Most Conservatives have for many years tried to make the case that “Liberalism” is synonymous with “Socialism.”

The main point being that liberal politicians can only be elected by ensuring their “constituents” remain dependent on the goodies only liberals can provide.

“The Redistribution of Wealth” therefore has to be a primary plank in their campaign platforms.

(It’s interesting to note that all these programs are designed to give their constituents just enough to survive, yet never enough to escape the trap of Government dependence).

Reagan once said “We should measure welfare’s success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.”

Quite a contrast , don’t you think?

And now, as we head into the last 1/8 of the Obama Presidency, many opine that Obama has failed to produce……..failed to keep his campaign promises of 2008.

But is that really true? I don’t think so.

Take for example Obama’s promise that electric rates would have to increase, or that gasoline should be $5 per gallon. Or that the rich should pay a greater share of taxes (than the 80+% of all taxes they already pay). The examples of his ridiculous campaign promises are legendary if not for their content then for their sheer numbers. Remember: The oceans will stop rising if we just elect Obama.

Well, this video pretty much sums it all up.

This is a professionally produced gem. Note that it:

Never mentions any candidate or political party by name.

Never says so, but clearly describes how this is no accident. It is a carefully orchestrated plan. It is PERFECTLY PLANNED DESTRUCTION.

And then it implies at the end that if like what you just saw, don’t do anything on November 6th.

Enjoy the clip. (Both literally and figuratively).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Environmentalism and ‘saving the world’ are almost exclusively preoccupations of the left. Outwardly they are noble pursuits, and yet they have always smelt a bit rotten. In order to find the source of the odor it is necessary to look beneath the surface and understand what is going on at the psychological level when someone takes up these causes. Clues are few and far between, so when you find something in the press that hints at a deeper malaise, it’s worth looking at it very closely.

The following comment by English journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft is one such. He said:

“The great twin political problems of the age are the brutality of the right and the dishonesty of the left.”

By far the more straightforward of the two is the ‘brutality of the right’ and it can be explained by pretty much any of us. For example if I were to summarise my approach to life it would go something like this: “Normally I try to treat other people with respect, but essentially I am selfish and that is what normally guides my actions. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.” In essence that’s it – the brutality of the right flows from our selfishness. Most of you will relate.

It’s Wheatcroft’s second ‘problem’ that is the clue to what is wrong with environmentalism that we really want to look at. If we drill down into what is meant by the ‘dishonesty of the left’ we eventually come to the concept of ‘pseudo-idealism’. Pseudo-idealism is not real idealism, its feel-good selfishness masquerading as idealism. The vast majority of environmentalists belong to this camp: they preach their cause not from a genuine concern for the environment, but from a genuine concern for feeling good about themselves.

The psychology behind it is that we are all variously embattled at one level or another, and so ‘do-gooding’ can be massively seductive because it is so guilt relieving.

However – and here is the danger – in order to get the full guilt relieving benefit from ‘do-gooding’ (or any of the myriad forms of political correctness including environmentalism), the practitioner has to delude themselves that they are not on a selfish trip. In most cases this is so patently absurd that they have to work very hard at maintaining it. As a result they can become not just a strident advocate, but fanatical and intolerant of others who continue to battle.

This is dangerous because such intolerance is repressive and in essence anti-progress; and I don’t just mean economic progress – at a deeper level this intolerance is repressive of all progress.

In Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell said, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face”. If that future isn’t now, it is very close. Political correctness has become so pervasive in all its various guises that the boot may as well have a ‘dolphin friendly’ stamp on it, and as for the face – well we aren’t allowed to discuss its race or its gender or even its age can we – but I can guess it looks pretty much like you and me.

So the dishonesty of the left is manifold – it deludes it’s self that it is selfless when in fact it is extremely selfish; and its insistence we all ‘do good’ masks a threat far more dangerous than the brutality of the right.

Since warming hasn’t been cooperating lately, in desperation, Yale and George Mason University are trying to use a poorly wording and loaded poll to convince us that “weather is climate”. Problem is, the data does not support it.

Here’s the poll released today:

Just looking at the cover tells you a lot, it’s about the imagery of fear and terror, not facts.

Here’s a quote from the many news stories being circulated today in the MSM:

“Most people in the country are looking at everything that’s happened; it just seems to be one disaster after another after another,” said Anthony A. Leiserowitz of Yale University, one of the researchers who commissioned the new poll. “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Well by all means, let’s “connect the dots”, but let’s use history and data rather than sloppy questions like this:

What’s hilarious about this question is that the memory of such events is aided by the stories in the mainstream media, and what we are seeing is a positive feedback loop. More on that below.

These are probably the most pointless and loaded questions ever to be put into a poll about weather, why? because short term memory is better than long term, and they play into this fact, biasing the results strongly. Plus, it has been shown that bad weather itself affects memory:

“We predicted and found that weather-induced negative mood improved memory accuracy,” he wrote in the study, which is published in the currentJournal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Another study from the University of Toronto has also shown a link between bad moods and ability to remember details.

Forgas speculated that a worse mood helps us to focus our attention on the surroundings and leads to a more thorough and careful thinking style, while happiness tends to reduce focus and increase both confidence and forgetfulness.

Yale makes no mention of this psychological tendency to remember better in bad weather in their study, nor do they correct for it. So then, it is no surprise to see results like this for weather in the last year:

I’d really like to see what the last 10 years looks like in a similar question…but they wouldn’t dare do that, because it would not give the results they seek.  Plus, the type of severe weather events listed above, have regional distributions. For example, the south far more likely to have tornadoes and hurricanes that the Pacific Northwest. And in any given year, a strong wind and a strong rainstorm are common events just about anywhere, yet they try to make normal weather part of the “extreme” weather pattern, without defining what “extreme” weather is to the person being polled.

But, by saying “we are taking a poll about extreme weather” and then including winds, rain, snowstorms, heat waves, cold snaps, etc, which are regular occurances, lumping them with tornadoes, hurricanes, etc…they bias the poll by association. Its a clever trick, and it is also dishonest.

And in a hat tip to the slimy “forecast The Facts” campaign against TV weathercasters that don’t “toe the line” on saying garbage like this, here’s the poll’s hat tip to that paid political ploy run by the Center for American Progress:

In stark contrast the the agenda filled Yale poll by Anthony A. Leiserowitz, a Gallup poll from last week says that American don’t seem much concerned about global warming at all. In fact it is dead last in the concerns.

This is why warmists need a new ploy, if they can make global warming about everyday weather, they’ll have a golden hammer. In my opinion, it is psychological terrorism.

