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

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.

From Investors

The EPA thinks it’s worth spending billions of dollars each year to reduce already minuscule amounts of mercury in the outside air. So why is it trying to shove mercury-laced fluorescent bulbs into everyone’s homes?

When the EPA announced its new air pollution rules this week — designed to reduce power plant emissions of mercury and other to gases — Administrator Lisa Jackson blogged that:

“Mercury is a neurotoxin that is particularly harmful to children, and emissions of mercury and other air toxics have been linked to damage to developing nervous systems, respiratory illnesses and other diseases.”

At $10 billion a year, complying with the new rules won’t come cheap, and that assumes the EPA’s low-ball estimate comes true. According to the coal industry, this is the most expensive rule the EPA’s ever imposed.

Fear not, since Jackson claims the “health and economic benefits” will be many times greater than the costs.

But here’s the curious thing: While whipping up fear about mercury in the outdoors, the EPA is actively downplaying mercury’s health risks when it comes out of fluorescent bulbs inside people’s homes.

In a pamphlet extolling the virtues of the looming federal ban on traditional incandescent light bulbs, the EPA says it’s a “myth” that the mercury used in compact fluorescent lights is “dangerous in your home.”

But if you break a mercury-containing CFL? What then?

Before Cleanup

Have people and pets leave the room.
Air out the room for 5-10 minutes by opening a window or door to the outdoor environment.
Shut off the central forced air heating/air-conditioning system, if you have one.
Collect materials needed to clean up broken bulb:
stiff paper or cardboard;
sticky tape;
damp paper towels or disposable wet wipes (for hard surfaces); and
a glass jar with a metal lid or a sealable plastic bag.

During Cleanup

DO NOT VACUUM. Vacuuming is not recommended unless broken glass remains after all other cleanup steps have been taken. Vacuuming could spread mercury-containing powder or mercury vapor.
Be thorough in collecting broken glass and visible powder.
Place cleanup materials in a sealable container.

After Cleanup

Promptly place all bulb debris and cleanup materials outdoors in a trash container or protected area until materials can be disposed of properly. Avoid leaving any bulb fragments or cleanup materials indoors.
If practical, continue to air out the room where the bulb was broken and leave the heating/air conditioning system shut off for several hours.

Here’s what happened when one concerned citizen took action following a CFL breakage:

According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter’s bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges’ house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter. The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a “low-ball” estimate of US$2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began “gathering finances” to pay for the US$2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn’t cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.

Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as US$180 annually in energy costs — and assuming that Bridges doesn’t break any more CFLs — it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.

And when they burn out?

► Contact your local waste collection agency

Visit Earth911.com Exit EPA Disclaimer to find collection schedules in your area or drop-off locations if curbside collections are not available. Note that waste collection agencies:

– provide services that are usually free, though some may charge a small fee.
– sometimes collect household hazardous wastes only once or twice a year, so residents will have to hold on to their light bulbs until the collection takes place. Other collection agencies provide collection services throughout the year.
– may also collect paints, pesticides, cleaning supplies or batteries.
– usually accept waste only from residents, although some collection programs include small businesses as well.

So it’s going to cost you additional money to recycle your spent CFLs and/or you’re going to have to burn gas to deliver them to a recycler. Worse, you’re going to have burn the one thing you cannot ever get back- the time required to do this.

And if your local trash hauler doesn’t offer CFL recycling, p*ss them off!

1) Your local garbage service
Probably the best place to start is with whoever currently picks up your household trash or recyclables. If you pay for this service, you’ll almost certainly find a customer service number on your bill. Give them a call and ask if they offer CFL or mercury recycling. If not, politely suggest they do so. Here’s an opportunity to write a letter, attend a meeting or take some other activist role in highlighting the importance of proper CFL disposal. The appropriate follow-up will depend on whether your trash service is privately or publicly held.

Left out of this suggestion is that should the hauler be forced into such a program, the cost would be passed on in the form of increased fees. And the truth is that few are going to be bothered with this. Millions and millions of CFLs are going to be discarded into landfills, which will eventually contaminate the ground with significant amounts of mercury. And CFLs have far greater mass than incandescent bulbs.

What about the energy required for manufacture of CFLs?

The total energy input for the production of a CFL light bulb comes to 1.7kWh compared to 0.3kWh for a single incandescent light bulb.

That’s six times as much energy required to create a CFL over an incandescent bulb!

Most CFL’s are manufctured in China, and in their manufacture workers are poisoned:

Large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent light bulbs.

A surge in foreign demand, set off by an EU directive making these bulbs compulsory within three years, has also led to the reopening of mercury mines that have ruined the environment of a remote part of China.

Doctors, regulators, lawyers and courts in China are increasingly alert to the potential damage to public health of an industry that promotes itself as a friend of the Earth but depends on highly toxic mercury for its core product.

Making the bulbs requires workers to handle mercury in either solid or liquid form because a small amount of the metal is put into each bulb to start the chemical reaction that creates light.

Mercury pollution in China is already a significant problem.

Reducing Hg pollution has been a high priority in China’s environmental management and improvement program. During the past few years, China’s State Environmental Protection Administration has also strengthened its management of the production, use, import, export, and disposal of Hg. Hg mining has been restricted in many areas, such as Wanshan. In 1996, artisanal Au-mining activities were officially banned.

This “green” stuff ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Six times as much energy is used in the manufacture of CFLs over incandescent bulbs, workers and landfills are poisoned and CFLs are toxic if broken.

But you can be comforted knowing that while mercury may be poisonous in the air, Lisa Jackson says it is safe once it is your home.

Merry Christmas!

Obama’s “moon project” aka high-speed rail is moving along. Costs are spiraling:

Faster than a speeding bullet train, the cost of the state’s massive high-speed rail project has zoomed to nearly $100 billion — triple the estimate given to voters and more than enough to run the entire state government for a year.

Planned completion times are increasing:

bullet trains won’t be up and running until at least 2033, much later than the original estimate of 2020, although that depends on the state finding the remaining 90 percent of the funds needed to complete the plan.

And the voters are increasingly beginning to see the light:

Four weeks after the news that the cost of California’s high-speed rail project has tripled since voters approved it, the struggling project is taking another hit: waning public support.

A new Field Poll shows that 64 percent of California voters would like a ballot measure giving them a chance to reconsider their 2008 decision to approve $9 billion in state bonds for the project.

Fifty-nine percent said they would reject the $98.5 billion project if it were put before them again. In 2008, 52.6 percent of voters approved plans for the rail line to connect San Francisco and Sacramento with Los Angeles.

So what should our government do? Should they be fiscally intelligent and kill the stupid thing?

Obama?

Ain’t gonna happen:

The Obama administration vowed Thursday at a House committee meeting in Washington that it would not back down from its support of California’s bullet train project despite attacks from critics who alleged it is tainted by political corruption.

“We are not going to flinch on that support,” said Joseph Szabo, chief of the Federal Railroad Administration.

Szabo said that his agency had committed itself to provide $3.3 billion for a construction start next year in the Central Valley and that federal law prohibits any change of mind about where to begin building the first segment of the state’s high-speed rail system.

“The worst thing we could do is make obligations to folks and start to renege on our word,” Szabo told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

If the cost has increased three fold before one shovel has hit the ground…what do you think it will end up costing in 20 years when it will supposedly be complete?

It’s insanity. It’s a huge waste of taxpayer money. And in the end it will STILL be faster to fly.

If Obama really wanted a “moon project” to spend money on it should be for a completely new mode of travel. Something that would provide new technology and might actually be worth spending the money on.

But instead he wants to bankrupt us on a 19th century mode of travel.

Prologue: This is a story of two Stone Age chieftains, who migrated to America during the last Ice Age, approximately twenty thousand years ago: one came from the East and one came from the West, but before you begin to recite the teachings of Archaeology from twenty years ago, you might be surprised to know of startling new discoveries about the migration of man and the inconvenient facts surrounding the theories of Anthropomorphic Global Warming.

The Whale People, Their Homeland (Europe’s Western Coast, now submerged)

Yellow Hair was an anomaly; he was ancient, almost forty years old, but strongest among all the men of the Whale People. He was chief of the Whale People, and he ruled his tribe with rules etched in flint. Breaking the rules often meant death for the offender; for life was a tedious and constant struggle between survival and death, and death came all too often twenty-thousand years ago, during the height of the last great Ice Age in the area off the coast of Western France.

Much of the world’s water was locked up in ice sheets that a mile high covering much of Europe, Asia, and North America; in fact, the ice sheets covered one-third of the earth’s land masses and depleted the oceans of so much water, the ocean depths were a hundred meters less than they are now. There were coast lines connecting Europe with North America, and Asia with North America, they extended nearly a thousand miles from north to south on each corridor. It was a temperate area of grasslands and coniferous forests with limited precipitation, because of the amount of water frozen in the glaciers. There were thousands of creeks and rivers fed by springs and lakes that are now a hundred meters under water. It was a harsh ecosystem that supported the mastodon, a creature much larger than the elephant, as well as musk ox, giant sloths, saber toothed tigers, large bears, caribou, giant moose, elk, horses, and camels, all of whom migrated freely back and forth from Asia and Europe to North America.

