Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
From an interview with Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a man of whom Bill Clinton said “We should all heed his advice”:
You’ve talked before about the civilizational challenge that climate change poses, how confident are you that the human race is up to meeting that challenge?
We don’t know and there is no guarantee that we will. But we do know that change can come very quickly. Look how quickly the US restructured its whole economy in 1942. At beginning of 1942, the automobile companies were producing automobiles. By the middle of 1942 they were all producing tanks and planes. It didn’t take decades or years, just a few months and they totally converted. If they could do that then, certainly we can restructure the world energy economy today. What Roosevelt did was ban the sale of cars. He didn’t say they couldn’t produce cars. He just banned the sale of cars.
Would you like to see President Obama do that?
I’d like to see him ban the sale of coal and oil.
Dear heavens, the Imperial President should “ban the sale of coal and oil”? Oh, yeah, that’s the ticket. Some 40% of US electricity, lots of our industrial energy, and ~ 100% of our transportation fuel comes from coal and oil, so I’m sure that other than the small matter of impoverishment, suffering, death, and economic ruin, banning them wouldn’t cause any disruption at all … while I want to ask “is this Imperious Idiot for real?”, the sad truth is that Lester Brown is totally serious.
But even more frightening than the horrendous economic disruption and human suffering from such a suicidal course of action is that Lester Brown is advocating tyranny, and given his history, our Imperial President Obama would likely be more than happy to accommodate him.
As a candidate, Obama spoke out strongly against expanded executive power, saying in October of 2007:
These last few years we’ve seen an unacceptable abuse of power at home. We’ve paid a heavy price for having a president whose priority is expanding his own power.
and
I taught constitutional law for ten years. I take the Constitution very seriously. The biggest problems that were facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all, and that’s what I intend to reverse when I’m President of the United States of America.
After watching George Bush, Obama’s position on limiting executive power was one of the reasons I voted for him in 2008 … back before I realized that if Obama’s lips were moving, there were non-zero odds that he was lying, as in this case. Which is one of the reasons why I voted against him in 2012.
Now that he’s in power, and particularly now that he’s in his second term, he’s decided that he gets the last say on everything under the sun, and has presided over a huge increase in executive power, viz:
Whenever this Congress refuses to act in a way that hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, I’ve got an obligation as president to do what we can without them.
Despite being a “constitutional scholar”, he seems to misunderstand the separation of powers. He has no such obligation. It’s not his job to decide what “hurts the economy and puts the people at risk”, and more importantly, he has no such power. If the Congress decides not to pass a law, that’s their choice. The President’s job is to be the “Chief Executive”, and as such, the Constitution says he is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”. Nowhere is he given the power to make or interpret the laws. That is the job of Congress on the one hand and the Courts on the other … and if Congress won’t act, well, tough. If you don’t like the Congress, vote them out of office.
However, obviously, neither President Obama nor Lester Brown see it that way. As we just saw with the new regulations involving coal plants, President Obama is more than happy to make new “environmental” laws by presidential edict. And I’m sure that both the Imperial President and the Imperious Idiot firmly believe that Obama has the power to ban the sale gas and oil.
The Founding Fathers were very concerned that the President should NOT have this kind of imperial powers, and for good reason. They’d seen the damage that strong-men had done in a variety of monarchies and tyrannies. So they devised a system of “separation of powers”—Congress makes the laws, the President enforces the laws, and the Supreme Court interprets the laws.
Sadly, we have fallen very far from that, and President Obama has done immense damage to that system by “solving” every problem, from glitches with Obamacare to interim appointments to immigration reform to destroying coal plants, by imperial proclamation. At this point, all I can do is fervently hope he doesn’t listen to Lester Brown …
Gotta say … 2016 can’t come fast enough for me.
w.
End Note: Please do not use this as a springboard for general political attacks on either side. There are lots of web pages for doing that. The issue here is the Imperious Idiot’s asinine proposal to ban the sale of coal and oil, and the Imperial President’s claim that he has the executive power to do just about anything, presumably including Lester’s proposed ban.
The Usual: If you disagree with something that I or anyone has said, please QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU DISAGREE WITH. This avoids many misunderstandings.
The Interview: The full interview is here.
Obama is working hard to get a seat in UN(EP) World Government politburo or central committee?
The best guarantee that a “ban the sale of coal and oil” will never happen is the simple fact that a “ban the sale of fire arms” has been shown to be impossible. People tend to shoot back at those who ruin their lives.
I expect that he says these things because he knows nobody will do anything of the sort.
The good news is the USA just surpassed Saudi as the largest producer of oil on earth.
A person such as Brown, would ( will ) NEVER comprehend the junk science of CAGW. Thus it is folly, futile, a waste of time, a spinning of wheels, zero expectation to EVEN ponder his or Nobamas possible ambitions with regard to oil / coal. This is shock and awe over a bankrupt, fraudulent illusion.
Buy national media time, hit these idiots in the face with current climate science.
“I’d like to see him ban the sale of coal and oil.”
In Norway this could have been a hardcore leftist and what they really wants is a radical change of society.
If you ban the sale of coal and oil in the USA I can guarantee you an instant radical change of the American society?
” Will Nitschke says:
July 5, 2014 at 12:24 am
I expect that he says these things because he knows nobody will do anything of the sort.”
No, that’s why he says them once…he keeps saying them, like a kid in the backseat on the way to Grandma’s ‘Are we there yet?’ will eventually be right, hopefully much sooner than later. All the while the driver is hoping there are not any cops with radar guns around because the kid has passed the point of annoyance about 500 repeats ago and now getting there quickly is top priority.
Don’t you get it? The implication is that if we just ban the sale of oil and gas we will seamlessly switch to renewables. The only reason we have not switched so far, in the progressivist mind, is that the producers of oil & gas steadfastly refuse to ALLOW such a switch. In the progressivist mind, the only way around the evil corporations is to use benign government (run by them) to push the corp’s aside.
Hey, maybe it’ll work.
At this point, a President once in office can do anything at all as long as one third plus one of the Senate are willing to vote against charges of impeachment brought by the House of Representatives. (Yes, this makes it ridiculously difficult to remove a bad chief executive from office and at this point we would all be much better off under a parliamentary system where the prime minister can be removed with a simple “no-confidence” majority vote of the legislature.) So, under our present system, are there one third plus one Senators willing to ban oil and coal?
If you want a book to convince you that imperial is bad, this is it:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Count-Revolution-Betrayal-Cristo/dp/0307382478/
The subject of this biography is a man with a white father and a black mother who was a hero in the French Revolution. He is also the hero of the book, but the book is also about Napoleon, whose role model was Caesar, and who reminded me of a certain Austrian dictator. There is also much of interest in this book about the American Founding Fathers and why their revolution was successful and why they devised a system with separation of powers. The book also shows what happens when an imperial guy subverts the system.
Barack Obama is demonstrated, proven serial, compulsive liar.
Anything he says, cannot be trusted on its own without independent verification.
What else is there to know?
He wants to take the American people on a 30 years walk in the Sinai desert. I think they call it social engineering?
Unfortunately, it is due to poor education, and the fact that there is a left wing/liberal bias in education that kids are not taught the importance of the industrial revolution.
There is a reason why we are the developed world, why we have such differing life expectancies when compared to thoose in the developing world and 3rd world, why we have such greatly different rates of infant mortality, mothers dying in child birth etc. Why we do not live a life of servitude and why many of us own our own properties or can rent something decent. It is all built on the back of coal and more lately oil and gas.
It is fossil fues that have set us free (and I mean that quite literally we only have to look what life was like for our forefathers in the 1700s) and which have created thw world that we live in and one which we take for granted.
Why would anyone wish to cast us back in to the dark ages is beyond me. They have no handle on who we are and why we are as we are and the road that has been traversed to get us to that point. Sheer madness.
“Lester Brown is totally serious”
In my view, Lester is one those academics who can’t tell the difference with proportion anymore.
An academic’s job is partly to address weaknesses in the normal operations of society and the market, however for some reason some people are unable to tell the difference between a weakness and the system itself, and so take the weaknesses and turn them into a projected fantasy, such that the weakness then becomes the system. Of course its a very convoluted process and other things are involved, but North Korea is a good example of this kind of thing, and it’s partly why we don’t give governments too much power; government responsibility to address weakness has a curious effect on the mind of some people, it turn them into raving nutcases- Lester Brown is one of them.
Lester Brown in my opinion truly is an idiot – if you “ban the sale of coal and oil”, companies could use the wartime Germany coal to fuel process to convert coal and oil into gas.
The process goes as follows:-
1. Combine coal with superheated steam at enormous pressure and temperature
2. Half the coal is converted into CO2, as the oxygen in the water vapour preferentially combines with carbon in the coal. The other half of the coal combines with the hydrogen in the water vapour, to form methanol, and other hydrocarbons.
So, true to form for green policies, “ban the sale of coal and oil” would cause tremendous economic damage, yet at the same time would cause a colossal increase in CO2 emissions, as coal and oil companies fought to survive, by resurrecting proven technologies for converting coal into hydrocarbons.
The Germans ran an entire wartime economy on this process – they didn’t have access to oil fields, so they had to make do with what they had – large reserves of coal. So there is nothing theoretical about this process, it works.
Would this be a ban on the sale of coal and oil just to US customers or global? If the current trend is anything to go by, a ban in the US would just mean that the coal and oil would be exported and the CO₂ emitted somewhere else.
“From an interview with Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a man of whom Bill Clinton said “We should all heed his advice”:”
Or he is just a professional scaremonger that has a use for politicians with an Agenda?
“The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it” — H L Mencken
Again I m sorry if this is off comment, but what has happened to no tricks zone. ?
Bloke, the price of oil would plummet overnight, down to a third of it’s current price. The saudis would go bust, the rest of us would be paying american prices for fuel. In Europe the ban will disrupt Mercedes, BMW etc. exports, but the economic effects should be more than compensated overall by the boost to economic activity from the cheap fuel. In the US there won’t be any electricity spare for charging electric cars, so no point in switching over to manufacture them, and it’ll take far too long to ship all those batteries by horse and cart anyway.
How long would it take to reorganise the US economy? How fast do horses breed and grow? The people who make cart-springs for pickup trucks, they’ll do well with all the new business for horse drawn carts and buggies.
No mention of Lester Brown is complete without this link to a Matt-Damon-narrated PBS piece that shows the Great Lester in all his glory.
http://video.pbs.org/video/1864227276
I looked for a way to top this so I tried to find a video of Lester Brown talking to Noam Chomsky but no such video exists; together they would probably reach critical mass and make the world implode.
The issue here is the Imperious Idiot’s asinine proposal to ban the sale of coal and oil, and the Imperial President’s use of executive power to do that.
I’m no fan of Obama these days but he has not used executive power to ban the sale of coal and oil. The author is gripped by fever, and needs aspirin and bed rest.
Lester Brown is a great proponent of Agenda21 that has at its core the need for global governance and large population reductions. This guy isn’t just an asinine idiot he is driven by the tempting smell of power that corrupts so many minds. You think driving the US into the dark ages is a problem for agenda21 proponents? You think a few deaths matter to those that view the thinking westerners as the biggest threat to imposing their new world order? You really underestimate these sociopaths methinks.
Lenin : “Words are one thing, actions are another.”
In other words, tell the suckers what they want to hear, then get on with your real agenda.
It’s little different here in the UK, where everybody knows virtually all our politicians lie to us virtually all the time. On the big issues, all 3 major parties sing the same song : unlimited immigration is good for the economy ; the EU will be our saviour. Patent claptrap. People have switched off big style, voter turnout rates are dismal. Which is what the 1%s want in their insatiable lust for power & control.
The Imperious idiot (good call) refers to full cost accounting re coal, ie asthma, heart disease & respiratory illnesses. He does not mention geoengineering.
Google “What in the world are they spraying?” A 97 min. film produced by G. Edward Griffin +2.
Or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf0khstYDLA
Brit version by David Lim, a young scientist from Reading University:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-zRREd8DZQ 84 mins. 2+ years of research.
Alternative titles you could put in the search box :
Pilots must learn about Geoengineering and Chemtrails, present…
OR : Increases in extreme weather, food prices & illness
That says it all really.
I’ve never smoked a cigarette ( of any variety 🙂 ) my whole life, & I was playing squash & footie till my mid forties, loved it. I’ve got asthma the last few years. Barium & aluminium particles they’re spraying on us.
Obama is a former lawyer, from Chicago (?), and now politician. And you are surprised when his mouth moves he’s lieing? Reminds me of a joke. How do you know a politician is lieing? Their mouth is moving.
I knew the whole “AGW” theory was complete bunkum when Thatcher gave her speach to the UN in 1989. And then Gore speaches in the 90’s. And many other pollies since.
“Ed Zuiderwijk says:
July 5, 2014 at 12:23 am”
As I understand, there is a strong drive by pollies in the US to follow Australia’s gun laws and banning ownership of guns that the Howard Govn’t suceeded introducing in the 1990’s. This, as you know, does not affect outlaws. Gun ownership in Australia is now higher than then. Gun crime has not decreased. Homemade guns and illegal gun imports are increasing.
“… was one of the reasons I voted for him in 2008”
<sarc>Thanks.</sarc>
Whenever this Congress refuses to act in a way that hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, I’ve got an obligation as president to do what we can without them.
===========
err excuse me, when congress refuses to act in a way that HURTS our economy?
so
if they try and stop hurt hes going to step in, over ride and CAUSE harm?
call me pedantic but he said exactly what hes doing right out n openly..
why isnt someone starting proceedings?
No US President current or future, is going to ban the sale of Coal and Oil. It doesn’t matter what Lester says, it won’t happen.
Obarmy has far worse than this dope closer to him in the White House :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3Eo2YTQUr8
OR :Webster Tarpley : The Elite’s Plan for Global Extermination
A 55 min. deconstruction of the deadly Dr. John Holdren, science czar to the insane.
Holdren was screaming global doom & the swift need for vast depopulation, from global COOLING, back in the 70s, along with the venomous Ehrlich,now it’s global warming, but the depopulation agenda is constant.
Ted Turner, multi billionaire owner of CNN, propaganda factory for the 1%s, & one of the most powerful men on this planet, has openly espoused a 95% population reduction.
There’s no shortage of these Eugenicist barstewards, look at Bill Gates with his deadly vaccines.
Google up the Billionaire Good Club.
Reminds me of an Ecologist booklet I read as a 19 year old student, in 1972 :
A Blueprint For Survival.
A Club of Rome scare special, oil was going to run out by the year 2000, Sometime between
1980 & 1990 the demand for arable land would exceed supply.
No less than 34 “distinguished scientists”, most with 3 or 4 bunches of letters after their names,
signed a “Statement of Support” for this worthy piece of dumb doom mongering.
Prominent among them was Sir Julian Huxley, UN Eugenicist in Chief.
The issue never was climate.
It’s all about depopulation & control.
The CO2 producers they’re after, that’s us.
Insanity commands, idiocy advises, the 1% rule.
Classic strawman. 1) America managed to change its industry very quickly in response to war. 2) America now needs to change its industry because I want it to do so. Sentence 1 and 2 are not linked in anyway whatsoever. However the idiot is trying to say that they are. Is America under attack? Is America going to be overheat from climate change in the next few months? Does America need to do something today to change the future? None of these questions can be answered in the positive, therefore the imperious idiot is at fault.
I wonder if Lester Brown would ever be heard answering this question in the same way:
Would you like to see President Xi Jinping of China do that?
“I’d like to see him ban the sale of coal and oil.”
Ironically, Xi is probably a President more capable of carrying out such a policy – but he’s not stupid enough to do so. On the other hand, Obama……
When governments oppose science, they look not only foolish but sometimes bizarre.
Consider what a Canadian government produced (skip to the CO@ generation):
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm
about how to increase CO2 inside greenhouses up to 1,000 ppm for optimal plant growth. Nearly all literature on greenhouses clearly state that CO2 must be replaced quickly because plants are just ravenous to “eat” CO2.
This has got to be grade school stuff. You build a greenhouse. Plants are put in. Temperatures increase yet CO2 “goes missing”. Temperatures rise and the greenhouse has to be cooled (by venting) which brings in more CO2. If you add lots of CO2 into the greenhouse, the temperatures are raised minimally.
It’s inescapable, either the political leaders are really as dumb as polls suggest or CO2 it’s just a means to an end. Most readers here can make the logic leap to the end game.
I have commented about it on some other post.
The EU and the USA use “climate change” to drive energy policy. I call it Informal Imperialism.
It is hard for the bottom billion.
They need electricity and clean water, and it can only be done with proper use of coal.
