Sunday, September 28, 2014

Islam Comes to Moore, Oklahoma

 

Alton Nolen, alleged beheader.
By Alan Caruba

It took the gruesome videos of two American journalists being beheaded by a masked Islamic State (ISIS) butcher, followed since then by more victims, to finally wake Americans to the threat that they face from Islam, but the beheading of a Moore, Oklahoma victim by a man who had been trying to get his co-workers to convert to Islam that brought the threat to the homeland.

The memory of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon have long since begun to fade, but Islam has returned to page one with a display of the violence that is the heart and soul of a cult based on the life and teachings of Muhammad.

Don’t call it a religion. And surely do not call it the “religion of peace.” There was nothing peaceful about Islam from its earliest days when the citizens of Mecca came to the conclusion that Muhammad and his followers were a threat to them. That was 1,400 years ago.
 
If it were in my power, I would require every American to read “It’s All About Muhammad: A Biography of the World’s Most Notorious Prophet” by F.W. Burleigh ($`6.95, Zenga Books).

Instead, I will only highly recommend it as the best way to understand the man who literally invented a so-called religion based on his own pathologies and then, through terror, ensured it spread to the entirety of Arabia in his lifetime.

As the author notes in its introduction, the biography is based almost entirely on the original literature of Islam as well as early biographies, histories, and collections of traditions. Twenty thousand pages of material were given line-by-line scrutiny “because what is written about him in the original literature is disturbing.”

“More than two-thirds of the canonical biographical materials have to do with the violence he used to spread his religion.”  It was a short step from Muhammad, the self-proclaimed prophet who later called himself the messenger of Allah, to Alton Nolen, the Muslim convert who is alleged to have beheaded a former co-worker.

What is little known about Muhammad is that he suffered from epileptic fits throughout his life and had had a troubled youth that would have unhinged anyone. A fortunate marriage at age 24 took him out of a life of low status and poverty. His wife was twenty years his senior, a woman of wealth. Though a grave concern in an era when the fits were seen as demon possession, Muhammad began to interpret them as the voices of Allah and his angels, particularly Gabriel.

“It was during this period of emotional and intellectual upheaval that his overcharged brain, wracked by doubts and suffering, came to his rescue in the form of a series of spectacular hallucinatory experiences that convinced him he was unique and had been singled out by God for a special purpose. This took place in A.D. 610 when Muhammad was forty years old.”

“His belief became unshakable and later became content of much of the Koran and his later ruthless behavior as pillage, rape, the enslavement of men, women, and children, and other atrocities he perpetrated—make such a belief beyond ludicrous.”

“It was sufficient for Muhammad to think something for it to become the truth. He was convinced that whatever came into his head came from Allah.” For ages insane asylums have been filled with such people.

As Muhammad drew followers to himself and to the exacting rituals he created for Islam, he enriched himself and them with acts of banditry, attacking caravans and then attacking tribes, particularly Jewish ones, to build a mountain of stolen wealth. Burleigh notes that the Koran has a chapter “entitled ‘The Spoils of War’” that “transformed Muhammad’s religion into an organized-crime enterprise for its approval of plunder.”  He told his believers “Enjoy what you take in war” for it is “lawful and good.”

Again, it is a short step from his era to the present one in which believers have united to create the Islamic State (ISIS) by war and to begin to steal the wealth of Syria from the sale of its oil on the black market. Imposing themselves on a large area of Iraq, ISIS is simply an extension of al Qaeda and al Qaeda is an expression of Muhammad’s demand that Islam become the sole religion of the world, exacting a subjugation tax from any who would not convert.

Burleigh concludes his book saying “Muhammad was a diseased genius, an epileptic psychopath with a clever tongue who believed God talked to him, a toxic mixture that transformed him over time into a mass murderer and a despot pushing a delusional religion.”

It should surprise no one that he “divided the world into lands conquered and lands yet to be conquered, into lands that submitted to his delusions about himself and lands yet to submit to his delusions.”

Following World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Islam was in decline, but the discovery of oil in the Middle East provided the funding to spread its message. That message, dependent on violence and terror has created such a problem in the Middle East that Islamic nations there are joining in the effort to defeat ISIS.

Burleigh asks “Who will defend you against the encroachment of what Muhammad created and the very real threat that it could eventually destroy all that you cherish?” He does not recommend the man who said, “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”  That man is President Barack Hussein Obama.

