and restore floodplain easements for flood prevention
• $50 million for “Watershed Rehab”
• $1.1 billion for rural community facilities direct loans
• $2 billion for rural business and industry guaranteed loans
• $2.7 billion for rural water and waste dispoal direct loans
• $22.1 billion for rural housing insurance fund loans
• $2.8 billion for loans to spur rural broadband
• $150 million for emergency food assistance
• $50 million for regional economic development commissions
• $1 billion for “Periodic Censuses and Programs”
• $350 million for State Broadband Data and Development Grants
• $1.8 billion for Rural Broadband Deployment Grants
• $1 billion for Rural Wireless Deployment Grants
• $650 million for Digital-to-Analog Converter Box Program
• $100 million for “Scientific and Technical Research and Services” at the National Institute of Standards And Technology
• $30 million for necessary expenses of the “Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership”
• $300 million for a competitive construction grant program for research science buildings
• $400 million for “habitat restoration and mitigation activities” at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• $600 million for “accelerating satellite development and acquisition”
• $140 million for “climate data modeling”
• $3 billion for state and local law enforcement grants
• $1 billion for “Community Oriented Policing Services”
• $250 million for “accelerating the development of the tier 1 set of Earth science climate research missions recommended by the National Academies Decadal Survey.”
• $50 million for repairs to NASA facilities from storm damage
• $300 million for “Major Research Insrumentation program” (science)
• $200 million for “academic research facilities modernization”
• $100 million for “Education and Human Resources”
• $400 million for “Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction”
• $4.5 billion to make military facilities more energy efficient
• $1.5 billion for Army Operation and Maintenance fund
• $624 million for Navy Operation and Maintenance
• $128 million for Marine Corps Operation and Maintenance
• $1.23 billion for Air Force Operation and Maintenance
• $454 million to “Defense Health Program”
• $110 million for Army Reserve Operation and Maintenance
• $62 million for Navy Reserve Operation and Maintenance
• $45 million for Marine Corps Reserve Operation and Maintenance
• $14 million for Air Force Reserve Operation and Maintenance
• $302 million for National Guard Operation and Maintenance
• $29 million for Air National Guard Operation and Maintenance
• $350 million for military energy research and development programs
• $2 billion for Army Corps of Engineers “Construction”
• $250 million for “Mississippi River and Tributaries”
• $2.2 billion for Army Corps “Operation and Maintenance”
• $25 million for an Army Corps “Regulatory Program”
• $126 million for Interior Department “water reclamation and reuse projects”
• $80 million for “rural water projects”
• $18.5 billion for “Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy” research in the Department of Energy. That money includes:
• $2 billion for development of advanced batteries
• $800 million of that is for biomass research and $400 million for geothermal technologies
• $1 billion in grants to “institutional entities for energy sustainability and efficiency”
• $6.2 billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program
• $3.5 billion for Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants
• $3.4 billion for state energy programs
• $200 million for expenses to implement energy independence programs
• $300 million for expenses to implement Energy efficient appliance rebate programs including the Energy Star program
• $400 million for expenses to implement Alternative Fuel Vehicle and Infrastructure Grants to States and Local Governments
• $1 billion for expenses necessary for advanced battery manufacturing
• $4.5 billion to modernize the nation’s electricity grid
• $1 billion for the Advanced Battery Loan Guarantee Program
• $2.4 billion to demonstrate “carbon capture and sequestration technologies”
• $400 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Science)
• $500 million for “Defense Environmental Cleanup”
• $1 billion for construction and repair of border facilities and land ports of entry
