Thursday, December 1, 2011

Eco-Absurdity

Hurricanes seen from outer space

By Alan Caruba

There are no lengths and no depths to which Greens—environmentalists—will not go to advance the greatest hoax of the modern era. It used to be called “global warming”, but when that was exposed as based on falsified computer models put out by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the term “climate change” was adopted to mask it.

Billions of dollars have been wasted on claims of a massive increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere and entire careers, organizations, and government agencies have been financed to advance the hoax.

So much depends on this cash flow that the fraud’s machinery continues to function. Yet another IPCC conference on climate change began on November 30 in Durban, South Africa for the purpose of extending the absurd Kyoto Protocols that some nations signed onto with the promise of reducing “greenhouse gas emissions.” The original protocols exempted China and India. The U.S. refused to participate and many industrial nations have indicated they have no intention of doing so this time around.

As just one example of this BIG LIE, on November 30 I received a news release from the Missouri State University stating that one of its professors was “delivering a message in Washington, D.C. today urging the nation’s leaders to address the moral issue surrounding climate change.”

Oh, so now global warming is a moral issue, too?

As I have frequently noted, climate is something measured in centuries, while weather is forecast in days and, even then, can prove to be incorrect. The definition of the weather is “chaos” as it is subject to change in just hours as various “fronts” shift course. Even the most powerful events like hurricanes are difficult to predict and the U.S. mainland has not been hit by one in years. By the time Hurricane Irene arrived on the East Coast this year, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm.

This and the revelations of “Climategate”, the thousands of emails exchanged by the IPCC meteorologists of the University of East Anglia’s climate center, has hardly made a dent on the frantic efforts to keep the global warming lie alive.

“Michael Nelson, MSU associate professor of environmental ethics and philosophy, is part of the Climate Ethics Campaign, a team of representatives from government agencies, business and environmental organizations delivering a national climate ethics statement to President Obama and Congress.”

Here’s where it really gets absurd. Having blamed global warming for everything, this gang of hucksters assert that “’Missing from the international debate is the deeply disturbing moral and ethical implications of climate change.’ Nelson said ‘Climate change is a real, dangerous and rapidly worsening problem that cannot be driven solely by short-term economics or national self-interest.’”

The level of fear-mongering reaches new heights with the Climate Ethics Campaign claim that “Climate change-related impacts are already harming and killing people here and abroad. Unless carbon pollution is rapidly reduced, the resulting natural disasters, floods, diseases, illnesses, water and food shortages, and environmental degradation, along with associated rising violence and social breakdown, will injure or kill millions more every year.”

So, there you have it. Either we spend billions on “climate change” or people will die and societies will suffer turmoil. Can you name a single day when the weather somewhere has not killed someone? Do societies experience turmoil because of the weather or because they oppress their population? And can anyone do anything about the weather? No.

I fully expect these charlatans to announce that Santa may not show up on Christmas Eve if we don’t do something about climate change..

The weather, deemed too warm or too cold, continues to be touted as the result of too much CO2 in the atmosphere even though it is a mere 0.038% of the atmosphere and meteorological science has established its impact is virtually non-existent. There is no correlation between its increase and the climate except that it shows up well after any change.

Prof. Nelson, apparently concerned that his job is on the line, said, “We want to urge every citizen to push for policies that reduce emissions and prepare for climate change.”

Some of those policies threaten to further undermine the nation’s economy in the form of the Environmental Protection Agency’s assertion that CO2 is a “pollutant” and is falsely trying to use the Clean Air Act to shut down every coal-fired plant for the generation of electricity—even though they provide fifty percent of all electricity generated.

These aren’t just bad policies based on utterly false and debased science, but they represent the real threat to the lives of all Americans and to the economy in general.

There is no real “ethical” component to climate change. There is only the need to clean up after a hurricane, blizzard or flood in order to help people get their lives in order again. That is already addressed in part by government agencies like FEMA.

The time has long since passed when the U.S. and other nations should pay any attention, let alone waste any more time and money on the “sustainable” schemes being pushed by the United Nations and the many organizations dependent on this massive fraud..

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Climategate, Part Duh!


By Alan Caruba

At what point will it finally occur to the pea-brained legion of journalists, academics, alleged scientists, United Nations propagandists, and others still blathering about “global warming” and “climate change” that there is no global warming and that the climate has been changing for the past 4.5 billion years on planet Earth?

It would appear that no amount of the evidence of fraud is sufficient to convince them they have either participated or been taken in by the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Perhaps, though, the latest release of thousands of emails between the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change perpetrators may push them toward a rational conclusion and release the rest of humanity from the penalties and costs imposed by the global warming hoax.

It’s not that the IPCC is not relentless in this ugly business. A report released on November 18 by these reprehensible liars predicted “more extreme weather events.”

Well, duh! There isn’t a day that goes by without an extreme weather event occurring somewhere on the Earth. One might consider the weather at the northern and southern poles extreme. Or the heat of the Earth’s deserts? Then throw in the usual blizzards, floods, and droughts—and you have a non-stop variety of “extreme weather events” to which to point.

To put it another way, the whole hoax was working just fine until the Earth began to cool around 1998. So naturally the IPCC had to (1) change the terminology from global warming to climate change, (2) deny that its “scientists” were lying, and (3) continue the pathetic prediction scheme by pointing to “weather events.”

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, “The scientific link between climate change and extreme weather, however, isn’t uniformly clear, according to the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988 to assist policy makers with climate change.”

That’s right, this whole farce has been going on since 1988. At what point will the “enablers” of global warming accept defeat? Not soon if one considers that the IPCC is laying on another climate conference to be held in Durban, South Africa from November 28 to December 9. It will be the 17th opportunity for these deceivers to gather to wine and dine while taxpayers from the many nations they represent pick up the tab.

Here’s the kicker. “Christina Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said “the report also underscored the need for governments to take action to reduce emissions.”

What emissions? Carbon dioxide? A trace gas in the atmosphere (0.038%) that has no effect whatever on climate or weather?

Does anyone grasp how costly all the lies about “emissions” have been and continue to be? The Christmas tree to be erected at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. comes complete with the purchase of so-called “carbon offsets” to pay for its transport 4,200 miles across the country from California. Eighty million tons of “carbon credits” were purchased.

Bear in mind, that tree and all others depend on carbon dioxide in the same way humans and other creatures depend on oxygen! CO2 is vital to the growth of all vegetation on Earth. Without it, we all die.

But what is one Christmas tree compared to an entire nation, Australia, whose government just imposed a carbon-emissions tax on everything? The tax will drive existing heavy industry and other generators of CO2 from the nation that can afford to leave and make those who cannot less competitive with global manufacturers and other businesses. Some business will just shut their doors.

This kind of deception is global. The International Energy Agency announced in early November that “dangerous climate change will be essentially irreversible within little over five years.” The news report concluded saying “The IEA uses conclusions from research collated by the United Nations. Most climate scientists agree with the U.N. conclusions, although recent polls show a growing proportion of the public in many countries is skeptical of climate change.”

No, most climate scientists do not agree with the U.N. data because they know how flawed and frequently fraudulent it is. This kind of casual journalistic reference is a lie, along with all the rest of the global warming and/or climate change data from “official” sources like the IPCC and IEA, et al.

In early November the U.S. Department of Energy published “estimates” of global carbon dioxide emissions for the year 2010. Writing in Forbes, James Taylor of The Heartland Institute, took note that the Department concluded that “emissions rose by 6% from 2009 to 2010. This constitutes the largest rise yet recorded.” And then he added that “global temperatures have not risen during the past decade.”

There is no correlation. Never was.

Whether it is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the International Energy Agency, the U.S. Departments of Energy, Interior, and the Environmental Protection Agency, all depend on people being too ignorant or indifferent to grasp the truth that everything done in the name of global warming, climate change, or carbon dioxide emissions is a costly, evil deception.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Monday, November 21, 2011

Obama's Green Energy Fail


By Alan Caruba

Watching Secretary of Energy Steven Chu face nearly five hours of grilling by a congressional committee seeking answers to the multi-billion dollar loss taxpayers have taken after the department dispensed their money in pursuit of its Green energy program was a reminder that ideology is not a substitute for reality.

Dr. Chu received a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1987 for his work at Bell Labs, shared with colleagues, on cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. At the time he was appointed to head the Department of Energy, he was a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkley. He also had gained notice as an environmental enthusiast advocating a shift away from fossil fuels—coal, natural gas and oil—to combat “climate change.”

