The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.
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The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense, and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature.
New data also indicate that ocean cycles are probably the most important single factor in explaining temperature fluctuations, though solar cycles may play a role as well, and that reliable satellite data undercut the likelihood of endangerment from greenhouse gases. All of this demonstrates EPA should independently analyze the science, rather than just adopt the conclusions of outside organizations.
The released report is a draft version, prepared under EPA’s unusually short internal review schedule, and thus may contain inaccuracies which were corrected in the final report.
“While we hoped that EPA would release the final report, we’re tired of waiting for this agency to become transparent, even though its Administrator has been talking transparency since she took office. So we are releasing a draft version of the report ourselves, today,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman.
Bernard Madoff will spend the rest of his life in prison.
The mastermind behind the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history was sentenced on Monday morning to 150 years behind bars, the maximum requested by federal prosecutors.
Madoff confessed in March to 11 counts including fraud, money laundering and perjury, among other things.
Many of Madoff’s wealthy clients lived in South Florida and lost their life savings to his scheme.
Passing President Obama’s “cap and trade” energy program would cost the average Oklahoma family $3,200 a year, Sen. Jim Inhofe said Friday, but he’s confident the measure will be killed in the Senate no matter what happens in the House of Representatives.
The Tulsa Republican, a longtime critic of what he considers “this hoax called global warming,” made his latest statements during a morning stop in Shawnee while House members in Washington were preparing to vote on the controversial issue.
“Between the years of 1998 and 2005, I was the only member of the United States Senate who would take on what I call ‘the Hollywood elitists’ and the United Nations on this hoax called global warming and I went through seven years of purgatory on that issue.”
During an appearance on MSNBC, political commentator Pat Buchanan correctly defined the “Climate Bill” for what it really is, not just a new tax on the American people, but a complete transfer of power and wealth to a global government that is using the manufactured fear of global warming to grease the skids for total domination.
Referring to the passage of the climate bill and global warming in general, Buchanan said that the legislation was passed through the use of fear and that, “More and more scientists are coming forward to say this is a hoax and a scam which is designed to transfer wealth and power from the private sector to the government sector and from the government of the United States to a world government. Which is what we’re going to get in Copenhagen when we get this Kyoto two agreement.”
Buchanan labeled the legislation a “tax bill” that would raise the prices of utilities for every American, hammer the middle class and working class, “for a danger that we don’t even know is really there”.
The former senior advisor to three U.S. presidents accused the Obama administration of hyping the apocalyptic myth that the oceans will rise and that cities will be underwater in order to ram through the legislation.
Establishment left-wing blogs like Crooks and Liars and Media Matters are carrying the video of Buchanan’s remarks with little or no accompanying commentary, as if Buchanan’s comments alone are enough to discredit his position.
Those who act as shills for the climate change hoax may believe that anyone who dares challenge the authodoxy of the church of global warming is automatically a heretic and that no evidence whatsoever needs to even be presented to counter their sacrilege, but here in the real world we prefer to stick to the facts.
Empirical satellite data shows that mean global temperatures are the same that they were 30 years ago and that global sea ice is also at similar levels. Following a spike in global temperatures at the end of the last century that coincided with the sun undergoing its most active period in recent times, the planet has now cooled to 1979 levels. At the end of summer last year, despite hysterical predictions that the North Pole would be free of ice for the first time in history, Arctic sea ice had actually expanded by 30 per cent, an area the size of Germany.
Coinciding with expanding ice sheets, there has been no rise in sea levels for the past three years. Tropical storms and extreme weather events attributed to global warming like hurricanes and typhoons are at a record low.
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The United Nations’s IPCC, the heavily politicized organization that is often erroneously cited as an independent scientific body by climate change promoters, was last year caught citing fake data to make the case that global warming is accelerating, a shocking example of mass public deception.
“This was startling,” reported the London Telegraph. “Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.”
It soon came to light that the data produced by NASA to make the claim, and in particular temperature records covering large areas of Russia, was merely carried over from the previous month. NASA had used temperature records from the naturally hotter month of September and claimed they represented temperature figures for October.