Ok let’s look at that positive feedback loop of opinion aided by the MSM I mentioned earlier. For that, I’m reposting portions of:

Why it seems that severe weather is “getting worse” when the data shows otherwise – a historical perspective

Published in April 2011

Bouziotas et al. presented a paper at the EGU a few weeks ago (PDF) and concluded:

Analysis of trends and of aggregated time series on climatic (30-year) scale does not indicate consistent trends worldwide. Despite common perception, in general, the detected trends are more negative (less intense floods in most recent years) than positive. Similarly, Svensson et al. (2005) and Di Baldassarre et al. (2010) did not find systematical change neither in flood increasing or decreasing numbers nor change in flood magnitudes in their analysis.

Note the phrase I highlighted: “Despite common perception”.  I was very pleased to see that in context with a conclusion from real data.

That “common perception” is central to the theme of “global climate disruption”, started by John P. Holdren in this presentation, which is one of the new buzzword phrases after “global warming” and “climate change” used to convey alarm.

Like Holdren, many people who ascribe to doomsday scenarios related to AGW seem to think that severe weather is happening more frequently. From a perception not steeped in the history of television technology, web technology, and mass media, which has been my domain of avocation and business, I can see how some people might think this. I’ve touched on this subject before, but it bears repeating again and in more detail.

Let’s consider how we might come to think that severe weather is more frequent than before. Using this Wikipedia timeline as a start, I’ve created a timeline that tracks the earliest communications to the present, adding also severe weather events of note and weather and news technology improvements for context.