No one knows why the giant glaciers appeared or why they receded, but the Ice Ages were real events in the story of the earth; the Ice Ages spanned tens of thousands of years and facilitated the dispersal of man all over the world.

The Whale People were a hardy bunch that had drawn their genetic pools from the blue and green eyed traders from the East, the tall, blonde haired, white skinned people from the land to the North, and the darker people of the South. It was a fairly short walk from North Africa to what would become Spain; the drought conditions of the world brought on by so much water being sequestered in ice forced many of the darker people of Africa to migrate north to be near the life giving water from glacial melt in summer and the springs that formed creeks and rivers on the Southern boundaries of the European Glacier and to the western shores of Spain and France.

The Whale People had originally occupied a coastal area that was next to the Southern ice shield of Europe approximately twenty-thousand years ago. Almost nothing could survive on these ever increasing glaciers that covered large portions of the continents, but there was a strip of new land exposed from the ocean depths, extending well beyond our present shorelines, because of so much of the earth’s water being frozen in the glaciers. This strip of land was warmed by the ocean, but it still remained a cold climate in summer, from the cooling effects of the great mass of ice on its borders. On this narrow strip of land, a micro-climate existed that had allowed animals, grasses, and a few hardy trees to proliferate in a wondrous abundance for tens of thousands of years, but the pressure by humans and the ever encroaching ice was reducing the availability of food sources and thus the livable space was under fierce competition by all species, but the competition among humans was the probably the fiercest.

Yellow Hair’s tribe had occupied the Southern coastal regions since the beginning of time or at least as far back as their oral history recorded their time here on earth. Yellow Hair wasn’t a singer who memorized the family lines and history of his tribe, but he knew his fathers had been chiefs far back in time. He had remembered his fathers and his personal history by assigning each of them, one of his fingers. He could go back in time by looking at a finger and tell you the name of that father, going back in time, nine generations.

The Ice People, The Migration (From Central Asia)

Tiger Paw loved to hunt and here in the land of the North Star, this land the North People call Beringia (the land bridge connecting Siberia to Alaska), the hunting was better than in the stories of the First Days.

It was told in the oral traditions of history, on the nights of the full moon, of how his people, the Ice People, had followed the herds over the Great Grasslands and forests to the West, just South of the great walls of ice. In the beginning, they were the first people, because the Father of the Ice had shown them great favor by providing them with flint for spears and the many animals to hunt. At first everyone was hungry during the winter, but the Father of the Ice liked the Ice People and gave them the beasts of the Steppes and the stone technology to kill the beasts, he also gave them fire and taught the women how to cook and how to brain tan furs and leather.

They learned that the brain of each animal, when allowed to break down to a gelatinous mass in a covered ceramic bowl, was sufficient to tan its own hide. They marveled at the skills of the ice Father and how he put all these mysteries of life within reach of those with the intelligence to figure out the answers. The Ice Father taught the women to love the hunters and to entertain them at night, so the tribe would be happy and always have new little ones.

Tiger Paw’s belief was essentially correct in the oral history of his tribe, but his concept of time wasn’t capable of comprehending the enormity of his tribe’s migration. His ancestors started moving east through the mountains and grasslands of Southern Russia and Northern Asia, several thousand years ago. Using the logic of 20,000 years ago, they figured the sun was always refueled in the East and traveled overhead to the West, only to get tired at the end of each day, needing to sleep through the night to be strong and hot the next morning, much like the hunter who hunts all day, breeds his woman at night, and then sleeps to be strong in the morning. They wanted to see this land where the sun is refreshed; there is surely much fuel to warm the sun, just beyond the horizon to the east. Sadly, the sun seemed to be weakening, because the great ice sheets were getting larger and eating more and more land. They were over a mile high and moving to the South at the rate of several man strides every day.

The idea of a great source of fuel to the East, was essentially the idea for migrating to the East. For over a thousand years, they followed the basic idea of moving east, always east. There were hostile tribes to contend with and periods of starvation coupled with disease, but they kept moving east.

Their culture and customs were ill suited for sedentary life. It was a simple matter of hygiene; a concept that was understood by sedentary tribes, for they knew that human waste was dangerous and should be deposited in a hole dug specifically for that purpose, they also understood the need to maintain clean drinking water.

It seems a simple concept, but migrating people rarely suffered from the ravages of cholera and dysentery, for they rarely made camp for longer than it took for a kill to be consumed or to spoil, except in the winter and the effects of disease were lessened during the extreme cold of winter.

Sedentary tribes, without cultural customs for contending with human waste, were condemned to die of disease if they stayed too long in one place. The problem was self-correcting in time, since tribes that lacked certain cultural conventions were weakened and often annihilated by other tribes who looked upon them as unclean or they simply died out from the ravages of disease.

During the migration of the Ice People, they had acquired many customs from the women they had traded for and the occasional lost hunter they had adopted. Even though Tiger Paw believed his tribe to be the only true people walking the earth, he understood advantages in acquiring new people with new technologies and customs.

The Whale People of Europe

Nine generations would place Yellow Hair’s father in the time when the great mother whale, Olalla of the big wild salt water, gave birth to man and all the creatures of the earth. In Yellow Hair’s mind, his distant relative was the first human to slide through Olalla’s birth canal and swim to shore; therefore, his birthright was one of leadership and a semi-divinity, for he was a direct descendant of Olalla. He couldn’t explain the bloodlines of other people or even those in his tribe and he forbid himself and others from asking frivolous questions that complicate the simple explanations of their life.

It was this natural birth of Yellow Hair’s relative that intrigued the Whale People and provided the common bond that held them together. The secrets of their existence and their connection with divinity was thought to exist through the navel of Yellow Hair, for that umbilical connection was directly related to Olalla the Whale Mother who had birthed the first relative of Yellow Hair, the very first human.

Unfortunately, it was the natural scheme of their life that was in jeopardy at this time; for the success of the Whale People made them the envy of many tribes. They had mastered the science of not only trapping great bounties of salmon in the rivers, but more importantly, they smoked and dried the salmon over smoldering fires to preserve them for months. This was a quantum leap in technology for the people of the world. News spread for over a thousand miles to the East along with the tasty morsels of the pink colored fish flesh.

Tribes with many huge warriors and advanced stone weapons ventured into the traditional lands of the Salmon People and brought many wondrous trade goods to trade for the smoked salmon of the Whale People. Trade was good for the Whale people, but some of these tribes decided to stay and there were now tribes camped in their winter hunting grounds and on their fishing grounds.

The winters were too cold to fish in the great salt water and the rivers and creeks were frozen. Rather than eat smoked salmon all winter, the Whale people had learned the different migration routes of the Caribou and devised traps to catch the Caribou in blind canyons for the winter. If there was enough feed for the Caribou, they would slaughter them as they needed meat; if the valley floor ran out of the lichens that the Caribou eat, they would slaughter them all at once and smoke the flesh like that of the salmon. In a gaunt world of starvation and hardship, the Whale People lived in a world of plenty.

They were happy to live under the leadership of Yellow Hair; not only was he divine, but he was a fair and intelligent leader, who could sense when and where the Caribou were migrating and when the Salmon started their runs or when there was a whale trapped in a small estuary by the tide. His people made boats with oak frames with greased leather for hulls that worked well if you kept the hide well greased with seal oil or whale blubber.

If his people observed the rules, they lived in harmony within the group: if they broke the law, Yellow Hair might cut their throat or trade them into slavery. He was feared, but loved as well. He was the nucleus that kept his tribe strong.

In these early days and up up until the present, there were several aspects of a society that needed to be worked into a particular culture for that society to exist and thrive. Survival, procreation, food, and leadership were all important elements that had to be defined culturally for a tribe to exist. If the rules or laws were broken, the society broke down.

Yellow Hair could control his own people; unfortunately, there were other tribes moving in and occupying their traditional Caribou hunting grounds. They observed the Caribou techniques of the Whale People and just repaired the log fences and gaits while waiting for the Caribou to pass through the mountain valleys.

This was no problem for Yellow Hair, he knew the mountain passes and could divert the Caribou with fire and by dressing his men in wolf and bear hides to drive the Caribou into different blind canyons. He would just build new gaits and fences at the entrances. These new people would have to live off the few Caribou that might be separated and the odd elk, horse, camel, or moose they could kill. If they were desperate or if they found a mastodon trapped in mud or lame, they could fight the mastodon to the death, for it was only possible to kill one at great risk to the hunters. He knew these new green and blue eyed people would often be facing starvation and that the Whale People almost always had plenty of Caribou and fish; therefore, they were at risk from these starving tribes.