Ask the people in SS Africa.
“Congress makes the laws, the President enforces the laws, and the Supreme Court interprets the laws.”
One would hope that if the president violates this rule, which no doubt the constitution makes very clear, it would open the way to his impeachment?
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
DavidS says: “No US President current or future, is going to ban the sale of Coal and Oil. It doesn’t matter what Lester says, it won’t happen.”
“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” Obama told the Chronicle . “Coal-powered plants, you know, natural gas, you name it, whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.”
Since congress didn’t pass cap-and-trade, the alternate choice was using the EPA to bypass congress. Don’t have to ban sales when these products can be over-regulated. Over-regulation is even better than passing laws, because people that create unnecessary and unpopular laws can be voted out, but people in the EPA were never voted in. At this point in time, the EPA would appear to have more power than congress in creating and enforcing laws and regulations.
willis you are a true man..admitting one’s errors is difficult, if not impossible, for many.
What do only coal & oil have to do with it? If CO2 is the problem than any and all CO2 producing fuels are at fault: fossilized sources of natural gas & ethanol, contemporary sources of methane & ethanol, wood, et. al. Let’s simply return mankind to the days before fire.
“Any kid can work out a program of more ice cream and less school and free movies and him telling other people what to do instead of people always telling him.”
James Gould Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust. 1942
Oh, & BTW. The US utility industry does not use oil to make electricity so alternatives like wind, photovoltaics, improved appliance efficiency, CFLs, nuclear, etc. make zero difference in the amount of oil the US uses or imports or converts to CO2.
What transportation fuel derives from coal???
“…loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this. It also means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary.”
1984
cn
Bring back the gas bag car!
http://gekgasifier.com/forums/index.php?/topic/620-want-to-store-woodgas-the-gas-bag-vehicle/
Excellent Willis.
He says he has a responsibility to act but he’s wrong.
He has a responsibility to not act as he swore in his oath of office.
The duty of He and the other two branches is to protect the US Constitution.
cn
“A nation that can’t control its energy sources can’t control its future.” ― Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
The reality is that “A nation that lacks affordable energy and misuses its sources can’t control its future.”
The damage already done will result in future blackouts and economic instability. And history teaches that those who seek power are often strengthened by crisis.
And when we do have shortages and blackouts … they’ll be even more intense pressure to centralize control and “manage” scarce resources.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. Robert A. Heinlein
Why not go to your search engine and Google: “Fall of the Republic HQ” and then watch the video that comes up. (That video has been on line for quite a few years now but it is still valid today)
1 June 2014: Washington Times: Rowan Scarborough: Pentagon wrestles with bogus climate warnings as funds shifted to green agenda
Ten years ago, the Pentagon paid for a climate study that put forth many scary scenarios.
Consultants told the military that, by now, California would be flooded by inland seas, The Hague would be unlivable, polar ice would be mostly gone in summer, and global temperatures would rise at an accelerated rate as high as 0.5 degrees a year.
None of that has happened…
The report also became gospel to climate change doomsayers, who predicted pervasive and more intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts…Doug Randall, who co-authored the Pentagon report, said, “Even I’m surprised at how often it’s referred to…
Asked about his scenarios for the 2003-2010 period, Mr. Randall said in an interview: “The report was really looking at worst-case. And when you are looking at worst-case 10 years out, you are not trying to predict precisely what’s going to happen but instead trying to get people to understand what could happen to motivate strategic decision-making and wake people up. But whether the actual specifics came true, of course not. That never was the main intent.”…
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/1/pentagon-wrestles-with-false-climate-predictions-a/?page=all
This Pentagon climate report speaks to the heart of false climate science alarmism that is rampant to day .These alarmist climate science reports are meant to exaggerate and scare people. They do not highlight that these are worst case projections in the opening paragraph. These qualifications never make the headlines or press releases .The rational world does not plan for the future based on worst case scenarios. We might as well all quit living if this was the case . No nation can afford to spend money to mitigate worst case scenarios, nor should they. The problem is that some politicians take these worst case situations and make public policies and actions as if they were true. They then fabricate entirely new falsehoods like carbon dioxide is a pollutant on top of these worst case scenarios and you now have a firm government action thrust on the general public that is all pure fabrication of a worst case scenario that will never come about. Yet it comes from the highest administrative offices in the land
Now does it make any sense to ban oil or gas in order to comply with worst case projections that will never come about. ? Common sense seems to have left Washington.
We just have to find a way to keep those damn dead people from voting.
Would Obama have won the last election if he told people about how was going to placate the greens by banning new coal plants, wasting $billions on alternative energy, trying to bring in Carbon taxes, requiring US states to cut emissions in their state by 30%, and stalling new pipelines.
He hardly talked about climate change at all. And no one asked him to explain what he was going to do about global warming. Everyone was quite happy to ignore the issue, the Republicans thinking they had won the debate and it was too risky to bring up climate change at all.
If governments are going to bring in Carbon taxes, they should be forced to reveal that when they are going to the polls.
Another one of these iluminados wants to ban ambulances because, according to him, they pollute a great deal and only “fascist” need them anyway.
The hydrogen content of typical coals ranges from 5% to 10%, carbon content from 40% to 80%, balance contains ash, sulfur, water. Wide variation in composition. Methane, CH4, is 25% hydrogen, 75% carbon. Methane combustion produces about half as much CO2/E6Btu as coal (H2 is hot stuff!) and about twice the water vapor. Since the energy contained in the water vapor is not recovered (like in my condensing furnace) it must be counted as an energy loss up the stack. Tradition insists that coal uses HHV, higher heating value, and must count this water vapor energy loss up the stack. Natural gas fired CCPPs use LHV, lower heating value, and do not count this loss up the HRSG stack (PTC 4.4). If both were compared on HHV the CCPP stack loss would increase 11 percent (not percentage!), i.e. HHV/LHV.
As I understand it the EPA regulation is 1,000 pounds CO2/MWh. My back of the envelope has CCPPs at around 600 lb/MWh, simple cycle around 1,000 lb/MWh, and coal at about 2,200 lb/MWh. It also seems to me that under equal protection of the law any and all sources of CO2 must meet that same limit, your NG/oil fired space and water heater, your gasoline and diesel powered cars and trucks (horsepower, Btu equivalent of 1,000 lb CO2/MWh). i.e. 1,000 lb CO2/.003412 Btu. (I haven’t looked yet, but suspect there’s a physics conundrum here.)
All that converting coal generation to natural gas generation accomplishes is to create a much more competitive & unstable marketplace for natural gas and kick the CO2 can further down the road.
Buggy whip futures are UP!
‘What Roosevelt did was ban the sale of cars. He didn’t say they couldn’t produce cars. He just banned the sale of cars.’
Um, could Lester Brown please explain precisely what, in his mind, the difference is?
”
Jake J says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:53 am
The issue here is the Imperious Idiot’s asinine proposal to ban the sale of coal and oil, and the Imperial President’s use of executive power to do that.
I’m no fan of Obama these days but he has not used executive power to ban the sale of coal and oil. The author is gripped by fever, and needs aspirin and bed rest.
”
Of course they are not banning the sale. They are already banning the USE. The EPA has been setting up impossible standards for new coal plant use already. IT’S DONE! Next will be existing facilities and the plan is to bankrupt the companies using coal.
BTW, Willis, your title should have IDIOT in the title plural because it’s applicable to both brown and obama.
The Obama way is the classic ‘African way’ that we have seen for decades in countries like Zimbabwe and other politically corrupt African nations with their tin-pot ‘dictators’. It is not the American way, and Americans are obliged to remind Obama of this.
So Willis, you seem like a man who takes action when you see things that need action. We use your efforts. Article V of the Constitution provides that the States, 2/3 required, can apply and require Congress to call a Convention for Proposing Amendments. Amendments proposed and passed by 3/4 of the State legislatures become part of the Constitution WITHOUT THE APPROVAL of Congress. In other words, Congress has no vote, nor does the President. Currently the move is underway to do this and we are getting close to the 2/3 of States required to call the Convention. One of the amendments to be proposed is term limits on the members of the House and Senate; something that they would never do to themselves. If only this amendment passed it would dramatically shift the power from Washington back to the States. You can learn more here:
http://action.conventionofstates.com/movements/convention
FYI, this convention is not called to rewrite the Constitution as some opponents say as a scare tactic. It is only for proposing amendments.
Jake J says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:53 am
The issue here is the Imperious Idiot’s asinine proposal to ban the sale of coal and oil, and the Imperial President’s use of executive power to do that.
I’m no fan of Obama these days but he has not used executive power to ban the sale of coal and oil. The author is gripped by fever, and needs aspirin and bed rest.
Jake
Where have you been? The EPA has virtually killed the sale of coal for power generation. Willis is has tagged this president as imperial I would tag him dictator complete with soviet style commissars.
nickreality65 says: “What transportation fuel derives from coal???”
The electricity that is used to charge batteries in electric cars.
Obama is an arrogant narcissist with way too much power. A narcissist without power is a nuisance. A narcissist with power is dangerous.
The kooks flock to Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama does not disappoint them.
Co2 SCIENCE blog has an article on Dark Ages Cold Period(Europe) The article mentions that during our recent past there have been three major cooling periods, namely
975-250 BC- SUBATLANTIC COOL PERIOD
250 BC-450 AD- DARK AGES COOL PERIOD
1400-1850 AD- LITTLE ICE AGE
I think we could experience a similar cooling period during the remaining part of this century
if the oceans continue to cool as they did in the past
Oil and gas will not be banned .It may be rationed . During just one severe winter(2013/2014) , propane and natural gas were already in short supply in many parts of United States. Regional supply was rationed until the supplies were restored
.Ocean cycles are 65-70 years and cool period runs 30-35 years . There could be two such cold troughs before 2100 if past history is a guide. We had similar shorter cool periods more recently1790-1850,1900-1926, and 1964-1995 when the North Atlantic was running cold and AMO was negative.
“A nation that can’t control its energy sources can’t control its future.” ― Barack Obama
========
“A nation that can’t control its leaders can’t control its future.” ― We the People
One measure of Brown’s ignorance is his belief that what FDR did at the start of WWII – convince
(not order) our automakers to convert to war production is in no conceivable way equivalent to what he is suggesting – FDR’s order simply meant that no one could buy a new car during the war.
It didn’t require building some new transportation infrastructure or a new mode of transportation.
So much for Brown’s World War Two analogy.
The only practical alternatve to a gasoline powered car would be a natural gas powered car, which
is not exactly a giant positive leap if you’re talking carbon emissions. Ditto for coal – every utility would immediately build gas powered electric generators, as they have since the time when fracking caused the price of natural gas to drop precipitously, from being “a very expensive method of making electricity” to almost as cheap as nuclear power, our cheapest form of electricity. No giant leap in carbon reduction there either, and the supply of natural gas is not infinite, especially when everyone starts using it to both power their cars and make most of their electricity. His banning of coal and gasoline would almost certainly simply replace those two fuels with natural gas. Using natural gas in an open cycle gas turbine produces carbon emissions not all that different than what you emit using coal.
Cutting electric power emissions is very simply done – put up a trillion dollars as no interest loans
for building nuclear plants. That would build 200 nuclear plants, each guaranteed to last at least 60 years (80 to 100 years more likely) , which would , in conjuction with our existing nuclear and hydro provide for roughly 85% emission free electric power. Sending the Treasury payments of one cent for each kilowatt hour of power produced by each new nuclear plant would completely repay the loan in 50 years. Problem solved.
After watching George Bush, Obama’s position on limiting executive power was one of the reasons I voted for him in 2008 … back before I realized that if Obama’s lips were moving, there were non-zero odds that he was lying, as in this case.
=========================================================
Sorry you didn’t do a little more homework back then? Obama’s actions have been entirely predictable to, and predicted by, those of us who looked beyond the disinformation promulgated by the propaganda arm of the DNC (a.k.a. “mainstream media”).
That he was an outright liar was completely obvious: Bill Ayers was “just a guy from his neighborhood”. Oh, yeah, and the bit that he forgot to mention: Ayers hired Obama to head the Annenberg Challenge and worked with him on the Woods Fund, and was introduced as Alice Palmer’s successor at Ayers’ home.
All these facts were available at that time.
The point being that Obama was an obvious liar in 2007.
Having just passed July 4th, as an outsider (Canadian) looking in, I can’t help but think that the US has become what they fought against and declared independent from in 1776. There is no representation from Congress anymore and the Presidency has morphed into a Monarchy that has more power over people’s lives, both individually and collectively, then King George ever had.
Perhaps a complete ban on coal and oil would help certain control freaks gain an appreciation of driving cars and taking airplanes rather than walking or riding horses and bicycles.
Or perhaps not.
rogerthesurf says:
July 5, 2014 at 3:46 am
“Congress makes the laws, the President enforces the laws, and the Supreme Court interprets the laws.”
One would hope that if the president violates this rule, which no doubt the constitution makes very clear, it would open the way to his impeachment?
Arguably, he already has regarding the Affordable Care Act, Immigration Law, and EPA regulatory restrictions and maybe in other areas.
He is worse than the liberal press implied Bush could become.
/sad
Ed Zuiderwijk says:
July 5, 2014 at 12:23 am
The best guarantee that a “ban the sale of coal and oil” will never happen is the simple fact that a “ban the sale of fire arms” has been shown to be impossible. People tend to shoot back at those who ruin their lives.
______________________
I live in a large metropolitan area in the central US. Last night, the 4th of July, both fireworks and firearms were quite noticeable fired off by happy citizens until well past midnight (and I can’t hear very far.) Both activities are banned, yet the view from any high vantage point confirmed that aerial bursts were frequent and prolific as far as the eye could see. Recent laws banning certain guns and multi- round magazines, while calling for strict registration of those firearms already existing in Connecticutt and New York are known to have produced at best, 10% compliance from the citizenry.
People like Lester Brown may have an audience within certain political power structures which are all too ready to gain total control of the nation through any means, but in the end, they won’t last and they won’t succeed.
“Gotta say … 2016 can’t come fast enough for me.”
That reminds me of the ABB folks (Anybody But Bush). They were out in force back in 2007/8 even though Bush’s second term was ending and we were going to elect a new President who clearly had to be SOB (Somebody Other than Bush).
So, we get President Obama – EWB (Even Worse than Bush).
Why would anyone believe that a junior Senator with no real executive experience and no track record of being true to his word would be anything but what he is?
Now he says, “This (climate change) is a problem that is affecting Americans right now,” Obama said. “Whether it means increased flooding, greater vulnerability to drought, more severe wildfires — all these things are having an impact on Americans as we speak.”
Source: http://www.today.com/news/obama-al-roker-climate-change-2D79627268
When, dear Mr. President, was not a changing climate a problem that affected Americans? Remember, the real problem, according to your trusted advisors, is “global warming” caused by increased atmospheric CO2 primarily due to fossil fuel burning. With no significant atmospheric temperature change, either cooler or warmer, in around 17 years, “global warming just isn’t happening as predicted, but that darned climate just keeps changing anyway. With your vast array of advisors one would think you would get it right, but, speaking for myself, it appears your advisors are, at best, half-vast.
mjc – I have a completely different reaction to people who are manipulating me into changing my driving in an unsafe manner. I will, and have, slammed on the brakes, and pulled into the breakdown lane, thrown the car in park and explained, in detail, how what they are doing is dangerous. I don’t move until I extract a promise that they will cut it out.
People who are driven around by me generally understand that I’m an understanding sort about everything except when they pull this sort of dangerous stunt.
” If only this amendment passed it would dramatically shift the power from Washington back to the States.”
====
Which is where it should be Tom….
Obama studied the constitution…to find ways to get around it
There are several options in play for just how coal power generators will respond to the EPA’s CO2 limits. Shutting down old, marginal, performers, sequestration, co-firing coal w/natural gas, efficiency improvements, buying credits from CCPPs. Is this unit specific or site or utility wide like CAFE? Shut down 2 out of 4 coal units at a site, install a medium size CCPP and the site is now under the limit.
Every time the EPA rolls out some save the environment regulations, unintended consequences start popping up like Whack-a-Moles. Time will tell.
“ban the sale of coal and oil” ?
Well maybe shivering in the dark would be just the thing to wake up the Obamanoids.
BTW Willis shame on you for voting for him the first time. What were you thinking? If you want a president who obeys the Constitution you won’t find many choices among the Rs and none among the Ds. Ron Paul was the only one last time and likely Rand Paul will be the only one in 2016.
I voted for him in 2008
Jeeze Willis. The least amount of due diligence in 2008 would have shown you Obama was at the very least politically associated with communists. And may very well have been one himself.