• Prior to 3500BC – Communication was carried out through paintings of indigenous tribes.
• 3500s BC – The Sumerians develop cuneiform writing and the Egyptians develophieroglyphic writing
• 16th century BC – The Phoenicians develop an alphabet
• AD 26-37 – Roman Emperor Tiberius rules the empire from island of Capri by signaling messages with metal mirrors to reflect the sun
• 105 – Tsai Lun invents paper
• 7th century – Hindu-Malayan empires write legal documents on copper plate scrolls, and write other documents on more perishable media
• 751 – Paper is introduced to the Muslim world after the Battle of Talas
• 1305 – The Chinese develop wooden block movable type printing
• 1450 – Johannes Gutenberg finishes a printing press with metal movable type
• 1520 – Ships on Ferdinand Magellan‘s voyage signal to each other by firing cannon and raising flags.
• 1776 The Pointe-à-Pitre hurricane was at one point the deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record. At least 6,000 fatalities occurred on Guadeloupe, which was a higher death toll than any known hurricane before it. It also struck Louisiana, but there was no warning nor knowledge of the deaths on Guadeloupe when it did. It also affected Antigua and Martinique early in its duration.
• 1780 – The Great Hurricane of 1780, also known as Hurricane San Calixto is considered the deadliest Atlantic tropical cyclone of all time. About 22,000 people died when the storm swept over Martinique, St. Eustatius and Barbados between October 10 and October 16. Thousands of deaths also occurred offshore. Reports of this hurricane took weeks to reach US newspapers of the era.
• 1793 – Claude Chappe establishes the first long-distance semaphore telegraph line
• 1812 – The Aug. 19, 1812 New Orleans Hurricane that didn’t appear in the Daily National Intelligencer/(Washington, DC) until later September. Daily National Intelligencer. Sept. 22, 1812, p. 3. Dreadful Hurricane. The following letters present an account of the ravages of one of those terrific storms to which the Southern extreme of our continent is so subject. Extract of a letter from Gen. Wilkinson, dated New Orleans, August 22.
• 1831 – Joseph Henry proposes and builds an electric telegraph
• 1835 – Samuel Morse develops the Morse code
• 1843 – Samuel Morse builds the first long distance electric telegraph line
• 1844 – Charles Fenerty produces paper from a wood pulp, eliminating rag paper which was in limited supply
• 1849 – Associated Press organizes Nova Scotia pony express to carry latest European news for New York newspapers
• 1851 – The New York Times newspaper founded
• 1876 – Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson exhibit an electric telephone inBoston
• 1877 – Thomas Edison patents the phonograph
• 1889 – Almon Strowger patents the direct dial telephone
• 1901 – Guglielmo Marconi transmits radio signals from Cornwall to Newfoundland
• 1906 – Reginald Fessenden used a synchronous rotary-spark transmitter for the first radio program broadcast, from Ocean Bluff-Brant Rock, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible.
• 1914 – teletype intrduced as a news tool The Associated Press introduced the “telegraph typewriter” or teletype into newsrooms in 1914, making transmission of entire ready to read news stories available worldwide.
• 1920 – The first radio news program was broadcast August 31, 1920 by station 8MK in Detroit, Michigan, which survives today as all-news format station WWJ under ownership of the CBS network.
• 1925 – John Logie Baird transmits the first television signal
• 1928 – NBC completed the first permanent coast-to-coast radio network in the United States, linked by telephone circuits
• 1935 – Associated Press launched the Wirephoto network, which allowed transmission of news photographs over telephone lines on the day they were taken.
• 1942 – Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil invent frequency hopping spread spectrumcommunication technique
• 1946 – The DuMont Television Network, which had begun experimental broadcasts before the war, launched what Newsweek called “the country’s first permanent commercial television network” on August 15, 1946
• 1947 – Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young of Bell Labs proposed a cell-based approach which lead to “cellular phones“
• 1947 – July 27th. The WSR-1 weather surveillance radar, cobbled together from spare parts of the Navy AN/APS-2F radar was put into service in Norfolk, NE. It was later replaced by improved models WSR-3 and WSR-4
• 1948 – Network TV news begins. Launched in February 1948 by NBC, Camel Newsreel Theatre was a 10-minute program anchored by John Cameron Swayze, and featured newsreels from Movietone News. CBS soon followed suit in May 1948 with a 15-minute program, CBS-TV News, anchored by Douglas Edwards and subsequently renamed Douglas Edwards with the News.
• 1948 – The first successful “tornado forecast” issued, and successfully predicted the 1948 Tinker Air Force Base tornadoes which were two tornadoes which struck Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on March 20 and March 25.
• In 1953, Donald Staggs, an electrical engineer working for the Illinois State Water Survey, made the first recorded radar observation of a “hook echo” associated with a tornadic thunderstorm.
• 1957 the WSR-57 the first ‘modern’ weather radar, is commissioned by the U.S. Weather Bureau
• 1958 – Chester Carlson presents the first photocopier suitable for office use
• 1960 – TIROS-1 the first successful weather satellite, and the first of a series ofTelevision Infrared Observation Satellites, was launched at 6:40 AM EST^[1] on April 1, 1960 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
• 1962 – The first satellite television signal was relayed from Europe to the Telstarsatellite over North America.
• 1963 – First geosynchronous communications satellite is launched, 17 years afterArthur C. Clarke‘s article
• 1963 CBS Evening News establishes the standard 30 minute network news broadcast. On September 2, 1963, the show expanded from 15 to 30 minutes.
• 1966 – Charles Kao realizes that silica-based optical waveguides offer a practical way to transmit light via total internal reflection
• 1967 – The National Hurricane Center is established in the Miami, FL National Weather Service Forecast Office.
• 1969 – The first hosts of ARPANET, Internet‘s ancestor, are connected.
• 1969 – August 14-22 Hurricane Camille, a Category 5 storm, gets widespread network news coverage from correspondents “on the scene”.
• 1969 – Compuserve, and early dialup text based bulletin board system is launched in Columbus, Ohio, serving just that city with a
• 1971 – Erna Schneider Hoover invented a computerized switching system for telephone traffic.
• 1971 – Ray Tomlinson is generally credited as having sent the first email across a network, initiating the use of the “@” sign to separate the names of the user and the user’s machine.
• 1972 – Radio Shack stores introduce “The Weather Cube”, the first mass marketed weather alert radio. (page 77 here) allowing citizens to get weather forecasts and bulletins in their home for only $14.95
• 1974 April 3rd – WCPO-TV in Cincinnati carries the “Sayler Park Tornado” live on television as it was crossing the Ohio river. It was part of the biggest tornado super outbreak in history. It is the largest tornado outbreak on record for a single 24-hour period. From April 3 to April 4, 1974, there were 148 tornadoes confirmed in 13 US states. Lack of timely warnings demonstrated the need for an expanded NOAA weather radio warning system.
• 1974 – The first Synchronous Meteorological Satellite SMS-1 was launched May 17, followed later by GOES-1 in 1975.
• 1974 the WSR-74 the second modern radar system is put into service at selected National Weather Service office in the United States and exported to other countries.
• 1975 – The Altair 8800, the world’s first home computer kit was introduced in the January edition of popular electronics
• 1975-1976 NOAA Weather Radio network expanded from about 50 transmitters to 330 with a goal of reaching 70 percent of the populace with storm warning broadcasts.
• 1977 – Radio Shack introduces a weather radio with built in automatic alerting that will sound off when the National Weather Service issues an alert on the new expanded NOAA Weather Radio network with over 100 stations. Page 145 here
• 1977 – The Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced home microcomputers was introduced.
• 1978 – NOAA Weather Radio receivers with automatic audio insertion capabilities for radio and TV audio began to become widely installed.
• 1979 – The first commercially automated cellular network (the 1G) was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979, initially in the metropolitan area of Tokyo. Within five years, the NTT network had been expanded to cover the whole population of Japan and became the first nationwide 1G network.
• 1980 – Cable News Network (CNN) is founded by Ted Turner.Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States.
• 1980 -  A heatwave hit much of the United States, killing as many as 1,250 people in one of the deadliest heat waves in history.
• 1981 – Home satellite dishes and receivers on C-band start to become widely available.
• 1981 – The IBM Personal Computer aka IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981, it set a standard for x86 systems still in use today.
• 1982, May 2nd – The Weather Channel (TWC) is launched by John Coleman and Joe D’Aleo with 24 hour broadcasts of  computerized weather forecasts and weather-related news.
• 1983 – Sony released the first consumer camcorder—the Betamovie BMC-100P
• 1983 America Online (then as Control Video Corporation, Vienna, Virginia) debuts as a nationwide bulletin board system featuring email.
• 1983 – The first 1G cellular telephone network launched in the USA was Chicago-based Ameritech using the Motorola DynaTAC mobile phone.
• 1984 – The Apple Macintosh computer, with a built in graphical interface, was announced. The Macintosh was introduced by the now famous US$1.5 million Ridley Scott television commercial, “1984“. The commercial most notably aired during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII on 22 January 1984 and is now considered a “watershed event”.
• 1985 – Panasonic, RCA, and Hitachi began producing camcorders that recorded to full-sized VHS cassette and offered up to 3 hours of record time. TV news soon began to have video of news and weather events submitted from members of the public.
• 1986 July 18th, KARE-TV in Minneapolis dispatches a news helicopter to catch live video of a tornado in progress, live at 5:13 PM during their news broadcast.
• 1988 – Doppler Radar goes national – the construction of a network consisting of 10 cm (4 in) wavelength radars, called NEXRAD or WSR-88D (Weather Service Radar 1988 Doppler), was started.
• 1989 – Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau built the prototype system which became the World Wide Web at CERN
• 1989 – August Sony announced the Sony ProMavica (Magnetic Video Camera) electronic still camera, considered the first widely available electronic camera able to load images to a computer via floppy disk.
• 1991 – Anders Olsson transmits solitary waves through an optical fiber with a data rate of 32 billion bits per second.
• 1991  – The 1991 Perfect Storm hits New England as a Category 1 hurricane and causes $1 billion dollars in damage. Covered widely in TV and print, it later becomes a movie starring George Clooney.
• 1992 – Neil Papworth sends the first SMS (or text message).
• 1992 – August 16-28 Hurricane Andrew, spotted at sea with weather satellites, is given nearly continuous coverage on CNN and other network news outlets as it approaches Florida. Live TV news via satellite coverage as well as some Internet coverage is offered. It was the first Category 5 hurricane imaged on NEXRAD.
• 1993 – The Great Mississippi Flood was carried on network television as levees breached, millions of viewers watched the flood in real-time and near real-time.
• 1994 – Internet2 organization created
• 1994 – Home satellite service DirecTV launched on June 17th
• 1994 – An initiative by Vice President Gore raised the NOAA Weather Radio warning coverage to 95 percent of the US populace.
• 1995 – The Weather Underground website was launched
• 1995 – DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) began to be implemented in the USA
• 1996 – Home satellite service Dish Network launched on March 4th
• 1996 – Fox News Channel was launched on October 7, 1996 with 24 hour news coverage
• 1996 – The Movie “Twister” was released on May 10, showing the drama and science of severe weather chasing in the USA midwest.
• 1999 – Dr. Kevin Trenberth posts a report and web essay titled The Extreme Weather Events of 1997 and 1998 citing “global greenhouse warming” as a cause. Trenberth recognizes “wider coverage” but dismisses it saying:   “While we are indeed exposed to more and ever-wider coverage of the weather, the nature of some of the records being broken suggests a deeper explanation: that real changes are under way.”
• 2002 – Google News page was launched in March. It was later updated to so that users can request e-mail “alerts” on various keyword topics by subscribing to Google News Alerts.
• 2004 – December: A freak snowstorm hits the southernmost parts of Texas and Louisiana, dumping snow into regions that do not normally witness winter snowfall during the hours leading up to December 25 in what is called the 2004 Christmas Eve Snowstorm.
• 2004 – DSL began to become widely accepted in the USA, making broadband Internet connections affordable to most homes.
• 2004 – On November 19, the Website “Real Climate” was introduced, backed by Fenton communications, to sell the idea of climate change from “real scientists”.
• 2004 – December The website “Climate Audit” was launched.
• 2005 – August, Hurricane Katrina caused catastrophic damage along the Gulf Coast of the United States, forcing the effective abandonment of southeastern Louisiana (including New Orleans) for up to 2 months and damaging oil wells that sent gas prices in the U.S. to an all-time record high. Katrina killed at least 1,836 people and caused at least $75 billion US in damages, making it one of the costliest natural disasters of all time. TV viewers worldwide watched the storm strike in real time, Internet coverage was also timely and widespread.
• 2006 – Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and opening in New York City and Los Angeles on May 24. It went on to limited theater release and home view DVD. It was the first entertainment film about global warming as a “crisis”, with hurricane Katrina prominently featured as “result” of global warming.
• 2006 – The short instant message service Twitter was launched July 15, 2006
• 2006 – November 17th, Watts Up With That was launched.
• 2007 – The iPhone, with graphics and Twitter instant messaging capabilities was released on June 29, 2007.
• 2007 – The reality show “Storm Chasers” debuts on the Discovery channel on October 17, 2007, showing severe weather pursuit as entertainment.
• 2007 – On October 10th, in Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education and Skills Al Gore’s AIT movie was challenged in a UK court, and found to have nine factual errors. It was the first time “science as movie” had been legally challenged.
• The 2008 Super Tuesday tornado outbreak was a deadly tornado outbreak affecting the Southern United States and the lower Ohio Valley from February 5 to February 6, 2008. With more than 80 confirmed tornados and 58 deaths, the outbreak was the deadliest in the U.S. since the May 31, 1985 outbreak that killed 76 across Ohio and Pennsylvania. It was widely covered live on US media.
• 2010 – A heat wave in Russia was widely reported by global media as being directly a result of “global warming”. Scientific research from NOAA released later in 2010 and2011 showed that to be a false claim.
• 2011 – On January 4th, the Pew Research Center released a poll showing that Internet had surpassed television as the preferred source for news, especially among younger people.
• 2011  – March, notice of an Earthquake off the coast of Japan was blogged near real-time thanks to a USGS email message alert before TV news media picked up the story, followed by A Tsunami warning. A Japanese TV news helicopter with live feed was dispatched and showed the Tsunami live as it approached the coast of Japan and hit the beaches. Carried by every major global news outlet lus live streamed on the Internet, it was the first time a Tsunami of this magnitude was seen live on global television before it impacted land.

