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.

The Enemies of Meat - A Four-Part Series


All dates, unless otherwise specified, refer to events in 2008

This is a four-part series about the falsehoods regarding the consumption and production of beef. It will expose a classic “scare campaign” designed to influence public opinion and policy.

Demonizing Beef: Consider the Source

Back in 2005 I wrote a commentary, “The War on Meat”, because for a long time I had been aware of a propaganda campaign about beef that emanated from a variety of sources that included the animal rights loonies, a variety of dubious think tanks putting out “studies” about the horrors of eating meat, as well as other sources.

In 2006, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) issued a report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow” that was so full of absurd claims, dressed up to look like science, that I made a mental note to revisit the issue.

When, in early August, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) compared the murder and beheading of a 22-year-old on a Greyhound Bus by some deranged passenger, to “acts of cruelty and killing performed every day by the meat industry” it reminded me how divorced from reality PETA is and, at the same time, how consistent the attacks on beef production and consumption have been.

By late August, USA Today ran an article noting “Animal rights groups pick up momentum.” A spokesman for the Animal Agriculture Alliance, an organization that defends the livestock industry, noted that “Ultimately, their goal is to eliminate animals being used as food,” adding that, “There’s a real danger when we allow a very small minority of activists to dictate procedures that should be used to raise animals for food.”

The real twist to the issue of livestock production came with the FAO report because it equated the raising of beef worldwide with the inane claims of another United Nations agency, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That really got my attention because the IPCC has, in recent times, been thoroughly discredited by conferences and petitions of scientists worldwide who have examined its global warming claims and concluded that they are based on seriously and often deliberately flawed computer models.

In early September, The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based, non-partisan, independent think tank had also taken notice. In an article published in Environment & Climate News, it noted that “Global warming activists are putting agriculture firmly in their crosshairs, launching new efforts to restrict meat production and consumption.” Noting that “Global warming activists say keeping livestock at a farm uses too much energy,” the article cited the way “the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations attributed 18 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions to livestock.”

Never mind that the Pacific Research Institute reports that “Worldwide, livestock production provides livelihoods for 1.3 billion people, and particularly in developing countries livestock are also a source of renewable energy for farming activities, and a source of organic fertilizer.” So at least one-sixth of the world’s population benefits from raising livestock and, of course, meat’s many nutritional elements benefit consumers. As incomes have begun to rise in nations like China, the consumption of meat has risen as well.

As Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, points out, “I think this shows is that (global warming alarmism) is really about controlling people’s lives rather than saving the planet.”
Environmentalism has always depended on some form of alarmism and that is why the FAO report on livestock production requires a strong dose of truth to offset its many distortions. Let us begin with the assertion that global warming is occurring. It isn’t. The Earth has been cooling since 1998. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a miniscule element of the Earth’s atmosphere, barely 0.038%. Thus, to predicate an attack on livestock production because of global warming is to engage in the kind of boldfaced fraud we associate with Al Gore.

Curiously, there is relatively little overt criticism of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization despite the occasional passing notice of its abject failure to make a dent in the frequent problem of famines. Due to its vast bureaucracy the FAO has been known to stand by while people died, engaging in internal politics and favoritism.

One study, written in 1988, and released by the Heritage Foundation, took note of its chronic problems, reporting that it was created in 1945 “with the lofty aspiration of feeding the world’s hungry. It has not done so, despite at that time more than $8 billion in outlays.

“The sad fact is that the FAO has become essentially irrelevant in combating hunger. A bloated bureaucracy known for the mediocrity of its work and the inefficiency of its staff, the FAO in recent years has become increasingly politicized. As in the case of other U.N. agencies, the FAO is anti-Western and oblivious, even hostile, to the role of free enterprise in development. It embraces the collectivist ideology espoused by the radical leftist nations who now dominate U.N. proceedings.”

Not much has changed since the Heritage Foundation was first issued twenty years ago and today’s use of the FAO to lend credence to the discredited global warming hoax.

The issue at hand is whether free people in a nation founded on liberty will stand by and permit massive hoaxes like global warming or organized attacks on its thriving beef production industry determine what they will eat while undermining an important element of the nation’s economy.