• $6 billion for energy efficiency projects on government buildings
• $600 million to buy and lease government plug-in and alternative fuel vehicles
• $426 million in small business loans
• $100 million for “non-intrusive detection technology to be deployed at sea ports of entry
• $150 million for repair and construction at land border ports of entry
• $500 million for explosive detection systems for aviation security
• $150 million for alteration or removal of obstructive bridges
• $200 million for FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter program
• $325 million for Interior Department road, bridge and trail repair projects
• $300 million for road and bridge work in Wildlife Refuges and Fish Hatcheries
• $1.7 billion for “critical deferred maintenance” in the National Park System
• $200 million to revitalize the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
• $100 million for National Park Service Centennial Challenge programs
• $200 million for repair of U.S. Geological Survey facilities
• $500 million for repair and replacement of schools, jails, roads, bridges, housing and more for Bureau of Indian Affairs
• $800 million for Superfund programs
• $200 million for leaking underground storage tank cleanup
• $8.4 billion in “State and Tribal Assistance Grants”
• $650 million in “Capital Improvement and Maintenance” at the Agriculture Dept.
• $850 million for “Wildland Fire Management”
• $550 million for Indian Health facilities
• $150 million for deferred maintenance at the Smithsonian museums
• $50 million in grants to fund “arts projects and activities which preserve jobs in the non-profit arts sector threatened by declines in philanthropic and other support during the current economic downturn” through the National Endowment for the Arts
• $1.2 billion in grants to states for youth summer jobs programs and other activities
• $1 billion for states in dislocated worker employment and training activities
• $500 million for the dislocated workers assistance national reserve
• $80 million for the enforcement of worker protection laws and regulations related to infrastructure and unemployment insurance investments
• $300 million for “construction, rehabilitation and acquisition of Job Corps Centers”
• $250 million for public health centers
• $1 billion for renovation and repair of health centers
• $600 million for nurse, physician and dentist training
• $462 million for renovation work at the Centers for Disease Control
• $1.5 billion for “National Center for Research Resources”
• $500 million for “Buildlings and Facilties” at the National Institutes of Health in suburban Washington, D.C.
• $700 million for “comparative effectiveness research” on prescription drugs
• $1 billion for Low-Income Home Energy Assistance
• $2 billion in Child Care and Development Block Grants for states
• $1 billion for Head Start programs
• $1.1 billion for Early Head Start programs
• $100 million for Social Security research programs
• $200 million for “Aging Services Programs”
• $2 billion for “Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology”
• $430 million for public health/social services emergency funds
• $2.3 billion for the Centers for Disease Control for a variety of programs
• $5.5 billion in targeted education grants
• $5.5 billion in “education finance incentive grants”
• $2 billion in “school improvement grants”
• $13.6 billion for Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
• $250 million for statewide education data systems
• $14 billion for school modernization, renovation and repair
• $160 million for AmeriCorps grants
• $400 million for the construction and costs to establish a new “National Computer Center” for the Social Security Administration
• $500 million to improve processing of disability and retirement claims
• $920 million for Army housing and child development centers
• $350 million for Navy and Marine Corps housing and child development centers
• $280 million in Air Force housing and child development centers
• $3.75 billion in military hospital and surgery center construction
• $140 million in Army National Guard construction projects
• $70 million in Air National Guard construction projects
• $100 million in Army Reserve construction projects
• $30 million in Navy Reserve construction projects
• $60 million in Air Force Reserve construction projects
• $950 million for VA