Compare the reach and speed of communications and news reporting at the beginning of this timeline to the reach and speed of communications and news reporting technology around the beginning of the 20th century. Then compare that to the beginning of the 21st century. Compare again to what we’ve seen in the last 10 years.

With such global coverage, instant messaging, and Internet enabled phones with cameras now, is it any wonder that nothing related to severe weather or disaster escapes our notice any more? Certainly, without considering the technological change in our society, it would seem as if severe weather events and disasters are becoming much more frequent.

To borrow and modify a famous phrase from James Carville:

It’s the technology, stupid.

Which speaks to the phrase: “Despite common perception” which I highlighted at the beginning. The speed of weather tracking and communications technology curve aids in our “common perception” of severe weather events. The reality of severe weather frequency though, is actually different. While we may see more of it, that happens because there are millions more eyes, ears, cameras, and networks than ever before.

1. There are less Tornadoes in the USA

12-month running sums of hurricane frequency (Dr. Ryan N. Maue, FSU)

3. And now, back to our original seed for this long thread, no effect in global flooding events:

Destructive floods observed in the last decade all over the world have led to record high material damage. The conventional belief is that the increasing cost of floods is associated with increasing human development on flood plains (Pielke & Downton, 2000). However, the question remains as to whether or not the frequency and/or magnitude of flooding is also increasing and, if so, whether it is in response to climate variability and change.

Several scenarios of future climate indicate a likelihood of increased intense precipitation and flood hazard. However, observations to date provide no conclusive and general proof as to how climate change affects flood behaviour.

Finally, this parting note.

While our world has seen the explosion of TV news networks, Internet News websites. personal cameras and recording technology, smartphones with cameras, and the ability to submit a photo or movie or live video feed virtually anywhere, anytime, giving us reporting of weather and disaster instantly on the scene, where tornadoes live on TV is becoming a ho-hum event, there’s one set of elusive phenomena that still hasn’t seen an increase in credible reporting and documentation:

UFO’s, Loch Ness monster,  and Bigfoot.

We still haven’t seen anything credible from the millions of extra electronic eyes and ears out there, and people still marvel over old grainy images. You’d think if they were on the increase, we’d know about it.

==============================================================

And this article is also germane:

The Amazing Decline in Deaths from Extreme Weather in an Era of Global Warming, 1900–2010

Proponents of drastic curbs on greenhouse gas emissions claim that such emissions cause global warming and that this exacerbates the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including extreme heat, droughts, floods and storms such as hurricanes and cyclones. But what matters is not the incidence of extreme weather events per se but the impact of such events—especially the human impact. To that end, it is instructive to examine trends in global mortality (i.e. the number of people killed) and mortality rates (i.e. the proportion of people killed) associated with extreme weather events for the 111-year period from 1900 to 2010.

This is due to better warnings, and yes, the MSM (especially TV and radio) is key to getting those warnings out.

Here’s another germane article:

Another blow to warmist hysteria over weather is not climate unless we say it is: “2011 damage is qualitatively indistinguishable from 1974″

Simmons, K., D. Sutter, R.A. Pielke, Jr. (2012), Blown away: monetary and human impacts of the 2011 U.S. tornadoes. Extreme events and insurance: 2011 annus horribilis (Edited by C. Courbage and W.R. Stahel) The Geneva Reports: Risk and Insurance Research , Published March 2012.