These interlopers should have stayed in their own country, Yellow Hair reasoned. They were unfit for life between the ice and the salt sea. Their eyes were light colored and they suffered from the sun’s glare, their skin was too white in color and they couldn’t work naked in the glacier fed waters to catch the salmon. They didn’t engage in ritual washing and smoking their bodies in the traditional way. That alone prevented them from being hardy enough to survive the fierce cold and winds of these ancient lands. The blue and green eyed people were weak beyond measure, but they were large people and dangerous.

Yellow Hair knew he carried the seed of the first human, but it was this first human’s lusty ways and hunger for wild women of the forests that had produced all these uncultured barbarians. This ancient father had produced these excess humans of his own blood, and were now posing a threat to the very existence of the Whale People.

Yellow Hair had little sympathy for weakness, he had seen a weakness of character in the previous chief, his own father, and challenged the chief to personal combat for leadership of the tribe and to possess the young princess wife of his father. He killed his own father and claimed his father’s earthly goods and wives as his own. He was hardy enough, but that was back when men were men. (The weakest of the men was many times stronger than an NFL linebacker.) In those early days they hunted and killed the near humans for sport. There weren’t enough of them left now to worry over; besides, they can’t speak words, the men run like pregnant women, and they make the crudest tools and weapons. They are laughable, but in a wrestling match they are deadly, for they are strong like the mastodon. No, it is much safer to kill them with spears from a goodly distance. The near humans’s muscles are so large, they can only thrust a spear, if they try to throw a spear it is laughable.

He didn’t like to think about it, but these near humans, might be the result of his relative, the First Human, coupling with some creature of the forest. It was an ugly thought, but how else do you explain the presence of these near humans. He tried not to dwell on the negative aspects of the heritage of the First Human, but sometimes this irresponsible behavior of his family was embarrassing and impossible to ignore.

Yellow Hair had several wives and at least nine children, aged from twenty-four years to one winter. He enjoyed his kids; however, they were expected to meet the same requirements for life and work as everyone else, if the rules were relaxed for his family, he knew there would be resentment among his people.

Women who chose a mate from another tribe were expected to leave, but if a suitable mate was a loner and could prove himself as far as fishing, hunting, courage, and work, he could be accepted into the tribe. Yellow Hair would never allow slackers and free loaders a wooden soup bowl; charming a maiden of his tribe, did not warrant a free meal around the cook fire.

Everyone had to contribute with meaningful work or be banished or possibly executed by Yellow Hair. Life was a precious gift, but the nature of living next to the ice made it imperative that everyone worked to insure survival of the group. When the Salmon got lost and didn’t return to their rivers and creeks in sufficient numbers or the Caribou were called by Olalla to rest a year and not migrate, the old frail people were expected to walk alone into the night and not return, infanticide was also practiced to keep the numbers of the tribe down when food was scarce to help keep the nutritional requirements low. There were always hard decisions to be made, but the Whale People realized they must be ready to sacrifice just to survive next to the ice.

Killing a huge mastodon could mean survival through the winter, but unless they were mired in a bog hole or suffering from a severe lameness, it was far too dangerous to try and kill them and even when they were trapped, it often took hours to kill the monsters and many times his hunters were killed as well.

Sea lions were also dangerous to kill for they could travel much faster than a man can run. They were usually killed with a fusillade of spears when the animal was caught sunning himself beneath a ledge. The spears were made with sharp narrow points and heavier shafts, but the lighter javelin was also used, these weapons were designed to penetrate a tough hide and several layers of blubber; unless, the spear throws were lethal, the animal would run to the sea to escape and a valuable cache of spears and javelins would be lost with him. The sea lions were unafraid of humans and would run over a man who stood in his way as if he wasn’t there. The man would be crushed under several tons of sea lion, traveling faster than a horse.

The wild horses were trapped in blind canyons like the caribou, but they were more wary than the caribou and often sensed a trap and would turn just before being caught, to run over the men and sacrifice a few members of the herd to insure that the herd would survive.

Stealth and hunting discipline was primary in killing any of these animals, for even though man was a strong lethal killer, if an animal turned to fight and a man was caught without his weapon, humans always died. Yellow Hair explained to his elder sons, Sea Otter and Ivory Tusk, that Olalla, the whale mother that had birthed their first father, had given them superior brains to stand against the fierce animals of the grasslands and the ocean; otherwise they would have starved long ago. They accepted these truths without question; yet, there were many unanswered mysteries for the twenty year old lads.

The Ice People of Asia

Often the men had some hunting trick or knowledge of nature that helped them secure food: the women the hunters acquired for wives, always brought new knowledge of food preparation and garment making that made life better for the Ice People.

Several generations ago, the Ice People adopted a small band of tiny people with black silky hair (from the tribes that would form Japan, then a mountainous area connected to Asia and on the Eastern shore of a large lake). Their tribe had been wiped out by barbarians and they were starving. Chief Four Fingers, Tiger Paw’s grandfather, was intrigued by the women and thought if they had some meat on their bones they would be intriguing bed warmers.

The kindness shown by Four Fingers was rewarded not only by having attractive bed warmers, but these people were excellent fishermen, they also knew how to smoke fish and meats, but most importantly, they understood boatbuilding and using a mast with a short gaff rigged sail and rudder.

Although, the Ice People were on the coast, it is important to remember that so much water was frozen in the great ice sheets, that the ocean depth was reduced by over a hundred meters. The land bridge connecting Alaska and Siberia was over a thousand miles wide. Coastal areas often extended hundreds of miles farther into the sea than they do now. Thousands of rivers and creeks existed that are now on the sea floor. Beringia was a dry grassland that teemed with migrating herds traveling freely between Asia and North America.

Four Fingers had welcomed these fishermen into the tribe and did his best to insure the little people adopted the Ice Culture, but the technology that was gained by the little people was transforming their culture. He was primarily concerned with the combining the two DNA groups by spreading his seed around as much as possible, but the cultural and technological aspects of these ancient fishermen kept the Ice People from starving many times.

The original DNA pool of the Ice People had been slowly diluted for thousands of years as they traveled through Asia, along the borders of the ice; but rather than weakening the gene pool of the Ice People, they became stronger. Instead of a fair-haired tribe with green and blue eyes, they were primarily dark haired people with almond eyes. There would be an occasional child born with round blue eyes and fair hair, amid great laughter and jokes directed toward the mother and father, but the Ice People were a loving people and the throwback was always accepted as one of the true people.

The Ice People had managed to keep their own numbers close to one hundred hunters, not counting women and children. They lived well, but there were dangers from larger hostile tribes. Many tribes were driven into Beringia by starvation, but killing the great mastodon required advanced hunting skills and coordination among hunters; and yet, the skills for hunting horses, camels, muskox, caribou, and other animals of this huge grassland were advanced as well. Fishing required the skills and knowledge for building fish traps and a willingness to work naked in near freezing cold water. Boat building skills consisted of carefully burning and scraping a log with sharp instruments, until a boat shaped form appeared. Their sails were abbreviated, since the heavy keel technology would take thousands of years to be discovered; however, with paddles, these fairly fast, sleek canoe type vessels could be used for fishing and sealing and perhaps more importantly for continued migration to the land of fuel to the East.

The Ice People were hunting and fishing on the Northern edge of the glacier that extended into Southern British Columbia and north into the Yukon and Alaska. Although, it was an enormous glacier, in comparison to the glacier to the East, covering the rest of Canada and much of the US, it was a miniature glacier. Tiger Paw’s People knew there was a corridor of excellent winter hunting between the two glaciers, but they were also enjoying excellent fishing and sealing in the stormy salt sea, during the summer months.

Life was good for the Ice People, but with success in the struggle for life, comes those who want to steal that success.

The Whale People of Europe

Both of Yellow Hair’s sons had chosen good mates from outside the tribe. Yellow Hair had examined the potential mates closely for sickness or deformities and then deemed them sound women suitable for work and childbirth. He had paid a man’s weight in smoked salmon and several pairs of winter moccasins for the young girls, but each one had been an excellent purchase from the barbarian tribes of green and blue eyes, since they each produced a healthy son for the tribe. Thus his tribe would be guaranteed to survive with the superior intellect and knowledge that Yellow Hair was passing on to his sons. Yellow Hair was respected by his tribe for his infinite knowledge of nature, animals, survival, food preservation, weather, the seasons, and the land itself.

Mates were an important aspect of tribal life, adultery was not permitted without a formal declaration by a woman in front of the tribe at dinner. A man could have several wives if he could care for them, but if one of them stated her desire to be with another, there might be a fight to the death or the choice might go unchallenged for various reasons. Yellow Hair was a detached observer and official of these domestic disputes. Someone might die in a fight as a result of hard feelings and tempestuous desires, so the divorce option was not to be taken lightly. He thought it was a good system that helped keep his tribe strong and stable and especially, in helping to control these wild mating desires of both men and women.