It’s hard to believe that a mere two months ago, in his February budget, Obama was still denying that America even faced a fiscal crisis, and yet today (April 14th) he not only admitted it: he attempted to describe it. About which, Yuval Levin said this:

It is certainly unorthodox for a president to renounce his own budget two months after proposing it, but that is just what the president did—implicitly dismissing even the goals set out by his budget in its own terms (let alone its potential to achieve them, as measured by the Congressional Budget Office) as totally inadequate. In that sense, the only immediate practical implication of the speech is that it throws the 2012 budget process into disarray (Yuval Levin, “The President’s Speech”).

So banal and so full of easy platitudes was Obama’s speech that one hardly faults Joe Biden for falling asleep:

Obama did at least make one true statement:

“There will be those who vigorously disagree with my approach.”

Yes!

He continued:

“Some will argue, we should not even consider ever, ever raising taxes even if only on the wealthiest Americans. It’s just an article of faith to them.”

An article of faith, or a working knowledge of economics?

Because make no mistake: the only real article of faith before us here is Obama’s blind belief that a country can tax-and-spend its way to prosperity.

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UN Document Would Give ‘Mother Earth’ Same Rights As Humans

This is for all the folks out there — you know who you are — who over the years have told me that I caricaturize environmentalism and environmentalists; that I present the environmental position “unfairly,” as “too extreme” when I call it what it actually is: namely, neo-Marxism at its blackest, a quasi-secular religion that hates human beings and worships at the shrine of death — e.g.: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs” (John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal).

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself” (Al Gore, Club of Rome executive member).

“Mankind is a cancer; we’re the biggest blight on the face of the earth” (president of PETA and environmental activist Ingrid Newkirk).

“If you haven’t given voluntary human extinction much thought before, the idea of a world with no people in it may seem strange. But, if you give it a chance, I think you might agree that the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species…. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental” (Ibid).

Quoting Richard Conniff, in the pages of Audubon magazine (September, 1990): “Among environmentalists sharing two or three beers, the notion is quite common that if only some calamity could wipe out the entire human race, other species might once again have a chance.”

Environmental theorist Christopher Manes (writing under the nom-de-guerre Miss Ann Thropy): “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.”

Environmental guru “Reverend” Thomas Berry, proclaims that “humans are an affliction of the world, its demonic presence. We are the violators of Earth’s most sacred aspects.”

A speaker at one of Earth First!’s little cult gatherings: “Optimal human population: zero.”

“Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere … [We have] an antipathy to ‘progress’ and ‘technology.’ We can accept the pejoratives of ‘Luddite’ and ‘Neanderthal’ with pride…. There is no hope for reform of industrial empire…. We humans have become a disease: the Humanpox” (Dave Foreman, past head of Earth First!)

“Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line we … became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth…. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.” (Biologist David Graber, “Mother Nature as a Hothouse Flower” Los Angles Times Book Review).

“The ending of the human epoch on Earth would most likely be greeted with a hearty ‘Good riddance!’”(Paul Taylor, “Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics”).

“If we don’t overthrow capitalism, we don’t have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don’t think it is possible under capitalism” (Judi Bari, of Earth First!).

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (Maurice Strong, Earth Summit 91).

David Brower, former head of the Sierra Club and founder of Friends of the Earth, calls for developers to be “shot with tranquilizer guns.”

Why?

“Human suffering is much less important than the suffering of the planet,” he explains.

Also from David Brower, Executive Director of the socialist Sierra Club: “The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”

Quoting the Green Party’s first Presidential candidate Barry Commoner:

“Nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, is necessary to save the country from destroying the natural environment…. Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.”

From Barry Commoner again:

“Environmental pollution is a sign of major incompatibility between our system of production and the environmental system that supports it. [The socialist way is better because] the theory of socialist economics does not appear to require that growth should continue indefinitely.”

So much for your unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed:

“Individual rights will have to take a back seat to the collective” (Harvey Ruvin, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, Dade County Florida).

Sierra Club cofounder David Brower, pushing for his own brand of eugenics:

“Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

That, if you don’t know, is limited government environmentalist style.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write history” (Sierra Club board member Paul Watson).

Again from Paul Watson, writing in that propaganda rag Earth First! Journal: “Right now we’re in the early stages of World War III…. It’s the war to save the planet. The environmental movement doesn’t have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually there will be open war.”

And:

“By every means necessary we will bring this and every other empire down! Mutiny and sabotage in defense of Mother Earth!”

And so on.

But, Ray, this is just the extremist fringe; these folks do not represent the true spirit of the environmental movement, as a reader of this website once told me.

Uh-huh. I suggest you keep telling yourself that so that you don’t have to confront the totality of the philosophy you’ve accepted.

And now there’s this:

UN document would give ‘Mother Earth’ same rights as humans:

UNITED NATIONS — Bolivia will this month table a draft United Nations treaty giving “Mother Earth” the same rights as humans — having just passed a domestic law that does the same for bugs, trees and all other natural things in the South American country.

The bid aims to have the UN recognize the Earth as a living entity that humans have sought to “dominate and exploit” — to the point that the “well-being and existence of many beings” is now threatened.