As David Deming points out in his excellent article today, temperature data collected by weather stations is being artificially impacted by measuring systems placed nearby to sources of heat. This is why claims that global temperatures are still rising are completely contradicted by real world evidence of falling temperatures and what some scientists are warning is the beginning of a new ice age.
“Why do people think the planet is warming?,” writes Deming. “One reason is that the temperature data from weather stations appear to be hopelessly contaminated by urban heat effects. A survey of the 1221 temperature stations in the US by meteorologist Anthony Watts and his colleagues is now more than 80 percent complete. The magnitude of putative global warming over the last 150 years is about 0.7 °C. But only 9 percent of meteorological stations in the US are likely to have temperature errors lower than 1 °C. More than two-thirds of temperature sensors used to estimate global warming are located near artificial heating sources such as air conditioning vents, asphalt paving, or buildings. These sources are likely to introduce artifacts greater than 2 °C into the temperature record.”
“Every year in the US, more than forty thousand people are killed in traffic accidents. But not one single person has ever been killed by global warming. The number of species that have gone extinct from global warming is exactly zero. Both the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets are stable. The polar bear population is increasing. There has been no increase in infectious disease that can be attributed to climate change. We are not currently experiencing more floods, droughts, or forest fires,” he concludes.
As we have attempted to warn, the major beneficiaries of the climate bill will be the elitists who own the carbon trading systems that will be used to handle the ‘cap and trade’ program, namely Al Gore and Maurice Strong, two figures intimately involved with a long standing movement to use the theory of man made global warming as a mechanism for profit and social engineering.
Gore’s investment company, Generation Investment Management, which sells carbon offset opportunities, is the largest shareholder of The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX).
While Maurice Strong, who is regularly credited as founding father of the modern environmental movement, serves on the board of directors of CCX. Strong was a leading initiate of the Earth Summit in the early 90s, where the theory of global warming caused by CO2 generated by human activity was most notably advanced.
Oliver Biggadike and Ye Xie Bloomberg
June 29, 2009
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The dollar declined the most against the euro in a month and dropped versus the yen after China repeated its call for a new global currency.
The Swiss franc declined against the euro and dollar this week as foreign-exchange analysts said the central bank sold its currency three times to support the economy. The greenback fell against most of its major counterparts after the People’s Bank of China said yesterday the International Monetary Fund should manage more of members’ foreign-exchange reserves.
“The dollar’s status as a reserve currency is being questioned,” said Benedikt Germanier, a foreign-exchange strategist in Stamford, Connecticut at UBS AG, the second- largest currency trader. “There are reasons to sell the dollar.”
Mir Hossein Mousavi, the de facto leader of Iran’s pro-democracy movement, has rejected the Tehran government’s official partial recount of votes in the disputed June 12 presidential election.
On Saturday Mousavi rejected the findings of a panel set up to hold the recount, and again demanded a full re-run of the election.
“Limiting the probe into complaints about electoral irregularities to recounting 10 percent of the ballot boxes cannot attract people’s trust and convince public opinion about the results,” the moderate candidate said on his campaign website Ghalamnews.ir.
Mousavi’s hard line stands in stark contrast to news reports on Friday, which indicated the reformist candidate may have been “backtracking” on his calls for protests against the disputed election results.
BASIJ HOME RAIDS
Human Rights Watch reports that the Basij militia — the paramilitary force responsible for much of the violence against protesters and allegedly the group behind the killing of Neda Soltan — is carrying out night-time raids in private homes, in an effort to prevent people from chanting on rooftops at night.
Even as the daytime protests fizzled, many in Tehran and other parts of the country took to shouting “Allah-o-akbar” (”God is great”) from their rooftops at night, in a sign of solidarity with the pro-democracy movement.
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“While most of the world’s attention is focused on the beatings in the streets of Iran during the day, the Basijis are carrying out brutal raids on people’s apartments during the night,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement. “Witnesses are telling us that the Basijis are trashing entire streets and even neighborhoods as well as individual homes trying to stop the nightly rooftop protest chants.”
