The Old Bait and Switch
The View from the Middle
During the 2018 mid-term elections, Democrats focused primarily on two issues – Health Care and Immigration. While I don’t support Medicare for all (it would actually be more like Medicaid for all), I was looking forward to a debate that might actually address the issues of access and spiral costs within our current Health Care system. When it came to immigration, I actually had hope that we might be able to work together to fix an issue that we have allowed to fester for over 30 years now. But now that the Democrats have taken over the House of representatives and Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker, what have they been focused on? Investigations, eliminating the Electoral College, dramatically changing the Supreme Court and changing the voting age to 16. Where did all this come from? Was this their true agenda? Let’s take a look at all of these topics to see if this is a worthwhile agenda.
As far as the investigations are concerned, I thought the Mueller Special Counsel report was going to shine the brightest of lights on the Trump administration’s sins before and after the election. Now that it appears that Mueller will not indict the President for collusion (which isn’t even a crime anyway) or obstruction of justice, Democrats promise a two year long political, economic and moral colonoscopy on the President to ensure that he is as distracted as possible and gets nothing accomplished for the American people. This may be a good strategy for the 2020 elections (or maybe not) but it certainly in not in the best interest of the country and hardly a campaign promise.
Isn’t it just a little ironic, also, that the party that was concerned that Trump might not accept the results of the 2016 elections now wants to change the rules of the game to gain an advantage by eliminating the Electoral College, even if it violates the very principles of fairness built into the Constitution. The framers feared “the tyranny of the majority” and thus created a bicameral legislature and the Electoral College to give power to all states, not just the behemoth population centers.
Alexander Hamilton may have expressed it best in his Federalist paper #68. Hamilton suggested that each state offered value to the union beyond just the bodies within their borders. Farming states like Indiana and Iowa have different issues and maybe even different values than populace states like New York and California. Mining states like West Virginia and Colorado face different challenges than the heavily populated states. The Senate and the Electoral College were designed to give all of the original 13 states a voice so that states like Georgia, Delaware and Rhode Island wouldn’t be absolutely dominated by states like Virginia, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Today, we don’t want New York and California to control the 47 states in between them (and Alaska too, of course). We don’t want the city slickers in New York and Los Angeles to be controlling the lives of the farmers and minors in fly-over country. Our President must govern all the people and all the states and the Electoral College insures that he or she must understand and address all of their concerns.
Donald Trump has already named two justices to The Supreme Court that will probably influence the court for 30 or 40 years and Democrats pray nightly for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s health. They are also still smarting from the Republican’s rejection of Merrick Garland (and I can understand their frustration there). But their answer to their fear and anguish is to change the rules of the game and completely overhaul a process that has been in place for 150 years. I’m willing to have this discussion, but this not a plank in their platform in 2016 or in 2018. This whole debate is a distraction at best. Get back to the things you focused on during the election.
Finally, the Democrats are pressing to move the voting age down to 16. In my opinion this is a blatant and self-serving attempt to include a group of people who they think will support their emotionally driven platform. Winston Churchill famously said, “If you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart, (but) if you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.” When we are young, before we have had to wrestle with the corruption, ineptitude and complexity of government, our vote is dominated by emotion. We can be lured in by images of a utopian world, which will never exist, and by promises that will never be fulfilled. Later in life our positions are tempered by real world experience.
I could just as easily make the case that our military and law-enforcement men and women should get two votes each election. After all, they put their lives on the line every day and deserve a bit more say on how our country is governed. You would tell me that this would be a self-serving idea from conservatives, and you would be right. Hopefully we can all see the same motivation behind the move to a 16-year-old voter.
The bad news in all of this for the American people is that the Democrat Party is not addressing the real needs of the country (healthcare, immigration, the economy), and I really hope they change direction. The good news is that all of these ideas (other than the investigations) will take amendments to the constitution which as arduous process that requires two thirds (67%) vote in both houses of Congress and three fourths (75%) of the state legislatures. Since all of this is so unlikely, why not focus on the things that actually can actually happen and move the country ahead? Anyone?