In the second part of this series, the Food and Agriculture Organization’s assertions will be refuted with facts, most of which will come from agencies of the U.S. government.

As Part Two of my four-part series on beef production and consumption continues, we look at the way an animal rights group like PETA taps the global warming hoax to justify requiring everyone to accept a vegetarian diet.

PETA: Saving the Earth by Not Eating Meat

As the vast global warming hoax begins its inexorable death, an equally vast campaign against the raising of livestock and the consumption of meat continues, led by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and supported by the propaganda machinery of the United Nations through its Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The assertion that the raising of livestock worldwide is contributing to “global warming” is so obviously absurd that one might easily and quickly dismiss it, but the fact remains that this continues to be the cornerstone of a campaign to end the consumption of beef by more than six billion people around the world.
Dating back to the pre-history of man, the eating of meat has been part of the human diet. In February 2005, I wrote about “The War on Meat”, noting that humans have twenty teeth devoted to eating meat, but only twelve for fruits and vegetables. Moreover, the human stomach is designed primarily to eat digest lean meat, while the small intestine, pancreas, and liver are mainly herbivorous, designed to digest vegetables, fruits, fats, and farinaceous (starch) foods.

However, if you go to the website of PETA, you will find a page titled “Meat and the Environment” that cites a 2006 FAO report that accuses the meat industry as “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”

Growers of livestock are accused of land degradation, climate change, and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and the loss of biodiversity. A number of environmental organizations such as the National Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and Environmental Defense, have joined in this Big Lie. Colluding with the United Nations agencies, their capacity to spread lies through the mass media and into our nation’s schools represents a threat to our health and our economy.

Little known to the public, however, is the fact that PETA which campaigns against the raising and processing of livestock for food, targeting restaurants, grocers, ranchers, and others, routinely kills animals, primarily pets, entrusted to their care. The same holds true for other allegedly “humane” organizations. In 2007 PETA killed over 19,200 dogs, cats, and other “companion animals.” Over the last five years, it killed more than 90% of the animals it took in. PETA receives nearly $30 million a year from people who think that it is working to protect animals.

The truth, however, is very different from the lies of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, an agency that receives very little scrutiny from the world’s press. Founded in 1945, the FAO was intended to contribute to expanding the world economy by promoting sustainable rural development with an emphasis on the poorest farmers, promoting food productions and self-reliance, and raising the level of nutrition of the world’s population. Fortunately for mankind, it has no mandatory powers and relies instead on the promulgation of bogus reports like “Livestock’s Long Shadow.”

The largely urban population of the United States cannot be expected to know how it is that an extraordinary variety of meat products are found daily in the nation’s supermarkets or enjoyed in its restaurants and fast food establishments. That job belongs to the more than 800,000 beef producers throughout the nation who provide a year-round supply of wholesome and nutritious beef at affordable prices.

Consumers have already begun to notice how the environmentally-inspired mandates to turn corn into ethanol, a fuel additive, have driven up the cost of beef and other food products. They have learned that Congress for thirty years has denied access to America’s vast reserves of oil and that its ethanol mandates have increased the cost of beef production along with the provision of affordable gasoline and all other petroleum products.

Today beef production technologies are based on sound science and are subject to strict government review. The safety factor of beef products is a modern marvel.

Charges that beef production is responsible for a score of threats to the environment is easily refuted when one considers that more than half the agricultural land in the United States is unsuitable for crop production and that grazing animals on this land more than doubles the land area that can be used to produce food in the United States. Rather than creating erosion, foraging animals such as cattle help stabilize the soil and promote expanded growth of grasses.

Despite this, United Nations agencies continue to urge policies that do nothing for the alleviation of hunger, but instead further an agenda for the socialist redistribution of wealth common to communist regimes. U.N. agencies have consistently sought to thwart the development of gene-slicing technology to enhance crop production along with the banning of pesticides and herbicides to protect crops, animals and humans.
Its ban on DDT has been called “tantamount to withholding antibodies from patients with infections; it is mass murder, and the U.N. is a co-conspirator in the deadly campaign against the chemical’s use.” Its charge that the Earth is warming when it is, in fact, cooling, is a pure deceit.

