The Huffington Riposte

Offering a conservative counterbalance to the extreme left-coast liberalism of The Huffington Post

Friday, October 30, 2015

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, BUT BE CAREFUL OF THE CANDY CORN

!!!!




Generic Candy Corn Will Give You AIDS


COMMENTARY October 22, 2003 
THE ONION 
Vol 39 Issue 41    Science & Technology · Opinion

Patrick Carlin

CEO, Brach's Confections

Once again, Halloween season is upon us, and with it, the wonderful anticipation of dressing up and trick-or-treating for delicious Brach's candy. With that in mind, it's important to remember all the ways that you can make your Halloween safer and more fun. It won't put a damper on anyone's holiday spirits to wear high-visibility costumes when going from house to house, to have kids trick-or-treat with an adult, and to inspect all candy for tampering. Perhaps most importantly, keep in mind that eating just a single kernel of candy corn manufactured by a company other than Brach's Confections will give you a deadly case of full-blown AIDS.
We celebrate Halloween to mark the foreboding onset of winter and to acknowledge the shorter days that autumn will bring. These shorter days were ominous to our mostly agrarian forefathers, who, in addition to living lives tragically bereft of candy corn, had few sources of artificial light. For them, the encroaching night was a genuine danger—such perils as bears and highwaymen prowled in the darkness! Although our forefathers did not face the risk of contracting a raging case of AIDS from eating generic candy corn, theirs was still a perilous time.
To lift their spirits, our ancestors celebrated All Hallow's Eve, the night on which the dead were believed to walk the earth. These wraiths wandered the land in search of forgiveness for their sins, not delicious, safe, non-immune-system-destroying candied treats, like those made by Brach's. Centuries ago, villagers mocked these vagabond spirits in festivals, with songs, bonfires, drum-beating, and pagan dances. Though modern society is more sophisticated, we still mark the day of Halloween. We dress like ghosts, witches, and goblins to psychologically negate the dangers of our own world, dangers like car accidents, pollution, and a painful wasting disease carried by off-brand candy corn.
No one knows exactly how a festive confectionary demarcation of the harvest festival came about. Yet everyone agrees that a Halloween without candy corn, that most delicious of all Halloween treats, would be cold, bleak, and spiritually unsatisfying. Brach's candy corn has a soft texture and the rich flavor of real honey. But the taste of the mock corn, while one of life's most delectable offerings, is secondary to the deeply meaningful symbolism, that of the grain itself. We seek, in candy corn, a sweet transition from bountiful harvest into gentle winter, as from drowsiness into sleep. We fear a violent plunge into the ice and snow, the harshness of winter upon us like a generic-candy-corn-borne immune-system retrovirus, cutting across the face of the earth with its jagged reaper's scythe.
This deeply embedded desire for placid seasonal change finds its purest expression in Brach's candy corn, whose sweet, mellow kernels soothe the palate, delight the senses, and raise the spirits. Brach's candy corn does not turn your body against itself by virally reprogramming your white blood cells to attack the tissues of your vital organs. Candy should not be a danger, but a reward for defeating it! Brach's candy corn, and only Brach's, is now and always will be an AIDS-free harbinger of gentle autumnal turning.
So enjoy the festival of All Hallow's Eve. Celebrate our defiance of death, and partake of the earth's bounty. Don the traditional colors: black, in memory of the forsaken of the netherworld, and orange, for the joy of the harvest. Above all, look out for the deadly AIDS-carrying candy of unknown provenance, and enjoy the safe, sweet candy corn that is Brach's!
Brach's candy corn is America's #1 brand of candy corn. Brach's candy corn is available in 12.5 oz., 14 oz., and 18.5 oz. packages. Other brands of candy corn will give you AIDS.
Posted by Leo Rugiens at 8:39 AM No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

Thursday, October 29, 2015

ALAS, POOR JEB, I KNEW HIM WELL HORATIO !!!

!!!!