MASS ARRESTS, TOUGH WORDS FROM AHMADINEJAD
AP reports that “several hundred” activists, journalists and students have been detained. If the Iranian government’s goal for the arrests is to crush the pro-democracy movement, it may be working:
The arrests have drained the pool of potential leaders of a protest movement that claims President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the election by fraud. They also point to the potential for high-profile trials – and serious sentences – before a special judicial forum created to handle cases from the unrest.
Also on Saturday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised that those who continue to dispute his victory in the June 12 elections will receive a “crushing” response.
“You should know that if you continue the response of the Iranian nation will be strong,” AP quoted Ahmadinejad as saying. “The response of the Iranian nation will be crushing. The response will cause remorse.”
Ahmadinejad also had tough words, once again, for President Barack Obama. He slammed the president on Saturday for “interfering” in Iran.
Speaking of Obama, he said: “He who spoke of reforms and changes, why did he interfere and comment in a way that disregards convention and courtesy?”
On Friday, Obama said Iran’s “outrageous” crackdown on demonstrators would hurt his hopes for direct talks with Iran.
VIDEO: POLICE THROWING TEAR GAS FROM HELICOPTERS?
A citizen journalist has told CNN that law enforcement in Tehran has been dropping tear gas from helicopters to disperse protesters.
The following video, which was broadcast on CNN, was uploaded to YouTube on June 26, 2009:
At least two leaders of the coup launched in Honduras today were apparently trained at a controversial Department of Defense school based at Fort Benning, Georgia infamous for producing graduates linked to torture, death squads and other human rights abuses.
The Georgia-based U.S. military school is infamous for training over 60,000 Latin American soldiers, including infamous dictators, “death squad” leaders and others charged with torture and other human rights abuses. SOA Watch’s annual protest to shut down the Fort Benning training site draws thousands.
According to SOA Watch, the U.S. Army school has a particularly checkered record in Honduras, with over 50 graduates who have been intimately involved in human rights abuses. In 1975, SOA Graduate General Juan Melgar Castro became the military dictator of Honduras. From 1980-1982 the dictatorial Honduran regime was headed by yet another SOA graduate, Policarpo Paz Garcia, who intensified repression and murder by Battalion 3-16, one of the most feared death squads in all of Latin America (founded by Honduran SOA graduates with the help of Argentine SOA graduates).
General Vasquez isn’t the only leader in the Honduras coup linked to the U.S. training facility. As Kristin Bricker points out:
The head of the Air Force, Gen. Luis Javier Prince Suazo, studied in the School of the Americas in 1996. The Air Force has been a central protagonist in the Honduran crisis. When the military refused to distribute the ballot boxes for the opinion poll, the ballot boxes were stored on an Air Force base until citizens accompanied by Zelaya rescued them. Zelaya reports that after soldiers kidnapped him, they took him to an Air Force base, where he was put on a plane and sent to Costa Rica.
For previous Facing South coverage of controversy surrounding the School of Americas/Western Hemisphere Center, see here.
ancavge
3:38 am on June 29, 2009 Permalink
| Reply Tags: Buenos Aires, Christian Conservative, Gov. Mark Sanford, grown man, Henry Makow ( 3 ), Mark Sanford, Sanford & Sons
Why can’t we find a grown man who will put responsibility to country, wife and family above the allure of sex? This widespread arrested development is caused by the secular religion of sex which mistakes romance for real love and spiritual fulfillment.
Gov. Mark Sanford, 49, a Christian Conservative, didn’t spend Father’s Day with his four sons. He flew off to Buenos Aires to be with his mistress Maria, 43, starting a two-week trial separation from his wife of 20 years, Jenny, 47.
Sanford’s wife Jenny is an attractive, educated woman who served as his campaign manager. She is the mother of his four sons. The novelty goes out of any relationship. It is replaced by devotion to the people who love you, to your progeny (your organic growth) and to making a better world for them to inhabit.