Yellow Hair liked to keep about a hundred men in the tribe and twice that many women. The number of children fluctuated, because so many children died from the harsh life. It was obvious that Olalla wanted only the strongest of children to survive and she had to test them every winter. Everyone was expected to work in the cold glaciers streams to help catch the salmon and the boys were expected to join in the difficult and dangerous hunts. The work of women was much safer, but many of them died in childbirth, so in time, Olalla provided twice as many women as men. Yellow Hair also purchased wives for his men, when there always seemed to be a shortage of unmarried women.

He gave them a thorough physical exam before purchase. He demanded clear eyes, preferably of the earth colors and not the colors of plants and sky, broad hips for child birth, good sound teeth that met in a fairly uniform manner, well formed milk paps, and a well formed birth canal with no infection.

He had an unfortunate incident in the past, a woman was infected and gave birth to two blind children. Yellow Hair had been forced to kill the babies and after becoming suspicious, he examined the woman and discovered that she was infected. He killed her and drove her husband out of the village to prevent the spread of infection to other members of the tribe. He hesitated to only banish the man, who was a cousin of his, rather than kill him, for he knew the infection would probably continue through the populations of other tribes.

Yellow Hair had picked his eldest son, Ivory Tusk, to succeed him as chief. The lad was strong, had good eyes, and an uncanny way of understanding the animals and fish. He was a good strong son.

It all happened very quickly. A group of several tribes raided the fishing camp in the early morning before the sun chased away the thick fog. They intended to kill and rob the Whale People of their dried salmon. Many of the Whale men were overwhelmed and killed, the survivors were forced to retreat to their canoes. They lost over half the adults and most of the children in the initial minutes of the attack. They had few personal belongings with them, but they felt lucky to escape with their lives. They pushed the canoes into the surf as spears were landing around them. They managed to retrieve a few of the spears that were thrown, but they escaped with only a few stones for knives and a few spears.

Yellow Hair counted people, there were forty-five men and twenty-three women with just a few suckling children and adolescents that had survived the raid. They had suffered a terrible defeat. The raiders might be following them in the extra canoes, they kept paddling all day to the North. Ivory Tusk was wounded in the gut and in a few hours, he could no longer continue to paddle. Yellow Hair took the time to transfer him to his canoe.

He looked his brave, handsome son in the eye and felt tears for the first time, since he was a child. “Olalla is calling you home” he said, “You have the chance to see her in this world, before you cross over to the spirit world. Are you ready, to see the Whale Mother?”

Ivory Tusk nodded his head, yes, and looked to the blue sky of morning, while thongs secured his legs and arms to prevent him from swimming and prolonging his agony. He was proud to be a strong leader like his father and made sure to maintain his honor and dignity as the men prepared him for the depths.

His father said to him, “We will sing of you at the winter fires and I will see you in the Spirit World, my son,” as he slipped his son’s bound body into the great salt sea.

The Whale People all said their goodbyes as Ivory Tusk disappeared under the waves and still looking up at them, the Whale People then resumed paddling as the storm clouds began forming.

The Ice People of Asia

Tiger Paw knew there were food thefts taking place by some of the other tribes and some of them were making threatening signs at kill sites. Life was hard in Beringia, starvation was everywhere, the Ice People were well fed, their women had meat on their bones and produced children every year or two; they were successful, but the other tribes wanted this good life and the riches associated with success and eating well.

The Ice People had a simple life and a simple formula for success, but it required a keen observation of nature, the intelligence to apply the skills of hunting, and the willingness to work tirelessly to secure food; for everything was easier if you secured food. If you had excess food, like dried and smoked fish and meat, you could trade for tools, weapons, furs, and women.

Tribes who weren’t successful had to trade their women and girls for food to live; eventually, the young men of less successful tribes became despondent and angry. They looked at the wealth of Tiger Paw’s people and wondered why their tribe wasn’t rich with the bounty of the world. After all, the bounty was put on earth for everyone, all the tribes should have healthy women and dried fish; the Ice People were just acting like bears, they took their share and everyone else’s share as well.

Blue Duck, the only son of Chief One Eye, of the Muskeg people, was one of those consumed with envy and hatred. He and several of his companions watched as a small band of Ice People brought down one of the giant moose with several well placed spear throws. He was incredulous that women accompanied the men on the hunt. This fact alone made his heart burn with hatred and anger; these people had no respect for the ancient customs of his people and now they were going to enjoy the tasty internal morsels of this magnificent animal, an animal that rightfully belonged to Blue Duck and his people. He decided it was time for the Muskeg people to assert their authority over the greedy tribes of the world and take what is rightfully theirs.

The three men of the Ice People had the moose deboned and cut into roast sized pieces that were packed into six backpacks, while the women prepared a feast of the heart and liver cut into small chunks and stuffed into the stomach with blueberries, onions, and edible grasses that the moose had eaten on his own. The stomach was roasted over the coals until it swelled and pressure cooked the contents into a nutritious feast for the three couples.

Blue Duck gathered his hunters around him and devised a plan; they would sneak up on the camp and attack the group when they started to eat the wrongfully acquired feast. They would kill the men and try to capture the women; if the women fought too hard, they would kill them as well. They would then eat the feast and pack the meat back to their own camp. It was a momentous decision, the men were reluctant to resort to murder and theft, but their stomachs had been empty for a week and they had not known a woman for months.

Blue Duck had five men to attack three men and three women in a camp that was celebrating. It was almost dark by the time they had crawled close enough to hear the Ice People laughing and talking. They crawled to within several caribou strides, just after dark. The stomach had the entrance and exit sections tied in a knot and it was under extreme pressure from the steam and heat locked inside. One of the men split the top with his flint knife and the delicious aroma made the Ice people cheer and laugh, while the Muskeg men felt their senses sharpened by the scent of food; until, they were even more determined to commit murder and mayhem.

The Ice People let their meal cool for a few minutes, while they waited with their wooden spoons ready to dig into the stomach.

Blue Duck had his right index finger in the air to remind his men to wait for his signal, before beginning the attack.

Just as the Ice People closed around the stomach to eat, Blue Duck and his men attacked with a fierce savagery. The Ice men were each killed with multiple wounds from the spears. An older woman managed to jump on the back of one of the attackers and mortally wound him through the neck with a knife, before a spear entered her rib cage from the side and pierce both her lungs. A second woman was hit in the mouth with the butt end of a spear and fell backwards in an unconscious state. The men fell on the meal and had turns breeding the woman like a pack of ravenous wolves. It was an hour or two later, before Blue Duck noticed a woman was missing. He tried to get his men to leave, but once a leader encourages his men to break the cultural laws, the men begin to lose respect for that man’s leadership and authority; besides, their bellies were distended after eating like animals and they were exhausted after having their way repeatedly with the woman, who now appeared to be lifeless. They wanted to sleep and leave in the morning, and there was nothing Blue Duck could do to get them moving.

Blue Duck realized it was hopeless and drifted off to sleep. Just before morning, a well disciplined group of hunters, led by Bear Killer, son of Tiger Paw, descended on Blue Duck and his men and within seconds, three more of the Muskeg men were dead, Blue Duck and another were wounded, but still alive.

They brought the wounded men back to Tiger Paw’s camp and tied them to a tree. Tiger Paw raged inside, but he didn’t show emotion to his people or to these criminals. He used his serrated flint knife, with an edge as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel, but far more durable, to cut the fur clothing from the two men, exposing their nakedness.

Blue Duck was screaming threats and insults, but his efforts were wasted, for the Ice People noticed the silhouette tattoo of a right hand on Blue Duck’s chest. It was a well known symbol of a chief’s hand, designating his choice for leadership; it was a black tattoo done with ashes.

This was big medicine for the Ice People; it could mean war, the Muskeg tribe was a large tribe with oversized people, who were often starving.

The Whale People of Europe

The Whale People followed the shore line and passed camps on shore with people who waved to them, but yellow Hair pushed on wanting to find a new hunting and fishing ground. The shoreline no longer allowed them to head north, they had been paddling west for several days when the storm clouds finally unleashed a fury on the Whale People. The waves were higher than the boats were long. Yellow Hair yelled to the other leaders to paddle to the peak of the waves at an angle and to paddle down at a high rate of speed to keep the waves from cresting and breaking over the top of them and burying them under a wall of water.

It was hopeless, the canoe captains couldn’t hear him over the noise of the storm; hopefully, his captains would follow his lead and survive the storm. He saw one of the canoes trapped in the trough, when a huge wave many times as high as a man buried them and drove them to the bottom of the salt water.