I have many stains on my soul. Thank the Maker that voting for Obama for President isn’t one of them.
I did vote for him over Keyes. Theocon or Communist – tough choice. I chose the communist. But at least I knew what I was getting. Ah. Well. Interesting times.
thingadonta says:July 5, 2014 at 1:17 am
“Lester Brown is totally serious”
In my view, Lester is one those academics who can’t tell the difference with proportion anymore.”
Yes Lester completely misses the vastly different proportions between banning the sale of cars and banning the sale of coal and oil.
It’s striking that he uses “certainly” to show how sure he is. He’s actually suggesting the coal and oil ban-restructuring the world energy economy would be easier.
“If they could do that [ban the sale of cars] then, certainly we can restructure the world energy economy today.”
It’s scary how little he must have thought about that before spewing forth.
However the idiot is a useful idiot.
Just look how reasonable, moderate and compromising Obama’s tyranny appears to be in comparison.
Toto: Thanks for the “Black Count” book suggestion. I have it on order. From its excerpts, it reminds me of the life and times of Ulysses Grant’s military career, a favorite read of mine regardless of author.
Admitting to voting of the O. You can be forgiven for doing it once. There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.
FYI, this convention is not called to rewrite the Constitution as some opponents say as a scare tactic. It is only for proposing amendments.
And if they decide to exceed their authority as the first Constitutional Convention did? Then what?
I wonder if Lester bothered to ask himself how long that ban on cars lasted, and what the public’s response would have been if it hadn’t ended.
And oh yeah, Roosevelt did some other wartime things. Something about internment camps…
Willis and I have this in common. We both voted for Obama in ’08 and for the exact same reasons (I am still not a fan at all of Bush the son primarily due to the fact he has no military acumen whatsoever).
If my memory serves me, we both quickly became disenchanted with Obama, and absolutely did not vote for him again, instead warning others not to do so as well. And like Willis, I also am holding my breath. 2016 cannot come soon enough. The guilt of the first vote for him will haunt me till I die and caused me to relinquish my life long party affiliation and voting habits forever, even if a democrat comes along that truly meets all my requirements. Democratic politicians are dead to me because of Obama. I refuse to even acknowledge them in even the tiniest detail.
While I still consider myself a social liberal and champion the cause of personal freedom and equal rights for all, I must plug my nose and vote the conservative ticket solely for the hope that we will still have a country to live in to fight for individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, no matter who you love or your decisions regarding your own body.
Mr. Brown: “I’d like to see him ban the sale of coal and oil.”
Mr. Eschenbach: “At this point, all I can do is fervently hope he doesn’t listen to Lester Brown …”
___________
Hmmm … seems to me that the fastest way for Mr. Obama to depart the White House would be for him to listen to Mr. Brown and then do exactly what Mr. Brown says.
The result would be a massively adverse public reaction, literally everywhere across America … and Mr. Obama’s subsequent removal from office, in accord with the appropriate provisions of the U.S. Constitution.
Would Obama have won the last election if he told people about how was going to placate the greens by banning new coal plants
Well he announced his intention in Jan of 2008: And he got elected.
Lester Brown fancies himself a thinker and waits for the day someone will come knocking on his door to ask him questions about the human race. Good questions; ones that contain the word “civilizational.”
It worked.
I don’t think I’ve ever before seen someone use the “al” morpheme to make the word “civilizational.” It’s all so pompous and holier than thou. When environmentalists get theological it leaves me cold.
It’s quite likley that the next Pres will rescind Obama’s coal order. If a republican gets elected, I suspect the EPA leadership will be purged as well.
Even California democrats are getting nervous about cap and trade which will apply to transportation fuels Jan 1 2015 which will add an immediate 10 to 15 cents per gallon and could be as much as 2.00 a gallon over the next several years. They’re getting a bill together to postpone or elliminate it.
Here in California I see some recovery, but I see many more whose lifestyles are in steady decline, and many who are almost out of options.
I don’t know that these politicians recognize how bad it has become for people who are skilled hard workers but can’t find work.
I find heartless aholes like Brown, oblivious to the pain they cause and to the disasters they want to inflict.
You knocked this one out of the park, Willis – well done. I very much like addressing the pure politics of the problem of governmental climate science abuse.
Pamela Gray: ” I must plug my nose and vote the conservative ticket …”
________
There’s another way that allows one to sleep at night … at least on this side of my keyboard.
I hate “Party Think”. Any candidate who hints, or otherwise demonstrates via prior political office, that he/she will do whatever the “party thinks” will automatically lose my vote. The idea of “Party Think” extends to ideological matters as well, so voting is also influenced by a candidate’s affiliations, such as climate alarmist greenhouses.
Instead, find candidates who will most closely resemble the necessary independence of mind to do what’s right in accord with their personal beliefs. It ain’t easy, and is most readily done in local and state elections, tougher at the national level but a candidate’s legislative history does tell a story over time.
For example, in 2008 I swallowed very hard to vote for McCain. But there was no way I was going to vote for Obama because after reading both of his books and reviewing his voting record as a Senator (Illinois and U.S.), it was obvious he simply did not have the background for the office of President, nor did he have a voting record other than party line, when he even bothered to vote other than “present”.
Willis: A rare commodity. Someone who does not “sell their soul” to political party X, or Y. (Even though your leaning may be X or Y…) Please NOTE: Neville Chamberlain was the Prime Minister of the CONSERVATIVE party in England, in 1938. He made a dreadful mistake in his assesment of “character” of a man. Comparatively little known is that there were so “many” adhering to the concept of “peace..at almost any cost”…that an old curmudgen named Winston Churchill was not going to make it to be elected P.M. . As the V.P. has a tie breaker vote in the US Senate, so does the P.M. have such a vote in the Parliment in England. Chamberlain had that vote. He used it. The result was a Churchill in the right place at the right time. To quote: “Never, in the course of human history, have so few (us “skeptics”, “non-believers” or heretics …) fought so hard against so many..” As our forebearers in the USA, celebrated yesterday, you “pay homage to no man”. This takes real courage, as it is the nature of man to demand servitude of other men in so many circumstances.
richard verney says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:11 am
Unfortunately, it is due to poor education, and the fact that there is a left wing/liberal bias in education that kids are not taught the importance of the industrial revolution.
Spot on, great comments!
If you want to learn more about the Administration’s agenda, be sure to watch the new movie, America, just released, now playing in theaters that describes the choice facing America. Dinesh Desouza is not a friend of the President, but an Immigrant that sees how great America can be relative to his home country:
Trailer: http://www.americathemovie.com/
Comments:
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2014/07/02/dinesh-dsouza-america-imagines-world-without-usa/
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2014/07/02/america-review
Holy smokes, you voted for Obama? This severely impairs the ability to have a positive view of your wisdom.
To carry Brown’s analogy about WWII, when the car companies were ordered to build tanks and airplanes, they could do so because the technology existed. But if they had been ordered to build death rays and flying saucers, no amount of orders from a president could have made it happen. Even Hitler ordered his scientists to develop weapons that did not and could not work, such as his mega-panzer and giant cannons. That is what solar and wind power are: infeasible, impossible.
In leading the people of the developed world back toward the stone age, the more erudite of modern luddites prefer applications of the equivocation fallacy to lying as it is the more difficult of the two fallacies to spot.
Eisenhower warned us of the Military-Industrial Complex. What he didn’t warn us about was the Financial-Beaurocratic-Progressive Complex.
Marc says:
July 5, 2014 at 8:45 am
Holy smokes, you voted for Obama? This severely impairs the ability to have a positive view of your wisdom.
____________________
You do have a point, but consider the molds into which we are all poured. Willis is kind of an old(er) quasi- hippy, having been inescapably immersed within the culture of the 60’s, like so many of us. Some of us were drafted, back then and skinned alive, peeled like onions, all those flowers – in- hair gone for good and in some ways, more able to discern the truths of politics, disgusted with any ramblings from the Left, ever since.
He eventually figured it out. Cut him some slack.
What do you think will be the result, down the road, of the cultural “training” of today’s youth?
Fortunately the Constitutional ammendments will act to protect the people. The 1st stating we have the right to speak up about this very thing. The 2nd indicating we can possess firearms and form a militia (as a means to protect ALL OTHER rights). The 10th indicates that the only powers that the federal government can have are those delegated to it by the Constitution. The 22nd limits the president to no more than 2 terms in office.
So long as these stay in force, the currently seated president has until Jan 20 2017 to complete his “Changes” or set in motion legislation to ensure their enactment and continuance.
However, there is legislation being brought before the States by such groups as WOLF-PAC and Citizens for Self-Governance calling for an Article V convention (Constitutional Convention) to make alterations and additions to the existing 27 ammendments. Yes that is correct, all 27 would be up for grabs including the 3 listed above. An article V convention could be utilized to keep the currently seated executive in power.
The call for convention passed in Georgia in March 2014. 1 state down and 33 to go.
‘Whenever this Congress refuses to act in a way that hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, I’ve got an obligation as president to do what we can without them.’
Unfortunately Congress did act. It passed the unelected regulatory bureaucracy in the 1930’s signed into law during the Roosevelt administration. That was placed under the control and administration of the President. At the time the Supreme Court was not in sanguine about that kind of unelected power and ruled to limit it as in the National Recovery Act. Congress again acted to enlarge the Labor Department under Johnson, create EPA under Nixon, the Dept. of Energy under Carter and Homeland Security under Bush. It is all done under the theory that a society’s progress is driven by creating the right legal framework to direct citizens behavior. The scores of thousands of pages of regulation created by this unelected regulatory apparatus and hundreds of thousands of enforcement operatives are all under the direct control of the President. We the People no longer control it. Obviously Congress can no longer control it and can barely influence its direction. At this point it is the President’s discretion is the Law.
As Denis Christianson points out, long ago the Congress created planted the seeds of tyrannical rule by ceding law making to unelected agencies such as the EPA. Supposedly these agencies acted on public input in making law. In reality, they were prone to acting upon the wishes of their boss, the President of the U.S. If they defied their boss, they were apt to be out of their jobs.
I’ve witnessed this process on several occasions. One of them played out when I responded to the EPA’s request for public input on its proposed “Endangerment” funding. In my input, I pointed out that claims being made by the climate models were not falsifiable, thus being unscientific under the Daubert standard. After finding for Endangerment, the EPA published a document in which it supposedly responded to each comment it had received. Upon reading this document, I found that it did not respond to my comment. When I wrote to the EPA’s administrator, Ms. Jackson, to inform her of the false claim that had been made by her agency in reaching its finding she did not respond to me. The wishes of the political left had been enacted into law through a lie that was known to the EPA’s administrator.
It has often been claimed by environmental activists that it is President Obama’s opponents in Congress who are responsible for blocking effective action on climate change.
This is the most absurd and disingenuous claim, because the Executive Branch of the United States Government already has all the authority it would require to enforce a substantial decarbonization of the US economy, and without needing another word of new legislation from the Congress to get the job done.
For those who are truly serious about decarbonizing the American economy, having the Executive Branch actively manage the transition to a mostly renewable energy future is not only the fastest way to achieve their goal, it is also the only way that has the slightest chance of ever working in practice.
A competent team of government lawyers and experienced environmental regulation specialists could design a highly effective regulatory framework for decarbonizing the US economy, a framework which could be made bulletproof in its ability to sustain any challenges made to it in the courts.
A decarbonization regulatory framework unilaterally implemented and managed by the Executive Branch could also include a perfectly legal system of carbon pollution fines which was the functional equivalent of a legislated carbon tax.
The courts have declared that the EPA has the authority to regulate CO2 as a dangerous pollutant, and they have independently determined in other types of court cases that the Federal Government can legally collect fines which are the functional equivalent of a tax.
All the Executive Branch needs to do to put such a policy in place is to ensure that the existing regulatory rule making processes are followed to the letter – easily done if the right people are designing the decarbonization regulatory framework and its associated regulatory implementation plan.
So if the Obama Administration is so concerned about climate change, why haven’t they used the powers they already have in their hands as the Executive Branch to unilaterally implement a policy which could substantially decarbonize the US economy over the next two decades?
Why hasn’t the president done it?
The reason he hasn’t done it is because the political blowback could be tremendous. Given that technology deployment can only move so fast, the adoption of such a decarbonization policy would force very substantial and very painful conservation efforts over the two decades that it would take to largely decarbonize the US economy.
The core of Obama’s current political strategy is to convince people that with perfectly designed energy policies, we can reduce America’s carbon footprint without having to make substantial changes in our personal lifestyles. With the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s line was, “If you like your current health plan, you can keep it.” With his existing climate change plan, Obama is saying, “If you like your current lifestyle, you can keep it.”
Yeah. Right. Sure we can.
In any case, other than the weight of public opinion as expressed at the polls, there is presently nothing to prevent the President and the Executive Branch from legally and unilaterally enforcing a substantial decarbonization of the American economy, if they chose to do so.
Jimmy Carter feels a little chipper every morning, even at his ever advancing age, knowing that his spot as the worst President in US history only has a short while to go before Obama takes over the #1 spot. He just prays every night that Obama stays healthy and survives until the end of his 2nd term so that his disastrous legacy will not be mitigated by a sudden untimely demise and relegate him back to #1
PERRY’S LAW — If the facts do not conform to the theory, they must be disposed of.
Incoherent executive policy on most every front, whether deliberate or simply the result of incompetence, plays directly to the stated strategy of that vile U. Chicago professor with whom Obama was reputed to associate. That strategy went approximately as follows:
“Bring the U.S. capitalist system to utter ruin. Then rebuild the country out of the ashes in the socialist ideal.”
pauljoneshogan says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:41 am
Still up, as far as I know, last post was on 5 July, Pierre commented on my comment yesterday … it’s still here.
w.
Our current technology allows us to use coal and Natural gas extremely cleanly. Yet rather than use commonsense and use our resources wisely our idiot in chief chooses to place many of the poor and old at risk of freezing to death yearly, without power, cooling or hot water the rest of the year as well. Yet because it does not affect him he thinks bigger cuts and higher prices everyone else can afford.
A King in England once thought as Obama Does today and it caused the writing of the Declaration of Independence. A document that changed the world and took power form the worlds monarchy’s. Now it is the bankers who have taken power by taking control of money and they have placed new puppets like Obama.
Until we removed the fed and control over our money back to the people the culling of the earth will continue by the left. Elitists like Obama and most of DC in general dont care if you or I die, were just one less consumer of planetary resources.
The second Amendment was placed to allow the people the ability to defend themselves from this type of tyranny. And just like banning cars the banning of ammunition makes our guns useless. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms “SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED””
They know and they plan how to keep the people from growing so mad they rebel all the while taking from us the ability to rebel.
Tyranny is already here IMHO!
I copied this from the linked interview with Lester Brown: A man who possesses the general naïveté and wisdom of an adolescent coupled with the perceived authority of an elder statesman – a very bad combination, I think. Anyway, the first paragraph is the question posed to this pathetic old man. And the second is his saliva dripping answer.
‘…one of the arguments the people doing it use is that you’re still going to need a baseline of energy from somewhere for when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing and we don’t have the storage capacity to run our economy of renewables alone. How would you respond to that?
‘We’ve been managing energy flows for a long time. Consider the demand side of the electricity equation, what happens at 3am when no-one’s using electricity versus 6pm when everyone is using it? That’s not creating an insuperable barrier to relying on electricity for our energy needs. The same is true with renewables. They are all manageable. If you have one wind farm, it fluctuates quite a bit but with two, it fluctuates less. And if you have wind farms across the country connected by a national grid, then wind is baseload.’
Well, it’s nice to know that North America and the other continents are at least 12,000 miles wide so that when the sun goes down on their east coasts then their west coasts are sunny long enough for the sun to rise again on the east coasts and vice a versa and, voila, perpetual electricity. Oops, that would defy the laws of geography so Lester didn’t respond to the solar part of the question, only the wind part. And, I guess his windy answer might be a little right. Maybe we could build twenty wind farms all over the place to get reliable power out of the equivalent of one. But, someone needs to explain to him about demand and baseload. So, Lester, what happens when it’s “3am when no-one’s using electricity versus 6pm when everybody’s using it” is that they leave the lights on in skyscrapers in the city at 3am and it’s not because people are working overtime in those buildings at 3am. It’s to maintain a steady baseload. Fail.
Jake J says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:53 am
Ah, I see my lack of clarity strikes again. I did not mean that Obama had done that. I meant that the issue was Obama’s claim that he can do anything including that. I’ve changed the wording.