By contrast, a three-ounce serving of lean beef contributes less than 10% of calories to a 2,000-calorie daily diet while, at the same time, providing an excellent source of protein, zinc, vitamin B-12, selenium, and phosphorus, as well as being a good source of niacin, vitamin B-6, iron and riboflavin.

In essence, the campaign against beef production and consumption is a campaign against the health of all who enjoy its benefits and, along with efforts to curb all forms of energy use, constitutes an insidious war on the welfare of the world’s population and economy.

Part Three of the Center’s series on beef production and consumption takes a look at why eating beef is one of the best choices one can make for their health.

The Food Police have a ‘Beef’ with Beef



In August 2007, Claudia H. Deutsch of The New York Times wrote an article, “Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change.” Talk about grasping at straws!

This alleged science writer was apparently unaware that the Earth has been cooling since 1998, nor that a legion of scientists, climatologists and meteorologists, have been coming forth to blow great big holes in the global warming hoax.

“The biggest animal rights groups do not always overlap in their missions,” wrote Deutsch, “but now they have coalesced around a message that eating meat is worse for the environment than driving. They and smaller groups have started advertising campaigns that try to equate vegetarianism with curbing greenhouse gases.”

Deutsch quoted Matt A. Prescott, manager of vegan campaigns for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), as saying, “You just cannot be a meat-eating environmentalist.” The Humane Society got into the act as well. Deutsch cited a webpage that asserted that, “switching to a plant-based diet does more to curb global warming than switching from an S.U.V. to a Camry”; a quote from Paul Shapiro, the senior director of the Society’s factory farming campaign.

Putting aside the fact that claims regarding carbon dioxide (CO2) increases have no impact on the warming of the Earth—they constitute 0.038% of the Earth’s atmosphere—such claims are so absurd they challenge credulity. They are, however, part and parcel of the general attacks on the production and consumption of beef.

Americans have grown accustomed to the “food police”, those groups that are forever warning them about eating just about anything. The cry is that Americans are suffering “an obesity epidemic.” Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, has opined that Americans should eat like 18th century serfs, dining “on perhaps a pound of bread, a spud, and a couple of carrots a day.”

The abundance of a wide variety of nutritious and delicious beef and other meat items in supermarkets across the United States is a triumph of science and animal husbandry. Some 800,000 producers of beef not only feed Americans but contribute to the economy through their exports.

Through science-based improvements in breeding and animal nutrition, beef production in the United States per cow has increased from about 400 pounds in the mid-1960s to 585 pounds in 2005 according to industry statistics.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (ERS), U.S. consumers spend a smaller percentage of their disposable income for food consumed at home (6.5%) than any other nation in the world. It has been Congressional mandates to convert corn—a major feed product for cattle—into ethanol that have driven up the cost of meat and other food products while reducing mileage and adding CO2 emissions.

Those who raise livestock for America’s dinner plates are also strong stewards of the land and more rightfully qualify to be called environmentalists than those seeking to convince people they are part of the bogus global warming hoax.

More than half the agricultural land in America is unsuitable for raising crops. Grazing cattle is an example of the responsible land management that has been in use for hundreds of years. In effect, grazing allows the use of the land while, at the same time, battling erosion, invasive plant species, and wildfires. It’s not just cattle grazing, it’s also proper environmental practices to protect water and encourage natural grasses.

Beef producers and farmers remain the targets of animal rights and environmental groups who consciously ignore the fact that food is required for human life while they focus on the energy required to produce it.
What cannot be denied are the health benefits of beef products. Not only to they provide the nutrients for energy, they do so with fewer calories, providing in addition a range of vitamins and minerals for a healthy lifestyle. This doesn’t stop the propagandists from claiming that meat is responsible for a variety of cancers and other alleged health threats.

The vegans will not tell you that diets rich in meat are a major factor in the regeneration of blood and in tissue repair. As a tissue builder, muscles and other elements, meat has no equal. Meat is easily digestible because the human body is designed to process it. The body literally requires less effort to convert meat than it does for fruits and vegetables!