The storm raged for three days and at the end, the Whale People were so exhausted they collapsed in the hulls of their canoes and let the storm have its way with them. Yellow Hair awoke on the fourth morning and looked out to see only one other canoe floating near-by. The temperature was mild, nearly seventy degrees, Yellow Hair had never felt such a mild temperature, on the shore, there was a forest of huge trees he had never seen before. He thought he might be in the Spirit World. He called out to the other boat, three men, including his youngest son, sat up and waved. There was also a woman in that canoe with a suckling child. There were three men and an adolescent girl in his canoe. Yellow Hair made a motion with is hand towards shore and the two canoes landed on a sandy shore; although, they were a hundred and fifty miles from the present coast of Virginia, they were the first Europeans to reach the East Coast of North America.

That night at low tide, they walked far out on a sand bar to look for the tell-tale yellow flickering of campfires in the distance: for the first time in their lives, they realized they were utterly alone in the world, like the beginning of time and being born by Olalla, they were alone in the world.

The Ice People of Asia

Tiger Paw knew this was a crucial and defining moment in the leadership of his tribe. His son and his raiding party had been correct in their method of revenge on this Chief’s son and his raiding party and now Blue Duck was screaming for mercy. Tiger Paw yelled for a wooden gag to be placed in each of the captive’s mouths and tied behind their heads with a leather thong. He skinned the tattoo from the chest of Blue Duck and tied it with a thong to the neck of the other captive.

Tiger Paw then ordered his son to take half the tribe and circle the North end of the glacier and head south through the Yukon and into British Columbia. They were loaded and starting their migration within the hour. It was a big gamble; Tiger Paw had no idea whether the two glaciers maintained a corridor of land between them, he just had a fairly good hunch that there was a corridor of good hunting between the glaciers.

They had to leave this country or be annihilated by the Muskeg People. There were only enough canoes for half the tribe. He might be sending his son and half his tribe to their doom, but he knew the coast line couldn’t support people traveling by land; therefore, there was no choice, he had to send half his people inland. He told his son to follow the Western Glacier and he would meet him at the southern end of the ice, in the area that was to become Seattle; Tiger Paw would take half the tribe by boat and they will join up at the end of the ice.

He turned to Blue Duck and emasculated him, so that his father would know he would never reproduce in the spirit world and certainly not on this earth ever again. He waited until Blue Duck had accepted his fate and was no longer struggling, he then cut his throat and ordered the rest of his people into their canoes. He let Blue Duck’s warrior go with his hands tied behind him and the tattoo still tied to his neck.

Tiger Paw and the rest of the Ice people left Beringia forever.

Tiger Paw and his did meet each other in the Puget Sound area, but Tiger Paw had no idea it would take twelve years for his son to make the trip. Tiger Paw’s son had gray hair and Tiger Paw was now little more than an ancient old man, but for the survivors it was a great reunion and a chance for marriages and procreation.

Eventually, nearly five hundred years later, the descendants of Tiger Paw and Yellow Hair would meet in the area that was to become Omaha, Nebraska. The names of Tiger Paw and Yellow Hair had been forgotten, but traces of their DNA are still present in many Americans. The same qualities that drove these chiefs to succeed against all odds and care for their people were carried down through the eons and it is still in the blood of tens of millions of their descendants, now walking the earth in North America.

Epilogue: This story is of course fiction; however it is based in fact, since we now know that there were land bridges that connected Europe and Asia to North America. Cultural and technologic traits as well as DNA evidence record the presence of DNA tracings of ancient Europeans among our indigenous native people of North America. This is significant, because the DNA evidence illustrates, that in spite of superficial cultural differences and phenotypical variation, people are much more closely related than anyone’s wildest imagination ever dreamed.

It is the author’s dream, that as new DNA science is discovered, people will have a softening of preconceived ideas of racial differences and a greater harmony can be achieved through knowledge and science, rather than relying on ignorance and cultural division.

Although the events in this article are based on supposition by the author, a man who has experience living on a sharp divide between survival and death, at least more than most people, it is easy to combine human nature with a harsh environment and find these behaviors close to the surface, even with our superior cultural attitudes.

The envious wailings of the OWS people who bemoan their pitiful existence and hide their selfish pleadings behind the cloak of Marxism and a dubious desire for an end to corruption; yet, their cries for equality seem to be hypocritical at best as they perpetuate and promote a code of lawlessness. Yes, under the guise of fairness and equality, greed begets more greed and the veneers of advanced culture become laughable with their pretensions of enlightenment.

This article, the preface of a novel, is not meant to belittle prehistoric man, but rather to illustrate that our advancements are mainly technological and we who consider ourselves so highly evolved culturally, are not that far removed from seeking shelter in caves and tents made of hides.

These people are modern in the sense that a baby from their culture could be raised in a twenty-first century family and no one would know the difference, but switching adults would be nearly impossible because of the cultural differences.

The extent of the land bridge between Europe and North America will be argued for decades, but the new DNA evidence suggests that if it was not complete, the exposed land masses permitted human migration with short trips by boat.

Crash and burn:

Dutch fall out of love with windmills

Towering over the waves of the North Sea like an army of giants, blades whipping through the wind, the turbines were the country’s best hope to curb carbon emissions and meet growing demand for electricity.

The 36 turbines — each one the height of a 30-storey building — produce enough electricity to meet the needs of more than 100,000 households each year.

But five years later the green future looks a long way off. Faced with the need to cut its budget deficit, the Dutch government says offshore wind power is too expensive and that it cannot afford to subsidize the entire cost of 18 cents per kilowatt hour — some 4.5 billion euros last year.

The government now plans to transfer the financial burden to households and industrial consumers in order to secure the funds for wind power and try to attract private sector investment.

It will start billing consumers and companies in January 2013 and simultaneously launch a system under which investors will be able to apply to participate in renewable energy projects.

But the new billing system will reap only a third of what was previously available to the industry in subsidies — the government forecasts 1.5 billion euros every year — while the pricing scale of the investment plan makes it more likely that interested parties will choose less expensive technologies than wind.

Spain is also feeling the pain:

The AEE said it had asked the government to scrap its plans to legislate on a wind power subsidy it says will cut financing for the sector, destroy over 15,000 jobs an make 2020 renewable energy installation targets unachievable.

“In this context and given the proximity of the general elections, the sector urges the government formed after the polls on November 20 to work to avoid a legal vacuum in wind from 2013,” AEE said in a statement.

An AEE spokeswoman said late Thursday it was trying to pressure the government to improve a proposal for wind power subsidies which the industry ministry said was its final offer.

A massive roll out of wind farms in Spain has made the country the fourth-largest generator of wind power in the world.

It is estimated that there are 14,000 abandoned windmills in the US

Minnesotans for Global Warming report that in the last 30 years, the United States has had 14,000 wind turbines abandoned. Apparently, once the subsidies and the wind run out, these 20-story high Cuisinarts are de-bladed and retired. This means more bats and migratory birds will live.

From Minnesotans for Global Warming: “The symbol of Green renewable energy, our savior from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it’s too cold or the wind speed is too high.”

Without subsidies, wind power is not economically viable. Left wingers do not understand what a subsidy is. They think it’s free money, harvested from special green trees.

535 million dollars in taxpayer money, flushed down the drain by Obama and crew to fund a company that everyone knew was going bankrupt, will be just the tip of the iceberg if what the Washington Post is reporting is true:

If the 20 companies that have won loans so far deliver all the new jobs they have promised, they will hire a total of 8,050 new workers for permanent positions. Half of those 20 companies have neither created nor saved any permanent jobs yet; several won their loans only recently. Even the BrightSource project, which employs 700 construction workers now, will employ only 86 people on a permanent basis.

The cost for those 8,000 jobs? Close to 19 billion dollars of taxpayer money:

The Energy Department has provided about $9.6 billion in loan guarantees to 18 developers and manufacturers since 2009. An additional 14 projects have received conditional commitments for $9.2 billion in guarantees, according to the Energy Department website.

Do the math.

So what has Solyndra taught us? That these “green” loans are nothing more than a giveaway of our money, without any real due diligence being done, to companies that are favored by Obama.

And the complaint we hear from Democrats?

“The majority of Republicans on this committee deny that climate change is real,” Waxman, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said. “If you are a science denier there’s no reason for government to invest in clean energy.”

They deny that the climate changes? Baloney. They deny that man is causing it. Big difference. And I highly doubt they don’t want to invest in clean energy, they just want it done wisely.

The government stepping in and guaranteeing investors that they will get their money back if a company fails does not appear to be wise in a field that is so prone to collapse, as happened with Solyndra. It’s pretty much another version of an Obama bailout…for friends, or big donors.

But my favorite complaint has to be this one.

Yup, you heard that right….we don’t deserve to keep out money anyways.

Another thing Solyndra gave us is more evidence that the media is on Obama’s side:

A quick Lexus Nexis search informs us that the story of the Solyndra collapse was being told a year prior to the company filing bankruptcy in both local and trade media. Why the mainstream media, the same clowns who had time to pore through Sarah Palin’s emails and put nearly a dozen fact-checkers on her book, didn’t find any of this interesting is a breathtaking dereliction of duty.

On March 29, 2009, President Obama’s Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced a $535 million taxpayer loan to Solynda.