And now you know why the murders committed by Major Nidal Hasan in 2009, killing his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, or the murder in Oklahoma were both deemed “workplace violence” by law enforcement authorities reluctant to challenge the White House to the reality that both were inspired and approved by Islam.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Some Useful FACTS About Global Warming and Climate Change

 

By Alan Caruba

Thanks to Sunday’s Climate March in New York and Tuesday’s Climate Summit at the United Nations, Americans and others will  have been deluged with the lies that have been told to sustain this greatest of all hoaxes.

Here are the known facts. Use them to protect yourself against the Green assault the truth:

# Both the Earth and the Sun pass through natural cycles. The Sun is currently in a cycle of lower radiation as signaled by fewer sunspots representing magnetic storms.

# There is currently no global warming. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for 19 years. No child who has passed through K-12 classes in school has experienced a single day of “global warming.”

# Not one computer model that predicted increased warming has been accurate.

# Carbon dioxide, (CO2) blamed for global warming, is not a “pollutant” despite a Supreme Court decision stating this. Our exhaled breath contains about 4% of CO2. 

# How can carbon dioxide be called a “pollutant” when it is directly responsible for the growth of all vegetation on the planet? Without CO2 there would not be a single blade of grass or a redwood tree. Or the animal life that depends on vegetation; wheat and rice, for example, as food.

# There is zero evidence that carbon dioxide generated by human activities is causing catastrophic climate change. Climate is measured in centuries or shorter periods of many decades in order to determine its cycles. The weather is what is occurring where you reside and it changes every day.

# At 78% nitrogen is the most abundant gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. It is an essential building block of amino acids present in all proteins. It is a very stable, unreactive gas. Oxygen is the second most abundant gas-of-life in the atmosphere at 21%. Water vapor is the third most abundant gas-of-life in the atmosphere; it varies up to 5%, It reduces incoming solar radiation by day and reduces surface cooling at night. Carbon dioxide is the least abundant gas in the atmosphere at 0.04%.

# The assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is man-made and an urgent problem is a fiction. In May Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, cited the Zimmerman/Doran survey in which, out of 3,146 respondents, only 79 listed climate science as an area of expertise. Hardly 97%. “Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus,” noted Bast.

# In February, Patrick Moore, a Canadian ecologist, a co-founder of Greenpeace, a militant environmental group which he left in 1986, told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years.”

# Not only is the Earth not warming, but Heartland Institute analyst, Peter Ferrara, notes that “If you look at the record of global temperature data, you will find that the late 20th Century period of global warming actually lasted about 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Before that, the globe was dominated by about 30 years of global cooling, giving rise in the 1970s to media discussions of the return of the Little Ice Age (circa 1450 to 1850), or worse.”

# The cooling of the Earth has led to a dramatic increase in both Arctic and Antarctic ice, up 50% since 2012.

# One result of the false claims about carbon dioxide has been the Obama administration’s policies such as the refusal to permit the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to import oil from Canada to U.S. refineries. The Environmental Protection Agency’s absurd restrictions on CO2 emissions have forced the closure of many coal-fired plants that are needed to provide low cost electrical energy. The administration has long wanted to impose a “carbon tax” on all energy use in America, a punishing and needless expense.

# The Obama administration’s climate policies are entirely political in nature. It has announced that the EPA’s process of setting new rules affecting power plants will be delayed until after the November 4 midterm elections. It is extending the public comment period until December 1. The growing discontent over similar climate and environmental policies was evident when leaders of the European Union announced it was moving away from green policies that had driven up the cost of electricity across the continent.

In a world threatened by the rise of radical Islamism, by the outbreak of diseases like Ebola, and other actual problems to be addressed, the notion that thousands would march in the belief that they and the entire rest of the Earth’s population have any effect on the climate is appalling.

What is perhaps most sad and most reprehensible are the host of world leaders who continue to maintain the lie of global warming or the misrepresentation of climate change to impose a tax on an essential element of the Earth's atmosphere.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Blathering Eco-Intellectuals

By Alan Caruba

I confess I have always been wary of intellectuals. They love arcane theories that often have little to do with real life and this is particularly true of eco-intellectuals who have embraced a panoply of lies and claims about the “environment”, “fossil fuels”, “sustainability”, and other notions that permit them to bloviate without once addressing reality.

This has been a week of eco-propaganda on a global scale. On Sunday there were “Climate Marches.” On Tuesday there will be a UN “Climate Summit”, and there will likely be an avalanche of nonsense in the media intended to make us believe we have control, influence, or impact on the climate when it is obvious to the rest of us that we—the human race—have none.

In the past nearly two decades we have all been experiencing not a warning, but a cooling of planet Earth. It has nothing to do with us and everything to do with the Sun that has been in a low cycle of radiation—less heat!

