I’m beginning to see some new and encouraging signs that the public is getting hip to the truth about President Barack Obama and his real agenda for America. An interesting one occurred Monday night when Karl Rove appeared on The Tonight Show.

Rove freely spoke his mind about ObamaCare, and each time the audience responded with applause. The first time Leno brought the subject up, he said that he didn’t like it and that it was “bad for the country” which drew immediate applause. Later in the conversation, Rove said it would bankrupt the country, which also drew applause. Not once did I hear a single “Boo” out of the audience. Considering how Rove was treated by the media during the Bush administration, I was frankly surprised that he was welcomed on a major network talk show in the first place, although I don’t think he would have been treated anywhere near as respectfully by Letterman as he was by Leno.

Another interesting sign was an article in yesterday’s NY Times entitled: “CNN Fails to Stop Fall in Ratings”. The article reports that Sean Hannity’s ratings are almost 4 times as high as Larry King’s, and I checked a few TV ratings sites, & confirmed that the top 10 cable shows are ALL on Fox.

While the network news shows from NBC, CBS & ABC each have significantly higher ratings (7-8 million viewers each) than any one of the shows on Fox, when you look at the total viewers of all of the Fox shows from 5PM to 11PM (Beck, Baier, Smith, O’Reilly, Hannity, Greta & O’Reilly rerun) the number is over 22 million viewers. While some of us watch more than one of the Fox shows, I still believe that number is quite significant.

The question that remains, is whether we’ll be able to disarm the progressives in the coming elections both this year and in 2012, before Obama does too much more damage to our country. It’s going to be a hard fight considering the total disdain for the constitutional limits on the powers of the federal government that the Obama administration has displayed thus far.

I wish I could say I heard anything new or interesting in President Barack Obama’s interview with Bret Baier, but all I got was the same old dishonest, deceptive and unsubstantiated double talk.

Baier’s first question was whether Obama supported the Slaughter Strategy. He never answered the question, and went off on his standard campaign style justification for his health care bill.

Baier’s second question came from viewer’s eMails asking why, if the bill was so good, that even with his huge majority, he couldn’t pass it and had to resort to bribes & trickery. Again, he avoided answering the question entirely.

Baier’s next question was about Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s statement that she liked the Slaughter approach, “because they don’t have to vote on it.” Obama’s answer again avoided the question, and started to use beltway double speak by saying they still had to sequence the votes (???), and then he started talking about how people suffered during Hurricane Katrina.

After talking about the Nebraska deal that he felt wasn’t right, he couldn’t say whether the Florida deal was in or out. Baier then quoted Obama himself when he was a senator, saying that a president can’t govern if he passes bills through reconciliation, and asked him if he thought he could govern if health care was passed this way. No surprise here, Obama just ignored the question and said he was more concerned with the poor people who need health care. He double-talked his way around the issue of the cuts in Medicare, and the “Doctor Fix” which he said had been a problem for 4 years that he had inherited and wasn’t his fault.

In summary, he didn’t answer even one of Bret Baier’s questions.

I was hoping that Baier would close by saying something like “Mr. President, with all due respect, you haven’t answered even one of my questions, but thank you for your time just the same.”

I’m sure that the interview was recorded earlier on the condition that the White House had to approve of it before it could be aired, and that Baier, who I like, did the best he could to wring some truth out of Obama, a concept that’s apparently foreign to him

Sadly, it was just more of the same old, same old, same old….

As a system, absolutely not, as for the term itself though, perhaps we should.

In an article in the Telegraph on Thursday 3.04.10, the Chairman of Marks & Spencer, the leading department store in London, made some interesting remarks about capitalism. He spoke mostly about the perception of capitalism and the free market system, in the eyes of people around the world, and the fact that the term itself has begun to become so negative, that they forget the fact that capitalism is the only system which has ever worked, and that every time it was tried, communism led to misery, oppression, and the murder of millions. He even suggested that we find another name for it. Why not ? The progressives found another name for communism, didn’t they?

This evening on Glenn Beck, (3.05.10), Glenn spent the entire hour on the subject of how the progressive left has taken over our education system for the express purpose of trying to brainwash our children with an incredible array of anti American propaganda designed to make the younger generation believe that the American way of life, and our free market economy has failed them. As we know of course, it’s the progressives themselves and their big government that are responsible for virtually all the misery that America is suffering through right now. Their anti-American propaganda has been evolving since the beginning of the progressive movement, when they first began to demonize the dollar sign itself, as a symbol of evil, greed and the oppression of human rights. Remember the old Monopoly men in their top hats carrying bags with $ on them ? They’ve been around for longer than the board game.

I first learned about this from Ayn Rand while attending lectures at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in NY in 1964 while still a teenager. Ms Rand used to do all the Q&A’s after the lecture, and did some of the lectures herself. She was mesmerizing. Ms Rand spoke about the dollar sign quite frequently. To her it symbolized the best part of America, our freedom to better ourselves, and our most basic freedoms of thought & speech. She said that the dollar sign itself was derived from the initials U.S., and that seems likely in that it’s just an S superimposed over a U with the bottom cut off. Having escaped the Soviet Union on her own when she was 15, Ayn Rand was disgusted by the idea that America could be using its own symbol as a sign of depravity, and she proved herself right in 1957, when she published her own view of where America was headed.