At one point Dr. Chu thought that painting roofs and other structures white would help reflect the sun’s radiation and save the nation and the world from global warming. Another nutty idea of his was a global “glucose economy” to create a “low-carbon economy” by shipping glucose from tropical plants would replace oil, the energy source that fuels transportation worldwide and serves a multitude of other uses.

Why any of this nonsense qualified him to be the chief administrator of the Department of Energy defies understanding. A footnote to this is the fact that the Department was the creation of the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter whose “windfall profits” legislation drove much of the oil industry out of America despite the fact that the U.S. sits atop some of the greatest deposits of oil in the world.

The loan guarantees of grants made by the Department of Energy are turning out to be a huge scandal for the Obama administration, rivaling the Department of Justice’s “Fast and Furious” gun-running program to the drug cartels of Mexico. When you toss in an unemployment rate that rivals that of the Great Depression, it is hard to understand why anyone would suggest that Obama will be reelected.

As reported in The Washington Post in September, “A $38.6 billion loan guarantee program that the Obama administration promised would create or save 65,000 jobs has created just a few thousand jobs two years after it began, government records show.”

This works out to $5,077.574 per job created.

We are now familiar with the Solyndra scandal, one of the companies that received loan guarantees despite grave misgivings of DOE staff members. It declared a very predictable bankruptcy as a manufacturer of solar panels. Its failure was blamed on competition from China, also a major producer of wind turbines.

Between solar and wind technology, the failure of these two Green energy producers touted by the Obama administration, is beginning to be noticed at the same time the Environmental Protection Agency is hell-bent on closing down coal-fired electrical power plants and the companies that mine coal.

Another DOE beneficiary was BrightSource, another solar firm which received a $1.4 billion bailout. It turns out that the DOE officials involved was Sanjay Wagle, formerly a principal in Robert Kennedy, Jr’s firm. In 2010, BrightSource whose largest shareholder was Kennedy’s VantagePoint Partners, had $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million.

Just how many billions the Obama administration’s Green energy program will have lost by the time they are eventually calculated will be testimony to the general failure of solar and wind power. Meanwhile, the Sierra Club is celebrating Obama’s decision to delay approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, estimated to generate 20,000 jobs.

The Department of the Interior has just delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio “for up to six months” and an industry group estimates that drilling in the Utica shale affected by the delay would produce 204,500 jobs by 2015.

In mid-November, Lisa Murkowski, a Senator from Alaska, wrote an opinion published in The Wall Street Journal, noting that the Obama administration’s proposed expansion of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico are its first concession since its moratorium on drilling in the Gulf. The administration still opposes offshore drilling on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

Sen. Murkowski pointed out that “Cuba, Mexico, the Bahamas, Canada and Russia are all moving ahead on offshore development adjacent to our borders,” noting that according to the Department of Interior, “our offshore areas hold more than 86 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The Artic Oceans is projected to hold 20% of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas.”

Why anyone thought Dr. Chu was qualified in any fashion to run the Department of Energy defies the imagination. Why anyone still believes that solar and wind energy can replace traditional proven sources of energy is testimony to environmental propaganda and myth-making.

Green energy is simply one more way the Obama administration has set about destroying America’s capacity to generate the energy needed for everything requiring electricity. It is one more way to impoverish the nation. And he is running for reelection in 2012.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Saturday, November 19, 2011

System Failure on a Global Scale


By Alan Caruba

We are living in times when the structures involving the global financial system, national security, and self-governance are under attack, decaying, or just self-destructing due to all the ills to which humanity is prone.

Wars in the twentieth century were always an example of either the failure of nations to resolve their differences or of the ancient human inclination to steal whatever they can from their neighbor. Wars organize this into armies for that purpose. The other cause for war is the necessity to rid the neighborhood of the crazy guy who’s hoarding weapons and building bombs.

What is occurring of late, however, goes beyond the usual casus belli to something far greater, a loss of faith in national and international banking systems, aggravated by the failure of nations to act in a prudent fashion to protect the wealth of their citizens and their national sovereignty.

The cause of this is socialism, the polite name for communism. Like Islam, it exists for world domination, the control of the population for the enrichment of those holding the reins of power. It is no accident that the U.S. Congress is filled with millionaires or those who soon will be.

Communism, the creation of a man who never held a job in his life, Karl Marx, and its theoretically gentler version, Socialism, has proved to be a failure wherever it was implemented. It is always introduced as the antechamber to utopia, a better life for everyone and it has always led to the slaughter of millions in the name of achieving it. It is just another form of slavery.

Socialism, as practiced throughout the United States and Europe, dependent as it is on the “redistribution of wealth” in the form of “entitlement” programs is now crashing down around the heads of various elected leaders.

As the former British Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, once famously said, “Sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.”

When you pile on debt beyond the mind’s capacity to imagine and you empower “super committees” or hold desperate meetings as are occurring in Europe, public faith in national currencies begins to disappear and with it a rational world in which goods and services generate income.

We are now 66 years since the end of World War Two, the war that followed “the war to end all wars”, World War One. Peace—the absence of war—lasted a scant twenty-one years in Europe before the latter cataclysm began in 1939.

Times of turmoil are the perfect opportunity for tyrants of every description to emerge, organize the collective anger, and launch new wars. In the past 66 years of “peace” there has been a succession of wars, usually between Communist and Capitalist nations such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars or civil wars. The recent wars and revolutions in the Middle East have been about oil and who gets to pump it out of the ground.

Threatening the entire world is the rise of the Islamic Revolution. Islam is less a religion than a battle plan for global conquest that has the added fillip of enslaving its adherents in a faith system that demands total obedience on pain of death. Unbelievers in general face this threat. Israel in particular always has.

Capitalism isn’t a perfect system, subject to periodic cycles of recession and depression, but it does require a greater measure of individual freedom than any other in order to encourage the kind of innovation and risk-taking that creates vast wealth-producing economies.

The problem the West is facing has been brought on by the profligate and often corrupt waste of the people’s wealth. This has been the result of metastasizing laws whose ultimate purpose is to keep populations from demanding more freedom from rapacious taxing, borrowing, and spending. Even central banks are powerless against this. Ours, the Federal Reserve, has responded by printing dollars out of thin air.

On November 18th a proposed constitutional amendment that would require Congress to balance the budget failed in the House. The U.S. is currently $15 trillion in debt. The worst fears of our Founding Fathers are coming true. Presiding over the nation is a Marxist ideologue and his henchmen.

When the Congress of the United States of America refuses to obey the limits of the Constitution, you have failure.

When that same Congress refuses to reform “entitlement” programs and reduce massive spending, you have failure.

When the Federal Reserve—a central bank that is not a part of the federal government— owns most of the nation’s debt, you have failure.

In my lifetime, the United States of America went from a largely Capitalist system and society to one of near total government control. It is Socialism supported by an insane system of taxation lacking even the appearance of fairness.

The United States has moved too far away from the purpose of the Constitution, established to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…”

We are that posterity,

In the decades since the last Great Depression a succession of Congresses has bankrupted the nation once again. It is happening as well in Europe because nations like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and France thought they too could defy common sense and fiscal prudence.

It is system failure on a global scale.

Americans and the citizens of Europe are the unwilling victims of too much government, too much regulation, too much corruption, too much taxation, and the general inclination of those in charge to acquire as much wealth for themselves while keeping the rest of the population complacent with “redistribution of wealth” schemes that always fail.

The Tea Party movement is calling for a restoration of America. We have precious little time to do that and it is the Democratic Party in league with unions who oppose that goal.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Global Warming: An Obituary


By Alan Caruba

I used to write obituaries when I was a young journalist and I daresay they are one of the best read sections of any newspaper. We have arrived at a time when the obituaries for global warming (now falsely called climate change) are increasing.

The October 25th edition of The Wall Street Journal sports an editorial titled “The Post-Global Warming World” commenting on the fact that the 17th annual United Nations-sponsored climate change conference in November is likely to be an even greater flop than recent ones. Few, if any, nations will sign on to the huge hoax of reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) to save the world from burning to a crisp.

Considering the long years of media-driven drivel about global warming, the hoax should have been over by now, given the exposure in 2009 of thousands of emails between the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) conspirators and growing body of evidence that everything they asserted was a great steaming pile of horse manure.

If there was ever a reason for the U.S. to stop funding the U.N., this is it.

I have predicted the death of global warming several times, but like a Hollywood zombie global warming is kept alive by its massive propaganda machine and useful idiots in the media.

Since the late 1980s The New York Times has engaged in the most horrid effort to convince its readers and the world that the IPCC should be taken seriously even though its successive reports have proven to be an offense to real science and the truth. No opportunity was ignored to advance the hoax even in the face of incontrovertible facts of every description.