A friend alerted me to an article in the August 22nd edition of the New Republic, a famously liberal magazine. “Global Warming Is Just One of Many Environmental Threats That Demand Our Attention” is the title of Amartya Sen’s article. He is a Nobel laureate in economics, a winner of the National Humanities Medal, an author, and teaches at Harvard University.

There were two immediate red flags that caught my attention. First was that he is an economist and the second was that he was writing about “global warming” as of it was happening. 

In early September I had written about another economist who had an opinion published in The Wall Street Journal. It was ludicrous in terms of his complete lack of even the most basic science he was either addressing or ignoring as he too warned of horrid environmental portents to come.  Economists should stick to economics.

If you suffer from insomnia or have a fondness for reading sentences filled with words rarely used in common communication, you will find that Sen’s article will either put you to sleep or, more likely, give you a migraine headache. The article is an insufferable platform for him to demonstrate his Nobel certified intellectual brilliance, while possessing very little understanding of science or what we ordinary people call common sense.

“Our global environment has many problems. If the high volume of carbon emission is one, the low level of intellectual engagement with some of the major environmental challenges is surely another.” That’s how Sen began his article and, in the very first sentence, he reveals his ignorance by referring to “carbon emissions” instead of “carbon dioxide” (CO2) emissions.

The latter is a so-called “greenhouse” gas that the Greens keep telling us is trapping huge amounts of heat in the Earth’s atmosphere that will surely kill us all. CO2 is about 0.04% of the entire atmosphere, the least of the gases of which it is composed. It doesn’t trap heat, but it does provide the “food” that all vegetation requires to grow. We carbon-based humans exhale CO2 after we breathe in oxygen. It is part of the natural cycle of life between animals and the vegetation that releases oxygen; a perfect balance of nature.

Suffice to say that Sen’s very lengthy article is typical of the eco-intellectual disdain for virtually any form of energy to serve humanity except for the two least reliable, wind and solar energy. There’s a reason why mankind turned to coal, oil and natural gas. It was vastly abundant and released large amounts of energy for transportation and other benefits that include the production of electricity.

There was a time not that long ago when people used whale oil to light their homes. And wood was used to heat them. Walt Whitman, a famed poet who lived in Lincoln’s time, never turned on an electrical switch in his life. It didn’t exist 150 years ago. There were no autos, no telephones, et cetera. If you define a generation as 25 years, that’s only six generations ago. And Sen wants us to abandon “fossil fuels” because he fears “the dangers of global pollution from fossil fuels…” 

He’s no fan of nuclear power either. (I guess we should all go back to whale oil, only we won’t because we love the whales.) “There are at least five different kinds of externalities that add significantly to the social costs of nuclear power” writes Sen, but who else refers to “externalities” of nuclear power? Okay, why not just say there have been two bad accidents, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and leave it at that. That still leaves a lot of safely performing nuclear plants here and worldwide.

We do not live in a world without risk or trade-offs. For lack of enough pipelines, a lot of oil is being transported by rail and there have been accidents. Around the world there are coal mining accidents. Even solar farms literally sizzle birds to death that fly over them and wind turbines chop them into little pieces.

Mother Nature does not care what happens to us when she conjures up a volcanic eruption, a flood, a wildfire, a hurricane or blizzard.

Humans have learned to either flee these things or wait them out in the safety of their homes. That’s what modern life is all about and it is a hundred times better than in the past when people were lucky to live to the age of sixty. Many died much younger from plagues of disease and we are watching that occur with Ebola in Africa. Even simple injuries caused death a scant time ago.

“There are empirical gaps in our knowledge as well as analytical difficulties in dealing with the evaluation of uncertainty.” Huh? What? This is intellectual gobbledygook, a substitute for saying that much of the time we don’t know what the future holds.

What we do know is that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and that we humans have developed what we call civilization over the past 5,000 years, a blink of time in eternity.
 
We should know by now to accept the Earth, the Sun and the galaxy in which we live for what it is and stop bothering to embrace idiotic notions that we have any control or that we are causing so much “pollution” the Earth cannot exist much longer.

You know what we do with the mess of stuff we produce and throw away? We burn it or we bury it. We even recycle some of it.
 
This keeps archeologists busy as they examine the garbage our not-too-distant ancestors left behind in their caves. Thankfully, none of them were economists.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Sunday, September 7, 2014

An Economist's Bad Climate Advice

By Alan Caruba

If I need my car repaired, I do not take it to a dentist. If I am seeking advice about the climate I check out what climatologists and meteorologists are saying, at least those who have not sold their souls to the global warming/climate change hoax.