The progressives were so successful with their propaganda that the very word “capitalism” itself, in the minds of so many people, has come to symbolize greedy bankers taking huge bonuses paid for with taxpayer money, or evil insurance companies who deny the people access to their right to health care. Glenn’s been hammering away at the difference between rights, and good & services for a few days now. But it looks like the progressives are directly responsible for the current perception of the term “capitalism”as well. It first came into popular use when Karl Marx used it in his writings, however it’s actual roots go further back than that. Thackeray is the first to publish a work using the term in his novel, The “Newcomes” in the mid 19th century. It was actually used earlier by a Frenchman, A. R. J. Turgot (1727-1781) who used the word “capitaliste” in an essay on the “Formation and Distribution of Wealth”. And that brings us to the reason why the progressives don’t get it. They don’t understand the very nature of wealth itself.

Looking back in history to feudal times, when the kings and the lords, and the dukes owned EVERYTHING, including the peasants who worked their land, the downtrodden ones justifiably thought that anyone with that much power had to be evil, because they kept all the wealth for themselves.

This fear of the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of anyone, was one of the primary things that influenced our finding fathers. Americans back then truly feared the concentration of power in anyone, including businesses and especially in their government.

The progressives, still think of wealth as something that exists in a static quantity in the universe, with the only question being how it should most fairly be divided. They don’t understand that wealth is something that’s created, primarily because they’ve never participated in the process. Look at their leaders, President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, Senator John Kerry, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and you’ll see that not one of them has ever contributed to the economy in a private sector job that was involved in the production of wealth. In a way, the same is true of a big portion of the Hollywood elite. While they’ve worked hard and made lots of money, making $10MM to $20MM for a movie, or $500M for a concert, gives them a pretty warped view of what it truly means to go out to work to make a living.

I’ve tried to explain this to several of these people, with the following example since I’ve spent much of my life as a builder:

“A man takes a piece of raw land, and with his own ingenuity, skill and sweat, he takes the trees and the rocks and the dirt to build himself a home. The difference in value between the raw land, and the land with the home on it, is wealth created by that man…”

Most of them still don’t get it though… All they can see is a man who owns a big house, while others live in hovels, so of course they decide, due to their unbelievable arrogance and conceit, that everyone would be better off if THEY were in charge of splitting up the wealth… We heard it in the clip of Van Jones, “Give THEM the wealth!  Give THEM the wealth! The key word there being “the” wealth… Like Obama, he only sees that big pile.. because he’s probably never put in a full day of honest productive work in his entire life. They’re scared of capitalism because they know they’re in trouble right now, and if it will help us defeat them, I don’t mind abandoning the term “Capitalism” for a while.

They think that they’re entitled to be the royalty, and their biggest fear right now, is that the crowd demonstrating outside their windows, may have finally caught on to their game. We’re already seeing some of the rats abandoning the ship. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them are scared that this crowd might even have a guillotine.

Richard Cohen’s excellent article in the Washington Post on Wednesday March 2nd, offers several compelling reasons why Israel doesn’t deserve to be compared to South Africa under Apartheid, but I believe that it will be hard for many on the left who think of the State of Israel in that manner to ever understand this, unless they know the truth, that Israel isn’t and never has occupied any Palestinian Arab owned land.

In her excellent article “Palestine – The Big Lie”, Sharon Nader Sloan lays out the true history of Israel, going all the way back to ancient Israel, all of which clearly proves that:

1: There’s never existed a “Palestinian State”

2: Jerusalem was never the capital of any nation other than Israel.

In fact there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian. They’re just Arabs, like all the rest. They hate Jews because their religion tells them to, and because in a matter of a few short years after modern day Israel was created, the Jews took that barren and desolate land and turned it into a bountiful and beautiful Garden of Eden growing oranges the size of basketballs. Of course by doing this, right under the Arabs’ noses, and for all the world to see, they showed the Arabs up for what they are, a culture of backwards, bigoted and racist barbarians, whose only contribution to human civilization was the invention of Algebra. Thanks a lot for that BTW! (sarcasm mine)

Then, to add further insult to injury, when shortly after her founding, all of Israel’s close neighbors got together and attacked her, all of those brave and manly warriors were made to look like “girly-men” by the Israeli military, and it’s easy to imagine how that made them feel.

As Ms. Sloan points out, Palestine is a region, not a nation, in the same way that the Sahara is a region. Most of the Arabs who owned land there SOLD it to the Israelis. The Israelis paid what to them were enormous sums for their land, and they were happy to take it. Not one square inch was stolen from anyone.

And if the need for a “Palestinian State” were so great, why didn’t we hear anyone demanding a “Palestinian State” during the 19 years that Jordan occupied Jerusalem and the entire West Bank? Why did they ever reject the UN compromise of splitting the land controlled by the British up into a Jewish state and what would have been a Palestinian State” in the first place? Instead they decided to go to war to destroy Israel, after which that land legally became Israel’s by right of conquest!

So why should there be a Palestinian State”? The Arabs are free to live there, there are even Arab members of the Knesset. Are they saying that they’re entitled to their own state because they live there? If so, how would we feel if the huge number of Hispanics in California demanded their own state as well? And while we’re at it, how would the non-Hispanic Californians feel about the Hispanics, if they were constantly throwing rocks at them, and harassing them 24/7?

The idea that the Jews in Israel are occupying Arab lands is taken for granted by almost everyone, and like Global Warming, it’s just another BIG LIE!

Floating Ice in the Delaware during the Little Ice Age

Most of us never noticed anything unusual in the famous painting of George Washington Crossing the Delaware when we first saw it in our American history textbooks. The floating chunks of ice in the scene, are only one of the many surviving reminders of the Little Ice Age. Fortunately for America, Washington’s entire army didn’t freeze to death in Valley Forge in the winter of 1777, but it was close, and 2,500 of his men did in fact perish that winter.