Thanks,
w.
davideisenstadt says:
July 5, 2014 at 3:57 am
Thank you sir. I think that my willingness to admit when I’m wrong is one of the reasons people put some weight on my opinion.
Best regards,
w.
BarryW says: July 5, 2014 at 9:00 am
“Eisenhower warned us of the Military-Industrial Complex. What he didn’t warn us about was the Financial-Beaurocratic-Progressive Complex.”
Actually, in the same speech:
and…
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm
Now why do you suppose the media have largely concentrated on that Military-Industrial thing?
M Simon says:
July 5, 2014 at 7:22 am
Hey, everyone’s a genius now … what, you never made a mistake? You never got fooled by a politician?
Yeah, I’m the only one …
w.
woops, sorry about the double quotation.
The important part is the last two paragraphs.
Craig Loehle says:
July 5, 2014 at 8:52 am
Alan Robertson says:
July 5, 2014 at 9:07 am
Excellent comments, both.
The American frogs are to boiling point as their own elitist class deprive them of the means to rebel, and slowly boil those who follow blindly.
The abuse of power by our current president is without equal and just because of his skin color those in the position to challenge him do not… We need statesman not yes men… DR King would be totally in disbelief of what race has now become, the excuse to do anything to anyone without question.. This is exactly what Dr king fought and died to stop.
The founders of this great nation in preamble of the US Constitution and the DOI expressed that ALL MEN WERE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS, THAT ALL MEN WERE CREATED EQUAL. Without equal power nothing is equal. Without equal responsibility nothing is equal.. without equal accountability nothing is equal.
This is precisely why social justice is the biggest lie as it allows the trampling of one persons rights in favor of another. IT’s way past time that the victim mentality to die and all people be held equally accountable and equally responsible… This is why Lady Justice is Blind..
===================================================================
“Constitutional scholar”. I’m reminded of that phrase, “Know thine enemy.”
I don’t think he misunderstands separation of powers. I think he’s using what he knows of “his enemy” to concentrate power.
The Constitution is intended to be the means form a Government that preserves individual freedom. The “problem” with freedom is that it means other people are allowed to believe and say and do things that I might not agree with. As long as what they don’t infringe on my or others rights, well, that’s the “price” of freedom.
Some only want freedom for themselves but not for others.
Banning the use of coal and oil in name of CAGW is just a handy lever to power.
(PS The Bill of Rights is not usually included in discussions of the separation of powers. It should be. It is, or should be, the limit on the authority of the others.)
Willis,
I disagree with something you said. You stated… “Despite being a “constitutional scholar”, he seems to misunderstand the separation of powers.”.
I think you are incorrect. Obama doesn’t “misunderstand” this concept. He simply disagrees with it. In fact, there was plenty of evidence that he disagreed with the basic tenets of our system of government available before the 2008 election.
In fact, in an interview given before the 2008 election, he lamented that the constitution didn’t have clauses that empowered the government. He argued that the fact that the constitution was a document that limited government (and thus empowered the people) was a shortcoming that needed to be corrected. Well, it looks like he found a way to correct this… through the administrative and regulatory state (bypassing legislated law).
So again, he understands our separation of powers just fine. He just thinks it sucks, and has purposefully tried to create an imperial presidency.
Voting for Bammy, and calling yourself a “skeptic” does not compute.
As to the issue at hand, Bammy has the power to, and should, ban the sale of oil & gas…
As a person who is long since disenchanted with things American: Bammy, go ahead, make our day!
Anton Eagle says:
July 5, 2014 at 11:27 am
…………
In fact, in an interview given before the 2008 election, he lamented that the constitution didn’t have clauses that empowered the government. He argued that the fact that the constitution was a document that limited government (and thus empowered the people) was a shortcoming that needed to be corrected. Well, it looks like he found a way to correct this… through the administrative and regulatory state (bypassing legislated law).
So again, he understands our separation of powers just fine. He just thinks it sucks, and has purposefully tried to create an imperial presidency.
=============================================
Obama understands perfectly well what he is doing.. He is systematically destroying that which made America Great… Destroying the American dream, the ability to work hard and rise out of poverty and be the captain of ones dreams and desires. The ability to succeed at ones dreams. Obama will be known as the great destroyer… I hope he and his ilk are severely punished for this by those they wish to enslave..
“What Roosevelt did was ban the sale of cars. He didn’t say they couldn’t produce cars. He just banned the sale of cars.”
Roosevelt also offered car makers very lucrative alternative contracts which utilized their existing capital base, then allowed them to transition back to their original markets in an orderly fashion after the war was over.
Brown and the eco-nuts would instead demand that shareholders in vast areas of the business world simply walk away from their huge investments. These Brownians are simply serial wealth destroyers.
Yet worse, the last time I looked, for each dollar invested in a PVC installation the present value of the electricity generated would be maybe 50 cents. So Brown and his ilk would have us destroy wealth as we throw away existing plant and then throw away more wealth as we replace the coal and oil with PVC technology. Not much of a forward-looking strategy.
Janice, only a fraction of electricity is from coal (and NG makes CO2) and just how many electric cars is or can the grid support?
Here in Canada we are getting ready to elect a part time drama teacher as our PM with the complicity of the MSM. Our PM already has as much if not more power to affect legislation and regulation as the POTUS. I pray to God I’m wrong or the gains we have made since 2008 will all be lost and then some. A couple of Trudeau Jr’s more famous quotes are “budgets balance themselves” and his response to the Boston Marathon bombers was “we need to find the root causes of their discontent from society”. Sigh……
Guys like Lester Brown and Barack Obama are just “useful idiots,” shilling for the unseen globalists who want to control every aspect of American life. The real movers and shakers are apolitical and are less interested in saving the world than they are in running it.
There are two questions about a vote for Obama in 2008:
1. How could a thinking person possibly make such an egregious mistake? — I was traumatized watching it happen, clearly a cult of personality phenomenon and mass hysteria phenomenon that was clearly evident in the moment to cleat thinkers.
2. If you say you have learned, tell us what you have learned about yourself that inoculates you in the future from a such terrible blind spot. It is easy to say that you made a mistake, but the question is: Has one learned the right lesson that really moves one toward wisdom?
And no, I have never been fooled by any politician ever. To suggest one was fooled by a politician is to demonstrate one’s utter and unforgivable naïveté — and it really just means you fooled yourself. Being fooled by a politician certainly doesn’t befit a person who wants to lead any adult cohort.
Sorry to be harsh, but naiveté is just as harmful as malevolent intent.
If you knew where to look it was clear that Obama was lying about everything in 2007, including his religion.
M Simon says: July 5, 2014 at 7:45 am
……….Would Obama have won the last election if he told people about how was going to placate the greens by banning new coal plants……….
Well he announced his intention in Jan of 2008: And he got elected.
________________________________
Lets not beat about the bush here.
Obama was voted in because of a melanin surfeit, and not because of anything he knew, said, or could do.
R
The defense against tyranny is THE reason We, The People enjoy the right to bears arms and form a militia. The second amendment exists to guarantee that we Americans can stand up to OUR OWN GOVERNMENT.
The second amendment to the US Constitution has nothing to do with hunting.
Obama was elected.
He’s our first “American Idol” president.
“”He’s so cute and has a great hook shot.””
Blame it on our own education system.
There is a nice word “decarbonize” introduced in this discussion. Yep, all our problems would be solved just by decarbonizing all carbon-based life forms.
M Simon says: July 5, 2014 at 7:35 am
“FYI, this convention is not called to rewrite the Constitution as some opponents say as a scare tactic. It is only for proposing amendments.”
And if they decide to exceed their authority as the first Constitutional Convention did? Then what?
The states will set the ground rules for the convention, and may recall any delegate that exceeds the boundaries.
Even if wild and crazy amendments are proposed, they still must be ratified by three-quarters of the states, just like amendments that Congress proposes.
Good heavens. RobRoy and the rest of you who are blaming this on education. We have ONLY ourselves to blame. Not teachers. Not our parents. Not the neighbor. Not the weather. The true blue citizen carries blame on their own shoulders. Only those who see themselves as perfect (even while NOBODY else has that opinion of that person) go out of their way to blame others. History is filled with despotic leaders who placed blame on whatever condition they didn’t like on the backs of others.
In one point or other in time the following entities were blamed for the ills of the world:
Samaritans
Women
Children
Jews
Christians
Men
Blacks
Whites
Industry
God
Satan
War
Peace
Government
Republicans
Democrats
Dogs
Cats
Sin
Perfectionism
So here is my blame: I blame myself. My teachers had nothing to do with it. My parents had nothing to do with it. The past government had nothing to do with it. The blame rests solely on me for the part I played in electing Obama in the first place.
And that, my friends, makes me a citizen of a free country. With freedom comes responsibility. For those of you here who blindly shove blame in any direction but on your own shoulders, how does that make you different than the very politician you hate?
Bill H says, “This is precisely why social justice is the biggest lie as it allows the trampling of one persons rights in favor of another.” Yeah, right. Over my life time, and the life time of my grandparents (Taft Republcans in Cincinnati) who raised me, the conservatives (mainly Democratics before Nixon’s southern strategy) did everything they could to prevent Negroes from equal rights: voting, education, civil rights. My grandmother could not vote until she was 30. Who opposed her voting rights- the conservatives.
I was in Birmingham, Alabama, Christmas vacation, 1961, visiting my college fraternity brother’s family. What I saw shocked and motivated me. I joined the NAACP and CORE when I got back to college. Fast forward. Now for the past few decades I’ve seen conservatives defame gays and oppose every law or action for gay social justice.
Willis, I don’t think presidential imperialism is anything new, and I think the neocons were every bit as inclined as the present white house to expand executive powers.
With the tea party activists playing the same role in the GOP that extreme environmentalists do in the Democratic Party, I have no party affiliation. I was very disappointed in George W.. I am very disappointed in Obama. I will probably be disappointed in the next president because he or she will be hostage to the extremists in their party. Issues of social justice, separation of church and state, and military preparedness and realism are important to me. I don’t trust the Republicans on issues of church and state and social justice, I don’t trust either party on military preparedness and realism or the war on drugs. I don’t trust the Democrats on climate change or economic realism.
So yes, Lester Brown is an idiot, and Holdren, too.
My 2016 presidential candidate will appoint Judith Curry as head of the EPA. Anthony will oversee NOAA, and you will be in charge of all NSF and other science funding.
Doug Allen says:
July 5, 2014 at 2:09 pm
“…mainly Democratics before Nixon’s southern strategy…”
Not this long debunked meme again:
The Democrats have not changed their stripes since pre-Civil War. The only thing that has changed is which group of people are designated to wear their chains.
In the 1920s the US Govt banned the sale of alcohol. The decade and a half that followed was not conspicuous by its temperance, but by the rise of criminal gangs dealing in bootlegging as a entrance to other criminal activities.
Currently the sale of heroin , crack, marijuana etc , is , I believe, illegal in US except under prescription. So how is the war on drugs going? In UK the illegal supply of drugs is believed to be the cause of a significant proportion of serious criminal activity.
In wartime Britain petrol and food were both heavily rationed and , from parent’s anecdotes , the control of the resultant black market consumed a large part of the Govt resources in money and personnel. Presumably Obama has both in abundance.
I would have voted for McCain, whom I referred to as McIdiot, if he hadn’t been such an – well, idiot. I mean, remember the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Acts? So, yes, I held my nose and crossed my fingers and voted for Obama in ’08. So sue me.
“Look how quickly the US restructured its whole economy in 1942. At beginning of 1942, the automobile companies were producing automobiles. By the middle of 1942 they were all producing tanks and planes.”
Note that private citizens don’t spend money on tanks and warplanes. From 1942 on they couldn’t buy new cars, city dwellers couldn’t buy gasoline, or tires, – the average person was a lot POORER in 1942 than they were during the great depression. Lester Brown’s policies would ALSO make us poorer.
I don’t really blame folks for voting for Obama the first time [although I didn’t, even though I viewed McCain as a terrible candidate]. A lot of people voted for Obama as America’s Act of Contrition for slavery — even though Obama does not have a drop of slave blood in his body.
But his re-election is hard to understand. Gallup did an exit poll, which showed that more than half of all voters made up their minds on election day. Remember that Obama was on all the TV networks constantly, speaking gravely about the Hurricane hitting NYC. Romney was denied equal time on the pretext that Obama was acting as President.
Romeny was truly “The Fixer”, who brought back numerous companies that were headed for banruptcy, saving many thousands of jobs. He had inherited a fortune, then gave it all to charity, to make it on his own. He adopted lots of kids of every race. He was an excellent candidate. But he was mercilessly demonized by a Party that constantly reminded voters of G.W. Bush.
That is all in the past now, and we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt. I do not think Obama is stupid, or incompetent, or inept. I think he has a plan, and he knows exactly what he is doing. He is part of a team that uses him as a figurehead.
Listen to one of America’s founders, Patrick Henry, who appears to have been very prescient:
“This Constitution is said to have beautiful features; but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful. Your President may easily become king. Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed by what may be a small minority; and a very small minority may continue forever unchangeably this government, although horridly defective. Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world, from the Eastern to the Western Hemisphere, blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad?
“Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.
“If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute! The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him, and it will be the subject of long meditation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to accomplish his design; and, sir, will the American spirit solely relieve you when this happens?
“I would rather infinitely — and I am sure most of this Convention are of the same opinion — have a king, lords, and commons, than a government so replete with such insupportable evils. If we make a king, we may prescribe the rules by which he shall rule his people, and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them; but the President, in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke.
“I cannot with patience think of this idea. If ever he violates the laws, one of two things will happen: he will come at the head of his army, to carry every thing before him; or he will give bail, or do what Mr. Chief Justice will order him.
“If he be guilty, will not the recollection of his crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American throne?
“Will not the immense difference between being master of every thing, and being ignominiously tried and punished, powerfully excite him to make this bold push?
“But, sir, where is the existing force to punish him? Can he not, at the head of his army, beat down every opposition? Away with your President! We shall have a king: the army will salute him monarch: your militia will leave you, and assist in making him king, and fight against you: and what have you to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue?”
~ Virgina Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1788
President Lincoln suspended habeus corpus and invoked martial law, so those precedents are already set. Various federal departments have been stockpiling billions of rounds of hollow point ammunition and armored personnel carriers. Mysterious camps are being constructed. Numerous top generals and admirals who do not pass Obama’s litmus test are being forced to retire. There are many other disturbing signs.
We have two and a half more years in Obama’s current term. All it would take during that time is a crisis du jour, and we could literally have a tyrant. Think it’s impossible?
Forget the talk of wind farms….
Wheat farms, corn farms, dairy farms, hay farms, oat farms, vegetable farms —
ALL farms depend upon oil and its derivative products to plow, seed, harvest, and market their products.
Ban oil and gas? The end result is a ban on food.
Idiot^2
Stephen Rasey says:
July 5, 2014 at 3:19 pm
We have two and a half more years in Obama’s current term. All it would take during that time is a crisis du jour, and we could literally have a tyrant. Think it’s impossible?
—————————————————————————————————————————
Sadly no.
I have been saying for a while that the 22nd amendment has a real possibility of being toast. Neither the POTUS, Congress or the SCOTUS has heeded the constitution for the last 20 years in particular (but since Teddy Roosevelt in particular to one degree or another with Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt II pushing the envelope to the edges) so what makes anyone think there won’t be a crisis real, imagined or contrived that will throw the whole lot out. The “immigration crisis” is just another brick in the Progressive wall. I wish, hope and pray I am being paranoid. Yet I still have faith in the concept of America. This coming from a Canadian.
This from Willis:
“””””…..After watching George Bush, Obama’s position on limiting executive power was one of the reasons I voted for him in 2008 … back before I realized that if Obama’s lips were moving, there were non-zero odds that he was lying, as in this case. Which is one of the reasons why I voted against him in 2012……”””””
As I recall, George Bush was not a Presidential candidate in 2008.
So whatever he did to incur your wrath; would have no effect after the end of his second terms.
It is very easy to get tyrants into office; nearly impossible (historically) to remove them from office.
We have to endure more than two more years, of this one, who was voted into power by people who chose him over George Bush, in 2008. A simple reading of “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinski, should have educated anybody to just who exactly Barack Obama is.
US citizens get the government they deserve. But their children, and grand children Won’t be thanking them for what they’ve been saddled with.
Its is an American trait to long for presidents who are outsiders… to the point that we are susceptible to the candidate with no history who is presented with great fanfare. An excellent fictional exposition of this phenomena by an observant “outsider” would be novella and movie of the same name: “Being There”.