On September 3 The Wall Street Journal published a commentary by Edward P. Lazear titled “The Climate Change Agenda Needs to Adapt to Reality: Limiting carbon emissions won’t work. Better to begin adjusting to a warming world.”

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!  It’s cooling, not warming.

Apparently Mr. Lazear is unaware that the Earth has been in a cooling cycle for seventeen years. A visit to www.climatedepot.com or a subscription to the Heartland Institute’s monthly Climate & Environmental News or a copy of its policy studies, “Climate Change Reconsidered”, would help him understand why he’s wrong. Check out www.climatechangedispatch.com as well for the latest commentaries.

Perhaps his error should be forgiven because Mr. Lazear is an economist. He was the chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors (2006-09) and head of the White House Committee on the Economics of Climate Change (2007-08). Presently he is a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and a Hoover Institution fellow.

He’s not a fool, but like a lot of academics who lack a background in science, he has been fooled by the legion of global warming/climate change charlatans from Al Gore through the ranks of organizations such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that depend on maintaining the hoax.

Mr. Lazear has fallen for the greatest lie ever; the assertion that greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, are warming the Earth. The hoaxers are calling the past seventeen years “a pause” in warming, but it is actually an indicator that the Earth is on the cusp of the next ice age. The period in between ice ages is calculated at 11,500 years and we are at the end of the current interglacial period.

“The Obama administration is instituting a variety of far-reaching policies to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change. Are any of these capable of making a difference”, asked Mr. Lazear. “Simple arithmetic suggests not.” Up to this point I was very pleased with his conclusion, but then he wrote “Given this reality, we would be wise to consider strategies that complement and may be more effective than mitigation—namely, adaptation.”

Humans have been adapting to the climate—the weather—since they emerged as homo sapiens about 195,000 years ago.

What Mr. Lazear wants the U.S, to do is limit “carbon emissions” but admits that “The economics also work against a major transformation in the technology of producing power, either mobile or stationary. Coal is cheap. Natural gas is becoming even cheaper.”

The primary flaw in his commentary is simply that more carbon dioxide is a good thing. As the primary gas utilized by all vegetation, more means greater crop yields and healthier forests. What carbon dioxide doesn’t do is “trap” heat long enough to lower the Earth’s temperature. It represents a mere 0.04% of the atmosphere.

The Earth is not a greenhouse with a glass roof. The amount of heat in the atmosphere is totally dependent on the amount of heat the Sun produces. In its current cycle, it is producing less.

“Carbon math,” wrote Mr. Lazear, “makes clear that without major effort and a good bit of luck, we are unlikely to control the growth of emissions enough to meet the standards that many climate scientists suggest are necessary.” Those scientists are usually on college or university faculties where securing federal and other grants to study a warming that is not occurring leads to urging limits on carbon dioxide. Others are just huge liars who, like Al Gore, have been making predictions of warming that have not and are not coming true.

There’s another reason why there will be more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It involves two of the most swiftly developing nations in the world, China and India, both of whom are building coal-fired plants to generate electricity as fast as they can. This is happening while the Environmental Protection Agency has been engaged in an all-out war on coal that has closed several hundred U.S. plants. If an especially cold winter occurs, the demand for electricity to warm homes and other facilities may overload a system that has been diminished in scope.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the driving force behind the global warming hoax. It is holding a climate change summit on September 23. Guess who won’t be attending? Chinese president Xi Jinping, India’s prime minister, Narenda Modi, and for good measure, Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. Others whose leaders will not be attending include Canada, Japan, and Russia.

In typical fashion, always predicting climate conditions decades from now, the United Nations, according to a report in The Guardian, “is warning of floods, storms and searing heat from Arizona to Zambia within four decades, as part of a series of imagined weather forecasts” to publicize the climate summit.

All of the forecasts made by a legion of climate charlatans in the 1980s and 1990s turned out to be WRONG.

You cannot trust the UN’s World Meteorological Organization which like the IPCC is just part of a vast matrix of groups that have been so severely corrupted by the global warming/climate change hoax that one must exercise caution when hearing its forecasts. If they are for anything beyond two weeks hence, you would be wise to be dubious.

Mr. Lazear is just one of many, often with distinguished careers in other fields than meteorology or climatology, who have bought into the hoax and who declaim the need to reduce carbon dioxide. He’s wrong. The others are wrong.

And you need to educate yourself to avoid being afflicted by various government policies intended to advance the hoax. To start with, do not vote for any politician who talks of global warming/climate change or uses the term “sustainability.”

© Alan Caruba, 2014