Our understanding of our planet’s climate history in recent years has helped us answer some intriguing questions. My favorite example of this is the recent discovery of the so called “secret” behind the extraordinary tone of the violins of Antonio Stradivarius. If our climate history teaches us anything however, it’s that severe climate change is a completely natural phenomenon, which we can only attempt to adapt to. Just as we can’t stop hurricanes, volcanoes or earthquakes, we can’t change our climate in any meaningful way, no matter how many trillions of dollars we spend on it.

The New York Times, ever since its inception in 1851, has helped perpetuate the myth that climate change poses an imminent threat to mankind. Newspapers have always been fond of doom & gloom stories, because catastrophes help sell newspapers, but that’s unfortunately not the only reason why the NY Times keeps printing this rubbish. These days they run these stories mainly in order to support the Progressive Agenda.

The primary culprit responsible for promoting this hoax in recent years has been the UN, through its climate body the IPCC, which has been intentionally falsifying climate data for many years now in order to help them reach the progressive’s goal of a single world government. The most blatant example of their lies is their Hockey Stick graph which attempts to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, the mere fact of which poses a serious threat to their theory and their agenda.

We need to understand this history, if we’re to have any chance of insuring that this never happens again, and to that end, articles from magazines, such as the ones published by Time (June 24, 1974) and Newsweek (April 28,1975) are invaluable references.

In part 1 of my series “Global Warming: Exposing the Far Left’s Lies” I discussed the long and sordid history of climate change hysteria. The article above from the NY Times in 1922, is just one of the many articles that helped create that hysteria that was featured in the pages of that once great newspaper.

I recently found a search page on their website that one can use to find articles on various subjects from their archives. I did a search using the keywords “Climate Change” and found the following list of articles from 1875 thru 1980:

I also did the search with other keywords, & found many other articles using keywords such as “Ice Age” and  Climate Cooling” etc…

As I wrote in my aforementioned series:

“The earliest known examples (of climate change alarmism) typically involve primitive witch doctors and shamans telling their people that the change in climate is an indication that God was unhappy with their sinful ways. In a strange sort of way nothing’s really changed, as shown by the fact that the current AGW crowd has literally converted this madness into a religion for their followers. The leaders themselves have ulterior motives however, and many rational observers, including myself, believe that the environmental extremists of today are virtually identical to the communists of the past. When they don’t have a good crisis to exploit, they just make one up.”

Lord Monckton illustrated this point well with his inverted traffic light analogy:

Fortunately for the Climate Alarmists, the climate is ALWAYS changing, and there’s no reason to expect that to ever change. So what must we do to make sure that this doesn’t keep happening every 15 to 25 years?

I think that the best thing we can do is to insist that the history of climate change alarmism and fraud be memorialized in all of the applicable history textbooks that are used in our schools. Most of those textbooks are riddled with lies and need to be re-written anyway. While we’re at it, we should also insist that our new textbooks tell the truth about the so called “Religion of Peace”.

AND THE TRUTH WILL KEEP US FREE !

Related posts:

1. New York Times thinks 2.6% is a lot
2. New York Times develops strange new respect for laws, ethics and stuff
3. The New York Times Wants To Suppress Free Speech Of Other Corporations

Is this Man the Evil Genius Behind the Greatest Hoax of All Times?

Dr. Ed Berry, an Atmospheric Physicist who runs a website called Climate Physics.com just sent me a You Tube video that’s pretty darn interesting.

Apparently Jesse Ventura has a TV show called “Conspiracy Theory” that I’ve never previously heard of, which recently did an expose on the real powers behind the Global Warming Hoax. While every instinct I have tells me that the show, which has the look and feel of a cheesy tabloid, cannot be taken seriously, Ed Berry and I are in agreement that the conclusions of this show seem solid. Interviews with Lord Monckton and Dr. Richard Lindzen, are featured in the show, which also lends substantial credibility as well.

Its premise, that the entire Global Warming scam is the product of a conspiracy in pursuit of money and power, is not at all outrageous when you stop to consider the fact that world leaders, in cahoots with the UN, have indeed been working hard to sell the public on a totally phony theory, based on a political rather than a scientific agenda. Rather than focusing on just the political side of the issue (their desire to control the entire world through a single world government,) the show also focuses on the financial side of the scam, and follows the money trail back to its roots.

Al Gore it seems, isn’t the only one in this scam who’s in it for the money. After watching the video I did a little research on the central figure, the former UN official who’s currently hiding out in Beijing, Maurice Strong, and found some other links that confirm the video’s conclusions, the first linking Strong to George Soros, and the other to Barack Obama who it seems was involved in the creation of the Chicago Climate Exchange. Isn’t it interesting how much fraud and corruption seems to be able to trace its roots back to Chicago?

I still have doubts about Ventura however. In the video he refers to Gore as a friend of his, and even says, near the beginning that he himself believes in Global Warming. For the moment though, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he was referring to the fact that the earth has indeed been warming from the end of the Little Ice Age to 2002, rather than the idea that the rise in temperatures was caused by man’s use of fossil fuels.

Note: Dr. Berry’s website Climate Physics.com is an excellent place to learn more about the Global Warming scam. In the near future Ed will be debating the science of Global Warming with a prominent individual from academia who supports the AGW movement. I’ll post an update on this debate here on NewsReal to let you know when it’s going to begin. It’s going to be interesting, that’s for sure!

Related posts:

1. Global Warming: Exposing the Far Left’s Lies, Part 1
2. Man-Made Global Warming: the Myth that Refuses to Die
3. Global Warming: Exposing the Far Left’s Lies, Part 5

Several weeks back I got all excited after the CRU eMails were leaked, and was hoping that it might prove to be the turning point in this fight. In a discussion about it with Bob Ferguson, the President of SPPI (Science and Public Policy Institute), Bob calmly responded that it wouldn’t slow them down at all, and that they’ll simply come up with another lurking catastrophe to make us hysterical over. He then said that “Ocean Acidification” would likely be their next manufactured panic.