Now that we have no objective mainstream press, the country is as susceptible to the “invention” of a candidate from whole cloth… and the unwarranted destruction of a candidate with the potential for good works… as any cold-war era Soviet bloc country. It happened in 2008 and 2012 and could well happen again.
Idiot ^ Infinity
“””””…..RobRoy says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:40 pm
The defense against tyranny is THE reason We, The People enjoy the right to bears arms and form a militia. The second amendment exists to guarantee that we Americans can stand up to OUR OWN GOVERNMENT.
The second amendment to the US Constitution has nothing to do with hunting……”””””
It also has nothing to do with militias.
The second amendment simply says. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. ”
Nothing in the rules of English grammar, causes all that gobbledegook about “a well regulated militia” to alter the meaning (in any way), of the above simple statement.
At best the militia bit, is simply a reason the framers offered for the second amendment. It is not a conditional appendage.
They could have said: The sun rising in the East, in a free state, The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The meaning is exactly the same; the reason given is different. (and irrelevant).
And note the use of the word “infringed”. In the First Amendment they say “abridged.”.
In my world, “infringed” means don’t even mess with the edges of this directive.
“Abridged” means rewrite War and Peace, for the Classic Comics, but don’t change it too much.
Note also that the second amendment’s “the people”, is exactly the same “the people”, as are guaranteed the right to peaceably assemble, to petition the government for redress off grievances, in the first amendment; just a couple of dozen words earlier.
The first amendment doesn’t mean that a well regulated militia has freedom of speech and religion, etc. It’s …..THE PEOPLE….in both amendments.
Bart says:
July 5, 2014 at 2:34 pm
Bart’s revisionist history satisfies him. Not me. I remember the 50’s and 60’s. I remember telling Barry Goldwater personally (a friend of Dad’s who was chosen as one of the few journalists who accompanied him during the presidential campaign and of friend of mine through ham radio) that I would not vote for him because of his voting against the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Most of the bigot Democrats, the Dixiecrats, became Republicans. I lived through it Bart. Dad was a friend of Nixon’s too, and though I didn’t personally know him, I know a lot about the Southern strategy from my Dad as well as from much study.
The Republicans are not the good guys. The Democrats are not the good guys. Politicans are ambitious and like the rest of us, flawed. Power corrupts everybody. Many, like Lester Brown and Holdren and so many others in both parties and many here are fanatics who probably believe their half truths and their doomsday messages- about climate change, about government, about liberals, about conservatives. So what else is new!
“””””……Pamela Gray says:
July 5, 2014 at 7:36 am
Willis and I have this in common. We both voted for Obama in ’08 and for the exact same reasons (I am still not a fan at all of Bush the son primarily due to the fact he has no military acumen whatsoever). ……”””””
And you voted for Obama because he does ???
Bush sr was a Navy pilot (WW-II)
Bush jr was an ANG fighter pilot (F-102). You don’t get to wash the tires on one of those, without some military acumen.
This thread is just too depressing; and unbelievable too.
Doug Allen,
Barry Goldwater had the right idea. A couple of his quotes:
And:
We need someone like that now.
dbstealey
Yea team!
Pity that Goldwater got pulled down over his comments about using nukes.
Nowadays I recognise that really he probably got pulled down because the left felt he was too dangerous to their cause.
It has happened a lot in my country as well, especially recently.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
Let him ban the sale of oil and coal and start the countdown to the end of his presidency.
Do it right now. 5, 4, 3….
It takes a moron to fight a moron.
dbstealey says:
July 5, 2014 at 5:08 pm
Barry Goldwater was a very decent guy- yes. I wasn’t tearing Goldwater dowm, just showing Bart where the Republicans were in 1965 with their southern strategy. Barry Goldwater wanted to vote for the Voting Rights Act of 1965- he told me so- but couldn’t get nominated by the Republican Party if he did! I loved Barry. He put my Christmas American Flier train set together Christmas eve, 1947, when my folks couldn’t. But I had been to Birmingham, Alabama, a few years earlier. I loved civil rights more! Remember, there were poll taxes; there were Knights of the KKK cross burnings; there were kids being kept out of school and college; there were freedom riders being killed; there were linchings, and the party of Abraham Lincoln,-where was it? Tryying to prevent passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Both parties had extemists just as both parties do now, extremists who set the agenda. As for Barry Goldwater’s mostly libertarian leanings- yes, we need that now. We need both center right and center left.
What happended to my reply to dbstealey 5 minutes ago?
…was one of the reasons I voted for him in 2008 …
Willis,
Very disappointing. I thought you were a lot smarter than that. It did not take a rocket scientist to figure out what kind of person Obama was, even in 2007. But then again he did fool half of the voters in 2008.
Here come the rolling protest aginst Obama policy: http://www.businessinsider.com/conservatives-purposely-making-cars-spew-black-smoke-2014-7
Pamela Gray says:
July 5, 2014 at 7:36 am
You supposed that Obama had military acumen?
Interesting.
Acquired as the red diaper baby of Communists, or while a drug dealer in Hawaii, a radical student at Occidental or Columbia, a law student at Harvard, a community organizer in Chicago, a “present” state legislator in Springfield, a Marxist adjunct lecturer & owner of a house bought by Saddam’s bagman & his wife’s no-show “job” or a two year junior senator in DC, both years spent running for president?
The F-102 was far more dangerous to fly than today’s combat aircraft. Compared to the F-102’s lifetime accident rate of 13.69, today’s planes generally average around four mishaps per 100,000 hours. Compare the F-16 at 4.14, F-15 at 2.47, F-117 at 4.07, S-3 at 2.6, & F-18 at 4.9.
Even the Marine Corps’ AV-8B, regarded as the most dangerous aircraft in US service today, has a lifetime accident rate of only 11.44 mishaps per 100,000 flight hours.
The F-102 claimed the lives of many pilots, including a number stationed at Ellington during Bush’s tenure. Of the 875 F-102A production models that entered service, 259 were lost in accidents that killed 70 Air Force & Air National Guard pilots.
I have no love for the policies of either Bush, but respect their military service.
RobRoy says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:40 pm
“People” means the same thing in the 2nd Amendment that it does in the rest of the Constitution.
Marc says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:23 pm
My congratulations, go to the head of the class.
w.
Bryan A says:
July 5, 2014 at 9:08 am
“However, there is legislation being brought before the States by such groups as WOLF-PAC and Citizens for Self-Governance calling for an Article V convention (Constitutional Convention) to make alterations and additions to the existing 27 ammendments. Yes that is correct, all 27 would be up for grabs including the 3 listed above. An article V convention could be utilized to keep the currently seated executive in power.”
————————————————————————————————————————
First off, I do not know about WOLF-PAC so no comment on them.
Article V is not a “Constitutional Convention” as you call it. It is, quoting Article V: “a Convention for proposing Amendments”. Yes any amendment can be proposed, including amendments to cancel Amendments already ratified. So there appears to be a danger here. However, any proposed amendments must be first passed out of the Convention then 3/4 of State legislatures must ratify any of those proposed amendments in order for them to become part of the Constitution or to be stricken therefrom. There is too much disagreement on most of the proposed amendments for them to make it all the way to being approved by 3/4 of the States. I would not fear any cancellation of current Amendments by this Convention for the same reason. As I stated earlier, the main amendment proposed will be term limits on Senators and Representatives. That one is sure to make it out of the Convention and would most likely be approved by at least 3/4 of the States. And that is the most important thing we could do because we need to make sure members of Congress can no longer entrench themselves there for an extended period.
Placing unwarranted fear about “what if they cancel this or that Amendment” is just a propaganda pitch by those who are in power and do not want this to happen.
My information has it that Florida and Alaska both have passed the application. 3 down but still a long way to go.
.
Tsk. Remember, “Barry” Soebarkah is a lawyer. As a “constitutional scholar,” he reads the charter of our republic’s federal government the way any shyster reads a contract or other structuring document, looking for loopholes through which he can drive to the attainment of his purposes.
Consider therefore what his actions thus far have told us about his purposes, emphasis on the concept of the Cloward-Piven strategy.
——————–
.
America’s first Half-White Bolshevik President revealed himself to me when he was talking to a guy named Joe, who happened to want to be a Plumber. Sadly, Joe would have made a more effective Chief Executive.
Pray for stupendous Blow-back in November. A lesser Evil is is a lesser Evil.
Tucci78 says:
July 5, 2014 at 6:27 pm
If I were an optimist, I would hope that the maladministration of Baraq Hussein bin Obama al Indonesii, one of the surprisingly large number of Marxist Muslims in our world, would inoculate yet another generation against the siren call of socialism.
One of two things must be true. Either the Democrats are unfathomable idiots, who ignorantly pursue ever more destructive policies despite decades of contrary evidence, or they understand the consequences of their actions and relentlessly carry on anyway because they somehow benefit.
–James Simpson, 28 September 2009
How statists in both parties benefit is no mystery. Creating an ever larger victim class dependent upon the central government obviously benefits those who gain from an ever more powerful national regime.
Regarding the ban on the sale of cars I think there was a stockpile of cars. We can ban coal and oil and use the stockpile in the ground. 😉
In many countries around the world imported USED cars make up the majority of car imports. Cars do sometimes has an extended life.
What if the Roosevelt ban on cars lasted 20 years?
I’d like to see how you function over the ensuing 5 years. LOL.
Doug Allen says:
July 5, 2014 at 4:12 pm
I lived through it too, Doug. Goldwater stood against the VRA on the principle of limited government, not on any racist sentiment, and the VRA would not have passed without Republican support. The bill passed the Senate by a 77-19 vote, with Democrats in favor by a 3:1 margin, and Republicans in favor by a 15:1 margin. It passed the House by a 333-85 vote, with Democrats by a 4:1 margin, and Republicans by a 5:1 margin.
The revisionist history is that the Dems ever stood on principle for anything. With them, it is all about power. It is also revisionist history to say that “Most of the bigot Democrats, the Dixiecrats, became Republicans.” Most of the Dixiecrats retired as lifelong Democrats.
I never said the Republicans are angels. If they had any real power they would, no doubt, attract the power hungry. But, they have always been the Party of Individual Liberty since their inception. I stand by what I stated: Democrats have been, and always will be, the Party of Slavery.
Responding to RobRoy at 1:40 PM (“The second amendment to the US Constitution has nothing to do with hunting…”), on 5 July, at 4:11 PM george e. smith had observed:
I concur, and so have a great many experts on semantics and English usage.
Notably, in 1991 author J. Neil Schulman contacted Roy Copperud, a recognized expert on usage in the American language, and asked him to examine the text of the Second Amendment, which resulted in an exchange with Prof. Copperud that became the substance of an article published by Mr. Schulman in 1992 and which was incorporated in Mr. Shulman’s book Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns (1994, 1999).
This article is online in multiple locations, under the title of “The Unabridged Second Amendment,” to which the reader’s attention is drawn.
george e. smith says:
July 5, 2014 at 4:11 pm “It also has nothing to do with militias.”
george, than why are a militia mentioned?
Certainly not to mean “nothing”.
———————————————————————————–
milodonharlani says:
July 5, 2014 at 6:07 pm
“People” means the same thing in the 2nd Amendment that it does in the rest of the Constitution.
Milo, I agree.
I guess I missed your point.
RobRoy says:
July 5, 2014 at 7:03 pm
The militia are mentioned as short hand for “kooks & crooks excepted”. “Well-regulated militia” had a specific meaning to the Founders & Framers, as per Blackstone.
Does anyone know what year and model this car is?
Tucci78 says:
July 5, 2014 at 6:56 pm
Tucci, Thanks for that “Copperud” link.
I rest my case.
“Would you like to see President Obama do that?
I’d like to see him ban the sale of coal and oil.”
Lester, what the hell do you suppose that would do to the U.S. economy?
Complete brainless idiots like him make my blood boil. AAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!
Tucci78 says:
July 5, 2014 at 6:56 pm
Tucci, Thanks for that link.
I rest my case.
The militia of the U.S. consists of just about everyone. That’s probably why the term was used.
XL Pipeline.
At 4:12 PM on 5 July, Doug Allen had erred thus:
This reflects a common misconception about the history and Ur-nature of the Red Faction which does grievous injustice to plain facts well-documented in original as well as secondary sources, today even more readily available to the inquirer through the access provided by the Web. One very good clarification comes in a brief 2006 article uttered online by history professor Clyde Wilson on 12 September 2006, titled The Republican Charade: Lincoln and His Party,” from which is drawn the following:
The Republican Party had sprung virtually unaltered from the predecessor Whig Party (corporate lawyer Lincoln had gained the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 entirely on the strength of his support for Henry Clay’s “American System” of protectionism, fiat currency issue, and pork-barrel “public improvement” extraconstitutional government expenditures, the man being characterized throughout as “a good Clay Whig”) in an effort to shake off the New England regionalism of the Whigs as the Federalist Party follow-on, and thus improve the “court party” faction’s chances at the national power-grab needed to effect and enforce the Morrill Tariff.
Which tariff was the real cause of the War of Northern Aggression.
Jimbo, that’s about a 1930 Model A Ford?
nickreality65 says: “Janice, only a fraction of electricity is from coal (and NG makes CO2) and just how many electric cars is or can the grid support?”
Nick, your original question just dealt with whether there were ANY transportation fuels that came from coal. I do agree that only a fraction of electricity is from coal. However, in a metaphysical sense, some of the electricity generated by coal could be used to help charge a battery for an electric car. I will admit that I could have phrased my answer to you a bit better.
Lester Brown gets away with what went on during WW ll because most people don’t know what took place in manufacturing at that time.
Autos were still produced but only for military use and were painted olive-drab. 1942 model Cadillac cars were for generals and so on down the auto chain/military chain. FDR didn’t ban cars.
Cadillac also built tanks. Ford built trucks and half-tracks for military use.
Which tariff was the real cause of the War of Northern Aggression.
1828 tariff that had South Carolina wanting to secede and later Georgia?
At 9:33 PM on 5 July, Ed Mertin had asked:
For all practical purposes, the Morrill Tariff of 1861 was substantially a repeat effort to impose the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations.” Only worse.
Economist Thomas DiLorenzo published a very good brief essay on “Lincoln’s Tariff War” (6 May 2002), from which is drawn:
Lincoln called for the mobilization of armies and the imposition of blockade to no purpose other than to close the seceded southern states’ seaports to foreign trade, for Charleston and Savannah and especially New Orleans operating as effectively duty-free ports of entry for foreign manufactures would result in the diversion of so much trade from the northern centers around Boston and New York and Philadelphia as to utterly wreck the economies in the center of Whig – er, Republican – political power.
Source materials on this subject are in print and online, readily available.
Seems Lester Brown grew up on a farm during WW ll? Farmers had adequate supplies of gasoline at that time which they did also use for their cars and trucks.
Gasoline was rationed for city people.
Am getting rather tired of the fish-tales that are published now and passed off as truth.
“Barbara says:
July 5, 2014 at 8:28 pm”
And Ford donated all profits from sales of Fords in Germany to Hitler.
At 1:32 AM on 6 July, Patrick had stated:
Hadn’t that been in much the same way that businesses all over the Greater Chicagoland Area have spent most of the last century and more making “donations” to the Cook County political machine?
—————————-
There is no calculus involved. Nor differential equations. It involves the simplest of mathematics. As it turns out this really is “the most transparent administration in history!” All one need do is invert what Resident Obama says and the truth is laid bare. So-called “clean energy” cannot power our industries and society as they exist today, but it most definitely can power the fundamentally changed America Resident Obama envisions.
The success of his vision is already playing out. The Canadians will very likely pipe and sell their bitumen to China, as do we and the Australians with our coals. These energy sources will be used by supposedly less exceptional peoples than Americans. That is, of course, if you think the present crops of Americans convey exceptional-ism to any degree whatsoever.
The long march through the institutions worked. Get over it.
“US citizens get the government they deserve.”
No, in a democracy you get the government the major parties let you choose. Obama vs McCain/Romney was the choice between arsenic and cyanide.
My guess is that the Republicans will put foward another unelectable candidate in 2016 and throw the election to Hillary Clinton.
regarding being fooled by a politician – I freely admit I was always a strong GWB supporter, and I still think he was a very good man who honestly tried to do his best. But I also admit that he made more than his share of bone-headed, mind-numbing mistakes that I *never* saw coming, some of which I still don’t understand. (no need to list them, everyone’s been talking about them for years)
I won’t say I was fooled by him, he is who he is – but I learned that he had a far greater capacity for error than I thought possible. So that’s my mea culpa, and i doubt I’m alone.
also, in 2008, McCain wasn’t much better than Obama. That man never saw a war he didn’t want to get the rest of us in the middle of, and just might have had enough pull to pass cap and trade.