Global warming has become a green religion to be taken on faith, but its claim to legitimacy was the “science” it put forth. That science began to come into question when a natural cooling cycle began in 1998. Glaciers began to noticeably grow along with the ice shelves of the Arctic and Antarctica. Snow arrived earlier and in greater abundance than previous decades.

Global tropical cyclone activity has been at historic lows and the frequency of U.S. hurricanes has declined. The latest, Irene, was rapidly downgraded to a tropical depression by the time it made landfall.

So, naturally, when Elisabeth Rosenthal, a blogger on “Green” topics for The New York Times wondered out loud “Where Did Global Warming Go?” I was curious to know her answer. Turns out that, despite being heralded on the covers of Newsweek, Time, The Economist, and countless other “news” magazines, in TV documentaries, et cetera, it hasn’t gone anywhere

After lamenting that, since his visit to the 2009 Copenhagen UN conference on climate change, President Obama has failed to mention global warming every day, Rosenthal wrote “But two years later, now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.”

No, nearly every other nation has concluded it was a massive and very expensive fraud. That is why the forthcoming UN conference is going to implode. Policy makers are trying to extricate themselves from the useless solar and wind projects to which billions were committed. As soon as Obama is out of office and the Environmental Protection Agency is scaled back to its original 1970 objectives we can begin to attend to the rebuilding of the nation’s economy.

Note Rosenthal’s use of the term “climate change” rather than “global warming.” Note, too, that the 2009 Copenhagen conference was a huge failure with none of the nations in attendance agreeing to do much more than get together again, preferably in Cancun, Mexico, 2010, where the weather, unlike Copenhagen’s was not at risk of the huge blizzard that forced Obama to leave early lest he be trapped there until the snow melted.

“Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified,” Ms. Rosenthal lamented that “Mr. Obama now talks about ‘green jobs’ mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, but not the planet.”

People who worry about “the planet” and not about real problems such as how to feed seven billion of its human inhabitants or how to provide enough electricity to keep the lights on in the world’s cities or who think “improving the economy” is a poor choice to make when more than 14 million Americans are out of work are seriously out of touch with reality.

“He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address,” said Rosenthal, pouting over something about which neither Obama, nor anyone else on planet Earth can do anything except to clean up the mess left behind by hurricanes, floods, and other forces of nature..

The climate, measured in hundreds of years, as opposed to the weather which is unpredictable more than a week from now, is the result of the activity of the Sun, the oceans, volcanoes, clouds, and cosmic rays. It is determined by the immutable laws of physics.

“The fading of global warming from the political agenda is a mostly American phenomenon,” wrote Rosenthal, apparently unaware that the European Union is about to collapse because several of its member nations are so deeply in debt that makes the U.S. look like a paragon of prudent fiscal policy. Rosenthal appears to be unaware of the rapid political changes occurring across the northern tier of African nations called the Maghreb and elsewhere throughout the Middle East.

Like the urchins “occupying Wall Street”, Rosenthal chides Americans who “prefer bigger cars and bigger homes. We value personal freedom, are suspicious of scientists, and tend to distrust the kind of sweeping government intervention required to confront rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

Since when is valuing personal freedoms, many of which are protected by the Constitution, and being suspicious of those scientists who have been claiming we’re all going to die, or questioning sweeping government intervention anything other than a deeply embedded American tradition and a very good idea under any circumstance?

Since 2008 the Heartland Institute has sponsored six International Climate Change Conferences, the last in Washington, D.C., June 30-July 1. Haven’t heard about them? Maybe that’s because the mainstream media has gone out of its way to ignore them. The conferences, however, have contributed to the growing body of knowledge disputing global warming to the point where, even in the nation’s capitol, the topic has become little more than the slow revelation of the utter mendacity of the hoax and its perpetrators.

Where has global warming gone? Onto the ash heap of the history of the last twenty-plus years of bad policies, wasted billions of the public treasure, and all of it driven by the UN’s mendacious “science.”

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Sunday, October 30, 2011

Killing Energy, Killing Jobs, Killing America


By Alan Caruba

America has been under attack since Barack Obama took the oath of office on January 20, 2009. The primary target has been the nation’s ability to generate energy for electricity and transportation, without which this nation will slide into Third World status and economic decline.

This appears to be the goal of this administration from the President to his Secretaries of Energy and Interior, to his Director of the Environmental Protection Agency. There is no other rational explanation for what they are doing.

We are days away from the latest Environmental Protection Agency assault in the form of the “MACT” rule allegedly to reduce mercury and other emissions that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says will reduce electricity generation in America by about 81 gigawatts in the years ahead. A recent Wall Street Journal editorial said “this could compromise the reliability of the electric system if as much as 8% of generating capacity is subtracted from the grid.”

The Wall Street Journal reports that eleven Governors have written the EPA to ask that it delay the final rule in November. Twenty-five state Attorneys Generals have filed suit “to lift a legal document known as a consent decree that the EPA is using as a fig leaf for its political goals.”

As but one example, in Illinois, Ameron announced the planned shutdown of its Meredosia and Hutsonville energy centers, The Meredosia center generates 369 megawatts. The Hutsonville center has a generating capacity of 151 megawatts.

The EPA, even before the Obama administration, has been using the 1970 Clean Air Act to bludgeon the nation’s ability to access the energy resources required to generate electricity, primarily coal that provides 50% of such generation, and oil that fuels our transportation capability.

In late October, James J. Mulva, the CEO of Conoco-Phillips, addressed the subject of the growing discoveries of natural gas being found throughout the nation. “More than 600,000 Americans already explore, produce, store and produce natural gas, according to consultancy IHS Global Insight.”

At least 15 states now produce shale gas and others may join them,” noting that the largest shale area, the Marcellus which covers much of the Northeast” “already supports 140,000 jobs in Pennsylvania alone.”

The Obama administration, beginning with the president’s admitted goal of shutting down as much of the coal industry as possible, has demonstrated his intention of deterring the provision of energy. When the BP Oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, the administration imposed a moratorium on all drilling. The decreased production cost 360,000 barrels a day in addition to lost jobs related to oil drilling in the Gulf. Rigs that are needed to drill have since been moved to other sites around the world.

The U.S. is home to more than 150 billion barrels of conventional oil that has the capability of generating thousands of new jobs if access to it was permitted. The most immediate result has been the rise in the cost of gasoline at the pump. Two courts ordered that the moratorium be lifted.

Oil companies currently pay more than $30 billion a year in federal, state, and local taxes. Meanwhile the Obama administration has been wasting billions in loan guarantees to essentially useless solar and wind power companies, the latest of which, Solyandra, will cost taxpayers millions when the solar panel producer went belly-up. Others will follow.

Meanwhile, the President crisscrosses the nations demanding higher taxes on companies engaged in coal, oil and natural gas. When Jimmy Carter imposed a windfall tax on oil companies many ceased to explore for new sources here, moving their efforts to other nations. Today, by withholding the necessary permits to produce energy in Alaska, the Trans Alaska Pipeline System is operating at one third of its capacity.

A proposed pipeline from Canada still awaits approval and, on November 6th, led by the Sierra Club, the largest protest against its tar sands is expected to draw thousands to Washington, D.C. to join hands and circle the White House to ensure the Keystone XL pipeline is kept from providing the U.S. with the oil extracted. The proposed pipeline would reduce the U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. The U.S. already has more than 50,000 safely operating oil pipelines to support our transportation and other needs.

In January 2010, Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research, warned that the Obama administration “continues to embrace Washington-dominated, command-and-control energy policies focused on mandates, subsidies, and political favors—not market forces.” He criticized “subsidizing one form of energy,” wind and solar, “while restricting the exploration of another,” warning that it “will lead to several measurable outcomes, increasing energy prices across the board, fewer jobs, and a weaker footing in the global economy..”

Nearly two years later, that warning has come true with a vengeance.

Oil, coal, or natural gas, it doesn’t matter to an administration and a president determined to restrict the amount of energy Americans need for their present and future needs. The result, in part, has been a stalled energy sector and a contributing factor in an economy with an estimated 20 million unemployed or under-employed.

The losses in income taxes and the taxes paid by this industry sector, in addition to the hideous borrowing and spending by the Obama administration is doing enormous harm to America and yet Barack Obama wants a second term in office.

Little wonder that Americans fear for the future of the nation.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Sunday, October 23, 2011

The Difficulty of Predicting the End of the World

By Alan Caruba

I am beginning to feel sorry for Pastor Harold Camping who predicted the end of the world would occur on May 21, 2011 and, when it didn’t, predicted that it would end on October 21 instead. Oops.