The wording may yet evolve, but the general structure is meant to mirror Bolivia’s Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, which Bolivian President Evo Morales enacted in January.

That document speaks of the country’s natural resources as “blessings,” and grants the Earth a series of specific rights that include rights to life, water and clean air; the right to repair livelihoods affected by human activities; and the right to be free from pollution.

It also establishes a Ministry of Mother Earth, and provides the planet with an ombudsman whose job is to hear nature’s complaints as voiced by activist and other groups, including the state.

“If you want to have balance, and you think that the only (entities) who have rights are humans or companies, then how can you reach balance?” Pablo Salon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, told Postmedia News. “But if you recognize that nature too has rights, and (if you provide) legal forms to protect and preserve those rights, then you can achieve balance.”

The application of the law appears destined to pose new challenges for companies operating in the country, which is rich in natural resources, including natural gas and lithium, but remains one of the poorest in Latin America.

Read the full article here.

This, what you just read above, is merely the logical elaboration of the mainstream environmental philosophy, and, among many, many other things, it demonstrates a profound and fatal misunderstanding of the concept of rights, which by definition are compossible.

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“Fetal Rights,” Abortion, And Public Funding Of Abortion

By definition, a fetus does not possess rights because the things in nature that give rise to rights are human individuation and the faculty of volition, which in turn gives rise to moral agency.

A fetus is the diametric opposite of individuated: it lives off of a fully individuated host. For this precise reason, the right belongs exclusively to the host — i.e. the pregnant woman — from whom that fetus derives its life entire. When the fetus is born, it becomes individuated. It is at this point that rights begin.

There are no such things as fetal rights — just as there are no such things a zygotic rights or cytoplasmic rights or protoplasmic rights.

On this issue, as on many others, I stand in complete disagreement with so-called libertarians (a meaningless word), many of whom are far to the left and many of whom are far to the right. I am, for the record, a classical liberal. And here’s one thing I’d like for someone to explain to me at last:

How does it follow that because a woman does possess the inalienable right to choose abortion or not, I or anyone else should therefore be forced to fund the abortions of others, as Barack Obama and the leftwingers are now demanding?

Answer: it does not. It does not follow.

This is a non-sequitur fallacy writ large.

My rights, your rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin.

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Friday Poem

Forever Yours

He trudged into the desert, taking almost
nothing with him but water and a ghost-
ly old photo
of a lady beside the ocean.
That first night,
he lay above a dry creek bed. Below,
he heard vipers moving through the sand
with a side-winding motion,
and
he did not sleep.
He’d grown obsessed with the notion
of walking deep
and deeper into the wilderness. By
the third day, his lips were swollen and dry.
Now he was completely isolated,
surrounded by a desert that dominated
with its glittering sand
and
not high above, a sky so huge and blue
that it scared him to look too long upon.
There was nothing new
now under his sun. By now, his water was gone.
Day five, he quit moving altogether
and sat instead for hours, with his photo and leather
flask, coughing in the cool valley of a dune,
watching the daytime moon,
gibbous and gorged, roll by like an eroded stone.
The sky was biblical. The sun was white as bone.
Finally, on the evening of his sixth day,
when his strength had all but slipped away,
a willowy woman in a white dress appeared.
She had long black hair, which stirred in the xeric
air, and though his eyes were watery and bleared,
he knew for certain who it was. And so
it was that she beckoned him. He rose, sure but slow,
up from the ferric
and rust-colored sand,
as if this is what he’d been waiting for all
along. And,
leaving his shoes and other belongings
behind, he followed her into
the drifted dunes, beneath a sky of melting blue.
And that was it. Days later when they found his things,
they saw the photo half-buried in the sand.
It was a black-and-white of a black-
haired woman, very elegant, tall,
whose short life,
two years back,
had been eaten away in a strange
Patagonian land, below a mountain range.
That woman was his wife.