Willis Eschenbach says:
July 5, 2014 at 6:13 pm
Marc says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:23 pm
There are two questions about a vote for Obama in 2008:
…
And no, I have never been fooled by any politician ever.
My congratulations, go to the head of the class.
w.
I would, but I accomplished such on the backs of men wiser than me that revealed the full capacity of human nature long before me. That’s a nice dodge of my questions. It was monumentally obvious what kind of person Obama was in 2008, so it doesn’t speak highly of someone at your age who could have missed that.
The man who can be trusted with power is so rare as to be irrelevant today. When given a vote, it must always go to the person who least promotes the power and expansion of government, and then expect to still be terribly disappointed.
Marc says:
July 6, 2014 at 5:37 pm
Great, you’re a freakin’ unique genius and I’m an idiot, you’re a man who has never been fooled by any politician ever.
Me, I saw the 2008 election as a choice between Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin. Obviously, you thought McCain/Palin was the better choice …
Sarah Palin, one heartbeat away from the Presidency … and you claim you’ve never been fooled?
Look, Mr. Anonymously Arrogant, in a choice between Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin, all you can do is choose who you think might be fooling you less. I thought Obama was the lesser of the two weevils … so sue me.
And if you’re so damn smart, why are you hiding your identity under a bushel? Are you afraid your friends or your boss will find out about your boasts? You worried that your mom might read your fanciful claims and realize that the reason you haven’t ever been fooled by a politician is that you are sixteen and have never voted?
As one of the anonymice, of course, there’s no way to confirm or falsify your braggadocio. So go ahead and declaim of your amazing brilliance, tell us how you voted for Sarah Palin, there’s no way for us to check any of it … sorry, not impressed in the slightest.
In my book, any man who anonymously claims he has never been fooled, by a politician or anyone else, is experimenting with the stress/strain curve of veracity … but I must say, for a man who’s never been fooled by a politician, it’s been a pleasure watching you make a fool of yourself.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming …
w.
At 8:16 PM on 6 July, Willis Eschenbach had written:
Hrm. With regard to “Barry” Soebarkah (by way of his own “official” biography, he’d been adopted – with his name thus changed – by “Lolo” Soetoro to become a citizen of the Republic of Indonesia, and there has been – even at the time of the 2008 elections – no history of any action in law to restore his legal appellation to “Barack Hussein Obama II”), what I did hear from him was his troth plighted to the great war on “climate change,” when in January 2008 he stated quite explicitly in an interview with the editorial board of The San Francisco Chronicle:
Bad as Crash Test Johnnie was and still is (and having grown up and lived most of my life in the Delaware Valley to know all about Joe Biden, I can tell you that Sara Palin would be a helluva lot preferable in that “only-an-impeachment-away” slot), that explicit dedication to the great “Liberal” fascist war on atmospheric carbon dioxide instantly put the harpoon in Michelle’s Metrosexual Meatpuppet insofar as I was concerned.
Mr. Eschenbach, that guy wasn’t “fooling you” AT ALL.
And still you voted for him?
———————————–
You VOTED for HIM??? What kind of blind sucker are you?? I saw through that creep the moment I set eyes on him. He was so obviously unqualified, such an obvious fake, so clearly a communist idiot. How simple does someone have to be, to have EVER been taken in by the likes of him?? Nice that you have finally figured it out after all of what has happened, but you were sure an idiot. Hard to believe that someone can stop being an idiot – yeah, you have been slapped in the face in this particular case and forced to recant, but your credibility is destroyed forever as far as I can see.
In making his comment, Mr. Wilson seems to have the purpose of reminding us that in debating an issue it is logical to avoid characterization one’s opponent when the character of this opponent is unrelated to this issue. Thus, for example, in debating CAGW it is logical to avoid characterization of Mr. Obama as “imperious” because whether or not he is imperious is unrelated to whether or not we face CAGW. Well said!
William Wilson says:
July 6, 2014 at 8:46 pm
So sue me … I find this parade of genius folks that have never ever been fooled, the line of ‘never made a mistake’ folks to be hilarious.
You pretend that I chose Obama/Biden out of a host of good candidates. Instead, I voted for him instead of John McCain and Sarah Palin … so to use your words, you VOTED FOR HER??? What kind of a blind sucker are you? I saw through that creep the moment I laid eyes on her … your credibility is destroyed forever as far as I can see, blah, blah, blah …
Do you not see how foolish you sound when you start spouting off like that? Neither my credibility nor yours hangs on who you might have voted for in 2008, that’s ridiculous.
It’s a judgement call. I thought Obama/Biden was the lesser of two weevils, as I said above … and while you may disagree, your vile attack on me in response is unpleasant, unwarranted, and unsupported.
Go back to tearing the wings off of flies or something, William the Perfect. Clearly you’re not mature enough for a political discussion.
w.
Willis,
In response to:
In my book, any man who anonymously claims he has never been fooled, by a politician or anyone else, is experimenting with the stress/strain curve of veracity … but I must say, for a man who’s never been fooled by a politician, it’s been a pleasure watching you make a fool of yourself.
1). Didn’t claim never been fooled by anyone. Can’t get fooled by politician because I never believe their words, I examine their preexisting character and actions the best I can, knowing that is also inadequate. To the extent I have ever been “fooled,” I have only fooled myself.
2). I stay anonymous because I have a highly visible professional position where I keep my politics invisible as that is necessary to work most effectively with the broad cohort of people who work for and with me. Furthermore, I still have to put my children through college, so I don’t take chances with any impairment of my livelihood.
3). My mother recently passed away at 88.
4). I am sorry that it offends you to be criticized on this. I am not going to argue about Palin except to say she philosophically believes in a more restrained federal government than Biden, but that was irrelevant. I was voting for president as it seemed remote that Biden or Palin would rise to the presidency. Given the statistical chances, I ignored that dimension.
5). I met McCain as a teenager in 1977 in a group of 10 students who listened to and spoke to him about his then very recent POW experience. He certainly now evinces some post-traumatic tics, but his character and experiences versus Obama’s couldn’t be much more fundamentally different. I don’t love McCain, but the comparison to Obama at the time, and even now, is not a close call.
6). While it may be comforting to you to assume I am making things up because I am anonymous on publicly accessible forums, you might want to consider the alternative too. Your willingness to write me off without considering the valid reasons many people have for remaining anonymous doesn’t address the substance. Plus, I am not trying to be smarter than anyone; as I said the things I said are broadly known by millions, you just missed them somehow. I assure you, I have not made anything up, but you can believe whatever you like.
7). Again, I am most interested in what lesson you think you learned by the choice you made. It was a shocking admission, but if you have learned something fundamental about something, more power to you — just curious what you think that is.
8). It is all OK, I will still read your stuff as you seem to be seeking the truth in your efforts — a value I hold in the highest esteem.
Terry Oldberg says:
July 6, 2014 at 10:10 pm
Thanks, Terry. Since I didn’t say that Obama was “imperious”, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.
I called him the “Imperial President” because in the past he has way overstepped his powers in the fight on climate change, in exactly the manner suggested by Lester Brown … which is extremely relevant to the discussion.
w.
Only one president hasn’t used executive orders and that’s because he died of pneumonia thirty days after taking office. We had one president issue over 3,500 orders during the great depression. All orders are subject to judicial review and can be struck down if deemed by courts to be unsupported by statute or the Constitution. So there really is no imperial proclamation.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/orders.php
Also, there is more to the “Whenever this Congress refuses to act…” quote. Any president would say something pretty strong about a Congress that blocks job creation and economic recovery for political gain. I’m a third party voter.
http://m.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/09/remarks-president-campaign-event
…The crisis that struck in the months before I took office put more Americans out of work than any time since the Great Depression. But it was the culmination of a decade where the middle class had been losing ground. More good jobs and manufacturing left our shores. More of our prosperity was built on risky financial deals and homes that we couldn’t afford. And we racked up greater debt, and incomes fell and wages flat-lined. And the cost of everything from college to groceries went through the roof.
Now, these problems didn’t happen overnight. And the truth is they’re not going to be solved overnight. It is going to take us a few more years to meet all the challenges that have been decades in the making. And the American people understand that. What the American people don’t understand are leaders who refuse to take action. They’re sick and tired of watching people who are supposed to represent them put party ahead of country and the next election ahead of the next generation. That’s what they don’t understand. That’s what they don’t understand. (Applause.)
You know, President Kennedy used to say after he took office what surprised him most about Washington was that things were just as bad as he had been saying they were. (Laughter.) And I understand what he meant. (Laughter.) When you’ve got the top Republican in the Senate saying his party’s number-one priority is not to create jobs, not to fix the economy, but to beat me — that gives you a sense of the mentality here. Things aren’t on the level. That’s how you end up with Republicans in Congress voting against all kinds of proposals that they supported in the past. Tax cuts for workers and small businesses, rebuilding roads and bridges, putting cops and teachers back to work used to be bipartisan ideas.
Now, I’ve said I will continue to look for every opportunity during the course of this year to work with Congress to move this country forward and create jobs.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: We can’t wait!
THE PRESIDENT: But we can’t wait. (Laughter and applause.) When Congress — whenever this Congress refuses to act in a way that hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, I’ve got an obligation as President to do what we can without them. (Applause.) I’ve got an obligation to work on behalf of you and the American people. (Applause.) I’m not going to let members of Congress put party ideology ahead of the people that they were elected to serve — not when there’s this much at stake.
This is a make-or-break moment for this country, for the middle class in this country and folks who want to get into the middle class. So, for example, that’s why last week I appointed Richard Cordray as America’s consumer watchdog. (Applause.) Now, this is a man whose sole job is to look out for the best interests of American consumers — to protect families from the kinds of unfair or deceptive, abusive financial practices that helped to bring the economy to its knees. That shouldn’t be controversial. Why would somebody be against that? (Laughter.)
And yet, for almost half a year, Republicans in the Senate blocked his appointment. They wouldn’t even vote on it, not because they said he wasn’t qualified, because they couldn’t say that. Former attorney general — you had Democrats and Republicans across the country, including his home state of Ohio, saying he was qualified. They just wanted to weaken Wall Street reforms. They thought, well, this might be too tough on these financial firms.
Now, does anybody here think that the reason we got into this financial mess was because we had too much oversight?
AUDIENCE: No! …
At 10:56 PM on 6 July, Ed Mertin praises our Indonesian-in-Chief for adopting an explicit “King Stork” attitude toward our national pondful of frogs, writing:
In this there is the pernicious assumption that there are purposeful dirigiste interventions which government goons – elected politicians and appointed bureaucrats – can undertake to engender “job creation and economic recovery” by way of coercion, and that this command economy policy is justified by the assumption that the people voluntarily participating in the private sector of our society are incapable of wealth creation absent the wise and all-knowing thuggery of career popularity contest winners and officious “experts” battening on public payrolls.
Hrm. There’s a concept in political economics known as “the knowledge problem” (articulated by Mises nearly a century ago, and much discussed by Hayek and other scholars subsequently) which cogently puts the spike in the premise that any government officer (or banditti of such perfumed arrogants) can know enough about the manifold factors of production, distribution, and consumption even in small subsectors of national or world economies to substitute beneficially for Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” of peaceably interacting voluntary market participants.
If I put in a link to any supporting reference, my comment will get held – yet again – “for moderation,” so I won’t do that. Instead, let me direct your attention – as a beginning – to Israel M. Kirzner’s very straightforward review article on “Economic Planning and the Knowledge Problem” in Cato Journal Vol. 4, No. 2 (Fall 1984), in which he quotes Hakek (1945):
Further investigation is left as an exercise to the student. The fascisti have been squirming and squealing unsuccessfully against this rocket rammed up their collectivist dupa ever since Mises published “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1920).
In your extensive quotation of the lovefest gull-and-diddle session from Soebarkah’s 2012 campaign, you’ve more than amply made it clear that your beloved Community Organizer hasn’t got the least goddam clue about what the proper role of civil government in society is, or has ever been.
And you’re using this to extoll him?
Bad as the Republicans are – and I’ve no doubt at all that they’re an execrable bunch of weasels, thieves, and blind idiots – when it comes to “Barry” Soebarkah, I have to go along with what P.J. O’Rourke had written back when Bubba was a-squat on the presidential commode:
Marc says:
July 6, 2014 at 10:30 pm
Willis,
So you never believed John McCain, you never believed JFK, you never believed LBJ, you never believed Olympia Snowe, nor Barry Goldwater, nor Ronald Reagan, in fact, you simply have never believed a single word that any politician has said.
Got it. Must make your life easy, you never have to wonder if they’re telling the truth or not.
However, despite the fact that you have never ever been fooled by a politician, not once in your entire life … on those occasions when you have been fooled by a politician, you’ve actually been fooling yourself.
Got it.
Makes perfect sense. No politician ever fooled you, by gosh, but when they have fooled you it’s only an illusion, because actually you have fooled yourself … Q.E.D.
We’ve all been fooled at one time or another, Marc. It sounds like you were badly fooled by Sarah Palin, for example. Her character was so weak that she walked out on the governorship … couldn’t make it as Governor, wimped out on the job, but she’s fine by you to be President? And you were more than fooled by the pair to so cavalierly discount the chance that a 72-year old man might die before he turned 80 … yeah, like that’s never happened.
But those are all just matters on which reasonable men can disagree. What is unpleasant is your sneering, triumphant tone of your basic claim.
You see, your basic claim is that anyone who votes for some lying politician other than the lying politician that Marc The Unfoolable Genius voted for is an easily-fooled idiot who needs to be grilled by Marc the Magnificent to find out whether he’s learned the proper lesson from his unbelievably stupid mistake, viz:
But OK, since you insist, here’s what I learned by the choice I made:
Never answer political questions from a pretentious unpleasant arrogant anonymous braggart with the alias “Marc” and an ego the size of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.
Go away, little man. I voted for a different pair of lying politicians than the pair of lying politicians you voted for. Get over it.
w.
PS—I don’t care why you are anonymous, nor am I saying you are wrong to be anonymous. I’m just pointing out that unlike me, you could lie through your teeth all day long about your life and what you’ve done or not done … and nobody, not even your friends or co-workers, could ever falsify those claims. So unlike people who sign their own names and have to pay a price if they don’t tell the truth, you will never pay any price if you stretch the truth until it breaks.
As a result, I have absolutely no reason to think that you are not lying. And given the actions of other anonymous bloggers around the web, I have every reason to believe that you may well be lying.
Be clear I’m not saying you are lying. That is an accusation I never make without clear evidence in hand that it is incontrovertibly true.
What I am saying is that your claims make no impression on me, because there is very real possibility that you are lying, you will pay no price if you are lying, and we have absolutely no way to determine if you are telling the truth or not. So I just put it in the “so what” pile.
Ed Mertin says:
July 6, 2014 at 10:56 pm
Thanks, Ed. Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, but just about every politician of both parties firmly believes that the other party is blocking legislation that will lead to job creation, and that the opposition’s policies won’t lead to economic growth. Republicans clearly believe that about Democratic polices, and vice versa. That’s how it’s always been.
Given that, most bizarrely you are claiming that simply because Obama doesn’t like the economic policies of the opposition, he is justified in governing by imperial diktat. Sorry, but that’s exactly the kind of misuse of executive power that the Founding Fathers feared. If your claim is true, there is no situation where the President would not be justified in intervening. You don’t like the opposition’s policies on Michelle’s school lunches? Must be time for an executive order. You don’t like the Republican’s position on abortion? Hey, neither do I … but that doesn’t mean that Obama gets to make the rules.
Nor am I alone in my dislike for this kind of imperial action. For example, who said:
So spare me the pious nonsense about how executive orders are not part of the Imperial Presidency. Obama was very clear that that is exactly what they are … or he was clear, until he became President and could use Executive Orders to reward his friends and screw his enemies.
Now, he has even enlisted folks like yourself as apologists for his change of heart, making the claim that if the President doesn’t like his opponent’s economic policies he can wipe them out with the stroke of a pen …
I’m sorry, Ed, but that is indeed an Imperial Presidency.
w.
Tucci,
Re: the knowledge problem…
Every individual makes many thousands of decisions every day. Some are important, some less so, but each one influences how the organism will act. Those decisions are in turn acted upon by other organisms. It is an amazing system that efficiently allocates resources.
Multiply those thousands of decisions by hundereds of millions of people [billions, if you include overseas investors], and you have a quantum computer. That computer is infinitely more powerful and accurate than the large, but limited number of government bureaucrats who think they can make better decisions than a quantum computer.