The fact is that men of varying theological and astrological inclinations have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time. Predictions can be found in Hindu, Taoist, Scandinavian, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim eschatology—the branch of theology that is devoted to final events.

There is brief mention of it in Jewish literature but the term “messiah” referred to a human leader who would lead the Jews out of bondage and unite the nation. The most famous is Moses in the story of Exodus until Christians adopted the belief that Jesus was, in fact, the messiah and would return. Similarly, the Muslims adapted this to refer to the Twelfth Imam, a mythical figure whose return would be hastened by all manner of earthly death and destruction.

The very fact that all major faith systems have some version of a messiah or an end of the world story suggests that the fear of this event is deeply imbedded in human psychology and no doubt is related to the fact that we all die at some point. Conveniently, most religions have their version of what will occur when that happens and usually have a destination such as heaven or paradise for those who have lived moral lives and hell for those who have not. A Hindu gets to come back, but must dodge doing so as a cockroach.

The most famous prediction is the Mayan one that predicts December 21, 2012 as the end of the world. Technically, the calendar began on August 13, 3114 BC and the cycle it asserted ends in December 2012. Its longevity is testament the fascination that the Mayan calendar has evoked. Need it be said that Mayan civilization is no more, so in that sense it was accurate, but off by several thousand years.

In its most basic terms, the end of the world ends for every one of us when we die. Human vanity, being what it is, most of us can barely conceive of the world without our being in it. Some religions preach that we should embrace death and an afterlife while others, more pragmatic, suggest we make the best of the one we have in the here and now.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in the course of his soliloquy about suicide refers to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” while Macbeth laments, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time” concluding it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, said we should “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

We are besieged by scientists who keep telling us that a stray asteroid could destroy the Earth by randomly colliding with it out of the great vastness of space. Others content themselves with calculating when the Sun will go supernova billions of years hence. Then there are the known extinctions that coincided with magnetic reversals.

In the1970s the United Nations climate clowns cooked up a huge hoax about global warming which has gone awry thanks to another completely predictable and natural cooling cycle that began in the late 1990s. That has not prevented the UN from trying to assert complete control over the world’s nations and their populations by scaring them into believing yet another end-of-the-world scenario.

For the record, a predictable new Ice Age is on its way, due to begin any day now since the last one ended about 11,500 years ago. When it does arrive, its affect will be swift and play havoc with the northern hemisphere. Meanwhile, winter around the world is becoming harsher in duration and effect.

Lawrence E. Joseph undertook “a scientific investigation into civilization’s end” in “Apocalypse 2012” published by Morgan Road Books in 2007, concluding that the Mayan calendar is a poor guide to the end of the world. “I think doomsday has a profound if unspeakable allure for those who are unhappy with themselves, their society, their Maker. It’s a form of vicarious revenge that anyone can take on life’s unfairness.”

“At any given point in history,” Joseph wrote, “there has always been a chorus of eccentrics predicting the end of the world. If only so much of the information about 2012 did not violate one’s sense of intellectual decorum: prophecies from Mayan shamans, interstellar theories of obscure Siberian geophysics, ruminations of South African psychics, and decrees of kabbalist rabbis.”

“Indeed, no single source, no matter how persuasive, could or should move one to seriously ponder the imponderable of the world tumultuously metamorphosing in 2012.”

With luck, if we are not struck dead by lightning or a sixteen-wheeler whose driver has fallen asleep at the wheel, the victim of an Iranian nuclear bomb, plus a multitude of other ways to shuffle off this mortal coil, we shall be around on December 21, 2012.

Nobody gets out of this world alive.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Will Warmists Face Justice for their Deceptions?

By Alan Caruba

When you murder someone the case is never closed. The same holds when you murder the truth. No matter how long it takes, truth is defended despite all the calumnies heaped on those who stand firm against the lies and the propaganda intended to persuade those who have been deceived.

Ultimately, truth is its own defense. There never was a shred of truth in the claim that humans were causing the Earth’s climate to heat up by using so-called “fossil fuels” and engaging in manufacturing and other activities. There was no dramatic “global warming” in the 1980s until the present.

The Earth’s climate has warmed very slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age, dated to around 1850. Five hundred years of extremely cold weather had gripped the northern hemisphere starting around 1300. The much heralded “climate change” is, unlike the weather, measured in terms of centuries, not days, weeks or years. It is used by politicians that do not know what they are talking about. It is also used by charlatans, but I repeat myself.

Under the direction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a massive fraud was engineered. The object was to turn carbon dioxide (CO2), a common though minor atmospheric gas, into a commodity that could be traded in exchanges around the world that would issue “carbon credits” to utilities, industrial facilities, and others who would be required to pay for permission to produce energy and products. It was an audacious scheme.

It began with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, otherwise known as the Kyoto Protocol. It set binding targets for the reduction of CO2 by 37 industrialized nations and the European community and was adopted on December 11, 1997 and entered into force on February 16, 2005. The U.S. never signed the Protocols. They were rejected by a unanimous vote in the Senate.

It was a complete lie without any basis in science. C02 plays no role in climate change and reducing whatever amount industry and other human activities might produce would be meaningless.

Surely the people behind the scheme knew this. The IPCC charged a small clique of climate scientists to come up with “proof” that global warming was happening. In England they were located at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and, in America, they were led by Dr. Michael Mann working first at the University of Virginia and later at Penn State University.

Dr. Michael Mann's "Hockey Stick" Graph
Mann’s research, assisted by co-authors Bradley and Hughes, was published in 1998. “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations” became famous for a graph dubbed the “hockey stick”. Its sudden upward curve, intended to demonstrate a dramatic increase was based on tree ring reconstruction of climate over a thousand years.

To say it attracted attention is an understatement. It and other studies produced by the IPCC clique became the cornerstone of the “global warming” hoax. The problem for Dr. Mann was that Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician in Toronto, along with Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph concluded it was bogus science and published a paper in 2004 criticizing it.

In science, when a theory or hypothesis is put forward, the data supporting it is as well. Years went by before McIntyre could get access to it. The tree ring data had been provided by Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit. Neither Dr. Mann, nor Briffa made it available, but McIntyre was able to secure it from another source. When he plotted all the tree ring data, not just the parts cherry-picked by Mann, the “hockey stick” disappeared.

In November 2009, thousands of leaked emails between Dr. Mann and other "warmists"---scientists responsible for the global warming hoax, revealed nothing less than a massive fraud.

Flash forward to a freedom of information (FOI) request by Chris Horner on behalf of American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center. Despite stonewalling for years, Dr. Mann’s former employer, the University of Virginia complied in May 2011, agreeing to release Dr. Mann’s computer files containing the data he had kept hidden for more than a decade.

Serendipitously, a similar FOI issued to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has revealed the level of financial gain received by another key player in the global warming hoax, Dr. James Hansen, a longtime NASA employee and the man credited with generating the hoax with testimony before a congressional committee in 1988. He has been the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies since 1981

It turns out that in 2010 alone he received “between 236,000 and $1,232.500 in outside income”! When you add in all the awards and speech fees Dr. Hansen has received over the years it is a tidy sum while he exploited his taxpayer-funded position. The agency had resisted disclosing this information for years, but as a federal employee Dr. Hansen waives privacy interests as a condition of employment.

A former government employee, Vice President Al Gore, became the face and voice of the hoax, earning millions in the process.

What has the global warming cost Americans? Joanne Nova of the Science and Public Policy Institute has estimated that the U.S. government spent more than $32.5 billion on climate studies between 1989 and 2009, nor does that include about $79 billion more spent for related climate change technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks for “green energy” (solar and wind).

For deception on that scale, one might think they will be punished at some point, but it will likely be years more before those responsible for the global warming fraud will stand before the bar of justice, if ever.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Saturday, October 1, 2011

The EPA Gets Caught in a Big Fact Lie


By Alan Caruba

The notion that the Environmental Protection Agency uses “science” to justify their regulations is false, just like most of the claims they issue on various aspects of the nation’s environment. Their favorite scam is to estimate the number of deaths they will prevent with some new draconian regulation.

The EPA is the American equivalent of the Gestapo, a ruthless enforcement agency with a very Green agenda that is opposed to the use of many beneficial chemicals, every form of energy, and the right of people to be left alone.

At the top of its list of priorities is the destruction of the nation’s economy with special attention to all forms of energy production. Manufacturing anything comes next, followed by afflicting the nation’s vast agricultural sector. The EPA insists that dust is a pollutant. You can’t farm without generating DUST.

To understand the threat the EPA poses it is necessary to understand that proposed Clean Air regulations are based on the claim that “global warming” is real, is happening, and is caused primarily by carbon dioxide (CO2). The claim is utterly without any scientific merit..