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
Don't Dive Into AOC's Empty Pool
Don’t Dive Into AOC’s Empty Pool
The View from the Middle
We have 11 years before entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed. Coastal flooding and crop failures will create an exodus of “eco-refugees” threatening political chaos. As the warming melts the polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations. Coastal regions will be inundated. One-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta will be flooded, cutting off its food supply. Shifting climate patterns will bring back the 1930’s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheat-lands, while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time.
Sounds pretty ominous, doesn’t it. This Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez really knows what she’s talking about. She’s not fear-mongering. These are FACTS, even though all of these FACTS will occur in the future. Sell everything and party hard, because the world looks like it’s going to end by 2030.
Wait just a minute. All of these predictions were not made by AOC. They were made by Noel Brown, the Director of the New York office of the U.N. Environmental Program or UNEP – in 1989. So, all of these apocalyptic events were supposed to happen by the year 2000. Let’s take a look at the accuracy of Mr. Brown’s predictions. The Maldives Islands are still there and have the same extremely low average elevation of six feet as they did in 1989. In fact, you can still play golf there at the Kuredu Golf Club where the only water hazards are the local pools and not flooding from Global Warming (sorry, Climate Change).
Bangladesh is still, well, Bangladesh, and I can’t find a single report of even one “eco-refugee” let alone the 23 million predicted by Mr. Brown. The Nile Delta in Egypt has not been flooded and their food supply has not been cut off, and a return of Dust Bowl conditions has not decimated the wheat-lands in the U.S. or Canada. None of Doctor Brown’s prophesies were realized by the year 2000 and have still not been borne out today – 30 years later. Not only have they not been fulfilled, there is zero evidence that there has been any headway at all towards these existential forecasts.
Do you remember in 2008 when Al Gore predicted that the polar ice caps would be gone in five years? That means they should have been gone by 2013. The problem for Al is, they’re still there and as large as ever (many argue they are bigger). Back in 2014 a group of science purists from the Journal of Nature Climate Change took a look at 117 of the latest predictions of the Climate Change community and found that 114 or 97.4% were wrong, overestimating global temperature changes. With that track record, is it OK for me to be a little skeptical about your future forecasts?
This all means nothing to AOC and the other climate fortune-tellers. They just restate the old predictions with a new end date. AOC now says the world will end in 2031 if we don’t reconstruct every building in America, eliminate all gas driven cars and planes and de-flatulate our country’s cows by then. There is more, of course. This is just the tip of the Green New Deal iceberg. Others have said that the earth will be uninhabitable by 2100, by which time they and we will all conveniently be dead. The fact checkers will have long forgotten this promise.
I have always agreed with the late Charles Krauthammer on this and described myself as a Climate Change agnostic. Climate (not weather) is such a complex system that it is impossible to predict. It’s OK to be skeptical, for as Niels Bohr, brilliant Danish Physicist of the early 20th century, said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
Now, all of this is not to say that I am in favor of trashing our planet. I believe that God made us stewards of his world and as part of that responsibility we should conserve, preserve and recycle in order to take care of the planet He entrusted to us. Should we be exploring renewable sources of energy? Of course. To quote Thomas Edison, “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power. I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
Now, before you jump off the fatalistic, climate change ledge, here are some facts. Scientists now are saying that even if the U.S. was wiped off the face of the earth it would only change global temperatures by half of a degree in the next 100 years. And that's a forecast, not a fact. We could be fighting global cooling in the next 100 years for all we know. Mother Nature is impossible to predict and full of surprises. No one really knows what is going to happen in the next 100 years. Don’t fall for the snake oil selling, doomsday promising charlatans who promise utopia in the future if you just give them all of your money and freedoms today.
We have more than a hundred years of oil and coal left on this planet to utilize. We should be working hard to develop solar and other forms of energy right now, but those sources are not adequate to satisfy our needs today. It is impossible to just turn off the spicket of our current energy sources. Total renewable energy sources only supply 11% of our total energy requirements and that is dominated by hydro-electric and biofuels (ethanol). Solar only accounts for a little over 1% of our energy requirements today. How do we convert the sun’s awesome power into useable energy here on earth is a question that needs to be answered? And we will answer it. But we can’t jump off the high dive into an empty pool on the promise that it will be full of water before we hit bottom. And that is exactly what AOC and the other maniacal Climate Change fanatics are asking our country to do.