Bob was right of course, in fact the enviro-fascists were already long at work on this one. The NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council) recently released a video all about Ocean Acidification, and how it will destroy our oceans. In reply, SPPI just released their report exposing the truth behind this ridiculous new green fantasy, with a foreward by Lord Monckton.

“OCEAN ACIDIFICATION” – THE EXTREMISTS’ FALLBACK SCARE

First, they called it “global warming”. Then they noticed there had been no warming for 15 years, and cooling for 9, so they hastily renamed it “climate change”. Then they noticed the climate was changing no more than it ever had, so they tried “energy security”, and even named a Congressional Bill after it. Then they noticed that most Western nations already had bountiful energy security, in the form of vast, untapped domestic supplies of oil, gas, coal, or all three, so they switched to “ocean acidification”.

This is the new phantasmagoric for the tired, old scare whipped up by the NRDC and the environmental extremist movement for their own profit at our expense. The world’s corals, they tell us, will be eaten away by the acidified ocean within not more than ten years hence. Shellfish will be no more, their calcified carapaces and exoskeletons dissolved by the carbonic acid caused by our burning of fossil fuels. The oceans will die. Sound familiar?

Yet, as the indefatigable Craig Idso here demonstrates, the scientific consensus – if science were done by consensus at all, which it is not – is that the rising “ocean acidification” scare is just more piffle.

Read or download the entire report here

Related posts:

1. Is Climategate The Last Gasp of Global Warming Hysteria?
2. Build Your Arks, the Oceans are Rising
3. Man-Made Global Warming: the Myth that Refuses to Die

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1. Open Thread
2. Open Thread
3. Open Thread

Wouldn’t it be nice if the media reported ALL the news from the front, rather than just the bad news?

War is horrible of course, but even under terrible conditions, our troops have made much progress thus far, and they’re justly proud of what they’ve accomplished. As a former Marine myself, I tend to pay extra attention to news about The Corps, and have strong paternal feelings for those terrific kids serving today. The following letter from a company commander in Afghanistan was just forwarded to me by one of my fellow Vietnam vets. Marines are trained to improvise, overcome & adapt, and  they’re certainly earning their pay right now. In The Corps we like to say that our job is to take bullets for civilians. I’ve never been more proud of  my boys than I am right now.

Letter from an in-country Company Commander of the Third Battalion, Fourth Marines.

I finally have a minute to sit down and write a letter concerning the 
past few weeks here in Now Zad. I wanted to make sure that I got the word
out to everyone, so please send this out to friends and family that I may 
have missed on the distro list. I first want to say how incredibly proud of 
my boys I am. These Marines have been amazing and continue to be amazing.
 Between them and the amazing support staff that we have in 3/4 that allows
 us to do quite literally whatever we want to the Taliban, this has almost 
been an easy operation. Here are the up sides:

1) Not a single Marine was killed or seriously wounded during this 
operation.

2) We have taken more ground, run off more Taliban, liberated more 
villages, and seized more weapons and Home Made Explosives than has ever
happened in Now Zad. One of the caches of HME that we blew up was over 1100
lbs of HME (for a reference, that’s over 16 “Mine-Proof” vehicles completely
destroyed) and it was the largest find in Helmand Province. Ever.

3) We air inserted two companies, behind enemy lines, while my company
went straight up the gut of the enemy’s defense on the ground. The enemy
was so terrified that he abandoned his stockpiles and ran away to where he
thought he was safe. Some of them ran right into the arms of the British 
Battalion to our East, some of them we have hunted down since they ran.
More importantly, we have begun to HOLD the ground by immediately building
coalition positions in strategic locations all over the valley and
partnering with the local Police and Army units. Let’s not forget, the 
infantry is a TERRAIN based organization. We don’t have to kill people in
order to do our job, only if those people don’t want us on that specific
piece of dirt and wants to come get a taste.

4) We aggressively sought out and crushed a Murder and Intimidation
racket that was going on in our AO. (M&I campaigns are used when the enemy 
has no other tactic but overwhelming fear to instill on the local 
population. The ‘night letters’ that were being delivered said things like:
”If you accept help from Coalition Forces we will kill your children one by
 one…” Except that Marines got to the letter writers first. Whammy.

5) We have re-opened a once deserted town to the people and have begun 
to pay them to clean it up. Quick cash infusion + Heavy labor for young men
+ promise of more work = no young guys re-enlisting in the Taliban. One of 
the key components of this plan was to instantly follow up with a Civil 
Affairs Group that would handle local national problems that weren’t related 
to the Taliban (food, shelter, work, etc…)

6) We have begun Medical Programs for the locals with what supplies we
 have. Those supplies are limited, but they are able to cover things like
 burns, and kids stepping on mines (yes, we MedEvac them just like we would a 
Marine), and skin rashes, and even an infant with pneumonia who is just
 fine, now.

7) Our engineers breached a mine-field that had completely frozen other 
forces. Our Danish friends brought some tanks to help us out and they were
 able to break up one or two ambushes for us. Nothing is cooler than getting 
ambushed and having tanks with you to respond. Nothing.

Your Marines stayed on point, in the freezing cold weather, with the 
rain soaking them to the bone, to hunt down the Taliban who had been
abusing, killing, and stealing from the people of the Now Zad Valley.