There is NO global warming. At least not the kind Al Gore lies about.

The North and South Poles are not melting; they gain and lose ice in a perfectly natural cycle that has been going on for billions of years. The polar bears are not disappearing. Drilling for oil in ANWR will have zero effect on the caribou. Et cetera!

With our vast reserves of coal and natural gas, the U.S. does not lack for the ability to generate electricity or to refine oil for transportation.

If you want to stay warm this winter, you better hope that utilities keep producing the electricity for your home or apartment’s heating system. Fifty percent of that electricity is produced by cheap, abundant coal and the EPA is hell bent to shut down as many coal mines as possible, leading in turn to the shutdown of utilities that burn coal. Natural gas accounts for just over twenty-four percent of electricity generation and it need hardly be said that the EPA is wary of fracking, the technology to access it.

Blowing the Whistle on the EPA

The big news—the kind even the mainstream media was unable to ignore—was that the EPA’s own inspector general has released a report accusing the agency of cutting corners regarding the “science” cited to justify its effort to declare CO2 a “pollutant.”

Simply stated, without CO2 all life on Earth dies.

It is a gas that plants use for their growth. From a blade of grass to a giant redwood, all depend on CO2, as do all the crops grown coast to coast. Enormous quantities of corn and wheat are grown that contribute to the U.S. economy, feeding both livestock and humans in wondrous ways. Take away vegetation and the animals die. Take away the animals that grace our dinner plates and we die.

Absurdly, the EPA says it is a “pollutant”, a dangerous hazard to our health.

No, the most dangerous hazard to our health is the EPA.

The EPA insists on ignoring all the other natural sources of CO2 as well as the fact that it constitutes less than one percent, 0.038 percent of the atmosphere. The oceans of the world gather it, store it, and release it. The EPA, though, says that when man is involved, it is pure evil.

Mind you, every human exhales about six pounds of CO2 every day. The fact is that the air Americans inhale daily is clean is due to the agency’s early efforts to mitigate some abuses. Those were the days before the EPA abandoned a rational, fact-based approach to its stated objectives. One of its legacies is the idiotic required inclusion of ethanol in every gallon of gasoline. Made from corn, it actually produces more CO2 to produce and use.

The EPA effort to regulate CO2 came along with the invention of the global warming hoax that claimed CO2 was “trapping” the Earth’s heat. That is why CO2 and others are deceptively called “greenhouse” gases (GHGs). Manufacturing everything from a donut to megawatts of electricity emits GHGs.

Finally, even the EPA’s inspector general blew the whistle on the utterly deceitful way the EPA arrives at its justification for a vast matrix of regulations that has been stifling the economy for years. The IG has charged that the EPA did not meet its own guidelines for peer review to ensure the integrity of the science stated.

Anyone who has been following the rise and fall of the global warming hoax knows that “peer review” has become a highly corrupted practice. Real peer review is critical to the integrity of any scientific study. When major science journals abandoned the peer review process to publish gibberish about global warming, they put all other new scientific studies at risk.

As Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, noted, the EPA’s regulation of CO2 emissions would require “230,000 full-time employees to produce 1.4 billion work hours to address the actual increase in permitting functions” that would result if the EPA is allowed to get away with this scandalous hoax. It would cost an estimated $21 billion per year. By contrast, the EPA’s budget request for fiscal year 2012 is $8.973 billion.

The EPA claims that the Clean Air Act gives it the power to regulate CO2, but it does not. It was never intended to, but the Supreme Court in one of its more idiotic rulings opened the door for the EPA claim. In his dissent from Massachusetts v EPA, Justice Antonin Scalia quipped that, as defined by the Court, “everything airborne, from Frisbees to flatulence, qualifies as an ‘air pollutant’”

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) pointed out that “The EPA’s determination has led to a mountain of Clean Air Act regulations that could cost over a million jobs.” It is noteworthy that Sen. Barrasso said, “EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has regularly assured Congress and the American public that its finding is based on sound scientific practices.” It isn’t. Jackson “should testify immediately,” said Sen. Barrasso, “the American people deserve the truth.”

The EPA has been short on the truth about all of its claims for four decades and needs to be shut down in order to let a truly science-based agency replace it with strict congressional oversight and limitations.

The time is long overdue to pull the plug on the Environmental Protection Agency.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Friday, September 16, 2011

The Slow, Certain Death of the Global Warming Theory


By Alan Caruba

I have been predicting the death of the global warming theory since late in the last decade when it became obvious that the Earth had entered into a cooling cycle. By 2009 the leak of thousands of emails between the “scientists” whose computer models the claims were based upon revealed they were in a state of panic regarding this obvious phenomenon.

Employed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming (IPCC), those “scientists” have since been protected by the universities who benefited greatly from the huge grants of public funding they received. The issue of whether such men should be prosecuted for deceiving the entire world remains to be decided.

The lead player, Dr. James Hansen, still on the payroll of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is the man who told Congress in 1988 that global warming threatened mankind and the Earth. He has since switched to lying about coal and oil, two of the fossil fuels on which the economies of all nations depend, claiming they are deadly pollutants that must be abandoned in favor of “clean energy”, wind and solar.

Former Vice President Al Gore, the most public face of “global warming”, has become a public joke. Recall, however, that he received a Nobel Prize and an Oscar in additions to the millions earned from the sale of “carbon credits” to offset “greenhouse gases.” Some exchanges devoted to these credits have closed their doors. The proposed Cap-and-Trade legislation based on them lingers in Congress.

One need not be a climate scientist or meteorologist to conclude that humans have nothing to do with the climate or the weather. Watching huge hurricanes wreak havoc, along with other weather-related events should be enough for anyone to conclude that humans do not “cause” such things.

Occam’s Razor is the ancient principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely the correct one, but billions in public funding, taxpayer’s dollars, have been diverted to the “research” that corrupt scientists have used to justify the global warming fraud.

MIT Professor, Dr. Richard Lindzen, an internationally recognized authority on atmospheric science, said, "Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age."

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to those courageous scientists that stood their ground against the global warming fraud. Recently the Heartland Institute, in concert with the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and the Science and Environmental Policy Project, published “Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report.” It is 430 pages co-authored by Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Robert M. Carter, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, all of whom have been among the scientists repeatedly slandered as “global warming deniers” and “skeptics” for their efforts to educate the public.

The report, in careful documented, scientific language identifies the way the warmist’s computer models over-estimated the amount of warming, ignored the fact that increased carbon dioxide benefits plant growth, that there is less melting in the Arctic, Antarctic and on mountain tops than claimed, and that there is no sign of acceleration of sea-level rise in recent decades.

A recent Rasmussen survey indicates that upwards of 60% of Americans have concluded that humans have nothing to do with “global warming” or any other aspect of the climate. This is extraordinary when one considers how the mainstream media, the curriculums in the nation’s schools, and the unceasing efforts of major environmental organizations have tried to impose the global warming claims on the public.

In a similar fashion, “The Other Climate Theory” by Anne Jolis, an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, describes how a project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has put what may well be the final nail in the global warming coffin. The work of physicists using particle beam technology, CERN confirmed that the Sun’s cosmic rays enhanced cloud formation. The IPCC’s 2007 report had peremptorily dismissed this possibility, but then the IPCC’s reports have been the basis for the global warming fraud, asserting a “consensus” among scientists that never existed.

Thus the scientific method of describing a phenomenon, formulating a hypothesis to explain it, and performing tests to confirm or reject a hypothesis, has once again demonstrated that “global warming” is just so much hot air.

This is not stopped the Environmental Protection Agency from doing everything in its power to destroy the energy sector of the nation based in part on the global warming fraud.

Universities across America have entire departments and units devoted to keeping the global warming fraud alive. The mainstream press is heavily invested in it. Schools continue to frighten children with its claims. All this and other efforts will fail because science—real science—does not support it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Cheating Students of an Education

By Alan Caruba


It says something about the dreadful state of American education when “bullying” has become the greatest issue of the day.

As millions of American youngsters return to school, they continue to be indoctrinated with programs designed to teach that homosexuality is okay, that sex education is more important than history or math, and that they should care less about individuality than the group.

This is straight out of former Soviet-style education than an educational system that previously turned out generations who fought and won World War Two, contributed to a thriving economy, put men on the Moon, and were focused on achieving competence in reading, writing, and arithmetic. In 2001 I wrote a four-part series noting that the rot in our school system is not new. It dates back to the 1960s and earlier.

I got to thinking about this when I read a September 15th Wall Street Journal article, “SAT Reading, Writing Scores Hit Low” by Stephanie Banchero. “SAT scores for the high-school graduating class of 2011 fell in all three subjects areas, and the average reading and writing scores were the lowest ever recorded, according to data released Wednesday.”