On September 6, 2011, Solyndra filed for bankruptcy.

Below is a quick snapshot of what was known by anyone paying attention in-between the federal loan and the bankruptcy. As you’ll see, these were not difficult dots to connect unless you were in “see no negatives about Obama” mode.

…In a sensible world, the first warning sign that would’ve caught the attention of our Media Overlords would’ve been the Obama administration rushing in where venture capitalists (and the Bush administration) feared to tread — a company that had never turned a profit.

Over a half-billion (with a “b”) dollars in taxpayer money thrown at a company partially owned by billionaire George Kaiser, who just so happens to be a major fundraiser for the President — and the media didn’t even bother to track what happened or pick up on the many, many stories that not only indicated something was going horribly wrong but also that, with our money, the White House had made a lousy bet that benefited their campaign contributors.

And still…to this day…there is nary a peep out of the MSM about that fundraising connection to Obama.

What a shock!

(EPA stands for the Environmental Protection Agency, and CAFE stands for Corporate Average Fuel Economy.)

The EPA: Politics Ahead of Science

The EPA writes and enforces its regulations that are based on laws passed by the Congress. The EPA administrator (currently Lisa P. Jackson) is appointed by the president and approved by Congress.

The author of this cited report, Mark R. Powell, is an American Association for the Advancement of Science Risk Fellow with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The report makes it abundantly clear that EPA puts its regulatory role ahead of science. As Powell correctly notes, the main impediment to research at the EPA is that it is first and foremost a regulatory agency: “EPA’s primary constituencies tend – with some justification – to view science and analysis as an obstacle to regulatory action.” Science often has little to do with how a decision is made: “EPA for a variety of reasons is unwilling, unable, and unequipped to address and acknowledge the uncertainties in the underlying science.”   [emphasis mine]

From this source, we get this quote: “This announcement is more of the same from an administration that cares about political science more than independent science. Furthermore, the decision sidelines science at a time when the EPA is actively considering revising standards meant to protect the public’s health from lead and ozone pollution. The EPA’s announcement means the best available science will now be watered down by politics, and the public’s health will suffer as a result.”

Here is another source and another quote: “In a stunning act of political kowtowing, the EPA caved to special interest groups and politics and declared CO₂ a ‘dangerous pollutant’, even though it is part of the natural cycle of life.”

This source says that the EPA puts its ideology ahead of common sense: The Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting (Lead RRP) regulation officially took effect on 22 Apr 10. The Lead RRP regulation is meant to protect pregnant women and children from exposure to unhealthy levels of lead paint. Even so, the rule illustrates how EPA is currently driven more by ideology and bureaucratic inefficiency than common sense. The rule requires that any renovation of any building built before 1978 affecting six or more square feet of paint must be overseen by a government-certified renovator and conducted by a government-certified renovation firm. Certification requires completion of an EPA-approved training course and payment of a fee to the agency. The rule applies to anybody – including painters, electricians, plumbers, and carpenters, plus general contractors and property owners – who “disturbs painting” in covered structures. But as of April 22, EPA had certified exactly 204 course trainers.

We can now see that the EPA is politically motivated, as the first two references illustrate, how it will cave into pressure from special interest groups, as the third reference illustrates, and places its ideology ahead of common sense, as the fourth source illustrates.

About Lisa P. Jackson, EPA Administrator

Lisa Perez Jackson is from the lower 9th ward in New Orleans, LA. She was introduced by President-elect Barack Obama at a Chicago news conference where the president-elect unveiled his energy and environmental team. In brief remarks, Jackson said, “At the top of the list is the threat of climate change, which requires us to transform how we produce and use energy throughout the economy.” The Natural Resources Defense Council hailed Obama’s choices and said the Jackson pick, “signals to the rest of the world that the United States will be a leader on global warming.” “This is certainly a person who understands environmental justice and who has launched and initiated efforts to reduce pollution and therefore the cancer and health impacts in communities of color, ” said Monique Harden, co-director of Advocates for Environmental Human Rights.

In an appearance before the USA TODAY editorial board, Lisa Jackson also said the agency will soon propose rules to cut greenhouse emissions from cars. “We will continue to move stepwise down the path toward regulation of greenhouse gases,” Jackson said.

But not all are pleased with Jackson, who worked with the US EPA from 1987 to 2002. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a resource for government whistle-blowers, released a scathing press release calling Jackson’s record “disastrous.” The press release claims that Jackson neglected hazardous waste sites, failed to address rising air and water pollution, missed deadlines on meeting greenhouse-gas reduction targets, and became too cozy with industry.

On 27 May 11, Jackson said: “Continuing the successful clean cars program will accelerate the environmental benefits, health protections and clean technology advances over the long-term. In addition to protecting our air and cutting fuel consumption, a clear path forward will give American automakers the certainty they need to make the right investments and promote innovations.” Regarding jobs, in order to meet higher CAFE standards – particularly if those standards represent a jump from current technological capabilities – manufacturers are going to have to produce more “unconventional” vehicles to bump up their average fuel efficiency across their fleet. Unconventional, green vehicles cost consumers more. And, according to the Energy Information Agency, more expensive cars during an economic downturn equal lower sales, which equals fewer jobs!

About CAFE

The EPA, in Apr 10, finalized its program to reduce greenhouse gases and improve fuel economy for cars and trucks. These rules were developed in response to President Obama’s call for a strong and coordinated federal greenhouse gas and fuel economy program. The rules will simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve energy security, increase fuel savings, and provide clarity and predictability for manufacturers. Climate change is one of the most significant long-term threats to public health and the global environment. It is caused by an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which effectively trap some of the Earth’s heat that would otherwise escape into space. The key effects of climate change observed to date and projected to occur in the future include, but are not limited to, more frequent and intense heat waves, more severe wildfires, degraded air quality, heavier and more frequent downpours and flooding, increased drought, greater sea level rise, more intense storms, harm to water resources, continued ocean acidification, harm to agriculture, and harm to wildlife and ecosystems.

So we see that a key justification for a CAFE boost is the reduction of “greenhouse gases” and their effect on the environment. I guess that the EPA has not been informed that “global warming” is a myth. But that’s a subject for another post. Besides, as we saw above, the EPA doesn’t let science get in the way of ideology.

The new CAFE requirements will, of course, cost. Hybrids, like the Chevy Volt, have battery options that offer a huge opportunity to cut gasoline use to almost zero for most drivers’ daily routines. The cost of the new battery technology will add a significant amount to the price of a car. Big families and less well-off households may not be able to afford the dream cars of the fuel-efficient future.

Neither environmentalists nor the automakers seem entirely satisfied with the proposed CAFE standards, for different reasons. From this source we find that are four reasons.

1. What the White House Wants: Barack Obama wants to try to toe the line between the agenda of his most ardent environmentalists supporters and his corporate partners in the plan – international automakers.
2. What the Auto Industry Wants: Many in the auto industry would probably wish there were no CAFE restrictions. Gloria Berquist, the spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers argues that environmentalists significantly overestimate how much consumers want “green” vehicles. The restrictions also have been shown by some studies to increase the dangers associated with crashes, due to the use of less metal, and other factors. The Center for Automotive research claims a mandate of 62 mpg by 2025 would add $10,000 to the cost of new vehicles. They say such a mandate could kill the recovering industry.
3. What Environmentalists Want: Environmentalists were moderately happy with President Obama’s proposal. However, some complain that it doesn’t go far enough. They were hoping for 62 mpg.
4. What’s Next: The White House is happy with this proposal, but no one else is. It is expected that there will be significant modifications before September. Ultimately the proposal should be an interesting test of exactly how strict the Obama administration thinks it can be with the automakers, which some claim are “indebted” to it for saving them with bailouts.

Results of EPA Decision on CAFE

From this source we see that the new CAFE standards will reshape the automobile industry. The question is: By how much? One key issue: Industry spokespeople say the 62 mpg CAFE, sought by environmentalists, could be too costly and may not be feasible. One industry ally says hitting 62 mpg would require widespread vehicle electrification, adding nearly $10,000 to the price of a new vehicle. Federal agencies say the cost would be lower, $3,500 per vehicle, at most, and would be offset by consumer fuel savings. The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an industry lobbying group, has warned that the 62-mpg CAFE standard could cut car sales by 25 percent, costing the industry 220,000 jobs. Sandy Stojkovski, president of AVL Strategic Analytic Services, a technology consulting firm in suburban Detroit, said automakers could meet the less aggressive 3 percent target, the 47-mpg CAFE, with advanced internal combustion engines. But, she said, more aggressive targets will require greater vehicle electrification. Even then, Stojkovski said, the likelihood of creating affordable versions of powertrains such as plug-in hybrids is uncertain.