Jeb Bush’s Fateful Choice

Noah Rothman / Oct. 29, 2015
Jeb Bush
Image by © Brooks Kraft/Corbis.
22
Shares
A
As last night’s Republican presidential debate drew to a close, to the extent that the former GOP establishment frontrunner Jeb Bush made an impression, it was that of longtime Corleone family Consigliere Tom Hagen. A bright and loyal man, a competent fixer, he was also a man of an earlier generation and he seemed to be the last to know it. “You’re not a wartime Consigliere, Tom,” Hagen was gingerly informed by a younger man who had been in many ways his protégé, but who was now shaping the future of the organization to which Hagen had devoted his life. “Things could get rough with the move we’re making.”





Jeb Bush was a good governor; a policy-oriented and capable politician. In another environment, or maybe another era, he might have done better. As it stands, however, Bush has been fighting the last war since he got into this race. The prevailing conditions that yielded Republican presidential nominations to his father and brother no longer apply, but Jeb Bush appears to be the only person to fail to recognize that.
Bush inaugurated this campaign for the White House about as sourly as he could have. The former Florida governor bitterly resented the 2012 primary process that he believed had rendered Mitt Romney unelectable. “I used to be a conservative, and I watch these debates and I’m wondering,” Bush said at the time, lamenting the insular and parochial nature of that contest. He carried that resentment well into the 2016 race, confirmed by his contention that he intended to “lose the primary to win the general.” The only way in which that would be possible is to do precisely what he did: enter the race early, lock down the party’s donors, foster the impression that his campaign was an undefeatable juggernaut, and hope to scare his most viable competitors out of the contest. Almost all of that went according to plan, but the intimidation factor that Bush had cultivated failed to have the intended effect.
The beginning of the end for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign was probably reached at some point between his first mammoth financial disclosure and his lackluster second disclosure, which has resulted in theatrical budget-cutting exercises like the slashing of salaries and doing without office furniture. The end of the end might be some time off, but Jeb Bush’s presidential aspirations reached terminal velocity last night. In a Shakespearean twist, it was his protégé, the young Senator Marco Rubio, who delivered the unkindest cut of all.
The notion that Marco Rubio should resign his Senate seat because he missed slightly fewer votes than did Barack Obama at this point in 2007 is laughably partisan, and it carries about as much weight as the notion that Rubio is an out-of-touch one-percenter because he owns a modestly appointed fishing dinghy. Still, that is the demand of Rubio’s home state paper, the Broward County-based Sun-Sentinel. Jeb Bush had been signaling for nearly a week that he would echo this line of attack, and Rubio was perfectly prepared for it. The Florida senator defended himself against the Sunshine State paper’s ambush by noting that it had not displayed nearly as much concern over either Obama’s missed votes or John Kerry’s when it endorsed both of them for the presidency. After Rubio had called it a “double standard” betraying media bias, the crowd cheered. The issue had been neutralized for conservative voters, but Bush declined to notice. He pressed ahead robotically with the attack he had been preparing for days.
“I mean, literally, the Senate — what is it, like a French work week?” Bush said. “You get, like, three days where you have to show up.” His advisors perhaps had not considered the paradox of his contention that Rubio should get back to work passing new laws conservative voters don’t want in an institution they loathe, but no matter. Rubio absorbed the assault, parried deftly, and thrust home. With passion building to a crescendo, Rubio noted that Bush did not care when John McCain had missed a similar number of votes in either 1999 or 2007, that he was only doing so now “because someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you,” and that he would decline to reciprocate. Twice, Bush tried to interject but was steamrolled over by Rubio. Instead, he stood paralyzed, meekly smiling as he absorbed blow after blow. It was a withering moment for Bush’s campaign, and one that might prove fatal.
After receding into the background for the remainder of the debate, Bush was later asked if he the unregulated fantasy sports market needed more oversight. In another display of poor political instincts, Bush said that it did but that the federal government shouldn’t do the regulating – as though there was a third option. In response to this, New Jersey’s Chris Christie generated his wildest applause of the night by asserting that this issue was the least of the country’s worries, rattled off a brief list of the real challenges facing the nation, and attacked the moderators for wasting the public’s time. For Bush, his two most viable establishment-wing competitors in the race had bested him badly.
Jeb Bush has a choice to make. While he is burning through cash at a staggering rate, his campaign could survive on accumulated inertia for some time. He could drift into the winter of 2016 and hope to manufacture a victory in New Hampshire or South Carolina that positions him well for the South-heavy March primaries and, eventually, Florida. If this were an election cycle with precedent, that would be a perfectly viable strategy. But the hour is late, the donor class is nervous (as evidenced by the amount of money still on the sidelines), and the party’s establishment voters are hopelessly fractured while the conservative populist wing is united and energized. He could make a grand gesture, and shape the future of his party. He could also continue to play the spoiler in this race and hope to reignite the fire under his candidacy with the help of some yet-unknown exogenous event.
It would be surprising, though, if a few of those nervous Bush backers aren’t sitting down with their man today and having the same conversation that Michael had with Tom.
Like Hagen, Jeb Bush is a good man who deserved better; a conservative of repute and with a record of accomplishments, contrary to the fevered exhortations of his detractors. But his moment has passed, and his talents can almost certainly be put to better use elsewhere in the organization to which he is devoted. “Maybe I could help,” the resigned Hagen said in a perfunctory display of resistance to his fate. But the decision had already been made, and the reins of power passed. There was nothing left to discuss. “You’re out, Jeb.”
filed under:2016 presidential campaignChris ChristieJeb BushMarco Rubio
Posted by Leo Rugiens at 2:48 PM No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