Pielke Jr. writes on his blog:

1. When using our dataset, it is best to use the damage numbers as tabulated by the US NWS as they are consistent over time

2. That said, 2011 damage is qualitatively indistinguishable from 1974 and 1954 1953 at >;$20B

3. That would give a simple baseline expectation of 1 in 20 for 2011, but half or twice that would not be implausible given the uncertainties, so between 1 in 10 and 1 in 40

4. For 2012 and looking ahead there are two big question marks, one more certain than the other. Urbanization is increasing, which means that the chance of large losses increases (somewhat at the expense of smaller and medium losses of course). And there has been a notable and significant decline in the incidence of strong tornadoes in recent decades

Here’s the summary from the report:

The decades leading up to 2011 convinced many that the tornado threat had been reduced to the point that 100 fatality tornadoes and 500 fatality years were in the past. After all, neither figure had been exceeded in the U.S. in over 50 years. The National Weather Service implemented a nationwide network of Doppler weather radars in the 1990s. Warning lead time doubled, and then almost doubled again, providing sufficient time for families to receive a warning and take shelter. Television stations used sophisticated graphics to cover tornadoes with ever-increasing accuracy. Street level tracking software allowed TV viewers to know the exact location of a tornado and how close it might get to their home.

In this environment, a tornado that killed 10 or more people was national news and could grab the attention of the public for days and perhaps weeks. In 1999 one of the most powerful tornadoes ever documented struck a metropolitan area and resulted in 36 deaths, which while tragic, was only a fraction of the toll that might have been expected from a tornado like this at the start of the 20th century. The benchmark for what constituted a major tornado event was much different than 1974, when the 3-4 April “Super Outbreak” killed over 300 people. Things were different now, or so many people thought.

We begin by summarising the damages and fatalities from U.S. tornadoes in 2011. Next, we examine the tornado outbreak as it relates to the historical record. The next section looks at the role that extreme weather played, followed by a discussion of some of the vulnerabilities that are known to increase fatalities from tornadoes. We then consider what can be done to limit damages and fatalities from future tornado outbreaks. Finally,
we discuss whether or not this was an event that can be expected to occur again and then we conclude.

…Three previous seasons—1953, 1965 and 1974—now rival damage in 2011. Normalised damage exceeded US$20 billion in 1953 and 1965 and exceeded US$10 billion in 1974. The 1953 season provides perhaps the best historical comparison with 2011, as much of the damage in 1965 and 1974 occurred in just one outbreak. Damage in 1965 is attributable to the Palm Sunday outbreak, while damage in 1974 occurred in the 2-3 April “Super Outbreak”. 1953 had multiple damaging outbreaks in different parts of the country. One of the worst tornadoes of 1953 occurred in Worcester, MA, and ranked first in normalised damage until the Joplin tornado of 2011.

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Every time warmist academics try to push these ridiculous opinion polls as proof of “global warming makes weather more severe and more frequent” all it takes is a casual look at the data to know they are blowing hot air.

Crossposted from Watts Up With That

Ah…the smell of hypocrisy in the morning: (h/t Tom Nelson)

When writer and outdoorsman Mike Lanza realized climate change was staking a full-scale assault on our most beloved national parks, he didn’t just lament about how his kids wouldn’t get to experience them the way he did. Instead, he saddled up his entire family — wife Penny, son Nate, 10, and daughter Alex, 7 — with packs, kayaks, and climbing gear and embarked on a year-long mission to visit them all. His new book Before They’re Gone: A Family’s Year-Long Quest to explore America’s Most Endangered National Parks chronicles the adventure. He took some time to answer a few questions about our changing parks, life-list trip planning, and educating the next generation about climate change through adventures in the great outdoors.

…Q. Getting to all these places obviously required a lot of carbon. Did that ever trouble you?

A. Yes. I’m kind of a nut about energy consumption…We’re planning a family climbing trip to the City of Rocks in June, a nine-day hut trek in Norway in July, and a four-day backpacking trip in the Wind River Range in August.

Trains, planes and automobiles.

But hey, he is a nut about energy consumption and all.

Obama’s first big energy-policy speech was to the United Nations in 2009 when he boldly told the entire world that it had to get off of fossil fuels because: “the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing.” “Rising sea levels threaten every coastline,” blah, blah, blah, but to the true believers, it was lines from a psalm:

More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.
More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict.
All the largest emitters of greenhouse gas pollution [must] act together.
Wind turbines and solar panels and batteries for hybrid cars.
Loan guarantees and tax credits.
A future that is worthy of our children

Now, not a single word about climate or CO2. Guess that makes it official. Greenhouse gases and global warming are no longer a motivating concern for U.S. energy policy. Quick, tell the EPA, whose war on CO2 is already shutting down its first tenth of the grid. Not needed anymore guys. CO2 is no longer even worth mentioning. Can we hold Obama to it?

The President did repeat “clean energy” a bunch of times in his Nevada speech, but there is NOTHING unclean about CO2, so that doesn’t count. CO2 is the essential nutrient from which all life on the surface of the earth is constructed. Animals get their carbon building blocks from plants which get it from atmospheric CO2 through photosynthesis, and current levels of CO2—about 0.039 percent of the atmosphere—are alarmingly close to the minimum required to sustain life.

From Lawrence Livermore Labs CO2 “fact sheet“:

Carbon dioxide is necessary to sustain life in concentrations of about 0.04 percent of the earth’s atmosphere …

The biosphere craves more of this healthful gas, not less.

The ONLY concern about CO2 is the idea that its greenhouse warming effect might be dangerous, and no such concern is being voiced by Obama. Apparently it is off the table, which ought to clear off all of his green energy plans as well, because their explicit rationale has been the greenhouse threat from CO2.

“Climate” was why, in Obama’s 2008 words, electricity prices would have to “necessarily skyrocket.” It was all about capping CO2 in order to save the planet from global warming:

[C]limate change is a great example. You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.

The danger of CO2 required a switch to green fairy power. Coal would be forced into bankruptcy while alternate-reality approaches to energy would be subsidized:

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

That will also generate billions of dollars that we can invest in solar, wind, biodiesel and other alternative energy approaches.

So much for “all of the above.” All but coal, shale oil, tar-sands, ANWR oil, and pretty much anything that produces CO2. And yet, now that CO2 is no longer an official concern, none of these anti-CO2 policies has altered one whit.

Shutting down Keystone and ANWR are just the latest in the long train of Obama-democrat shutdowns of fossil energy, and Obama is still calling for more Solyndras. From his kick-off speech last week in Maryland:

And I want to keep on making those investments. (Applause.) I don’t want to see wind turbines and solar panels and high-tech batteries made in other countries by other workers. I want to make them here. (Applause.) I want to make them here in Maryland. I want to make them here in the United States of America, with American workers. That’s what I want. (Applause.)