9) We are bringing back government into Now Zad, so people have an 
alternative than the Taliban to settle their legal disputes, and have
someone to hold accountable for a lack of medical coverage, and to go to
 with their grievances about farming and commerce and security. They won’t 
NEED us to hold them up any longer.
 If all of this sounds like hubris, maybe it is. But I’m so proud of my 
Company and my Battalion for the planning and the execution and the follow
through that they have done. Be proud of your Marines, they did good work in December.

Merry Christmas to everyone. Much Love to all, let your friends know, we’re winning and it feels good.

Related posts:

1. You’re Fired! Open Letter to the Men of Afghanistan
2. Cable News Fleshes Out Afghanistan Quagmire – Are Congressional Democrats Listening?
3. Afghanistan: 52 Days And Still Waiting For A Decision

Classical music isn’t the only music that the older, more mature and more traditional folks enjoy, and as long as the kids keep promoting their rock & roll bands, I’ll continue to offer alternatives for the rest of us.

In today’s offering, you’ll be treated to another great piano virtuoso, Oscar Peterson. Oscar was every bit the genius that Vladimir Horowitz was, albeit in another medium. Watch his fingering in this video and you’ll see a technique that’s never been equaled in the world of jazz.

Enjoy !

—

Lunch Break is NewsReal’s daily apolitical post. (We all need a break from this political stuff every now and then!) When commenting on Lunch Break posts do not start political, religious, or philosophical debates. In fact from now on any serious debating comments on Lunch Break posts will be deleted. You’ve got all of NewsReal’s other posts to get argumentative, lets keep this one pure. (Humorous debates about meaningless subjects are permitted.)

If you would like to submit a video (humorous/music/film trailer/intriguing/etc.), image, or poem for this feature then please click here. (Sunday Lunch Breaks are often of a spiritual nature.) Please do not send attached videos, rather provide links to where the videos are available online at places like YouTube. Please include:

1. A link to where it’s from.

2. Any Comments you would like published with your submission

3. A link to your blog or homepage if you have one.

4. How you’d like your name published.

Also please keep it no more than PG-13 rated.

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2. Lunch Break
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One of the most common issues that I run up against with the NewsRealBlog community is my contention that spirituality is not the exclusive province of people of faith, but that secularists can experience the same feelings as well. On more than one occasion I’ve said that the feelings that I experience when looking at a Van Gogh painting, or listening to Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Piano Concerto, or reading a great piece of literature, are tantamount to what others describe to me as a state of religious ecstasy.

I just read a wonderful piece by Edward L. Hudgins published by The Atlas Society, entitled “Secular Spirituality” which I think would be both interesting and enlightening to many NRB readers, especially at this time of year, and I therefore present it for your consideration here:

The fall season ushers in Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and, this year, Ramadan as well. Winter brings Christmas and Hanukkah. Spring takes us to Passover and Easter. And those are just the highlights of the holy days marked by the Old Testament–based religions. Throw in their minor milestones (Purim, Pentecost); add Hindi, Buddhism, and a few other faiths to the mix; and you have a year-round sacred calendar.

Most people feel that the sacred and spiritual pertain to the soul or to things incorporeal and eternal—in contrast to the secular, which is thought to pertain to the material, worldly, physical, and temporal. On sacred days, we’re supposed to turn our attention from the low, mundane, and muddy, to things high, heavenly, and pure. But the fables and beliefs that give rise to the holy days of various religions conflict with each other, and no such belief can be shown to be more valid than the others. Therefore, they must be accepted on faith, which distinguishes such beliefs from those discovered by science or philosophy.

Where does that leave the rational, secular individualist? Those of us who wish to experience a sense of sacred meaning and inspiration will certainly not find it among days marking miraculous births, escapes from evil pharaohs, the receipt of holy books, or enlightenment under bodhi trees. And what sacred lessons can we draw from conflicting myths and dogmas that have stoked murderous human conflict among various faiths and sects throughout history?

Before we conclude that the quest for a secular spirituality is hopeless, perhaps we should ask: What, exactly, is the true nature of the spiritual or sacred? And do these elevated emotions necessarily conflict with reason, the secular, and the ordinary aspects of everyday life?

Read the entire article here.

Related posts:

1. NewsReal Sunday: Secularist Sam Harris says "There is a Core of Truth to Religion That We Should Be Interested In."
2. NewsReal Sunday: It Really Is Better Here
3. NewsReal Sunday: Obama Greater Than Jesus? (Part 1)

While our younger staff members are dancing to the sounds of rock & roll, I felt that equal time should be afforded to those who prefer more TRADITIONAL musical interludes.

So sit back, and fasten your seat-belts, because you’re about to enjoy the single greatest performance ever recorded by a classical pianist, Vladimir Horowitz playing his own “Variation on the Theme from Bizet’s Carmen”.

Related posts:

1. Lunch Break
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I just read an interesting article, entitled “Don’t let ‘Climategate’ Melt Down Your Portfolio” by Avner Mandelman, that all investors should read, especially those who have put their money into “Green” stocks. In the article the author writes:

“If someone is pushing a theme for investing, check to see how they might profit from it.”

I think that’s excellent advice !

“You’ve probably read about “Climategate” – how thousands of hacked e-mails from climate scientists revealed that they colluded to fudge their conclusions about global warming, told each other to destroy incriminating e-mails and perhaps even dumped raw data to mask the fraud.

Why did it work? Because the falsified conclusions appealed to people’s good nature, and because the conspirators co-opted above-average rhetoricians to deliver their message.

Now why am I going on about this? For two reasons: First, because global warming is an investment theme that a few brokers are pushing; so, if you are a theme investor, be careful. Second, this sort of revelation is a perfect teaching moment of the madness of crowds.