That is why central planning fails. It cannot possibly be as intelligent as the free market.
Anent “the knowledge problem,” at 1:19 AM on 7 July dbstealey writes:
There’s really nothing “amazing” about how organisms act and interact (sez the former Biology major) or how sapient entities undertake purposeful human action guided by their best appreciations of the situations and circumstances they encounter. Like physiology and ecology, praxeology really ain’t beyond understanding by way of simple skull sweat, particularly when you don’t lose focus on the concept of negative feedback as a controlling mechanism.
What makes the free market (which is to say the voluntary interactions of self-interested individual human beings in a milieu free from coercive intervention either “picking winners” or buffering the adversities of error and objective reality’s blind perversities) work better than any top-down ordination is that the market process leverages with greater efficiency the incentive for people to perceive negative feedback, both anticipated and ongoing, thereafter to observe, analyze, and act accordingly.
As regards the “quantum computer” analogy, nobody can honestly say that groups of people (even in great numbers, all cooperating like crazy) are somehow smarter or more reliable than the individual even if left to function without government thugs “guiding” them. There are accounts a-plenty of flaming idiot fads and fancies throughout history, and the power of willful ignorance and egregious stupidity en masse might actually be a good candidate for use of the word “amazing.”
What’s important, however, is the fact that (particularly with the increasingly accelerated dissemination of information about successes and failures) the effects of negative feedback are more rapidly and more readily appreciated when people mingle their individual choices together in a division-of-labor society such as ours, refining the quality of our knowledge and therefore the effectiveness of our actions.
That can look sort of like a “quantum computer” in operation, but think of it less as a grand difference engine grinding away than as an error-checking mechanism functioning on an almost uncountable number of branching decision trees.
“””””…..RobRoy says:
July 5, 2014 at 7:03 pm
george e. smith says:
July 5, 2014 at 4:11 pm “It also has nothing to do with militias.”
george, than why are a militia mentioned?
Certainly not to mean “nothing”.
———————————————————————————–…..”””””
Well RobRoy, I guess you just didn’t read my post on the subject.
For starters; nowhere in that document is a “militia” defined, nor is a “well regulated militia” defined.
Nor does it say just who is going to “regulate” this militia, whatever it is. Do the people regulate it or someone else.
Mentioning something, does not make it a condition on something else. As I pointed out, mentioning the sunrise, or a free state , also would not make those conditions.
Get yourself an English grammar book, and learn about sentence structure, and what makes one clause depend on another; or in this case be quite independent of another.
Some have argued that the various State National Guards, are militias. Far as I know, they are part of the DOD.
Stating a reason (ANY reason) why you believe in something (a militia), does not make it a condition on something else. Article 2 of the Bill of Rights does not make the right of the people conditional on ANY thing else.
Also if you hold that it only applies to a right of States to have a national guard (milita), and not the people, then simply move on down to Article 9 of the Bill of rights, where it says the people have ALL rights, that are not specifically mentioned in the Constitution; and that would surely include things like a right to privacy, and also the means to defend oneself.
Lester Brown is also an idiot about history. It didn’t take six months for American industry to switch in 1942 from making cars to making tanks. It took years. The process had begun in about 1938. FDR saw the inevitability of war and quietly engaged industrial leaders to plan and invest, particularly in machine tools –the tools that make the tools that make the products, be they Buicks or bombers. Brown seems like many warmunists to suffer from Progressive Disease, where hand-waving substitutes for real knowledge of how things work.
Liberals like the idea of being dictators. A couple of years ago the NYT was editorializing about how easy the rulers of China have it. If they see a problem they can just go fix the problem without having to worry about any interference from those who disagree with them.
richard verney says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:11 am
—-
You would be amazed, and perhaps saddened by the number of liberals who actually believe that the reason why the standard of living has improved over the last 200 years has been because govt regulations required it.
The idea that the industrial revolution created wealth and free enterprise distributed that wealth is completely foreign and even repulsive to them. They believe that the wealth has always existed, only the rich had stolen it and were keeping it for themselves, until govt came along and redistributed it.
Willis,
Of course I am not going away — with children in the mix, I have a dog in the hunt regarding the direction of civilization.
You have seen I am sure from this thread that many people are disturbed by disastrous course the presidency is on, which any evidence-based decision-making in 2008 clearly predicted, and legions of people understood that. I am sorry that you don’t want to address that.
Yes, everyone, including me, makes mistakes and misjudgments, but the problem is that most people don’t learn the true lessons from them. My mistakes and misjudgments have arisen nearly entirely from my own ignorance or my assumption of greater knowledge than I actually had — not from information that was actually missing. That is not circular.
Through a difficult childhood due to exogenous circumstances, I learned early on how difficult it is to know people’s characters. However, I would not wish my education process on others, even though it has made me pretty clear-eyed about humans — good and bad.
No the choice between McCain and Obama was not a “liar” neutral choice as you posit it — but I can see that you are unpersuadable.
By the way, the first vote I ever cast, at my first voter eligibililty, was in 1980 for Ronald Reagan — highly contrarian to my college classmates at the ultra-liberal institution from which I graduated.
Your dismissal of my comments because of anonymity is the opposite extreme of argument ad verecundiam, and just as invalid. If that is your stance, I suggest you ban anonymous comments from your threads — though I suppose Anthony’s views would dictate that.
Marc is my real name, just not all of it.
Sounds like Obama has a lot in common with the Kommisars of the EU – except that he was elected of course. I’m sure he could swap a few stories with Juncker, the president-appoint of the EU commission, about how to strangle the democratic process.
Still, Obama has plenty of supporters, as does the EU. A friend recently giving an argument in support of the EU, explained that the EU is “inclusive.” That’s the problem with sound bites, they’re just too damn enticing. Perhaps Obama is “inclusive” as well. There you go,as long as you find some popular attribute it can be used to justify all kinds of wrongful behaviour.
–Despite being a “constitutional scholar”, he seems to misunderstand the separation of powers. He has no such obligation. It’s not his job to decide what “hurts the economy and puts the people at risk”, and more importantly, he has no such power. If the Congress decides not to pass a law, that’s their choice. The President’s job is to be the “Chief Executive”, and as such, the Constitution says he is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”. Nowhere is he given the power to make or interpret the laws. That is the job of Congress on the one hand and the Courts on the other … and if Congress won’t act, well, tough. If you don’t like the Congress, vote them out of office.–
I think it’s obvious the president does not have the authority, but I also don’t think the congress has such authority.
Instead, what is needed for government to have such authority, is a amendment to the Constitution granting such authority.
Marc says:
July 7, 2014 at 10:37 am
Marc, I didn’t “dismiss your comments”. Let me take an example. You say:
And I say
So … what is the difference in our two statements?
The difference is that anyone who wants to can go to Ancestry.com, as people have done regarding my statements about my life, and verify that what I have said is in fact true.
So my statements are verifiable, but for all I know, you are 24 years old, your mom is 48, and you are still living in her basement.
So I have not dismissed your comments as you claim, Marc.
You have dismissed them, by making them unverifiable.
There is another important difference. I can’t lie about what I say. I have to stand behind my words, because you or my friends or my wife or anyone can check their veracity. So I can’t make stuff up like you can … note that I have said like you CAN, not like you DO, because I have no way to know what is made up and what is real.
In addition, you can change your name to Markk21 and walk away from your words. I don’t have that luxury. Everything I write I have to be willing to defend.
So as I said above, I’m not claiming that anonymity is wrong or bad.
I’m just saying that there is a price to pay for anonymity, which is that in essence you are dismissing your own comments. Why should I believe anything you say, Marc? It is unverifiable, and you will pay absolutely no price no matter how much you lie … and I’d be a fool to believe a word out of anyone’s mouth who is in that position …
… so I don’t.
But that’s not my choice, to give your words no weight at all.
That’s your choice, and bitching about me treating you differently because you are anonymous goes nowhere. We’d be crazy not to treat anonymous people differently, you don’t operate under the same constraints that people have who are willing to sign their own name to their words.
Now, if you make scientific claims, that’s totally different. Those stand apart from the man saying them, and they CAN be checked and verified.
But your story about your mom? Sorry … might be true, might not, no way to tell.
w.
Bryan A says:
However, there is legislation being brought before the States by such groups as WOLF-PAC and Citizens for Self-Governance calling for an Article V convention (Constitutional Convention) to make alterations and additions to the existing 27 ammendments. Yes that is correct, all 27 would be up for grabs including the 3 listed above. An article V convention could be utilized to keep the currently seated executive in power.
The call for convention passed in Georgia in March 2014. 1 state down and 33 to go.
Bryan – can you please provide some references regarding this?
=============================================================
And state National Guards did not exist at the time. If the Feds can step in and take over, how can they be state militias?
“I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials.”
— George Mason, in Debates in Virginia Convention on
Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788
Militia
“The militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, … all men capable of bearing arms;…”
— “Letters from the Federal Farmer to the Republic”, 1788 (either Richard Henry Lee or Melancton Smith).
“Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American … The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.”
— Tench Coxe, 1788.
“How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If during periods of mass arrests people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt.”
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and author of The Gulag Archipelago, who spent 11 years in Soviet concentration camps.
If we are ready to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that our measures are forging for them, if they did not resist.
— Edward Livingston
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
— Mao Zedong, Nov. 6, 1938, Selected Works, Vol. 2
People have mentioned the amendment process. That is how “things left out” (for lack of a better term) should be addressed. The end of slavery, women voting etc.
They should not be addressed by the courts changing or stretching the meanings or intent of the words used.
PS If you don’t like the candidates, vote in the primaries along with the general election. And support voter ID laws. Who gains by making voter fraud easier?
Willis,
The interesting thing is that your post is about you complaining about the imperial presidency. This post isn’t about me. As a presenter, yes you do have a higher obligation to be transparent. I don’t think you should ignore central questions about your post just because you can’t verify the identity of the commenter or my collateral non-material statements. I think you would give the benefit of the doubt to earnest inquiries that aren’t meant to impugn.
The issue I and others have pointed out is that you were part of a group of people who put this President into power, while many of us claim (and if you disbelieve us, there are many fact-based source to look at) that his current actions are entirely consistent with the character that he displayed before his first election. There was a cult of personality phenomenon, and it was further obvious that the press was not reporting on him deeply or honestly — which like in the case of CAGW, in and of itself — demanded further diligence. I did mine and saw this monstrosity coming. So did many, many others.
CAGW is a subject half about science and half about political ideology. My skepticism over government power requires me to demand rigorous proof of an existential threat to humanity before I could even consider giving my support to some form of collective, coercive action on the scale being proposed. Clearly, from the beginning, Obama was going to put collective action (Obama Care, climate nonsense, taxation, etc.) well ahead of any proof, as his underlying character demonstrated his fidelity to autocratic technocracy run by his version of the elite. He had a priori demonstrated his unfitness for power due to his prioritization of collective goals and government power over individual liberty – a trait that has consistently led to the grossest abuses of humanity.
I still find it a major lapse in historical and evidence-based political reality to have believed that Obama would do anything but press forward aggressively on the growth in the size, scope and power of the federal government. I again assert this was blatantly obvious to millions of people. So I really wish I knew why you missed something so fundamental to human character, power, and political reality. I wish you were more curious about it too.
Those of us who saw it and militated against an Obama election (not for a McCain election) are still chafed that many intelligent people failed in their duty of diligence before putting him in office. The failure can be addressed in a satisfactory way, and I have heard many do so. But at our age, to be unaware of the dangers of people with Obama’s character, despite the suboptimal alternatives, is hard to bear and cause for ongoing deep concern.
Marc
=====================================================================
TYPO! (sort of)
It makes more sense as, “keeping voter fraud easy?”
Marc says:
1. How could a thinking person possibly make such an egregious mistake?
Obviously I can’t speak for Willis, but what if said vote was not a mistake, but a considered decision? A decision based on the understanding that no matter who was in office, collapse is inevitable, and the better, considered choice would be the one to hasten said collapse?
“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace” – Thomas Paine
Tony,
TonyG says:
July 7, 2014 at 2:22 pm
Marc says:
1. How could a thinking person …………
……..“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace” – Thomas Paine
If that is his answer, I could accept that as a decision arising from a fundamental understanding of human character. It is those who missed his fundamental character that concern me.
Marc
As I said – I can’t speak for Willis, I’m just giving AN answer to your question 🙂
Tony,
Yes, I have the “let it burn” sentiment overcome me from time to time, and it is a course worthy of consideration. I agree it is AN answer and a reasoned one at that. I didn’t get the sense that was Mr. Eschenbach’s answer though, and as you note, you’re not speaking for him.
Many of my very close friends made the same choice, and I understand the lack of knowledge that leads normal, intelligent people to make such a terrible decsion. If that never happened, we wouldn’t have near the kinds of trouble we have in humanity.
george e. smith says:
July 7, 2014 at 2:40 am
US law recognizes both organized & unorganized militias. The National Guard is essentially a second Army & Air Force (Reserve Component) alongside the Active force. It is part of the organized militia. The unorganized militia is basically everyone within defined age limits who is able-bodied & not a crook or a kook.
The militia clause is in the 2nd Amendment because it’s a way of saying that the right to keep & bear arms may be denied people convicted of crimes or too mentally disordered to serve in the militia. And also because the US could not have won its independence without militia & the Founders rightly feared a strong standing army as a threat to financial security & freedom.
Marc, over and over you present this as though I picked Obama out of a dozen good candidates … sorry, but that’s not the case.
Instead, I made a careful decision, as I’m sure you did, evaluating dozens of factors—what they said, what they did, what they looked like when they spoke, who their followers were, who was their running mate, what their running mate said, what they did, what they looked like when they spoke, what their histories were, what their programs were, the list is very long.
At the end a man adds it all up and makes a decision. In my books, it was a close call. At the end of the day, to me the difference came down to Sarah Palin. The thought of that clueless wimp being in charge of the USA made my stomach crawl … and in fact, in the event she couldn’t even handle being Governor and walked out on the job.
Now, clearly you put different weight on those things … and that’s fine. That’s why we have elections overall.
But to claim, as you are doing, that I was an idiot for the choice I made?
Sorry, my anonymous friend. I put as much thought into it as you did, and neither of us know what would have happened had McCain-Palin been elected. We might be sitting here with President Palin claiming that she can see Russia from the White House, and all of your friends would be saying “You voted for HER? Really?
As a result, I find your insistence that you have the high moral ground to be both unpleasant and untrue. Yes, I understand that you justify it by saying that you are the one and only man in the world who has never, ever, been fooled even once by a politician … except when you were fooled by a politician or two.
Of course, you went on to tell us that when that happened you were only fooling yourself, and the politicians didn’t fool you one bit … riiiiiight, that’s the ticket …
So how about you come to confession, and confess your historical idiocy, and tell us just how stupid you were to fool yourself, and about all that you learned from that? Then we can all sit here in judgement on you, like you are sitting in judgement on me, and we could laugh at what a chump you were, and go on and on (as you do) about “how could you have possibly ever been such an idiot as to fool yourself over X” …
Your anonymous assumption of moral superiority, simply because you voted for Sarah Palin for President-In-Waiting, is most unpleasant.
Finally, you say:
I do give the benefit of the doubt to earnest inquiries that aren’t meant to impugn. But you have done nothing of the sort. To the contrary, you have been relentlessly trying to impugn both my character and my intelligence simply because I didn’t vote for the same two lying politicians that you voted for. Here’s your opening shot, first words out of your foul mouth:
You followed that up with:
Is that your idea of an “earnest inquiry”, Marc? Really? Is that how you generally open a conversation with someone you’ve never met? No questions, no attempt to be pleasant, you start right out of the box by claiming that they’re an idiot?
Because if you seriously think that you have been engaged in “earnest inquiry”, you desperately need to get out of your mom’s basement more often. Here in the real world, those are not called an “earnest inquiry”, they are called “ugly, baseless, and unwarranted attacks”.
So I’m sorry, but a nasty little man like you, who starts out by attacking me in a host of ways, and continues from there to demand that I answer questions so that you can scoff at my answers, gets no slack from me at all.
Go ask your unpleasant questions of someone else, there’s a good fellow. You’ve burnt your bridges with me. Perhaps you are used to people who tolerate that kind of unpleasant behavior. I’m not one of them, so you’d better go mindlessly attack someone else. I bite back.
w.