The only thing new is a switch in rationale. Out with saving the planet and in with … saving the economy. Now the reason we are going to unplug our existing energy infrastructure and put all of our eggs in baskets that can’t float without government subsidy is because that’s the way to prosperity.

Not an easy sell, but Obama is up to it. His Maryland speech was the template, resting his economic argument on two of the biggest whoppers ever told: 1) that his administration is already drilling aggressively yet gas prices are still high, proving that aggressive drilling can’t bring gas prices down, and 2) America is an oil-poor country, so really, our only alternative is rainbow colored unicorn farts.

Thorough take-down of the Obama-whoppers here. But the big take-away? CO2 is no longer enough of a concern to be worth mentioning, according to President Obama himself.

Obama doesn’t mean it, but if he’s going to abandon his climate-based opposition to fossil fuels then we should hold him to that: economic considerations alone call for Drill Baby Drill; there is no more need to fund the anti-CO2 frauds at the IPCC; and come on EPA, you heard the boss. Coal, “clean” in the old-fashioned sense of not spewing soot, is a-okay.

Who Made These Bones

This fossil skull is between 11,000 and 14,500 years old, according to radio carbon dating of samples from their campfires in caves of southwestern China. There are unique features of this skull and of at least two other specimens that make this find unique. Notice the bony protrusion of the cheek area, the width of the face in the region temporal mandibular joint, the excessive bony structure of the mandibular rami, the massive molar structure, the anterior portion of the jaw is protruding and massive, the bony structures suggest a massive mandibular musculature, the eye sockets are large and broad, perhaps indicating an individual with superior eyesight. The wear of the incisors suggest a seed and plant eater who relied heavily on those feed sources at least seasonally and probably more often, especially when the hunting or trapping failed. Every hunter/trapper who knows how to set snares, knows that it is much easier to snare deer or trap them in blind canyons and kill them as you need them, a type of primitive animal husbandry and meat preservation, but professional anthropologists have never visited a primitive hunting group like this because there are none.

Did this creature die because his lower incisors overwhelmed the upper incisors, causing infected gums and impacted teeth, making it impossible to eat roots,nuts, and seeds, thus did it become too painful for him to masticate the plant materials with the lower incisors cutting into the upper gum and against the impacted remnants of the upper teeth?

Were his teeth and that powerful jaw that served him so well, responsible for his demise? It happens to older horses all the time and judging from the right angle of the extending rami and the advanced wear of the teeth, this individual was an older male with a limited ability to grind seeds and nuts. Of one thing we can be sure, this is truly a unique creature of this world.

Before we allow the anthropologists to muddy up the water with highly predictable, politically biased, but extremely speculative claims of species migrating out of Africa, species that supposedly represent unique groups or a hybrid product of the evolutionary chain that branched off and eventually perished, let’s look at this new find through the eyes of a former trapper and professional hunter, who survived for years using many of the same analytical skills of the ancient hunter gatherer. Since we aren’t in the caves, we will need to rely on the findings of students and anthropologists; thus, our findings are compromised from the beginning, for no one reads “sign” (traces of life and movement) like a man who made his living reading “sign”.

Because of carbon dating, we know these creatures lived in proximity to modern humans, during the Pleistocene-Holocene transition of 11,000 to 15,000 years ago. We can also conclude that there were more than three individuals, for if the question of which came first the chicken or the egg is enigmatic, the question of the origin of these individuals is just as problematic, for the breeding of a species requires more than three specimens. The coward and the lemming will say they walked out of Africa without leaving a trace and then were overwhelmed by modern man; unfortunately, there is no sign to suggest this scenario, it is just accepted wisdom or should we say stupidity, for academics must accept and repeat unsubstantiated conjecture as fact in order to be accepted by your peers in academia.

We know these individuals were hardy enough to survive the coldest glacial period of approximately 20,000 years ago, back when ice covered one-third of the earth’s surface, the glaciers were over a mile thick, and a good portion of the earth’s water was trapped in these ice formations.

This early hunter liked to live in caves; the temperature of caves is constant, a bit on the cool side, but during an ice age it would seem like central heating. They liked to eat a large red deer, we may assume it is the size of an elk, since we have been given no specifics. The article mentioned that he was probably a stone tool maker, since there is evidence of worked stones at the sight, but the modern bushman knows it is nearly impossible to butcher, transport, cook, and eat a deer as large as an elk without stone knives.

It is the charred bone of the Red Deer that is the tell-tale sign of prehistoric beings with culinary skills, for charred bone survives the tests of time so well it is nearly as impermeable as stone tools. The men studying these people have named them the Red Deer People and one name is as good as another, but more important are the features of this well-preserved skull and the cavalier use of the word People. Notice the bony structures of the face, particularly the supra-orbital ridges above those large eyes and the huge nasal opening. This individual may have had the well developed sense of smell required to track game by using his sense of smell. The large eyes may indicate superior vision or perhaps a night hunter. There is no curvature of the cheek bones, the feature we rely on so heavily to define beauty; instead, we have a flat massive bone structure that would have served well for the attachment of a massive mandibular musculature for the grinding of seeds and roots. The wear pattern of the incisors suggest this possibility.

The forehead is well developed, but begins a distal curvature prematurely, when compared to a modern skull. The high forehead has been a trait of humans for hundreds of thousands of years. In man the frontal lobes protect the region of the brain associated with behavior and personality. The diminished area on top of the skull represents a compromised section of the brain associated with sensory data, but this information is only useful if we assume that this creature and modern man had similar brains with the exact formation and function; with the skull’s variance, should we assume the brain is the same?

This creature survived one of the coldest epics of the last ice age, referred to as the Glacial Maximum, a period that ended approximately 20,000 years ago, and the transition into the equivalent of our modern climate, known as the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, a period of change between 11,000 thousand years and 15,000 years ago. This transition saw a major die off of flora and fauna, but along with the die off came a rebirth of new plants and animals. The large Red Deer that this creature depended for protein, didn’t make the cut and it is safe to assume that most of his plant foods also perished. Was he unable to adapt, did he lack the mental capacity to alter his hunting and gathering knowledge and technology to meet the challenges of changing world? Perhaps, but remember, we are being objective by employing the skills of a modern day hunter and trapper and not relying on political or cultural biases that tend to contaminate the “scientific” findings of anthropologists.