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Victimless Crimes: Obama’s Deadly War

Just like the conservatives and their absolutely absurd “war on drugs,” Barack Obama and his clownish administration have caused much unnecessary destruction and death, which nobody, right, left, or middle, should sanction. This is a war which, unlike the conservatives, Obama initially claimed he was opposed to, but which he nevertheless has cravenly and predictably gone right along with, in order to fuel his popularity and the bureaucratic system he loves:

And then there’s this (watch it — it’s probably not what you think):

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Fascinating Facts, Curious Quotations

“The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life.”

Said the surrealist Andre Breton, explaining the possible provenance of some of his strange and early literature.

Sergei Yesenin (1895-1925) was a Russian lyric poet who, at age 30, hung himself. Vladimir Mayakovsky, his contemporary and also a Russian poet, angrily and in print condemned Sergei Yesenin for his “cowardly” suicide. Five year before he, Mayakovsky, then shot himself.

The earliest hints of evolutionary theory can be found in Anaximander, Sixth Century, BC.

“A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.”

Said Ernest Hemingway of T.S. Eliot.

“We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant.”

Said the Ex Muslim Wafa Sultan, correctly.

John Keats pronounced his own name with such a thick cockney accent that his friend Leigh Hunt nicknamed him “Junkets.”

Junkets evidently being the way “John Keats” sounded coming out of John Keats’s own mouth.

The “Wicked Bible,” from London, 1632, omitted the word not from the 7th Commandment:

Thou shalt commit adultery.

The first priest was the first rogue who crossed paths with the first fool.

Said Voltaire.

Man is the only animal that knows he must die.

Said Voltaire.

A man may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

Said Samuel Butler.

Death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death.

Echoed Wittgenstein.

The English writer Anthony Burgess — most famous for his novella A Clockwork Orange, which Stanley Kubrick subsequently made into a movie — had eyesight so poor that he once accidentally walked into a bank in Stratford-on-Avon and ordered a drink!

Shakespeare’s name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

Said Lord Byron.

“The Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum” an early French critic called Dostoevsky.

The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon;
Where gott’st thou that goose look?

Wrote Shakespeare in Act 5, Scene III of Macbeth.

“Now, friend, what means thy change of countenance?”

Substituted one William Davenant, in a hacked-up version which nevertheless played for nearly a century.

Strabo’s Geography, dated 7 B.C., states that the world is round and that one could reach India by sailing westward from Spain….

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First Portrait Of Jesus?

In reality there has been only one Christian, and he died on the Cross.

Said Friedrich Nietszche.

Is this the man whom Nietszche spoke of?

New archeological evidence says maybe. The fascinating photo bears the impression of what researchers say could very well be the earliest image of Christ.

From the London Daily Mail:

The tiny booklet, a little smaller than a modern credit card, is sealed on all sides and has a three-dimensional representation of a human head on both the front and the back. One appears to have a beard and the other is without. Even the maker’s fingerprint can be seen in the lead impression. Beneath both figures is a line of as-yet undeciphered text in an ancient Hebrew script.

Astonishingly, one of the booklets appears to bear the words “Saviour of Israel” – one of the few phrases so far translated.

The owner of the cache is Bedouin trucker Hassan Saida who lives in the Arab village of Umm al-Ghanim, Shibli. He has refused to sell the booklets but two samples were sent to England and Switzerland for testing.

A Mail on Sunday investigation has revealed that the artefacts were originally found in a cave in the village of Saham in Jordan, close to where Israel, Jordan and Syria’s Golan Heights converge – and within three miles of the Israeli spa and hot springs of Hamat Gader, a religious site for thousands of years.

Read the full story here.

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Side Aches And Shooting Pains (Redux)

A reader writes:

Dear Ray: Awhile ago you answered a reader’s question about side-stitches that was equally informative and made me laugh so hard I spit coffee all over my computer screen!! I was looking for it to show my Girlfriend (whom has been battling side-stiches since she started running) and could not find it! Did you delete it!?

— dodgybiker9

Dear dodgybiker9:

Yes, I did delete it, just recently. But here it is again:

Dear Ray Harvey: I’m a fellow who exercises regularly. As a result, I often find myself the victim of a multitude of aches and pains, including these peculiar shooting pains in my balls. Without a doubt, though, the pain that plagues me most are side aches. What ARE these things?