Monday, October 26, 2015

SWEDEN COMITS SUICIDE WHILE JAPAN STAYS HEALTHY

!!!!



Sweden Opened Its Doors To Muslim Immigration, Today It’s The Rape Capital Of The West. Japan Didn’t.

Photo of James Zumwalt

James Zumwalt
Author, 'Bare Feet,
10:22 AM 10/23/2015
6244
1865
 
As Europe confronts the social and financial realities of its largesse in opening its doors to millions of Muslim immigrants, it is time the tale of two countries is told.
The tale is an important one as the two countries involved have taken completely different approaches to Muslim immigration and the preservation of their own culture. As such, both provide examples of the proverbial canary in the coal mine on this matter.
Sweden began opening its doors to Muslim immigrants in the 1970s. Today it pays a high price for having done so. The group suffering the severest consequences of such an open door policy has been Swedish women.
As Muslim men immigrated to Sweden, they brought with them an Islamic culture sanctioning rape. It is a culture bad enough inherently in the treatment of its own women. Under sharia, Muslim women serve little more purpose beyond catering to their husbands’ sexual demands. A non-submissive wife runs the risk of being raped by her husband.
 

But under sharia, this rape culture also impacts upon Swedish women as they are “infidels” and, as such, are — according to Allah’s teachings — sanctioned targets for rape by Muslim men. Such an Islamic belief system has born witness to a drastic increase in rapes in Sweden — more than a thousand fold — since first opening its doors to Muslim immigration.
A 1996 Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention report bears this out. It noted that Muslim immigrants from North Africa were 23 times more likely to commit rape than Swedish men. It is no wonder why today Sweden is deemed the rape capital of the Western world.
Even more shocking, however, is the political correctness overshadowing the reporting of these crimes. Sensitive about accusations of Islamophobia, the Swedish press refuses to sound a warning alarm for native women about who these sexual predators are. Thus, when a Muslim commits a rape, the media only refers to him as a Swedish male.
But this failure to shine the light on Muslim male rapists leaves them hiding in the shadows to commit even more egregious sex crimes.  With no fear of accountability, these predators have adopted a pack mentality. A crime non-existent in Sweden in the 1970s is now commonplace today as the country has become a breeding ground for gang rapes.
Interestingly, between 1995-2006, the Swedish government tracked gang rapes, identifying a drastically increasing trend.  Unbelievably, after discovering the problem, it then adopted an ostrich-like “head in the sand” approach, terminating any further studies on them . Apparently the government’s fear of being labeled Islamophobic proved greater than its concerns about warning Swedish women about the threat. While no studies on gang rape have been conducted since 2006, one can assume these numbers have continued to rise.
It is interesting to compare Sweden’s approach and the Muslim immigration problems arising there to Japan’s approach and the non-existence of such problems there.
The reason for the difference is simple. Japan, unlike Sweden, has been much more circumspect about all immigration in an effort to preserve its own culture.
As Dr. Mordechai Kedar — an Israeli military intelligence officer — observed in his May 20, 2013 article “Japan — The Land Without Muslims,” although the country has a population of 127 million, there are only ten thousand resident Muslims. Thus, Muslims in Japan register less than one hundredth of a percent of the population while those in European countries are growing into sizeable minorities.