The View from the Middle
We have 11 years before entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed. Coastal flooding and crop failures will create an exodus of “eco-refugees” threatening political chaos. As the warming melts the polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations. Coastal regions will be inundated. One-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta will be flooded, cutting off its food supply. Shifting climate patterns will bring back the 1930’s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheat-lands, while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time.
Sounds pretty ominous, doesn’t it. This Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez really knows what she’s talking about. She’s not fear-mongering. These are FACTS, even though all of these FACTS will occur in the future. Sell everything and party hard, because the world looks like it’s going to end by 2030.
Wait just a minute. All of these predictions were not made by AOC. They were made by Noel Brown, the Director of the New York office of the U.N. Environmental Program or UNEP – in 1989. So, all of these apocalyptic events were supposed to happen by the year 2000. Let’s take a look at the accuracy of Mr. Brown’s predictions. The Maldives Islands are still there and have the same extremely low average elevation of six feet as they did in 1989. In fact, you can still play golf there at the Kuredu Golf Club where the only water hazards are the local pools and not flooding from Global Warming (sorry, Climate Change).
Bangladesh is still, well, Bangladesh, and I can’t find a single report of even one “eco-refugee” let alone the 23 million predicted by Mr. Brown. The Nile Delta in Egypt has not been flooded and their food supply has not been cut off, and a return of Dust Bowl conditions has not decimated the wheat-lands in the U.S. or Canada. None of Doctor Brown’s prophesies were realized by the year 2000 and have still not been borne out today – 30 years later. Not only have they not been fulfilled, there is zero evidence that there has been any headway at all towards these existential forecasts.
Do you remember in 2008 when Al Gore predicted that the polar ice caps would be gone in five years? That means they should have been gone by 2013. The problem for Al is, they’re still there and as large as ever (many argue they are bigger). Back in 2014 a group of science purists from the Journal of Nature Climate Change took a look at 117 of the latest predictions of the Climate Change community and found that 114 or 97.4% were wrong, overestimating global temperature changes. With that track record, is it OK for me to be a little skeptical about your future forecasts?
This all means nothing to AOC and the other climate fortune-tellers. They just restate the old predictions with a new end date. AOC now says the world will end in 2031 if we don’t reconstruct every building in America, eliminate all gas driven cars and planes and de-flatulate our country’s cows by then. There is more, of course. This is just the tip of the Green New Deal iceberg. Others have said that the earth will be uninhabitable by 2100, by which time they and we will all conveniently be dead. The fact checkers will have long forgotten this promise.
I have always agreed with the late Charles Krauthammer on this and described myself as a Climate Change agnostic. Climate (not weather) is such a complex system that it is impossible to predict. It’s OK to be skeptical, for as Niels Bohr, brilliant Danish Physicist of the early 20th century, said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
Now, all of this is not to say that I am in favor of trashing our planet. I believe that God made us stewards of his world and as part of that responsibility we should conserve, preserve and recycle in order to take care of the planet He entrusted to us. Should we be exploring renewable sources of energy? Of course. To quote Thomas Edison, “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power. I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”
Now, before you jump off the fatalistic, climate change ledge, here are some facts. Scientists now are saying that even if the U.S. was wiped off the face of the earth it would only change global temperatures by half of a degree in the next 100 years. And that's a forecast, not a fact. We could be fighting global cooling in the next 100 years for all we know. Mother Nature is impossible to predict and full of surprises. No one really knows what is going to happen in the next 100 years. Don’t fall for the snake oil selling, doomsday promising charlatans who promise utopia in the future if you just give them all of your money and freedoms today.
We have more than a hundred years of oil and coal left on this planet to utilize. We should be working hard to develop solar and other forms of energy right now, but those sources are not adequate to satisfy our needs today. It is impossible to just turn off the spicket of our current energy sources. Total renewable energy sources only supply 11% of our total energy requirements and that is dominated by hydro-electric and biofuels (ethanol). Solar only accounts for a little over 1% of our energy requirements today. How do we convert the sun’s awesome power into useable energy here on earth is a question that needs to be answered? And we will answer it. But we can’t jump off the high dive into an empty pool on the promise that it will be full of water before we hit bottom. And that is exactly what AOC and the other maniacal Climate Change fanatics are asking our country to do.
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