Similar irrational manias included global cooling in the 1970s (when investors were urged to invest in thermal insulation, and the like); the Club of Rome’s fear that we’re running out of resources; the Internet dot-com bubble, when insane stock prices for companies without revenues were the norm; and others of the same ilk: mass hysterias that allowed a few media-savvy promoters to take the money of the many, by preying on their credulity, their emotions or both. Like global warming now.”

Read the entire article here.

Related posts:

1. Cap-And-Trade Loss A Stunner In Aussie Vote
2. The Hoax is Finally Exposed
3. Open Thread

One of the stories that we’ve been hearing for years now, in justification of the government’s refusal to allow any more drilling or the construction of any new refineries, is that our oil reserves are so low that they won’t last us very long if we use them.

It’s true that many people believed that in the past, and many apparently still do, but the truth that’s beginning to emerge now, is going to bury that idea, in the same way that we’re currently debunking the absurd idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

While there have been some stunning new discoveries, a huge part of our new found reserves, has come as a result of recent developments in drilling technology which now allow us to drill far deeper, as well as allowing us to change the direction that we’re drilling in once we’re already down quite deep. As a result of these new techniques, many of the existing proven reserves, can now supply us with far more oil than we thought possible before.

But the numbers are still stunning !

According to our government’s Energy Information Agency’s (EIA) latest report (March 2009) the total known oil reserves of the world amounted to roughly 1.3 trillion barrels of which the USA had only 21 billion. While that may sound like a lot of oil to some, it amounted to only 1.6% of the world’s known reserves. According to those statistics, Saudi Arabia, with 265 billion barrels, had close to 13 times as much oil in reserves, as the entire United States.

Now here’s the good news:

According to an Investor’s Business Daily (Investors.com) report dated Nov 5, 2009, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) in now reporting that the total known energy reserves of the world amounts to roughly 5.58 trillion barrels which is 4.3 times greater than what we had previously been told by the EIA. What’s even more exciting, is that Saudi Arabia, with 540 billion barrels no longer has the biggest slice of the pie. WE DO!

That’s right. According to the CRS statistics, America has 1.32 TRILLION barrels of reserves, or 2.4 times as much as Saudi Arabia, and this doesn’t include all the oil in the shale & tar sands which are mostly in Canada anyway.

According to the report, the breakdown of the world’s major reserves are as follows: (in billions of barrels)

1: USA: 1,320
2: Russia: 1,250
3: Saudi Arabia: 540
4: China: 490
5: Iran: 430

Numbers 6 thru 10 belong to the lesser Gulf States, along with Canada at 220, Venezuela at 160, and Nigeria at 130

The truth about the reserves has been known around the oil patch for some time now, but it totally freaks out the enviro fascists, because the majority of these reserves are located in our territorial waters, and all those mindless fools can think of is images of oil rigs visible all along the west coast, and the east & gulf coasts as well.

Of course the truth of the matter is that very few of those rigs would be visible at all, as most of the deposits are far enough from the beaches that they couldn’t be seen at all.

The next cry we’ll hear from the enviro fascists is how those rigs would cause an environmental disaster that would destroy the oceans of the world. By the time that happens we’ll probably be referring to BS like that as an “AlgorLie”, because it’s so darn far from the truth.

If you ask any experienced fisherman about offshore oil rigs, you’ll learn that the rigs actually become artificial reefs that attract marine life, not repel it. Fishermen LOVE them, and just like hunters, fishermen for the most part are the true environmentalists of their realm.

The risk to the environment from spills from offshore rigs, is extremely small, and frankly insignificant by comparison to the benefits that they will produce. With the trillions of dollars in wealth that they’d be creating, we’ll be able to clean up the worst possible spills far more efficiently than we have in the past, and we must remember that even the worst spills can indeed be cleaned up. It took quite a while to clean up the majority of the mess from the EXXON Valdez, and mother nature will take care of the rest over time, but the bottom line is that taking such a small risk in order to bring America back from her current bankrupt condition back to being the richest nation in the world once again, is a risk well worth taking. The only potential concern that I have is that we must first get rid of the socialists and communists who are currently running our country, because if a sociopath like Obama were to get his hands on that much wealth, we’d never be able to get out from under his control.

Is there nobody in the government or mainstream media who will tell us the truth about anything anymore?

“America has an energy crisis, America is bad, the Israelis are the real terrorists, and on top of that, the world’s about to be roasted on a spit”

HAS THE ENTIRE WORLD GONE MAD ?

F.S.

Related posts:

1. Obama to the World: Come and Take Our Oil
2. The Truth Behind Climategate and Hopenhagen
3. Brazen Democrats Defend White House Liar: Demand Wilson Apologize for Telling the Truth

Turnbull: Cap-and-trade kills a career.

An article was just published on Investors.com that’s really exciting.

Let’s hope this is contagious, and the rest of the American people wake up too!

This is great news for all supporters of rationality and common sense in government:

Cap-and-trade in Australia — which just a week ago was declared a certainty — is officially dead.

This is the first major climate change turnaround anywhere in the Western world, with significant implications for our domestic debate.

Combined with the Climate-gate e-mails revealing the data suppression and deceit underpinning “scientific consensus,” the whole climate change alarmism house of cards is coming crashing down.

Read the entire article here.

Related posts:

1. MSNBC: Congressman Pushes Cap and Trade, though It Would Cripple Economy
2. Pickens Explains His Support for Totalitarian Cap-and-Trade Bill
3. Quick: Cough-Up $10 Billion Bucks

The whistleblower deep in the basement of one of the ugly, modern tower-blocks of the dismal, windswept University of East Anglia could scarcely have timed it better.