By “listening to his heart” Sanford betrayed both his family and his nation. Like Eliot Spitzer, he was considered a front-runner for the GOP Presidential nomination in 2012. Like Spitzer, Mark Sanford has damaged his career at a time when America is sorely in need of honest, competent leadership.
Sanford’s personal emails to Maria from July 2008 were hacked by another of her suitors. They reveal that even at the pinnacle of his career, Sanford was seeking spiritual fulfillment in romance instead of service.
He complains that he has been dominated by his head for too long. “You have my heart,” he says. Love “has become a real need of mine. You have a particular grace and calm that I adore. You have a level of sophistication that is so fitting with your beauty…Above all else I love that inner beauty about you.”
Sanford is idealizing this woman, easy to do when you have limited contact.(She is a divorcee who recommends Alan Greenspan’s last book, and is looking for a therapist.) By loving her, Sanford thinks he can possess her spiritual qualities and sophistication. He can’t. He must cultivate these qualities in himself.
He seems to miss his mother’s love: “She had the ultimate of all gifts — and that was the ability to love unconditionally. The rarest of all commodities in this world is love. It is that thing that we all yearn for at some level — to be simply loved unconditionally for nothing more than who we are — not what we can get, give or become.”
He is a spiritual seeker. He talks about operating an earth excavator on his farm at sunrise:
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“There is something wonderful about listening to country music playing in the cab, air conditioner running, the hum of a huge diesel engine in the background, the tranquility that comes with being in a virtual wilderness of trees and marsh, the day breaking and vibrant pink coming alive in the morning clouds — and getting to build something with each scoop of dirt. It is admittedly weird but one of my more favorite ways of escaping the norms, constant phone calls and formalities that go with the office — and it probably fits with my weakness in doing rather than being.”
“Being rather than doing.” Rather than pursue a chimera in Argentina, Sanford needs to read Eckhart Tolle and meditate. We all try to suck our happiness from the world like vampires when we only need to give our souls some nourishment and room to breathe.
Sex and romance belong to the courtship and procreation stage.
Once we have a reasonably successful marriage and family, commitment is more important. From commitment comes trust and from trust comes love. If we can’t commit, we should end the marriage before straying.
Sanford’s wife Jenny is an attractive, educated woman who served as his campaign manager. She is the mother of his four sons. The novelty goes out of any relationship. It is replaced by devotion to the people who love you, to your progeny (your organic growth) and to making a better world for them to inhabit.
Sanford and Spitzer are not Illuminati. This may be why they have suffered these blows.
But they showed a lack of maturity by making themselves so vulnerable.
God’s Will won’t be done on earth unless men and women do it. The world is in the grip of a Satanic cult, the Illuminati. They are creating a world police state. We desperately need leaders who are willing to sacrifice themselves to God, and put their family and country first. In service, they will find a higher and more fulfilling love.
Military personnel kidnapped the ambassadors of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua in Honduras, along with the Honduran Foreign Relations Minister Patricia Rodas, according to Venezuela’s ambassador to the Organization of American States (OAS), Roy Chaderton.
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Chaderton made the announcement just before noon today during an emergency meeting of the OAS in Washington that was convened to respond to the military coup d’etat underway in the Honduras.
“Excuse the interruption, it is an urgent matter. I have just received information in this moment that the ambassadors of Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela,and Foreign Relations Minister Patricia Rodas have been kidnapped by a group ofhooded military agents,” said Chaderton.
Rodas confirmed the kidnapping in a hurried phone call to the Caracas-based television channel Telesur as the kidnapping was underway, according to Telesur.
Early this morning, approximately 200 soldiers kidnapped Honduran President Manuel Zelaya from his home and took over the state television station. A conflict between Zelaya and top military officials erupted this week after the military officials impeded the distribution of electoral materials for a national poll scheduled for today on whether to have a national referendumto re-write the national constitution.
The president of the Honduran Congress, Roberto Micheletti, has been sworn in as de facto president. U.S. President Barack Obama expressed his “concern” and called for all parties to “respect democratic norms” and peacefully resolve the conflict. Zelaya has communicated with Telesur from San Jose, Costa Rica, where the military forcibly transported him.