While Japan does not openly single out Muslim immigration as a source of concern, Kedar explained, nonetheless, Japan remains concerned about Islamic influence. There are three reasons giving rise to this:
“First, the Japanese tend to lump all Muslims together as fundamentalists who are unwilling to give up their traditional point of view and adopt modern ways of thinking and behavior. In Japan, Islam is perceived as a strange religion, that any intelligent person should avoid.
“Second, most Japanese have no religion, but behaviors connected with the Shinto religion along with elements of Buddhism are integrated into national customs. In Japan, religion is connected to the nationalist concept, and prejudices exist towards foreigners whether they are Chinese, Korean, Malaysian or Indonesian, and Westerners don’t escape this phenomenon either. There are those who call this a ‘developed sense of nationalism’ and there are those who call this ‘racism.’ It seems that neither of these is wrong.
“And third, the Japanese dismiss the concept of monotheism and faith in an abstract god, because their world concept is apparently connected to the material, not to faith and emotions. It seems that they group Judaism together with Islam. Christianity exists in Japan and is not regarded negatively, apparently because the image of Jesus perceived in Japan is like the images of Buddha and Shinto.”
Kedar noted as well a most important aspect missing from Japan’s approach to Muslim immigration that plagues the approach taken by Western democracies.
“The most interesting thing in Japan’s approach to Islam,” he wrote, “is the fact that the Japanese do not feel the need to apologize to Muslims for the negative way in which they relate to Islam.”
Thus, the Japanese make no bones about it: they are Islamophobic. It is an attitude that is justified due to an Islamic ideology that demands all non-Muslims submit to it or die. But the Japanese are determined not to commit cultural suicide by allowing a culture totally anathema to their own to prosper domestically and challenge it.
Accordingly, when the call went out to the international community to assist in resettling the recent wave of Muslim immigrants in non-Muslim countries, Japan offered financial assistance but rejected opening its doors to resettlement.
There is something to be said about Japan’s approach to unabashedly preserving its own culture. We witnessed that culture at its best in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country in 2011.
There were no reports of rioting or of looting among the people. What we saw during a time of a great human crisis was a very organized society function with dignity and mutual respect for one another. It makes one fully understand Japanese reluctance to surrender that culture to Islam.
What is happening in Sweden and, paradoxically, not happening in Japan, should be of serious concern to the rest of Europe and the U.S. Both Sweden and Japan are living examples of “the canary in the coalmine” approach to Muslim immigration and its subsequent impact on a host nation’s culture.
In taking on the Muslim immigration problem, Western democracies need fully comprehend why the canary in Sweden is dying while the one in Japan is not.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/23/sweden-opened-its-doors-to-muslim-immigration-today-its-the-rape-capital-of-the-west-japan-didnt/#ixzz3pjOL7eyC
Posted by Leo Rugiens at 7:34 PM No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

Saturday, October 24, 2015

IN SPITE OF HER BRAVURA PERFORMANCE THE FACT OF HER INCOMPETENCE REMAINS

!!!!