In 2008, a Washington Times commentary by Dan Lips, an education analyst at the Heritage Foundation, noted that “Spending from all levels of government has soared. Today, the average student in American public schools can expect more than $9,200 to be spent on his or her behalf this year by taxpayers—a real increase of 69 percent over 1980 per-pupil spending. Yet this additional spending hasn’t meaningfully changed student outcomes.”

Lips warned that “it has become painfully clear that the federal government can’t solve the problems in America’s public schools”, but it is precisely the federal government’s takeover of the nation’s educational system that is the reason for the continual decline. It is yet another failed legacy of the Carter years, signed into law as a cabinet-level department in 1979, it began operation in 1980.

The statistics all reveal a long period of educational decline and the SAT scores are just one more example, but there are other indices, not the least of which is a huge dropout rate that has left countless Americans ill-prepared for any meaningful employment.

Meanwhile, there has been a relentless effort to infuse textbooks with a national curriculum as the result of the concentration by the “big four” textbook publishers. It has produced a one-size-fits-all approach to education nationwide, mostly geared to the dictates of only three states, California, Texas, and Florida because they represent about 30 percent of the K-12 market.

In 2001 the trend was already noticeable. “The result is an increasing trend toward texts that are long on visual gimmicks, short on factual information, and homogenized in content,” said that president of the Center for Education Reform, Jeanne Allen.

The introduction of “No Child Left Behind” that George W. Bush signed into law on January 8, 2002 has proved to be yet another top-down mandate that relied heavily on testing, testing and testing. Rapidly, teachers began to “teach to the test” in order to avoid the loss of funding to their schools.

Simply put, the federal government should get out of the business of education.

The regressive role of teacher’s unions was spotlighted when the then-new Governor of New Jersey took them on, insisting that teacher’s pay more for their pension and health benefits. The unionizing of teachers is as responsible as the federal takeover of education in America for the decline.

Recently, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said, “I’m tired of giving out fake diplomas” when he introduced a slate of education reforms of his state. The SAT scores underwrite his view that students are graduating from high school without the education they need to move onto colleges and universities.

Gov. Christie wants to focus on individual schools rather than districts as a measurable unit of success or failure. He wants to emphasize “outcomes” such as graduation rates, achievement gains. He wants to measure success by high standards that directly correlate to college and career readiness. He wants considerably less bureaucratic paperwork that requires more administrators than teachers. And he wants a clearly defined schedule for intervention in schools that are experiencing persistent education failure.

Something is amiss when students entering kindergarten are expected to have mastered reading skills that are supposed to be taught in the next grades. When did it become the job of parents to deliver five-year-olds to the local school with skills already in place that are the job of the school to teach? Why do these same children graduate from high school with horrid reading and writing SAT scores?

The education of today’s students has to be returned to the control of local school boards and those boards have to be freed from the demands of teachers’ unions that are interested solely in health and pension benefits, and the salaries of administrators and teachers.

Failing that and America will continue to have another generation of students that, since the 1960s, have literally been cheated of a proper education, no matter how much money is thrown at it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Subversion of Education in America - A Four-Part Series (2001)


The Subversion of Education in America: Lesson #1
By Alan Caruba

I’ll bet you think that the problems with our nation’s schools are a fairly recent phenomenon. Wrong. It dates backs to the 1960’s. Those that have implemented the subversion of our educational system have sought to fly well below the radar of public awareness, depending on stealth and duplicity to achieve the wreckage that has already stunted the lives of thousands who have passed through it.

In this and three other commentaries, I will walk you through the history of the problem with the help of an extraordinary book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America" by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt. The facts I will share with you are found in a fat compendium of research by this former senior official with the US Department of Education who discovered the mother lode, copied it, and fled. She is one of America’s unsung heroes.
As Iserbyt points out, in the 1960’s "American education would henceforth concern itself with the importance of the group rather than with the importance of the individual." The purpose of education would shift to focus on the student’s emotional health, rather than academic learning. Remember the 1960’s? Sex, drugs and rock’n roll? Drop out, tune in, and turn on? Just about everything that is wrong with America today had its genesis in this pathetic decade of youthful self-indulgence."

In 1965, there were two major federal initiatives developed with funding from The Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed that year. One was the 1965-1969 Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program and the other was the publication by the government of "Pacesetters in Innovation", a 584-page catalogue of behavior modification programs to be used by the schools.

Let me repeat that: a catalogue of behavior modification programs! We’re not talking of programs to teach students anything. We are talking about programs to indoctrinate children passing through the system to believe in values contrary to those on which this nation was based.

In brief, the intention was to create a generation or two of Americans who would accept the United Nations, not the United States, as their new "nation", a global nation, one-world government. The last thing the conspirators wanted was a nation of individuals who could or would actually think for themselves. This is how we ended up with Bill Clinton, the classic student achiever of the 1960’s.

Iserbyt writes that, "In 1960, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s Convention Against Discrimination was signed in Paris. This convention laid the groundwork for control of American education—both public and private—by UN agencies and agents."

Now connect the dots. In 1960, "Soviet Education Programs: Foundations, Curriculums, Teacher Preparation" was published under the auspices of the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare. It was the blueprint for the US school-to-work restructuring that would take place and it would rely on the "Pavlovian conditioned reflex theory." The mastermind of mind control and conditioning was a psychologist, Dr. B.F. Skinner who was the guru of the mess that passes for education in America today.

Though hard to believe even now, the US adopted the Soviet Communist approach to education. In 1961, Rep. John M. Ashbrook tried to alert Congress to what was happening. Citing a document published by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare called "A Federal Education Agency for the Future, " he called the new education programs "a blueprint for complete domination and direction of our schools from Washington. Guess what? He was right.

That is why the educational reform this nation really needs is the complete elimination of the US Department of Education. It won’t happen. For the same reason we are now only learning that those "Red baiters" of the 1950’s were right to assert the Department of State was shot through with Communists, no one in 2001 is going to believe that the US Department of Education is modeled on Communist theories.

The Subversion of Education in America: Lesson #2
By Alan Caruba

Just how did education in America turn from being a system that imparts knowledge to one that uses behavior modification techniques to influence the attitudes and beliefs of those passing through it?
To achieve this, beginning in the 1960’s, the perpetrators of the subversion have employed deception to achieve their goals. Earlier this month, a New Jersey daily newspaper ran an editorial, "Let board members speak", noting that members of a local school board had been restricted from speaking to the press to avoid "confusion" about the board’s programs and objectives. "But this isn’t about ‘confusion’," said the editorial. "It’s about control", adding "And it is insulting to the public and the idea of open local government."

There is nothing "open" about the effort to subvert education in America. It only has that appearance because it takes place at presumably local school boards or in a state education department. Always, the vehicle is a governmental agency. The controlling player, however, is the US Department of Education.
The objective of those who control our educational systems has long been to produce poorly educated, little world citizens, ready to forego the liberties guaranteed by the oldest living Constitution. The system introduced into American schools mirrors the Soviet and Communist Chinese systems that produce a compliant and complacent population.

To achieve this, they have had to dumb-down the students passing through the system. On February 17, 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported that the president of the University of California "wants to eliminate the SAT as a requirement for admission to all eight of the university’s undergraduate campuses." What a great way to further dilute all standards for academic achievement!

In January 2001, the Times reported that the University of California kicked out 2,009 students, six percent of last year’s freshman class, for failing to master basic math and English skills in their first year of classes. These are skills that should have been mastered in their first twelve years in California schools! It means that the diplomas they received are worthless pieces of paper.

This pattern repeats itself from state to state because it is the educational system that is failing American students. The President’s emphasis on testing misses the point entirely!
In the January/February 2001 issue of The American Enterprise, devoted to why some few schools succeed while the majority fail, Karl Zinsmeister writes that "it’s extremely interesting how many common traits are shared by the successful schools we profile. A remarkably similar basic formula applies in almost all of these places: high demands on students, strict discipline, a strong and unapologetic moral component, including a respect for religion, an emphasis on teaching intellectual basics, a preference for time-tested books and curricula, clear standards of dress, grooming, and comportment, and an insistence on politeness, respect and courtesy."

Compare that to schools in your area where the way students dress is an offense to decorum, the language they use is replete with profanities, and their chief complaint is that they have too much homework.
President Bush has bought into the Education Establishment’s systematic stupification of students. He is not the first President to fall prey to this effort. To learn the facts, you must read The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt.