Have never voted for a Democrat in anything other than local election stuff. I used to be staunchly Republican. Obama is not my beloved community organizer. However, the fact remains that Presidents have been issuing orders since the inception of the Republic. If the Founding Fathers really so feared the misuse of executive power… executive orders and proclamations would have been well defined in the Constitution. They were not, the very first President made rules. Idk, did they all kinda like the idea? In addition to judicial review of executive orders, Congress also has ways to overturn executive orders by passing legislation and can sometimes cease funding. Admittedly, it now takes a (hard to get) supermajority to override a veto of the legislation. <—–Something needs to be done about that. SCOTUS determined 200+ years ago that a President has two kinds of task: ministerial and discretionary. That was reaffirmed in 1867 Mississippi vs Johnson.
Willis,
You are posting on the most widely read blog on Climate in the world.
Climate change is the single most dangerous avenue for giving tyrants a path to undermining personal liberty and empowering themselves, which would lead to untold misery and deaths.
And merely by posting here, you are putting yourself up as a thought leader on a historic issue at a critical time. If you don’t want to answer hard questions, then I don’t see why you should hold yourself up as a thought leader.
This is a thoroughly political issue, and political wisdom in my view is a prerequisite for thought leadership, especially when posting on the political dimensions.
As I said, I didn’t vote for Palin, McCain is still alive, and if you checked, his health status before election was thoroughly vetted.
It is your choice to be a thought leader or not. If you think questions regarding your political judgment are impertinent, I am not sure why you are posting in a place where thought leadership on the historical issue of the time is expected. You didn’t have to say you voted for Obama,
`but since you did
`and since he consistently takes anti-science stances in furtherance of the concentration of government power,
`and since it was obvious that he was going to do so beforehand,
It would serve your loyal readers well, including me, to clarify how you are no longer subject to the delusion that led you to electing an entirely unqualified, dogmatic ideologue as the leader of the FREE world.
By the way, with your stated loyalty to facts and truth, please refer to the following:
Willis: “We might be sitting here with President Palin claiming that she can see Russia from the White “House, and all of your friends would be saying ‘You voted for HER? Really?'”
Claim:
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sarah Palin said: “I can see Russia from my house.”
FALSE
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/palin/russia.asp#fRCU39MBz3oaOQbZ.99
The basis for the line was Governor Palin’s 11 September 2008 appearance on ABC News, her first major interview after being tapped as the vice-presidential nominee. During that appearance, interviewer Charles Gibson asked her what insight she had gained from living so close to Russia, and she responded: “They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska, from an island in Alaska”:
Two days later, on the 2008 season premiere of Saturday Night Live, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler appeared in a sketch portraying Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, during which Fey spoofed Governor Palin’s remark of a few days earlier with the following exchange: FEY AS PALIN: “You know, Hillary and I don’t agree on everything . . .”
POEHLER AS CLINTON: (OVERLAPPING) “Anything. I believe that diplomacy should be the cornerstone of any foreign policy.”
FEY AS PALIN: “And I can see Russia from my house.”
Henceforth, invocations of Sarah Palin frequently employed the line “I can see Russia from my house,” rather than the words she actually spoke, “You can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.”
As to the question of whether one can actually see Russia from Alaska, Governor Palin was correct: such a view is possible from more than one site in that state. A Slate article on the topic noted that: In the middle of the Bering Strait are two small, sparsely populated islands: Big Diomede, which sits in Russian territory, and Little Diomede, which is part of the United States. At their closest, these two islands are a little less than two and a half miles apart, which means that, on a clear day, you can definitely see one from the other.
Also, a 1988 New York Times article reported that: To the Russian mainland from St. Lawrence Island, a bleak ice-bound expanse the size of Long Island out in the middle of the Bering Sea, the distance is 37 miles. From high ground there or from the Air Force facility at Tin City atop Cape Prince of Wales, the westernmost edge of mainland North America, on a clear day you can see Siberia with the naked eye.
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/politics/palin/russia.asp#fRCU39MBz3oaOQbZ.99
I would be happy to give you my personal email address if you would otherwise keep it confidential since you seem so bothered by anonymity. Or perhaps you have it as the moderator of this thread? Feel free to shoot me an email and I can provide verification on who I am.
Having read and commented on this blog for years, anonymously and never heretofore problematically, I really don’t understand why my question is heating you up so much.
Thanks,
Marc
PS
Regarding your comment below:
Willis: “Instead, I made a careful decision, as I’m sure you did, evaluating dozens of factors—what they said, what they did, what they looked like when they spoke, who their followers were, who was their running mate, what their running mate said, what they did, what they looked like when they spoke, what their histories were, what their programs were, the list is very long.”
Your contention is you made a reasonable decision at the time given the available information. We can simply agree to disagree. I am confident that had the information you made available to yourself about historical cults of personality — and their inevitable pernicious outcomes — beenn broader and more informed, you would not have made that judgment nor would you stand by it now. That is a statistically valid and empirical assessment.
I wish you well and don’t feel any of the antipathy expressed by you in your comments as I can see you believe them to be reciprocal ad hominem in response to the slights you took from my comments, but none was intended. And I am not trying to bite anyone, whether first or biting back. I just want the world to quit making the same horrrendous and deadly mistakes over and over again.
Marc says:
July 7, 2014 at 5:00 pm
Marc, was there some part of the close of my previous post that was unclear? Let me repeat it in case you missed it:
Because if you didn’t understand it, just ask, I’m more than happy to explain any part of it real slowly so you can get hold of what it means. Let me just hit the high points in summary fashion.
You are an unpleasant person. You came in attacking me from your very first comment. You do not understand what anonymity does to your credibility. Your claims to never have been fooled by a politician except when you fooled yourself are a pathetic joke. Your credibility with me is zero. In short, I have no interest in answering your nasty accusations or playing your sick games in any form. As before, I request that you go inflict yourself on someone else.
Do you understand that now? Because if not … well, I’m not surprised.
w.
Are you a tyrant too?
Plus, you just got caught making untrue statements about Palin and me.
I am sure the readers can each judge our comments, I’m cool with that.
Plus, I offered to reveal my identity to you, but that would only reveal how silly your insinuations that I was misrepresenting things were, because I wasn’t.
Do you not know the difference between not understanding and not agreeing? I understood every thing you said at the moment you said it, I just disagree, including the notion that you get to go unchallenged whenever you throw a fit of pique, and that means I have to go away.
“””””…..Gunga Din says:
July 7, 2014 at 1:20 pm
george e. smith says:
July 7, 2014 at 2:40 am
……….Some have argued that the various State National Guards, are militias. Far as I know, they are part of the DOD………..
=============================================================
And state National Guards did not exist at the time. If the Feds can step in and take over, how can they be state militias?……
All completely irrelevant. It matters not what a militia is; any sort of militia.
As you will find over the NRA building in WDC (I believe), the second amendment simply says “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
It’s not written in legal gobbledegook, it is written in plain English, that any 4-H club member can understand.
One could cite hundreds of reasons the framers could have given for having such an amendment. The chose one such reason. They could have cited others.
It’s irrelevant because the meaning as not conditional on any such reason. It’s a reason, not a modifying condition.
The Stock Market being in a great state of disarray; The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
There you have it. Exact same meaning; different reason offered.
Make up your own irrelevant reasons; English grammar rules (applied to what was written), don’t modify the meaning in any way at all.
The solution to the mystery, is not in some dictionary definition of militia, or even well regulated militia.
It’s in the English grammar book, under sentence structure.
Peter Dunford says:
July 5, 2014 at 1:45 am
———–
Speaking of electric cars, another Telsa blew up today. They have made safety improvements because of the danger of batteries blowing up under passengers. Still an impressive stock.
http://laist.com/2014/07/04/tesla_splits_in_half_and_explodes_a.php#photo-4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCn1CufaCYc&feature=youtu.be
http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2013/11/12/elon-musk-on-the-tesla-fires-headlines-are-deceiving-model-s-is-safest-car-on-the-road-by-far/
An inexact modernized quote from François Guizot, mid nineteenth century:
“If a young man is not a socialist he has no heart. If an old man is a socialist, he has no brain.”
Marc says:
July 7, 2014 at 6:54 pm
Is there some part of “it is impossible to determine if an anonymous person is lying” unclear to you? You can say whatever you want about Palin, about me, about climate, about anything, and walk away and change your alias and never have to defend your words. When you decided to become anonymous, you gave up all of your credibility for anything other than science, where we can independently determine if your scientific claims are true are false. So I don’t give a rat’s posterior what you say, it’s all just creepy snarling and biting, and as far as I know, you’re some twisted sixteen-year-old kid with too much time on your hands.
As a result, Marc, I don’t believe a damn word coming out of your mouth … and most of them are unpleasant.
Nope. Just sick of you attacking me. You are an unpleasant person who has gone out of his way to abuse me from the first words you uttered, and you have continued that to the present. Why on earth should I discuss serious matters with you, when all you want to do is be amazed at how stupid I am? Do you think that kind of behavior makes people want to talk to you? Reality check … they make people want to spit on you. You’re an ugly, nasty man who has no clue about how to hold a discussion. Go abuse someone else.
w.
Have a look at this link
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2683560/Green-group-lobbyists-drafted-White-House-energy-policy-tit-tat-revenge-against-secret-Bush-Cheney-oil-industry-meetings.html
well worth a read:
Willis,
The title of your article is derogatory — imperial, imperious, idiot — and you are right. Yet you through your vote empowered this president and people like Lester Brown.
Why are you not worried about your attack on them, but are whining that I haven’t been gentle enough on you.
And you lied about Palin’s statements, either through willful ignorance or something else. You could have found that the characterization of her comments that you repeated was a willful media fabrication with one 30 second internet search. That probably means you are gullible or biased.
You are correct that I find a credibility gap in you now that I know you voted for this kind of baloney when the information was there to avoid that.
By posting here, you are making yourself a public figure, but you just want a one way megaphone, much like Mann, and you want to hold yourself above critique — the world doesn’t work the way you want it to. I have been blunt but not nasty. The feeling of nastiness that you feel comes because I have hit a nerve because it is true that the information was there for you to avoid voting for Obama and you missed it. That is germane to this post and to your credibility as a public voice on CAGW and it’s political ramifications.
I am just the bearer of the news you refuse to hear.
I now see the personality trait that enabled your vote for Obama, and it appears to be uncorrected. Sorry you can’t hear the truth.
If you don’t like my anonymity, email me, and quit making up speculation. You won’t because you actively resist the truth when it conflicts with the self image you want to maintain.
Peace and love,
Marc
Marc says:
July 8, 2014 at 7:05 am
Seriously? You expect an answer from me? Dang, my friend, you are dumber than you look.
w.
===================================================================
I think we are “disagreeing” about something we really agree about.
Yes, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” is a statement that can and does stand alone.
But in the context of a document that limits the authority, sets the boundaries, of the Government the Constitution just formed by those who just took up arms to preserve the rights Government had taken from them? The “introductory statement” fits.
“We the Sheeple” are not to be toothless.
Regards.
Gunga Din says:
July 8, 2014 at 2:33 pm
As first introduced by Madison in the House on June 8, 1789, his proposed amendment read:
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
Following revisions, this version was passed by the House on August 24 & sent to the Senate:
“A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.”
After more revision, the Senate passed this version on September 9:
“A well regulated militia being the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
The House accepted the Senate’s changes on September 21, 1789, but added the words “necessary to” & capitalized “People”:
“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
===============================================================
Thanks!
Years ago I read that the 2nd originally read as you quoted it. I tried to find info on that today but couldn’t. It seems that the first comma “…militia, being…” was probably added before it was was sent to the states before ratification.
I did learn that Madison wanted to incorporate the ideals of the Bill of Rights into the Constitution itself but he was shot down because that would be looked upon as changing the Constitution. (I assume it’s text had already been approved.)
Gunga Din says:
July 8, 2014 at 3:35 pm
You’re welcome.
The comma-based argument is simply idiotic when you look at the history surrounding the right to keep & bear arms.
Madison did indeed want to incorporate a version of the first two paragraphs of the Declaration into the Constitution. I don’t know why his suggestion wasn’t taken up, but the whole Declaration stands at the head of the US Code, & the Constitution references the Declaration by saying “done in Convention by the Unanimous Consent of the States present the Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independance of the United States of America the Twelfth”.
Willis:
w.
Willis,
I already received an answer from you.
I asked you what lesson you learned from voting for Obama that would prevent you from making a similar mistake in the future.
Through your non-answer, whether you meant to or not, you answered my question as follows: “I learned nothing, and furthermore I remain incapable of self-reflection on certain matters.”
You wish I was “dumb” or “16” or “living with my [deceased] mother” or “anything” so long as it justifies your internal compulsion to dismiss me to protect your (apparently fragile?) ego.
I have read your stuff here for the last couple of years with interest. I have never criticized you previously, because I never encountered anything that evoked it. Your revelation of a vote for Obama did — especially in juxtaposition with your criticism of Obama and Brown — shock me and reveal something to me. Furthermore, your willingness to lie about Palin and to purposely insinuate that I was untrustworthy to tell the truth because I merely protect my family through my privacy (think Brendan Eich), reveals even more about you. Your further use of of foul language (“creepy”, etc.), toward me, despite never receiving any, clinches the case.
Your silly made-up rule — that anonymity disqualifies valid comment — is simply another self-protective piece of artifice that cannot withstand epistemological scrutiny; but it makes you feel better I am sure to cling to such a convenient self-shielding device. I had a a great professor that had a random numbering system for grading assignments — term papers and essays — so that he could grade them blind to the authors and therefore judge them without bias or preconception.
I didn’t enter this exchange looking for a disagreement or believing you were an “idiot” (your word, not mine) or having any belief that you had such a major blind-spot or to make you look bad. However, I leave it realizing I need to be skeptical of your ability to make subjective policy and political judgments and that you have an impoverished understanding of the principles of constitutional republican government as originally conceived for our country, which will cause me, going forward to disqualify your comments related to potential policy judgments on CAGW.
I am sorry that your avoidance of a valid question necessitated such a blunt evaluation to get at the gist of things; but I thank you for engaging with me sufficiently to reveal that information, which will be useful in the appropriate allocation of my time in the future.
All the best,
Marc (aka the creepy, nasty, little teenager living with his dead mother)
Marc says:
July 8, 2014 at 8:05 pm
Talk to someone else, my friend. You have been attacking me from the first words out of your mouth. It gets old …
w.
Oh, Willis, I will.
Once I learn someone is not near as smart as they think they are, they become very tedious to try to talk to.
And yes, i am attacking you over your moronic vote for Obama, it is intellectually indefensible. I will skip your posts and I think Anthony is doing himself a disservice by giving you the forum, and I have now learned many others do too.
Your behavior merits attack.
Marc:
I’m on Willis’s side in your attack on him for voting for Obama. In a scientific blog, personal attacks are counterproductive as well as being hurtful.
Terry,
Please read the entire thread before you comment. This wasn’t a science posting by w., it was a political one from top to bottom.
Furthermore, if you read the entire thread, you will see who (i.e., w.) used foul language, lies, personal attacks and false insinuations to try to make their points. Doesn’t bother me considering the source.
I have discovered there are w. sycophants here and he loves that. But, please read the entire thread before such a comment.
Btw, if you haven’t noticed, this is not just a science blog. What about all the mindless w. posts about fishing trips and whatever. Sorry, but that just shows me the guy needs attention too much attention.
This kind of stuff is driving a multi-year follower of the blog like me to stay away. It really taints the entire contents to have a guy like this be featured — and I am a hardcore, Anthony-like realistic, science-based skeptic, but his guy is too much, a detriment in the end.
Marc:
You’re right in suspecting that I didn’t read the entire thread before commenting. If I was unfair to you, I apologize.
“””””””…….Gunga Din says:
July 8, 2014 at 2:33 pm
george e. smith says:
July 7, 2014 at 8:45 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/05/the-imperial-president-and-the-imperious-idiot/#comment-1679591
===================================================================
I think we are “disagreeing” about something we really agree about…… “””””
Well Mate, I agree with you on that. And I wasn’t trying to be ornery either.
It seems that the politicians and the lawyers, are incensed that the Constitution is written in rather ordinary English (of the day) that anyone (including “the people”) can fully understand.
So they are superfluous when it comes to “interpreting” the Constitution.
“Interpreting” means replacing words with “other” words.
And in “other” words lies “other” meaning.
So we should use the words that are there; and NOT “interpret” them, to add “other” meaning.
But I’m always amazed that everyone ignores the ninth amendment , in which really lies the power of “the people”.
The Constitution conveys no rights to “the people”. We already declared full ownership, in the Declaration of Independence.
In the Constitution, we gave up some rights to the Government(s) ; “in order to form a more perfect union.” The ninth says we keep the rest.
Terry,
Thanks for the thoughtful and considerate reply.
Best,
Marc