Doubled Over

Dear Doubled Over: The side stitch is a mysterious thing. One theory, by far the most commonly accepted these days, is that side aches are the result of the diaphragm going into a state of what some call tetanic contraction, which is basically another of these generic terms that means next to nothing. When we inhale, our lungs fill with air. This in turn presses downward upon the diaphragm. Exhaling brings the diaphragm back up, so that if there’s any trapped air below the diaphragm, the diaphragm will cramp on the right-hand side. This same sort of cramping can also come about if food is consumed just before exercising.

There are a number of ideas about how best to prevent the side stitch — among them: take deep, deep belly breaths; eat more calcium; warm up gradually; strengthen the lower back and the midsection; avoid running downhill; avoid eating before exercise. But this is mostly just talky-talky, with probably not a hell of a lot of truth to it. Plenty of people, for instance, get side aches on their left-hand side, or even on both sides simultaneously. I know because I happen to be one of these people, as you can see. Additionally, plenty of people eat and drink immediately before exercising, or even during exercise, and yet never get side stitches. Also, many people run downhill and do not get them. In short, sir, I’m afraid you’re on your own.

Best of luck with your balls.

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The Mona Lisa

Thirty-one years after Leonardo da Vinci’s death, Giorgio Vasari wrote Leonardo’s biography, from which the famous painting got its name: The Mona Lisa — or, as it’s known in Italian, La Gioconda, and in French La Joconde.

Before Vasari, the painting had been referred to as “a certain Florentine lady.” Later, in the collection at Fontainebleau, “a courtesan in a gauze veil.”

Leonardo’s panel is undated and unsigned, and although most portraits of that time included something to indicate the sitter’s family name or social status, no such emblem can be found in the Mona Lisa…. Some speculate that the Mona Lisa is not a portrait of one woman, but an artful composite of many, Leonardo’s idealization of all womanhood. Others suggest it may have been one of Da Vinci’s young male models in drag. Some even believe that the Mona Lisa is not a portrait at all, but instead what is known as a “finzione,” an invention of Leonardo’s extraordinary imagination (source).

According to Vasari, Leonardo devoted four full years to painting the Mona Lisa — which, however, covers only a fraction more than five-and-a-half square feet of surface.

Worthy of the painting itself is Walter Pater’s unforgettable description of the Mona Lisa:

“She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave.”

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Worst Power Plant Disaster?

It’s not nuclear. Quoting Annalee Newitz, at i09:

“[W]hen accidents happen, the deadliest and costliest source of energy is water — especially when it’s held back by poorly-designed dams. The Chernobyl disaster doesn’t come close to the damage done when a dam at a hydroelectric plant bursts.”

Here’s her rundown:

1975: Shimantan/Banqiao Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 171,000
Cost: $8,700,000,000
What happened: Shimantan Dam in China’s Henan province fails and releases 15.738 billion tons of water, causing widespread flooding that destroys 18 villages and 1500 homes and induces disease epidemics and famine

1979: Morvi Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 1500 (estimated)
Cost: $1,024,000,000
What happened: Torrential rain and unprecidented flooding caused the Machchu-2 dam, situated on the Machhu river, to burst. This sent a wall of water through the town of Morvi in the Indian State of Gujarat.

1998: Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Jess Oil Pipeline Explosion
Type of power: Oil
Human lives lost: 1,078
Cost: $54,000,000
What happened:Petroleum pipeline ruptures and explodes, destroying two villages and hundreds of villagers scavenging gasoline.

1944: East Ohio Gas Company
Type of power: Liquified natural gas (LNG)
Human lives lost: 130
Cost: $890,000,000
What happened: Explosion at LNG facility destroys one square mile of Cleveland, OH.

1907: Monongah Coal Mine
Type of power: Coal
Human lives lost: 362
Cost: $162,000,000
What happened: Underground explosion traps workers and destroys railroad bridges leading into the mine.