The world is full of busy-bodies and scolds, many of whom are politicians who seek to expand the power of government by intruding into private and personal decisions about what people can eat. Why should some restaurants be required to provide caloric information about everything they serve? Why should some cities seek to restrict fast-food establishments? Why are you and I being treated like children or fools who are not responsible for what we eat, how much we eat, and where we eat?

Beef production has NOTHING to do with global warming because there is NO global warming. What warming occurred after the Little Ice Age ended in 1850 has been completely natural. So-called “greenhouse gas emissions” from animals, humans, or energy use, has no impact on the climate. For that you need to look at the Sun, the oceans, clouds, volcanic eruptions, and events well beyond the activities of mankind.
Hungry? Have a steak. Have a hamburger. Have some ribs. Eat some meat!

This fourth and final part of my series on beef production and consumption is a roundup of the many claims put forth to assert that the raising of livestock poses a threat to the planet and that people should stop eating meat. The general absurdity of these claims should be enough to dismiss them.

Absurd Claims About Meat

Over the years Americans and others around the world have been subjected to a barrage of such absurd claims about beef production and consumption that, in a rational world, they should be dismissed on sight.
With enough money and enough coordinated effort, we have witnessed how vast portions of the world’s population can be convinced, along with their elected leaders, that the Earth faces destruction because we drive cars, use air conditioning, and eat meat. In recent years, however, leading climatologists and meteorologists have spoken out against the global warming hoax and it too shall pass into history.

My interest in the many attacks on meat was spurred by the fact that I was raised in a family where dining well was enhanced by a mother, Rebecca Caruba, who was an internationally famed teacher of haute cuisine, a cookbook author, and an authority on wine. The many ways various meats, fish, and other delectable foods could be prepared made dinner in our home a stellar event every evening.

In 2005, Frank Murray, the author of many outstanding books on nutrition, sent me a copy of “You Must Eat Meat” that he co-authored with Max Ernest Jutte, MD. Murray, a senior editorial advisor for Let’s Live magazine, spelled out the many reasons why meat should be a vital part of everyone’s diet and health regimen. It dispels the many myths surrounding meat, drawing on medical data.

Let’s briefly examine recent claims about beef production and consumption. In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”, linking the worldwide provision of meat in people’s diets to global warming, deforestation, land erosion, air and waterpollution, and a host of other “reasons” to drastically scale back the raising of livestock and the eating of meat.

It was and is a wholesale attack on a multi-billion dollar industry, critical to the economies of many nations and the health of millions of people.
The animal rights advocacy group, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, (PETA) has long maintained a campaign against those who raise livestock and, of course, against the eating of meat. PETA is an aggressive vegetarian group fueled by an estimated annual budget $30 million that is famed for its outrageous promotional campaigns designed to gain media attention. The gap between their claims and the truth is vast. Other think tanks and allied groups aid in the dissemination of lies about eating meat.

Here’s what you need to know when you encounter the anti-meat propaganda:

Global warming. The only warming the Earth has encountered has been since the Little Ice Age ended in 1850. It has been completely natural and repeats the same cyclical warming periods. The claim that anthropogenic, man-made, warming has occurred due to the generation of “greenhouse gas” emissions—based entirely on flawed computer modeling by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—has been completely dismissed by thousands of climatologists and meteorologists, some of whom were advisors to the IPCC, but whose criticisms were ignored. Similar claims that the world’s livestock and other animal emissions contribute to a non-existent global warming are baseless. Fears surrounding carbon dioxide (CO2) have no basis in fact as this and other greenhouse gases constitute a very minor element of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Damage to the environment. Claims that the raising of livestock harms the environment—land, air and water—are equally without merit. More than half of the nation’s agricultural land is unsuitable to the growing of crops. By grazing cattle and other animals, the production of food products is doubled. Moreover, foraging animals such as cattle help stabilize the soil and promote the expanded growth of grasses. The nation’s 800,000 beef producers have avested interest in being good stewards of the land and engage in a number of programs that ensure that theirs and federal lands are properly managed. Their livelihood is closely connected to preserving a healthy, safe, and clean environment.