In less than three weeks, the world’s governing class – its classe politique – would meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to discuss a treaty to inflict an unelected and tyrannical global government on us, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all once-free world markets and to tax and regulate the world’s wealthier nations for its own enrichment: in short, to bring freedom, democracy, and prosperity to an instant end worldwide, at the stroke of a pen, on the pretext of addressing what is now known to be the non-problem of manmade “global warming.”

As usual, we can always count on Lord Monckton to deliver the entire story. His new report: “ClimateGate: CAUGHT GREEN-HANDED!” Is a “Must Read” for anyone who wants to know the truth about all the nasty details of the biggest scientific fraud of the modern era.

Read the entire report here…

Relevant links:

Click here for Part 1 of this 5-part series.

Groucho Marx once said,

”Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”

I doubt that sentiment has ever more true than it is today. The entire Global Warming movement and all the idiocy that goes with it such as Cap & Trade, has become 100% political. There’s literally ZERO scientific evidence that validates the ridiculous CO2 theory that it’s based on.

Lord Monckton, in his inimitable way, explained exactly what’s really behind this entire scam to Americans quite succinctly when he displayed his “Traffic Light Tendency” during his recent presentation in Minnesota.

Recently, when Lord Monckton was on the Glenn Beck show of 10.30.09, the specific subject of the discussion from the very beginning was the upcoming Copenhagen Treaty, and the manner in which it will lead to the creation of a new “Global Government” by getting us to cede some of our sovereignty to this new entity.

Lord Monckton’s analysis about the true intentions of the participants, in response to Glenn’s questions, was spot on as usual, however as I said in the first part of this series, I believe that arguing against the AGW hoax, solely based on political and economic grounds, without exposing the underlying scientific lies that it’s based on, is the wrong way to tackle the problem. I continue to believe that, and despite some recent events which indicate that we MAY for the time being, be out of any IMMEDIATE danger from this travesty of reason, we shouldn’t let up on our attack, until this entire canard is dead and buried. And by “dead”, I mean that we have to drive a stake though its heart, because this nonsense, just like Islamic terrorism, has literally been going on for centuries.

On the more recent Glenn Beck show of Thursday 11.12.09, for the first time, someone (Glenn) actually had the chutzpah to spell out in precise terms the complete truth about Obama’s 3 pronged attack against our Constitution and our way of life. Cap & Trade is clearly one of those 3 key parts of his strategy. Science no longer has anything to do with it. It did for a brief while during the early 1980’s when climate statistics pointed to a possible relationship between global warming and increasing levels of CO2, however it didn’t take the scientific community very long to conclusively prove that increases in atmospheric CO2 didn’t lead to rising temperatures, but that the reverse was true, that warming, due to the earth’s natural cycles of climate change, was responsible for the increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. From that point on, everything that you’ve heard and said in support of the AGW theory has been a bald faced lie, put out there for purely political purposes.

Recently however, we HAVE seen some interesting things happen. Foremost among the reasons for the signs of doubt arising in the minds of some of our more hypocritical legislators, is the fact that many of them are becoming aware of the risks they will be taking come election time, if they vote for Cap & Trade, or to ratify the Copenhagen treaty, assuming Obama signs it. But we STILL can’t afford to become complacent about this.

U.S. DEMOCRATS THROW IN THE TOWEL ON CLIMATE BILL

Key Senate Democrats Tuesday said it is unlikely there will be any more major committee action on climate-change legislation this year, the strongest indication yet that a comprehensive bill to cut greenhouse-gas emissions won’t be voted on until at least next year. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.), who is leading an effort by moderate, heartland Democrats to protect manufacturing and agriculture industries, said committees were no longer under any timetables to produce legislation. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D., Ark.), who chairs the Agriculture Committee, is facing a tough re-election campaign next year, and handling a highly controversial climate-change bill in her panel may risk alienating voters.
Ian Talley, The Wall Street Journal, 11 November 2009

Isn’t it great how the typical politician’s most deeply held beliefs go right out the window when they might hinder their chances for re-election?

But even though there HAVE been some positive signs in the last few weeks, these events are in no way a guarantee that Obama won’t just ram these bills down our throats at the last moment using his supermajority in congress to pull it off.

There’s one more aspect of the “energy” issue that truly puzzles me. For years our government has been restricting our access to our own oil reserves based on environmental concerns, and by arguing that we don’t have enough reserves to satisfy our energy needs for very long. I’m pretty sure however, that the argument that our oil reserves are insufficient to satisfy our long term energy needs is completely false. According to EIA (the U.S. Energy Information Administration) figures, (in billions of barrels) we have only 21BBL of oil reserves, which account for only 1.7% of the world’s known reserves of 1,232BBL. (USA 21, or 1.7%, of the world’s total of 1,232, with the Middle East having 745 or roughly 60%). Since it’s hard for me to believe anything the government says these days. I tend to believe the other reports that I’ve read that claim that the EIA statistics on oil reserves are pure hogwash.

According to a recent article from Investor’s Business Daily, which in my humble opinion is a far more credible source of information than the EIA, the USA actually has 1,320BBL, which account for 29% of the world’s known reserves of 4,450BBL. (USA 1,320, or 29%, of the world’s total of 4,450, with the Middle East having 1,330 also roughly 29%

So what does all this mean? Since I tend to be rather suspicious about the true intentions of the current administration, (and the last 16 years of Clinton and Bush as well,) I’ll be waiting to hear what NewsReal’s readers think. But I’d be very surprised if the consensus here, doesn’t agree with me that getting rid of the vast majority of our politicians, and the many useless bureaucracies that they’ve created, would make us far better off than we are today.