Therefore, we can say with confidence that it is nearly impossible to say. With sadness, it is easy to realize academics with their clueless abilities to relate to real world problems often miss real clues for their lack of experience in the lifestyle that this creature survived in and thrived for eons. Unfortunately, the Indiana Jones persona is a myth. The best that we can hope for is to recover DNA samples and continue to chart the blood of the families and species of the world, but to assume this creature explains or provides proof of evolutionary theory or intelligent design requires more than a stretch of imagination. Remember, if we chart the stored information within the DNA of a one cell organism, it will require hundreds if not thousands of pages of data.

Let’s take into consideration the fact that for the forces of nature to form a fossil, a unique and specialized set of characteristics from the environment need to be present; to assume that early species were thoughtful enough to only travel and die where fossils can be formed to help us in recording the steps of man and other creatures that walked upright, requires either a very weak mind or a very devious mind.

Our anthropologists are quick to theorize about the possibility of interbreeding between modern man and the Red Deer People, it isn’t impossible to “conceive” of the idea, when we think of the breeding habits of some modern men and of some modern women like Ms Fluke who seem to have problems with self-restraint and logic. But there is that cheek problem, the laws of attraction, and how much cultural definitions of beauty or ugliness is someone willing to overlook just to have their ashes hauled, but then we are also left with the mule or hybrid problem, the fact that nearly all cross species breeding, that can produce a viable life form, results in an organism that is sterile. But just maybe, it really isn’t science when we reach out to consider the “but maybe” syndromes.

This man has to be the sorriest example of a “professor” ever seen. Not only does he not understand the argument against his green energy push he also “mangles U.S., world History”

That is the headline at the very liberal, very leftist, blog known as Talking Points Memo

You know it’s bad when they are calling him out.

But let’s not even get into his ignorance in history. Let’s get into this statement:

“Now, here’s the sad thing. Lately, we have heard a lot of professional politicians, a lot of the folks who were running for a certain office, who shall go unnamed, they’ve been talking down new sources of energy. They dismiss wind power. They dismiss solar power. They make jokes about biofuels. They were against raising fuel standards. I guess they like gas guzzlers. They think that’s good for our future. We’re trying to move towards the future. They want to be stuck in the past!” Obama exclaimed to cheers from the crowd. “If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they probably must have been founding members of the flat earth society. They would not believe that the world was round!”

Leaving out the fact that the Columbus flat earth assertion is not historically accurate either he still fails to acknowledge what the real argument against his policies are. We all want alternatives to the traditional oil energy but conservatives understand that there is NO green energy alternative that is around today, or will be in the next decade, that can replace oil. So while we all want energy alternatives to be investigated and refined, we still need oil. And its better for our country to get it’s own oil rather than depend on other countries.

Newt asks a great question in response to Obama’s insulting speech:

“Why is Saudi drilling good and American drilling bad?”

“This is utter intellectual nonsense,” Newt taunted.

“If he wants to represent Saudi Oil and algae, I’ll be happy to represent American oil and American jobs and we’ll see this Fall who the American people want to elect.”

Additionally, why should the government subsidize obviously failed technology? Obama attempted to use Henry Ford’s innovation as an example. Well…did the government subsidize Ford?

No.

It was because of a businessman who wanted to become successful AND rich that we got the Model T and all the innovation that came with that.

But Obama wants to tax, tax, and tax some more, men and women like Henry Ford until they are forced out of business while doling out millions to his cronies in green energy. His policies stifle innovation. Stunts growth. And is ruining this country.

You know what makes today historic?

Gas prices have never been higher:

This while our President does nothing to help stem the tide. Instead he says that we can’t drill our way to lower gas prices since we only have 2% of the oil in the world. This conveniently leaves out the fact that we have enough recoverable oil for the next two centuries. The 2% figure comes from the CURRENT oil reserves.

Of course we would need to start drilling to get that oil. Something he doesn’t want to do.

But doesn’t he imply that it was due to his administration that oil production was at an eight year high? That oil rigs had increased? That more land was opened for drilling?

Of course he does. He is a master at deception

“Gasoline prices are higher today at least in part because government has neglected to pay sufficient attention to the importance of producing more of our own oil and natural gas,” said API Director Erik Milito.

President Obama likes to brag that oil and gas output has risen during his term. True, but he had absolutely nothing to do with it. Output, according to a new API study, “increased in 2011 over 2009 only as a result of growing production on state and private lands — up almost 29% for oil and 22% for natural gas.”

By comparison, on federal lands, which Obama’s administration controls, production fell 7.9% for oil and 6.8% for natural gas over the same period.

Oil markets understand that the increase in oil production was due to decisions made 5 years ago. They also see what is coming in the next 4-5 years by the decisions being made by THIS administration. The price of oil today is increasing because of the outlook for tomorrow.

But why the deceptions. It was only a few years ago that he, and those in his administration, admitted that high gas and energy prices isn’t all that bad.

Click here to view the embedded video.

His Secretary of Energy:

“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,”

Oh, sorry…he “retracted” his statement…but doesn’t regret it:

But Chu declined to say whether he regretted making the 2008 comments.

“Let me not comment on that,” he said.

Would he like to comment on this?

Chu specifically cited a reported breakthrough announced Monday by Envia Systems, which received funding from DOE’s ARPA-E, that could help slash the price of electric vehicle batteries.

He also touted natural gas as “great” and said DOE is researching how to reduce the cost of compressed natural gas tanks for vehicles.

High gasoline prices will make research into such alternatives more urgent, Chu said.

“But is the overall goal to get our price” of gasoline down, asked Nunnelee.

“No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy,” Chu replied. “We think that if you consider all these energy policies, including energy efficiency, we think that we can go a long way to becoming less dependent on oil and [diversifying] our supply and we’ll help the American economy and the American consumers.”

Obama has clearly stated in the past that he wants to increase the price of energy from oil and coal, to tax those who do provide that energy into oblivion. Those placed in charge of energy inside his administration have clearly stated they want prices to increase so we will be forced into the boondoggle known as green energy.

But now that polls show he is getting hurt by these rising prices he wants to make us believe that HE is the oil man that everyone accused Bush of being.

Just laughable.

As I’ve written before, I was a very uninformed young person for the first half of my life. I remember watching a movie in the Florida State student union about how Campbell’s Soup treated workers unfairly. I quickly decided to start my own boycott. Inexplicably, they somehow survived my boycott. I once went to the Tallahassee airport to try and meet Gary Hart before his presidential campaign imploded and I also sat on the stage when Jessie Jackson gave a speech during his 1984 race for the White House. As a Political Science undergraduate one of my professors, a self described Bolshevik, explained the great successes of the Soviet Union thus: Their economic and political system had to be superior to ours, otherwise how could they produce the weapon systems we were so scared of? Made sense to me… There were probably numerous other episodes but my brain has apparently, thankfully, forgotten most of them.