Eric Peters, noted car guy, says that Obama has decided to ban cars outright. His just-announced proposal that new cars be required by law to average 56.2 miles per gallon by 2025 will effectively do just that. To achieve an average of 56 MPG, he contends, one or more of the following would be necessary:

• Massive reduction in vehicle weight: It is easier to move a lighter car than a heavier car. The problem is the engineering/economic conflict between weight and safety. For decades, the federal government has been passing one safety-minded mandate after another, each of which has had the effect of making newer cars heavier than their equivalents of the past.
• Lowering weight while maintaining crash worthiness will not be cheap or easy: There are ultra-lightweight race cars that are extremely crash worthy. You can hit a wall in one at 150 MPH and walk away with nothing more than a few bruises. Of course they also cost hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of dollars each. High-strength, lightweight materials such as carbon fiber and titanium cost a lot more than steel or aluminum, the materials used to make ordinary passenger cars. The car Obama wants could be made of carbon fiber and average 56 MPG while also being very safe in a crash.
• Cut size: You could always just eliminate all cars larger than the SmartForTwo car (which incidentally only gets 41 highway and seats only two people). Maybe with a diesel engine such a car could manage to get close to 56 MPG, average. There are micro-compacts in other markets, such as Europe, that approach 70 MPG on the highway.
• Cut capability Absent some technological miracle, there is no way – period – any vehicle you could describe as a truck or SUV will ever average 56 MPG. If cost is no object and you don’t mind driving something very, very small, the car Obama wants us to drive is at least theoretically possible.

From this source we get the following points about the CAFE.

• Since planning, designing, engineering, and tooling a new model require at least four years, automobile manufacturers must begin to plan to meet future CAFE standards based upon extremely uncertain forecasts of the level of gasoline prices in the years in which a model is actually sold.
• In research performed over the past fifteen years, traffic safety analysts have found that occupants of lighter cars incur an elevated risk of serious injury and death in crashes compared to occupants of heavier cars.
• Fuel economy regulation inevitably leads to smaller, lighter cars that are inherently less safe than the cars that would be produced without a binding fuel economy constraint. When safety considerations are included, CAFE appears to be a very costly social policy.

The EPA and CAFE is also changing the business model for “large” car makers. The EPA is not just mandating 56 mpg by 2025, effectively creating a standard only hybrid electrics can meet, it is putting in place harsh fines for companies that make internal combustion engines. Fines for failing to meet arbitrary mpg edicts have been the cost of doing business for luxury automakers for decades since CAFE rules debuted. Mercedes, for example, paid $2.9 million in 2010 because it makes a limited menu of high-performance vehicles. “This is basically an attack on the way they do business because the things they traditionally sell are based on size and power,” Bill Visnic, an auto analyst with Edmunds.com, told the Wall Street Journal. “To do something like this is essentially putting them out of business here.” The EPA will put luxury automakers in a tough spot: Make electrics its customers don’t want, or make gas-powered cars priced out of reach by government fines.

In another article by Eric Peters, he states that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) says that SUVs are safer. [note: IIHS tests crash worthiness, while the EPA sets/tests mpg; both are government agencies] The first two vehicles on the IIHS list are the Audi A6 and the Mercedes Benz E-Class. But both the A6 and E-Class Benz are large luxury-sport sedans, not SUVs. IIHS describes these two as being “4WD.” Apparently, IIHS doesn’t know much about cars. The A6 and E-Class do offer all-wheel-drive. But AWD is not 4WD.

The thing to know about the IIHS report is not that “new SUVs” are safer, it’s that bigger/heavier vehicles are almost always safer than small, lighter ones.

How Are Electric Cars Doing?

The Nissan Leaf sold 573 units in April versus the Chevy Volt’s 493. Compared to March’s results, which had Leaf sales at 298 and Volt sales at 608. Those sales numbers are not exactly setting the world on fire. Both the Leaf and Volt are hybrids and small cars. Here are some earlier sales figures.

Having invested heavily in luxury automakers Tesla and Fisker, the Obama administration is now putting the screws to their gas-engine competitors like Porsche and BMW. Not uncoincidentally, the Obama Energy Department has invested $529 million in Fisker Automotive and $465 million in Tesla. Both are Silicon Valley based, Friends-of-Barack, luxury electric carmakers. Fisker will use its federal loan to build the $100,000 Karma and $50,000 Nina luxury electrics. Their wealthy buyers will get a further taxpayer gift of $7,500 on purchase. Tesla’s loan goes to development of the $60,000 Model S sedan.

The EPA has strangled gas-powered automakers with penalties with draconian rules in beginning in 2017. The automakers haven’t made electrics a priority because their customers don’t want them. Electrics are simply inferior to high-performance gas engines. Take Tesla’s $120,000 Roadster sports car. Though impressive in performance, it is less capable than the similar Lotus Elise, which costs half as much. That’s one reason the Roadster is going out of production this year.

Here is an opinion about electric cars by Eric Peters. He says that electric cars make sense at amusement parks and golf courses – and on the road, if the road is mostly flat, it’s nice and warm out (but not too warm) you’ve got money to waste, don’t have to go very far (especially in winter) and don’t mind waiting a couple hours before you can go someplace else.

In another article by Eric Peters, he discusses the fate of the Tesla, an electric car in which the Obama administration invested. The Tesla electric sports car is dead, a victim of its own defective economics. The company created an electric version of the gas-powered Lotus sports car, and tried to sell it for twice the price of the gas-powered version. Just 1,650 of these electric lemons found people rich enough – and dumb enough – to spend $109,000 for a $51,845 Lotus Elise stripped of its perfectly good gasoline engine and converted to run on electricity.

Tesla Model S electric sedan is less expensive, starting at just $58,000. And the $58K Tesla S is only good for 160 miles before its exhausted batteries need to be recharged. Meanwhile, a really nice 2011 BMW 330d (diesel) could be yours for only $44,150. It gets 36 MPG on the highway.

Where Are We Now?

We now know that the EPA puts politics ahead of science, that it will take an engineering miracle to meet the EPA defined 56 mpg, that Lisa Jackson is a “global warming” ideologue, that big cars are safer than small cars, that meeting CAFE regulations will cost both money and jobs, and that consumers don’t want electric powered cars. So, until Obama is history, and until the EPA is reined in, we consumers are doomed.

But that’s just my opinion.

Crossposted at RWNO, my personal web site!

Lost But Now He Is Found, Poor Drunk Uncle Omar Obama

Corruption and Lies seem to be a tradition in the Obama family.

Every family has a “Black Sheep,” someone who embarrasses the family by getting drunk and in trouble. It’s possible some of us have relatives who are illegal aliens on the public dole and have repeatedly defied deportation orders: thankfully, not many of us fit into that category. However, not many drunk relatives tell arresting officers to call the White House, presumably before they do something stupid.

“Omar” or Onyango Obama is the long lost brother Kenyan half-brother of President Obama’s father. The same Uncle Omar mentioned by Bill Ayers in the best selling autobiography “Dreams From My Father”, the life story of President Obama as portrayed by the unrepentant terrorist, Bill Ayers. Although he was mentioned in the book, our president is wishing his drunken uncle would behave himself or live in the shadows.

Drunk Uncle Omar Obama was driving drunk after leaving the Chicken Bone Saloon and barely missed hitting a squad car. When he was pulled over, he demanded that he be allowed to call the White House in a belligerent manner. The cops didn’t find the drunk name dropper all that impressive; a drunk illegal alien with a long rap sheet had run down and killed a 23 year old Milford, Mass. man, two weeks earlier.

Open-borders and Open Society advocates of George Soros philosophy consider drunken Obamas to be “harmless”. However, drunken Uncle Omar has defied two court orders to leave the country. He also owes thousands in back taxes and has a fraudulent Social Security Card and has evaded authorities for 50 years.

The court policy that allows the drunk criminals like Omar Obama to simply stay in the country is the “voluntary departure” system that allows illegal aliens to evade the police and deportation for years. Omar lost his first deportation hearing in 1989, he lost a second time with the Board of Immigration Appeals in 1992.

Uncle Omar joined the ranks of an estimated 400,000 to 700,000 illegal aliens who give the law a one finger salute and look upon disregarding America’s Immigration Laws as a right or entitlement.

Drunk Uncle Omar will now be represented by the same Ohio law firm that fought the deportation of President Obama’s indigent welfare collecting aunt, Aunt Zeituni Onyango. Zeituni landed in the US in 2000 on a temporary visa and sought asylum in 2004. She was denied asylum and refused to leave. She hid with relatives in public housing for years before winning a second bid to stay in the US, a country she seems to despise.

Both parties play games with the immigration issues to win votes from the ever growing illegal demographic. Yes, illegals seem to be able to vote, have driver licenses, and Social Security numbers. Especially those who are here illegally and are related to our president.

Aunt Zeituni Onyango, Ward Of The State, Perpetual Welfare Recipient, President's Aunt, Former Illegal Alien

President Bush told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to stop deportations until after the 2008 election, when Aunt Zeituni was caught and identified as an Illegal Alien in October of 2008. Thank you former President Bush.