As for lies that have been perpetrated on America (and indeed the entire world) about our environment and climate change, by liars like Al Gore, the IPCC, and the extremists in the environmental community, all I can say is that like many other lies that the American people have fallen for in the last 50 years or so, we were warned about this one as well, and we totally ignored what we were told.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
 Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
 Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell address, 17 January 1961

I’d like to once again express my gratitude to SPPI and to Lord Monckton, for their gracious support and ALL that I’ve learned from them, and I’d also like to thank Amanda Wenger, for creating the lovely “CO2 Flower” artwork, that David and I selected to be the “logo” for this series.

Click here for Part 1 of this 5-part series.

One of the most common problems people have when I explain the truth about the AGW hoax, is that they simply can’t understand how such a huge number of people in science, government, the UN, and the media can all be lying. Of course they’re NOT all lying. A large percentage of these people are just blind followers, who believe that the AGW theory must be true, simply because President Barack Obama, former Vice President Al Gore and all those big shot scientists, media spokesmen and “environmentalists” say it is. When you think about it, it’s easy to understand why that’s the case.

But they ARE lying, and we’ve known that for a fact for quite a while now.

When you think about it, it almost seems like a case of mass hysteria caused by a mass psychosis of some kind. Maybe the conspiracy theorists were right when they started complaining about the government fluoridating our water supply. H.L. Mencken once said that,

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public”

An updated version of that famous quote for today, when referring to “the great unwashed” might read: “Nobody ever went broke overestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

We now know of course, that the entire CO2 story they’ve been pushing is pure nonsense. As I said in Part 2 of this series: It’s The Sun Stupid! Since there IS no scientific evidence that CO2 has anything more than an insignificant effect on our climate, the IPCC has been covering their tracks for years. As the absurdity of their entire scientific premise began to become more obvious to rational observers, they started massaging the data to fit their story in rather extraordinary ways. The best example of this is seen in their “Hockey Stick” graph.

When the IPCC issued it’s first report in 1991, before they became as corrupt as they are now, they used a simplified but accurate version of the graph, showing the temperature history of the last thousand years. So we have to take one more look at it, as I believe what you’re about to see may well prove to be the smoking gun that puts these liars out of business.

It’s easy to see what their problem was… it was the Medieval Warm Period. In order to get anyone to believe that the emissions from our use of hydrocarbon based fuels were the primary cause of warming, they would need to explain what caused the 3 centuries of warming leading up to the peak of the Medieval Warm Period. In his presentation made in Minnesota, Lord Monckton spoke of a University of Oklahoma Geology professor by the name of David Deming, who said that in 2005 he received an email from someone deeply involved in the AGW movement which said: “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”, and that’s exactly what they did, with their new graph which replaced the one above. This new graph appeared for the first time in the IPCC’s 2001 report, and it’s called the “HOCKEY-STICK” for obvious reasons.

The IPCC’s infamous and now discredited “hockey-stick” graph that falsely abolished the medieval warm period and enhanced by at least half of the true temperature increase since 1980, giving the misleading impression that temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century were unprecedented in the recent history of the Earth. In fact temperatures were warmer than the present for almost two-thirds of the last 10,000 years – most recently during the “medieval climate optimum,” a period from about 950 to 1350 A.D. The “hockey-stick” appeared in the IPCC’s 2001 assessment report six time, and in full color, the only graph to be so favored. The graph was not based on science. It was a political statement.

They deny falsifying any of the statistics of course, and say that they merely “normalized” the earlier data. They also fail to disclose what they’ve done to the more recent data on this graph. Notice the red lines at the far right side of the graph? They’re not red in the IPCC report. What they don’t tell you is that the red line data above, comes only from Northern Hemisphere statistics. They don’t represent real “global” statistics at all! They’ve been lying through their teeth for years, and we know it. Gore however wasn’t satisfied with the IPCC’s lies, he had go one better. They didn’t seem scary enough to him, so he predicted that the melting ice sheets in the arctic would cause sea levels to rise 610cm (20 ft), even though the IPCC’s prediction for sea level rise was only 6cm (2.36”).

Gore’s been simply shameless with his lies. Remember how he keeps telling us, that the consensus is in, and that the 2,500 scientists at the IPCC have proved it? Well the fact is that the IPCC’s climate estimates were based on only 4 scientific papers, not on the consensus of 2,500 scientists. I don’t think any rational person can look at the two graphs above, and see the IPCC’s reports as anything other than what they are, a pack of lies.

Fortunately, we do have 2 things to be happy about right now.

The first is what I like to think of as a divine intervention. It began when the warming ended in 1998, continues to this day, and will probably last for the next 10 to 20 years, as the earth has now entered another cooling cycle. Solar activity goes up and down in known cycles that allow us to make fairly accurate predictions. I can’t wait to see the first photo of Gore in a heavy overcoat and earmuffs, but the lying weasel will probably be hiding under his desk at his beach front condo for the next 20 or so winters from now on. I think it’s a safe bet that we’ll never see any more photos of him skiing with his family

The second is that it looks like these charlatans may already know that the jig is up, and have begun to circle their wagons in order to begin their cover-up. On September 23, 2009, writing in The National Review Online, Patrick Michaels published an article entitled “The Dog Ate Global Warming.” The article begins as follows:

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Legitimate scientists have been filing freedom of information act suits, demanding to see the original data upon which the IPCC and others involved in this scam have been basing their projections and their conclusion, and just as you would expect, the dog ate the data!

I recommend that you read the whole story, which you can do right here.

In Part 5, we’ll conclude with the political ramifications of this whole disgusting affair.