The reason I mention this is because we all did things during our college years that we might want to forget. Luckily for me, none of my nonsense was captured on video. Not so lucky for our President. The video of him encouraging a gathering of Harvard students to embrace the man and the message of the late leftist Dr. Derrick Bell has been making the rounds of the Internet. Although Democrats (and most of the media) suggest this is nothing more than a student showing support for the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School, I’m fairly sure the President would just as soon not have to deal with the issue during an election campaign.

Luckily Americans recognize that by the time most of us reach middle age, the explorations, experimentations, the ill advised exhortations have been tempered by time and real world experience. Most of course does not mean all, and while one might be inclined to offer a pass to the President for what said in college two decades ago, the same cannot be said for his equally ill advised words two weeks ago.

Of course I’m not talking about Professor Bell. I’m talking about President Obama’s “Energy Speech” delivered last month. Aside from the fact that he makes a number of factual errors, the biggest problem is that the President doesn’t seem to learn from actual experience.

The President seems determined to run the United States off an economic cliff for the sake of his belief in the scam known as “Green Energy”. Not only has he wasted billions of taxpayer’s money on boondoggles like Solyndra, the very expensive and nonworking Fisker-Karma and the rapidly shrinking National Renewable Energy Lab, but more importantly he has added, literally, $243 billion a year to what Americans pay for gasoline. (130 billion gallons a year X $1.86 – the increase in the price of gas since Obama took office) That’s more than 10 times what Americans spend on the NFL, Hollywood movies and in Starbucks annually! Of course there are other unseen costs Americans must bear as businesses have to wrap their increased energy and transportation costs into everything they offer, be it canned tomatoes or package delivery, but those are too numerous to discuss here.

The problem is not a lack of accessible energy as the President suggests, rather the problem is his laser like focus on the illusion of economically viable “renewable” or “sustainable” energy to the explicit detriment of the demonstrably viable and abundant energy sources that fueled the 20th Century. More concerning is that he maintains that focus in the face of the repeated failures of virtually every aspect of the Green Energy hoax:

From subsidized windfarms that are now being subsidized further to stop operating to General Motors halting production of its heavily subsidized Volt because no one wants to buy it to the $50 light bulb that won the Department of Energy’s prize for a “green” but affordable light bulb. Add to that the fact that Green jobs are largely an expensive mirage and you have the makings of what must be a parody of a plan to actually revive the economy. Then when you think about the closing of actual, functioning plants across the country due to increased regulation, and the quixotic support for foreign fossil fuel exploration, it seems like more than just a parody, it’s like he’s mocking the American people.

But, no, really, his intentions are good… Well, even if they were, one must remember Einstein’s definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I don’t think the President is insane, which leads me to the conclusion that he’s doing the same thing over and over again expecting the same results. He believes so strongly that he is right about his green agenda that he simply refuses to believe that things will not turn his way eventually. He’s a modern day Walter Duranty, where billions of dollars are being wasted and millions of jobs are being destroyed yet somehow he doesn’t see it, or doesn’t care. Like Duranty’s reporting of the economic miracle that was the USSR while Stalin used an iron fist to inflict bloodshed and starvation across the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union, President Obama’s words increasingly ring hollow. More and more often when Americans hear “We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices” or “We’re focused on (oil) production” or “The only real solution to helping families at the pump in the medium and long term is clean energy. That’s how we’ll save families money” they recognize they are being lied to in a way that seems almost impossible to believe coming from a President.

Perhaps the President thinks the government’s education industrial complex has eradicated the critical thinking or skepticism gene from the average American so that they will simply believe something because it’s delivered by a man with a smile and an air of confidence. As much damage as government schools do, I don’t think they’ve succeeded in that yet.

At the end of the day most Americans are willing to look past the defiant words of a college student looking to make his mark on the world. I think they are less likely however to accord the same deference for equally nonsensical words uttered by someone old enough to have learned that the world does not actually operate like the ivory towers of academia, where theories and speeches and a lack of real world consequences rule the day. As much of a headache his words at Harvard might be causing for the President, his more current words are causing a much bigger one for the American people. This will take more than aspirin to fix…

In the “let the consumer decide” department, the benefits of alternative-energy vehicles like the Chevy Volt don’t outweigh the costs to consumers. Yet President Barack Hussein Obama wants, with tax dollars, to make alternative-energy vehicles ownership easier and prices more in line with conventional vehicle models by:

• increasing the $7,500 tax credit for alternative-energy vehicles to $10,000
• earmarking $1 billion to reward cities that provide infrastructure for such vehicles
• earmarking $650 million for a research program to increase the range and decrease the price of alternative-energy vehicles
• repealing $4 billion of tax incentives for oil and gas companies to “pay” for his proposed tax credits and earmarks
• giving a new five-year tax break for those who buy commercial trucks that run on electricity or natural gas

These were the measures he proposed in a speech before the Daimler Trucks North America manufacturing plant in Charlotte, NC on Wednesday, March 7, 2012, to address high gasoline prices. He said nothing about increasing oil production. While tax credits may give consumers more reason to purchase alternative-energy vehicles, they won’t give manufacturers any incentive to look for cheaper ways to manufacture them. Obama’s proposed tax credit increase ensures that taxpayers will continue to pay an arbitrarily high price for alternative-energy vehicles long after the market would have brought costs down. The responsibility is with manufacturers, not taxpayers, to produce an alternative-energy vehicle that consumers actually want to purchase, and at a price they can afford. That also means that government should not, through tax credits, try to foist alternative-energy vehicles on consumers.

In short, “let the consumer decide.” But that is not how the big government socialist central decision-makers work. We consumers don’t know what’s good for us. We are too stupid to make our own decisions. So big government must intervene. The tax code exists to raise revenue so the federal government can fulfill certain basic, essential functions that individuals or state and local governments cannot, such as defense. Tax credits, tax subsidies, and tax penalties turn the tax code into an instrument to manipulate behavior instead.

Regarding repealing oil and gas company tax incentives, Obama said, “It’s time to end that taxpayer giveaway to an industry that’s never been more profitable, invest in clean energy that’s never been more promising.” But he made no mention of the clean energy bankruptcies or the subsidies given to politically connected clean energy companies. BTW, Obama has a stated goal of having one million electric vehicles on US roads by 2015.

But that’s just my opinion.

Cross-posted at RWNO, my personal web site.