The President has proposed a five billion-dollar program to help children learn to read. Please! Please, please, will someone explain to me why spending even more money will answer the question of why our schools, soaking up billions a year, are NOT teaching this already?

One need only look at the realities of education in Texas to see why the call for national testing standards is a deception. An excellent article by Jerry Jesness in the November 2000 issue of Reason magazine blows away the hype about the test scores of Texas students. Despite apparent improvements, a closer look at the test scores of basic skills places young Texans in 39th place for SAT scores.

In 1984, the State adopted the Texas Educational Assessment of Minimal Skills that established minimal standards for graduation. The result has been that a considerable amount of time is spent "teaching to the test" in schools throughout Texas. Students are taught strategies to pass the text. For example, the acquisition of real arithmetical skills is sacrificed to methods that include drawing and counting sticks! This is not progress and the test is, essentially, meaningless.

All this was foretold back in the 1970’s as the "educrats" continued their efforts to undermine the teaching of basic knowledge. In 1976, Catherine Barrett, then president of the National Education Association, gave a speech in which she said, "First, we will help all of our people understand that school is a concept and not a place. We will not confuse "schooling" with education. The school will be the community, the community the school." This predates Hillary Clinton’s "it takes a village" concept, but it reflects a communist view that all of society must be employed to form the views of students. Individualism is bad. Conforming to the group is good.

Barrett went on to say "We will need to recognize that so-called ‘basic skills’ which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one quarter of the present school day. The remaining time will be devoted to what is truly fundamental and basic---time for academic inquiry, time for students to develop their own interests, time for a dialogue between students and teachers…more than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values, a philosopher. Students will learn to write love letters and lab notes."

You may want to read this again. The then-head of the NEA was talking about turning the school day into one devoted to just about everything other than the teaching of reading, writing and arithmetic. Teachers were, instead, to become "agents of change."

The change incorporated into today’s educational programs is intended to change the entire social structure of our society and the values that had made it great. Competition and achievement in the acquisition of basic knowledge and the skills to implement that knowledge are jettisoned in favor of changing attitudes about family, patriotism, religion, and sexuality. Look around you and ask yourself why we now except all forms of "families." Look around you and ask why we live in a cultural environment drenched with sexuality without responsibility. Ask yourself why millions fail to vote. Look at the way the expression of religious values is continually derided.

In 1972, Dr. Chester M. Pierce, MD, of Harvard University wrote an article entitled "Becoming Planetary Citizens: A Quest for Meaning" that appeared in the November issue of Childhood Education. He was concerned that children, by the age of five, "already have a lot of political attitudes", among which were "a tenacious loyalty to his country and its leader." What he wanted was a child who entered kindergarten "with the same kind of loyalty to the earth as to his homeland…"

This is a formula for degrading patriotism and loyalty to everything for which this nation stands in favor of creating citizens of the "global government" being pursued by the United Nations and the environmentalism that preaches against the use of the earth’s natural resources.

All throughout the 1970’s, the Federal government funded these goals. Local educational systems were taken over by programs designed to destroy local control. I do not want President Bush’s education proposals to succeed because they reflect the continued subversion of our nation’s schools by the Department of Education.

The process dates back to the 1960’s, continued through the 1970’s, and in the following discussion of education in America, we will see how they increased through the 1980’s.

The Subversion of Education in America: Lesson #3
By Alan Caruba

This will come as a surprise to you—everything about the nation’s educational system does—but Congress back in 1970 recognized that the federal government is supposed to have limited authority when it comes to education. An amended General Education Provisions Act specifically articulated a "Prohibition against Federal Control of Education.

It forbids the federal government from exercising any "direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration or personnel of any education institution, school, or school system, or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials by any educational institution or school system."

The loophole through which the subversion of our education system was accomplished was federal funding of "research" and "development."

By the 1980’s (see the previous two editions of Warning Signs for a look at the 1960’s and 1970’s by clicking on the Archives below) the effort to turn schools from places where students actually learn something to places where their values, beliefs, and cognitive skills were determined by "Outcome Based Education", behavior modification programs. The objective of these programs is to turn students in to little citizens of a one-world government where they are mere economic units, not individuals, nor people who give much thought to individual liberty.

Individual liberty was the reason the American Revolution was fought and is the philosophical basis for every word in the US Constitution. A generation or two of Americans who are systematically robbed of any knowledge of this are ripe for an authoritarian takeover.

The father of this movement is Prof. Benjamin Bloom and his book, "All Our Children learning." Published in 1981, it is the bible of OBE. In it he says, "The purpose of education and the schools is to change the thoughts, feelings, and actions of students." No, the purpose of education is to provide students with a sufficient knowledge of basic skills in writing, reading, arithmetic, as well as history and the sciences. Thus prepared, they are likely to be the kind of citizens that will question efforts to deprive this nation of its sovereignty in favor of a world government run out of the United Nations.

It gets worse. Writing in The Effective School Report, Dr. Thomas A. Kelly, Ph.D., stated that "The brain should be used for processing, not storage." This is the view of education that says you prepare students to take a test determined by federal standards of what they should know. The student is merely to process predetermined bits and pieces of information. The best example of this is the rat’s maze where the rat learns to follow a specific path to get a piece of cheese.

This is a simplified explanation of why today’s children have difficulty acquiring and retaining a body of useful, long-term information such as multiplication tables or who the nation’s presidents have been, the 50 States of the Union, when the Civil War was fought, where India can be found on a map, the names of the earth’s oceans, et cetera!

The whole movement to utterly change the direction and purpose of our nation’s schools picked up momentum in the 1980’s and, sorry to say it, it occurred on Ronald Reagan’s watch. The harsh truth about the subversion of the nation’s schools has not been a Democratic or Republican program. It has occurred no matter who was in office or who controlled Congress. It happened because few politicians were paying any attention to what was really occurring over at the Department of Education.

In her book, "The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America", Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt, says, "The real purpose of this project was to propose a radical redesign of the nation’s education system from one based on inputs to one based on outputs." It switched, in other words, from a curriculum of content a student was required to learn, to a series of answers the student was supposed to repeat when tested. Or as Iserbyt explains it, the system turned away "from one oriented toward the learning of academic content to one based on performance of selected skills, necessary for the implementation of school-to-work…" The schools, with direction from the DOE and grants from major foundations, as well as input from corporate leaders, were redesigned to produce workers.

Well, what’s so bad about that? We need workers. Ask anyone responsible for the management of any size organization, from a local bakery to a major corporation, what their primary problem is and they will tell you it’s finding good workers. That is to say, finding people with even the most basic education or skills to perform any job with a minimum of competency. That is the result of the education system that has been foisted on this nation.

Take away their pocket calculators and the newest generation of workers cannot add or subtract. Take away "spell check" on their computers and they are helpless to spell accurately. These are basic skills Americans used to learn in one-room schoolhouses heated with a wood-burning oven. They could also tell you the branches of the US government and a whole lot more than today’s graduates.

In the 1980’s the DOE says Iserbyt, "effectively transformed the essential character of the nation’s public schools from ‘teaching’---the most traditional and conservative role of schools---to ‘workforce training’---perceived as liberal and ‘progressive.’" It is a particular irony that one of Ronald Reagan’s campaign platforms was the abolishing of the Department of Education. He was right. He didn’t do it.

What, in fact, happened was that control of the schools and their curriculums increasing moved up the decision-making ladder away from local school boards and even state education departments. Administrators and teachers were delighted with this because it eliminated the "meddling" of locally elected and locally responsible school board members.

The instrument for this was the development of a "Course Goals Collection" completed by the DOE in 1980-81. "The collection consists of fourteen volumes with 15,000 goals covering every major subject taught in the public schools from K-12." Remember that 1970 prohibition on any federal government involvement in instruction? Nobody else did either.

In 1981, 70,000 copies were distributed, despite the fact that only approximately 16,000 school districts existed. And you wonder why every state now has the same goals? With remarkable success, Outcome-Based Education became the way American students were to be trained to believe the same things, have the same values, and to ignore those they were taught at home.

This is important because values are supposed to be the job of parents. Some parents are Catholic. Some parents are Protestant. Some are Jewish or Moslem. Some are liberal and some are conservative. Their values no longer seem to matter. That’s why there no longer is a moment of prayer in any school in America. That’s why the school day often does not begin with the salute to the flag or a recitation of a pledge of allegiance. Much of the day is spent "teaching to the test" whose standards were determined in Washington, D.C., not by the parents, not by the local school board, not by anyone you know!

How was this achieved? Because, according to a 1981 report by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, "Federal funds account for approximately ten percent of national expenditures on education. The Federal share of educational research and related activities, however, is ninety percent of the total national investment."