The question remains, how many more of these Obama welfare recipients are we going to be asked to support for the rest of their natural lives in a state of permanent Welfare and Public Housing. Our former inept and clueless President, Jimmy Carter, only had one embarrassing relative, Brother Billy, the one who inspired Billy Beer and became a cultural icon and a standing joke. At least, Billy was humorous; Zeituni and Omar are far from humorous.

We might remember the case of Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, a Palestinian bomb builder by trade; he immigrated to the US illegally (considered legal by Napolitano and Obama) in 1996 through Canada. He claimed political asylum from alleged persecution by Israelis, was released on a $5,000 bond posted by another illegal, then skipped his asylum hearing. His lawyer dropped his asylum claim and a federal judge issued a laughable “voluntary departure order”. Obviously, illegal aliens who enter the country illegally or not interested in leaving the country voluntarily. He later joined a New York City group that was formulating a bombing plot and was arrested after his roommate tipped off local police. And once again we have another example of the DHS being on the ball and defending our country.

“Always remember. Never forget.” Words, just words.

A citizen is rebuffed by a judge for trying to unravel the nefarious facts concerning the president’s dubious Social Security Number.

Unfortunately for the plaintiff, today is not her lucky day.

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURTFOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA____________________________________)ORLY TAITZ, ))Plaintiff, ))v. )) Civil Action No. 11-402 (RCL)MICHAEL ASTRUE, )COMMISSIONER OF THE SOCIAL )SECURITY ADMINISTRATION, ))Defendant. )____________________________________)MEMORANDUM OPINION
Before the Court is defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment [21]. Upon considerationof defendant’s motion, plaintiff’s opposition [31], the reply thereto [32], the entire record herein,and the applicable law, the Court will grant summary judgment in defendant’s favor for thereasons set forth below.
I.

BACKGROUND
Ever persistent, plaintiff has once again come before this Court in an effort to uncover“the biggest cover up in the history of this nation.” Pl.’s Opp’n to Mot. for Summ. J. 20 [31]. Shebelieves that the President is using a “fraudulently obtained” social security number and that theSocial Security Administration—among other agencies—is involved in a scheme to “cover[] upsocial security fraud, IRS fraud, elections fraud and possibly treason” committed by thePresident.
Id.
at 5–6, 13. As her numerous filings with the Court demonstrate, plaintiff will stopat nothing to get to the bottom of this alleged conspiracy. Unfortunately for plaintiff, today is nother lucky day.

Chief Napoleon Bear Killer wasn’t really a Chief, but he looked the part and he scared most White men. He was tall with a face that was the color and texture of weathered leather in need of oil. A mustache drooping from the corners of the mouth gave him a sinister look, his facial expression never changed, and he stared right through you; these particular characteristics made people from the city a little uncomfortable. The long knife he carried on his hip didn’t help his appearance; especially, when he sharpened it every night after dinner while telling one of his tales of murder and mayhem. He was actually a kind hearted man with a gift for story telling. Unfortunately, a favorite story of his was about one of his ancestors, a homicidal maniac named Olivia Muskrat. He loved to tell this story to hunters late at night around the campfire, when there were strange noises in the darkness or the wolves were serenading us after a few shots of sipping whiskey.

Olivia and her husband trapped on the banks of the Parsnip in the mid 19th Century. Apparently, they had a blissful and harmonious existence except for her husband’s tendency to commit adultery with various young maidens. Now trying to hide facts from a trapper would be like hiding a crime from Sherlock Holmes. Trappers are attuned to reading ‘sign’ and they can see a story among the grass and twigs where most people see nothing at all.

Olivia knew her husband was cheating and this can be a serious offense in a matriarchal society. She tracked him and came to know all of his paramours. The knowledge of his infidelities seethed in her until she lost her mind and went on a murderous rampage; she killed her husband and his girlfriends, all in one bloody night. Her victims were decapitated and their heads stuck up on poles around her cabin. She kept one skull for a lantern on her table and to carry at night as she walked checking her traps. Since the daylight in the North country is only a few hours during the winter and it is usually an eerie gray misty kind of daylight, she needed her lantern most of the time.

Since her ghoulish lantern could be seen at night as she walked along the creeks and rivers, the Indians lived in stark terror of her and her knife. Infidelity became a much more risky business in the Peace and Omineca River country; Olivia always knew and she would seek you out in the dark of night.

Eventually she died, but the spirit world wouldn’t let her in when she refused to leave her skull lantern and her knife at the gate. So Olivia still walks the trails and creeks looking for those who have committed adultery. The flickering lights that people see at night are thought to be the candles burning in the eye sockets of Olivia’s husband’s skull that she carries with her.

Chief Napoleon would look around and say that they were still finding headless bodies in the bush country and they are almost always adulterers. We guides would join in the game and say something like, “Old Sam Morton wasn’t an adulterer, he wasn’t even married.”

Chief Napoleon would stop sharpening his knife and say, “He laughed with Mona Red Top, Charley Red Top’s wife. She was killed a week later.” The Chief would then draw his finger across his throat for emphasis.

Oyuki, A Japanese Ghost

Then one of the guides would say, “Damn I didn’t know that. I don’t want to meet Olivia at night. She doesn’t cut your throat while you are sleeping does she?”

“Olivia comes around when you least expect it. That’s how she has been able to kill so many men without them fighting back, but she only kills you if she thinks you cheat.”

The hunters would get nervous and put their rifles right next to their blanket rolls and be listening for sounds and watching the darkness for the light of a lantern.

One of the guides always asks, “Have you ever seen her?”

Scrooge's Third Ghost

“Many times, she comes to me while I sleep. Make noise and wake me up. First I see skull, with eyes burning bright red and yellow. Then I see her point knife at me.”

A guide, “Are you a cheater?”

“No. I have two wives: old one for housework and cooking, young one for laughing and kids. I old man, two is enough for Chief Napoleon.”

We guides were country boys caught in a time warp. Most of us lived out our lives and were never over a hundred miles from the cabin we were born in. Being able to spook the sophisticated hunters who acted superior to us was great fun, not all of them acted superior, some of them were actually great guys to be around, but when they had an arrogant attitude, Old Chief could pretty well make them hysterical with his stories of murder and mayhem. Often times, some of us guides would get half spooked after listening to Chief Napoleon.

Polls report that half of us are concerned about anthropogenic global warming. Those believers have been fed vivid and frightening stories with facts that rival Chief Napoleon’s stories. Chief specialized in taking a few facts and blowing them out of proportion until a grown man was as scared as a child. Chief’s story telling entertained those of us who liked a good story and scared the Hell out of the gullible.

It’s been done many times in the past on a much larger scale. In 2004, an EPA employee figured out that 630,000 babies were born at risk of brain and nervous system damage because of “unsafe” levels of mercury in the mother’s body. Pregnant women were advised not to eat fish.

The Japanese have continued to eat fish; actually, women of childbearing age consume 74% over the unsafe levels of fish as set up by the EPA. In fact, instead of babies being born with brain and nervous system problems, the babies have good brain function and a higher intelligence at age four.

The erroneous report was based on extrapolating the deleterious effects of high dosages of mercury to a presumed level for pregnant women without evidence. Suddenly, the hysterical effects of a dire warning set in and pregnant women quit eating fish, a healthy food for expectant mothers.

The hysteria over DDT was brought about by Rachael Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962; she claimed the insecticides, particularly DDT, caused cancer. She scared way more people than a Hellfire and brimstone preacher could ever dream of scaring. There was no evidence for the claim and no one has proven the assertion to this day. The EPA banned DDT in 1972 followed by Europe and Africa. The most significant effect of the ban has been the deaths of millions from mosquito borne diseases like malaria.

In 1979, the American Journal of Epidemiology published an article linking low levels of Electro Magnetic Force from household wiring with Childhood Leukemia. There was the typical media feeding frenzy with scientific opinions from experts, who linked headaches and depression to the wiring that is in every American home.

In typical Big Brother concern, the US government established exposure limits and regulations that were estimated to cost over one billion dollars to the economy by the World Health Organization.

The authors of the original article published without proof and since then, there has been tens of thousands of articles published on the subject with no scientific proof of a link between EMF and cancer to date.

If we think back to Chief Napoleon and compare him to the most famous story teller of modern times, Al Gore; we realize they both achieved a measure of control through hysteria. Their audiences were considerably different. The Chief had a captive audience that was slightly scared to begin with, from being in a strange environment at night: Gore’s audience lives in a state of fear, a fear of the unknown and the future. Having a science they can comprehend, even if it is a false science, is reassuring to those who are insecure and gullible. Thus we have defined the people for whom these hoaxes are formulated, the gullible and insecure. Unfortunately it is their hysteria that can be used as a tool and a weapon by the Left to control the direction of our country and to keep themselves in the public trust. Most everyone knows it is far easier to save people when they aren’t really in danger.