Compare these to:

1986: Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
Type of power: Nuclear
Human lives lost: 4,056 (Source for this number: United Nations Scientific Subcommittee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation)
Cost: $6,700,000,000
What happened: Mishandled reactor safety test at Chernobyl nuclear reactor causes steam explosion and meltdown, necessitating the evacuation of 300,000 people from Kiev, Ukraine and dispersing radioactive materials across Europe.

A lot of this research was based on public policy professor Andrew Sovacool’s extremely informative monograph “The Accidental Century,” which looks at power plant disasters in the twentieth century in great detail.

(Link)

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Al Gore And The Snow-Job Of Kilimanjaro

In 2006, a movie director named Davis Guggenheim made a documentary about former Vice President Albert Gore and his global warming propaganda campaign. That movie is entitled An Inconvenient Truth, and since its release, the term “global warming” has, as you may have heard, fallen completely out of fashion — ostensibly because the earth has not warmed as predicted. “Climate change” and “climate chaos” have thus become the preferred nomenclature.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore — who, incidentally, told Grist Magazine that “Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are” — spat out a pile of doomsday scenarios, which his millions of minions indiscriminately swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Among those scenarios, none, perhaps, was more frequently regurgitated than Gore’s claim that “Within a decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Of course, the (inconvenient) truth about Kilimanjaro has been known for some time: as George Kaser (et al) published in the International Journal of Climatology, the snows of Kilimanjaro began receding around 1890 — which is to say, long before the advent of mass CO2 output. But we’ve written about that before, as have many others, like Dutch scientist Jaap Sinninghe Damste, winner of the prestigious Spinoza Prize, and please see also the following recent article in New Scientist: Kilimanjaro’s Vanishing Ice Due To Tree-Felling.

Now, however, there’s this:

And this:

If there is a poster child for global warming, it may be the vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro, which were predicted to disappear as early as 2015 in a widely-publicized report a decade ago.

However, the famed snowcap is stubbornly persisting on the African peak and may not fully vanish for another 50 years, according to a University of Massachusetts scientist who had a hand in the prediction.

The 2001 forecast was indirectly part of key evidence for global warming offered during the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which warned of the threats of rising global temperatures. In it, former vice president Al Gore stated, “Within a decade, there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro” due to warming temperatures.

“Unfortunately, we made the prediction. I wish we hadn’t,” says Douglas R. Hardy, a UMass geoscientist who was among 11 co-authors of the paper in the journal Science that sparked the pessimistic Kilimanjaro forecast. “None of us had much history working on that mountain, and we didn’t understand a lot of the complicated processes on the peak like we do now” (source).

And this:

Physicist loses civility over Gore’s Kilimanjaro claims: ‘That dishonest a##hole can no longer surprise anyone’

Al Gore and his representatives have declined to comment.

(Hat tip Climate Depot)

About a decade ago, Doctor R.J. Braithwaite wrote an article that appeared in Progress in Physical Geography.

In that article, which was peer-reviewed, Doctor Braithwaite tells us how he analyzed 246 glaciers, sampled from both hemispheres and latitudes, between the years 1946 and 1995. This “mass balance analysis” he conducted found that “some glaciers were melting, while a nearly equal number were growing in size, and still others remained stable.” Doctor Braithwaite’s unequivocal conclusion:

“There is no obvious common or global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years.”

“By some estimates, 160,000 glaciers exist on Earth. Only 63,000 have been inventoried, and only a few hundred have been studied in the detail described by Braithwaite” (“It Would Be Nice to Know More about Ice,” Jay Lehr).

On the basis of that logical fallacy known as the fallacy of insufficient evidence, all glacier fears are stopped cold right there.

But in fact that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

Keith Echelmeyer, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute, says this:

“To make a case that glaciers are retreating, and that the problem is global warming, is very hard to do… The physics are very complex. There is much more involved than just the climate response.”

Mr. Echelmeyer goes on to tell us that in Alaska there are large glaciers advancing in the very same areas where others are retreating.