Eating meat threatens human health. This is surely the most scurrilous lie of all. This highly politicized claim is wrongly reflected in the nanny-state inventions of dietary guideless issued by government agencies. They are primarily devoted to issues of weight gain or loss, but people come in different shapes and sizes, and a one-size-fits-all approach to proper nutrition is absurd. A well-fed population is taller, has more energy, and is more immune to disease precisely ecause, in the case of meat, it receives more protein and a wide variety of life-enhancing vitamins and minerals. Naturally nutrient-rich foods like lean beef ensures that people receive more essential nutrients in fewer calories.

Cruelty to animals. Finally, let’s address the claims that livestock is subject to cruelty in the way they are raised and ultimately processed for food. Common sense suggests that poorly fed and maintained livestock produce fewer pounds per animal. The reality is that modern beef production is devoted to raising beef that yield more and leaner, fat-free meat than as recently as a decade ago. The technologies involved are subject to both sound science and strict government review that include public health veterinarian inspections and safe food handling requirements in restaurants, supermarkets, and in recommended practices by consumers. Humane practices are required by law from the ranch to the processing plant.

There is no doubt that the war on meat will continue because there are many people invested in the often absurd and frequently outrageous claims made regarding its production and consumption.
There is, however, no reason to avoid meat as a valuable element of one’s diet or denying oneself the pleasures we associate with the many ways it is prepared for our dinner table.

© 2008 Alan Caruba.
All Rights Reserved.

If you wish to publish or otherwise share this series, please contact Alan Caruba at acaruba@aol.com for permission.

About the Center

Alan Caruba, the founder of the Center, has been debunking science frauds and others since 1990 by providing the best, documented, and insightful commentary to as wide an audience as possible, including many mainstream publications that publish the commentaries.

Caruba has been a longtime contributor to many leading news and opinion websites that include Canada Free Press, CNS News, and Family Security Matters. His daily blog posts are routinely re-posted on dozens of comparable websites, blogs, forums and other Internet outlets, giving them a far-reaching national and international audience of readers.

His blog, "Warning Signs" and Facebook page are popular gathering places for fans of his commentaries. An updated list of the websites and blogs that post his writings can be found at Caruba Editorial Services. His monthly Internet report on new books is Bookviews and his popular media spoof, The Boring Institute, also has a blog.

Since purposefully raising fear and anxiety over various issues is the main weapon used by various special interest groups, the Center was named for this practice and exists to refute it.

It was apparent that decades of having been told the Earth was doomed due to global warming, that the nation’s forests were disappearing, that there was no place to put the garbage, that virtually every species was endangered, that drilling for oil or natural gas, or mining coal and other minerals was a danger, and that just about anything you ate, drank or breathed could kill you, too many Americans had fallen prey to these deceptions.

Through the Center, Caruba has responded with articles and news releases based on scientific data. Out of this early effort came the realization that the environmental movement—the Greens—had a political agenda that was international in scope. That it was, in fact, based on failed socialist economic theory and sought to impose a world government directed by the United Nations.

It became obvious, as well, that the United Nations, through its Environmental Programme, including its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was directing the many efforts to cripple the economies of capitalist nations by restricting their access to their own and other natural resources.

This was further supported by programs that were intended to restrict land use, attacking rancher’s grazing rights or the construction of any new housing or other facilities. Many of these programs are an attack on property rights, the keystone of capitalism.

Legislation such as the Endangered Species Act, the vast matrix of U.S. environmental laws, and through a myriad of international treaties, protocols, and conferences everything that can be done to slow or stop development of any kind has been undertaken.

Efforts to leave millions vulnerable to diseases can be seen in the U.S. and U.N. attacks on the use of pesticides such as DDT. This has contributed directly to the needless deaths of millions from Malaria and other insect and rodent-borne diseases. The World Health Organization, after three decades, has called for the use of DDT to fight Malaria.

The attacks on genetically modified food crops are yet another way to reduce the provision of vital grains and other food sources.

Caruba has become a popular guest on radio and television, and the Center receives media coverage throughout the year. He is available for speaking engagements.

The Center is highly dependent on donations to cover to the cost of operations. They are, however, not tax deductible.

The Center’s office is in South Orange, NJ 07079.