Thus, as Iserbyt notes in her book, "just about everything that goes on in the classrooms of American public schools, with the exception of salaries, school buildings, buses, and the purchase of equipment, is either a direct or indirect result of funding by the U.S. Department of Education—as research!"

It should come as no surprise that, by the end of the 1980’s, writing in the January 25, 1989 issue of Education Week, Chester E. Finn, Jr., the former head of the DOE’s research branch, would tell business leaders that he favored a "national curriculum." Flashback to the congressional prohibition on a curriculum determined at the federal level. Consider it null and void. The people in the DOE obviously did.
Little wonder, too, that in 1989, then-President George H. Bush unveiled "America 2000" (now known as "Goals 2000") to the National Governor’s Association that virtually set in concrete the whole behavior modification movement that has been foisted on the American education system.

That same year, the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development’s Elementary Global Education Framework was announced. Its goals were to create "Human beings whose home is planet earth, who are citizens of a multicultural democratic society in an increasingly interconnected world, and who learn, care, think, choose, and act, to celebrate life on this planet, and to meet the global challenges confronting Humankind."

NO! We are talking about AMERICAN students going to AMERICAN schools in the sovereign nation of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. We are not sending kids to school to become citizens of the world, programmed to deal with global challenges, i.e., threats to the environment that require we all cut back on the use of energy or pick up the bill to bring developing nations up to speed. That is exactly the game plan of the United Nations and the worldwide conspiracy of socialists masquerading as environmentalists.

That is, however, what is going on in our schools TODAY. That’s why President George W. Bush’s proposal to throw $5 billion at those schools, presumably to teach a subject, reading, they should already be teaching, is a continuation of the same bad ideas that president’s since Eisenhower have been rubber-stamping. And then ignoring.

The Subversion of Education in America: Lesson #4
By Alan Caruba

I have lived my whole life in an affluent, suburban community in Northern New Jersey. When I attended its schools in the 1940’s and 1950s, the vast percentage of graduating seniors went onto college. Their parents had migrated from Newark during or just after WWII because the schools had an excellent reputation. Today, they are not much better than those of the inner city.

Here’s an excerpt from a letter to the editor in our local weekly. "I understand that our education officials have yet to detail for the public exactly what measures have been taken to ensure that a first-rate education will be provided for students." This stonewalling is endemic to education bureaucrats across the nation. He thinks he’s going to get an answer. He won’t.

"I was horrified to learn that 34 percent of the eighth grade students in (our) Middle School were found only partially proficient—the worst grouping—in the 2000 GEPA math section. Simply put, we rank 97th out of 97 schools in this failing category. Further, this dreadful performance has been repeated over the past several years.

"As a homeowner and a taxpayer, I want to know how the district’s school budget increased from $5l million five years ago to $70 million today, a 37 percent increase over four years, during which time these poor test scores have not gotten measurably better and our last place ranking has not moved out of the cellar."

Throwing more and more money at our nation’s current education system is not the answer. The system is inherently flawed because it is not intended to provide a basic 3R’s education.

President Bush proposes to introduce a national educational standard and then test to it, but we already know American students are deficient in all the areas of knowledge the schools are supposed to be teaching. The tests today’s students take are more about their values than about any body of knowledge they have acquired. Today’s schools are not about educating students. They are about teaching attitudes and values.
If you have been reading my series over the past three commentaries in this series, you already know that the system has been designed to deliberately dumb down students.

The architects of this attack on our nation’s youth can be found in the US Department of Education. They have adopted psychological methods of conditioning and jettisoned the teaching of information and basic skills. It is called "Outcome-Based Education."

Today’s students, as opposed to their grandfather’s or even their father’s education, are being systematically conditioned to think in "global" terms about humanity, nations, religions, and, of course, the environment. They are conditioned to be citizens, not of the United States, but of the world. That’s what you need when you’re creating a socialist one-world governmental system and that is exactly what is occurring at the United Nations.

Today’s students are taught not to make value judgments about other nations, even if they are authoritarian dictatorships. They may not know where Brazil is on the map, but they "know" all the rain forests are disappearing. They don’t know when the Civil War took place or why, but they "know" that all the Founding Fathers were slave-owners. They also "know" that America’s history is one of destroying the native Indian nations, taking their land, and exploiting it with farms, mining, and the destruction of whole forests. They cannot tell you what the Bill of Rights is, but they "know" the US is the leading contributor of "greenhouse gases" to the atmosphere, thereby causing global warming. It is a full course of lies.
They haven’t a clue about the individualism, sacrifice, daring and innovation that made this nation great, nor its political system, and most certainly not its history.

As Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt writes in her book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, they aren’t being "taught the difference between free enterprise and planned economies, i.e., socialism; between ‘group thinking’ and individual freedom and responsibility."

By the 1990’s the decades of effort to overturn an education system that taught specific bodies of information and the skills to use them—arithmetic, spelling, history, civics, science—had effectively been transformed into today’s touchy-feely system. It is a place where a student’s feelings of self-esteem are more important than whether they actually know anything other than the specific answers to the test. Thus teachers now "teach to the test" (their paycheck depends on it) rather than provide a broader body of knowledge. It is a place where competition is discouraged as unfair to those less qualified for any reason. It is a place where socialist attitudes and values are the priority, not knowledge.

Given President George W. Bush’s enthusiasm for education that is "accountable" and "will leave no child behind", will it surprise anyone that the "America 2000 Plan", written in 1991, was presented to the American people by Lamar Alexander, the Secretary of Education serving his father, President George Herbert Walker Bush?

The "America 2000 Plan" proposed to radically restructure American society, beginning with its schools. It was intended to affect 110,00 public and private schools. When you’re trying to create good little socialists, you can’t afford to have anyone who is being taught to think independently or asked to incorporate moral and ethical values.

The "voucher" program exists to give the federal government control over private schools because, whoever pays the piper, chooses the tune. Schools that accept voucher students will soon find themselves required to accept federal education regulations as well.

Goals 2000 and School-to-Work programs introduced to transform our schools reflect what Iserbyt describes as "the internationalization of education with exchanges of data systems, curricula, methods, et cetera, all essential for the implementation of the international socialist management and control system being put in place right now."

Everything, including the SAT college entrance tests, has been degraded to mask the dumbing down those who are passing through our schools. Today’s SATs permit students to use electronic calculators, ask fewer questions in general and fewer multiple-choice math questions in particular. Reading passages now ask definitions from context and the formerly difficult antonym section, calling for linguistic and intellectual subtleties, has been dropped entirely.

My hometown’s parent who could not get any answers from his district’s school board could not know that this is repeated across America in school after school. Parents are routinely lied to. Worse, today’s parents are often required to put their child put on a regimen of Ritalin, a mind-altering drug. We’ve got seven million government-approved drug addicts going to school in drug-free zones!

To the individual parent, there seems to be no way to resist the juggernaut of a system that routinely turns out thousands of "educated" morons. Some choose to home-school their children. Others who can afford it send them to private schools. Still others shell out for after-school tutoring services. Why? Because the schools have been "restructured."

President Bush is not providing a solution. He is part of the problem. His father was part of the problem. Presidents going back to Eisenhower have been part of the problem because they failed to see that introducing Soviet-style educational methods—behavior modification to produce good little socialists--into American schools was destined to bring us to this point.

Education is not about national standards and national testing. It’s about individual schools in individual school districts, all answerable to their communities and to the parents of the children entrusted to them. It’s not about how the child feels, but about how well the child learns. There is pride in learning, but if there are no grades, how does anyone, parent, child or teacher know what, if anything, is being learned?

Congress will probably give President Bush the $5 billion he wants to throw away on failed reading programs, and money for the national educational standards and testing he wants. Previous Congresses have gone along, failing or refusing to see how the educational system has been corrupted. The Republican "Contract with America" and the campaign promise of Ronald Reagan to dismantle the Department of Education had it right. It didn’t happen. It is the only hope to reverse the damage and return schools to local control.

Sit down with your child and watch "Jeopardy" together. If neither you, nor your child knows the answer to anything other than the television or film questions, you’re in trouble. Now multiply that against an entire population of Americans who don’t know the answers either.

END

Permission to republish or reprint this series in whole or in part must be secured via email or other written communication from The National Anxiety Center (acaruba@aol.com) or 28 West Third Street, #1321, South Orange, NJ 07079.

The series is Copyrighted by Alan Caruba, 2001. Any use of the series, in whole or in part, must contain attribution to the author, The National Anxiety Center, West Third St., Apt 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079 and/or the Center’s URL, http://www.anxietycenter.com/.


© 2001 Alan Caruba.
All Rights Reserved.