Quoting Doctor Martin Beniston of the Institute of Geography at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland:

Numerous climatological details of mountains are overlooked by the climate models, which thus makes it difficult to estimate the exact response of glaciers to global warming, because glacier dynamics are influenced by numerous factors other than climate, even though temperature and cloudiness may be the dominant controlling factors. According to the size, exposure and altitude of glaciers, different response times can be expected for the same climatic forcing.

Of course, as Doctor Beniston intimates, the paramount thing to consider in any discussion of glacial melt is the sheer size of these suckers, which because of their size do not respond to heat and cold like the snow in your backyard. According to the excellent glacier program at Rice University, those response times run something like this:

Ice sheet: 100,000 to 10,000 years

Large valley glacier: 10,000 to 1,000 years

Small valley glacier: 1,000 to 100 years

Glaciers are influenced by a variety of local and regional natural phenomena that scientists do not fully comprehend. Besides temperature changes, glaciers also respond to changes in the amount and type of precipitation, changes in sea level and changes in ocean circulation patterns. As a result, glaciers do not necessarily advance during colder weather and retreat during warmer weather (John Carlisle, National Center for Public Policy).

Glaciers Are In World-Wide Retreat — read one New York Times headline recently.

Well, they were anyway, starting decades before industrialization (i.e. increased CO2 output). As IPCC AR4 reports:

Most mountain glaciers and ice caps have been shrinking, with the retreat probably having started about 1850 [NB: the end of the ‘little ice age’]. Although many Northern Hemisphere glaciers had a few years of near balance around 1970, this was followed by increased shrinkage.

Research published by the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the much-touted Peruvian glacier (on p. 53-53) disappeared a few thousand years ago.

There are, moreover, glaciers forming across the globe, in both hemispheres. Here’s a very partial list:

In Norway: Alfotbreen Glacier, Briksdalsbreen Glacier, Nigardsbreen Glacier, Hardangerjøkulen Glacier, Hansebreen Glacier, Jostefonn Glacier, Engabreen Glacier, Helm Glacier, Place Glacier. Indeed, a great number of Scandinavia’s glaciers are exploding.

In France, the Mount Blanc Glacier.

In Ecuador, Antizana 15 Alpha Glacier.

In Argentine, Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest in all of Patagonia, was recently observed to be advancing at about 6 feet per day.

Chile’s Pio XI Glacier, the largest in the southern hemisphere, is also growing.

In Switzerland, Silvretta Glacier.

In Kirghiztan, Abramov Glacier.

In Russian, Malli Glacier is growing and surging.

In New Zealand, as of 2003, all 48 glaciers in the Southern Alps were observed to have grown.

In the United States: Mount St. Helens, Mount Rainier, Mount Shuksan, Mount Shasta, Mount McKinley, Mount Hubbard, and Rocky Mountain National Park have all shown recent glacier growth.

“There is evidence that the McGinnis Glacier, a little-known tongue of ice in the central Alaska Range, has surged,” said assistant Professor of Physics Martin Truffer. He recently noticed the lower portion of the glacier was covered in cracks, crevasses, and pinnacles of ice – all telltale signs that the glacier has recently slid forward at higher than normal rates.

There’s also this article from the Associated Press, which I quote only in part:

Geologists exploring Colorado’s Rocky Mountain Park say that they discovered more than 100 additional glaciers here in a single summer, said Mark Verrengia.

Officials previously believed the park, which is 60 miles northwest of Denver, included 20 permanent ice and snow features, including six named glaciers. The new survey, conducted by geologist Jonathan Achuff, shows there are as many as 120 features.

“Comparisons with historical photos suggest that at least some of the glaciers are expanding,” say park officials. “Subtle climate changes may be helping the formation of glaciers or at least reducing their retreat.”

“We’re not running quite in sync with global warming here,” park spokeswoman Judy Visty said.

Not, of course, that it really matters much either way, since the entire climate change issue is predicated upon a stupendously fraudulent premise: a corrupt epistemology.

To say nothing of the fact that, as has been demonstrated repeatedly, the free market is far better equipped to deal with environmental issues than proposed socialist policies — for the simple reason that free markets generate astronomically more capital with which to deal with such issues.

The wealthier the country, the healthier the country.