Former Secretary of State and Democratic Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton leaves after she testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, October 22, 2015. Clinton took the stand to defend her role in responding to deadly attacks on the US mission in Libya, as Republicans forged ahead with an inquiry criticized as partisan anti-Clinton propaganda.   AFP PHOTO/ SAUL LOEB        (Photo credit should read SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Ben Domenech
Ben Domenech

COULDA BEEN WORSE

The Daily Beast

10.22.1510:49 PM ET

Hillary Had a Lovely Benghazi Day


The GOP effort was less than sterling and Clinton remains the frontrunner for the White House—but that doesn’t mean she left Thursday completely unscathed. 
.
Even before the Benghazi Day festivities on Capitol Hill starring Hillary Clinton began yesterday, the expectations for how the performance would play out were already in place. Clinton herself had requested an open, public hearing, one where the cameras would show Republicans aggressively hounding her on specifics regarding what she knew, when she knew it, and how important Sidney Blumenthal was to informing her of it.
.
Congressional hearings naturally tend to turn the witness into a sympathetic character, and this one was no different. The side for the defense serves up softballs that lead to long-winded statesmanlike answers, while the prosecution looks like a bunch of parsing, small people who are torn between grandstanding and focusing on minor details that seem unimportant in the grand scheme of things.
.
The fact that House Republicans have many members more inclined to view opportunities to question a witness as an invitation to give another speech is never a good factor in such a scenario.
.
As it turned out, Republicans did slightly better than I expected given the well-known capability of Hillary Clinton to obfuscate at a Pro Bowl level. She danced around many of the Republican lines of questioning with her normal verve and ability to parse words to the nth degree. But Republicans largely resisted their worst tendencies, sticking to fact-checking, and dialing down most of the bluster. And they did catch her on a few things—not in a manner that changes anything about the conversation about Clinton, Benghazi, and her emails, but in ways that highlight Clinton’s questionable approach to the entire Libya situation and her role as Secretary of State.
.
Three moments in particular stuck out as beneficial for Republicans. First, Republican Jim Jordan highlighted clearly the difference between her public statements and her private communications regarding what happened in Benghazi, illustrating that she was telling people different things privately than she was publicly even within 24 hours of the attack.
.
Second, Republican Lynn Westmoreland extracted a damaging admission in the context of the discussion of Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal’s outsized role in influencing policy compared to the late Ambassador Chris Stevens’s inability to get responses to his repeated requests for security.
“You got that from Sidney Blumenthal and you say Mr. Blumenthal was a friend of yours and he had your personal email address,” Westmoreland said. “You say Chris Stevens was a friend of yours. Did he have your personal email?”
.
“I—I do not believe that he had my personal mail,” Clinton responded.
.
And third, questions from Republican Susan Brooks about a Stevens request email prompted a line from Clinton that will almost certainly end up in a Republican attack ad in the general election. Her decision to tell a joke about Stevens’s suggestion that he pick up additional barricades to secure the facility was a gaffe, if not a particularly juicy one.
.
So does this hearing change anything or damage Hillary Clinton in any significant way? No. But Clinton did not emerge completely unscathed or helped by the experience. To the degree it is a story, this entire experience helps cement a narrative about Hillary Clinton that is markedly different from the prior Clinton scandals.
.
.

Blumenthal Emails Main Query During Benghazi Hearing
Inform

.
.
Benghazi is not the same as any of the –gates they endured during Bill Clinton’s first go-round. It is different in this way: While all the prior scandals involved the Clintons behaving in devious, underhanded, or ethically dubious ways that stood to benefit them financially or politically, they did not cut against the core appreciation of the Clintons to function as competent public leaders.
.
In 2008, many Democrats and Republicans believed Hillary Clinton to be a responsible public leader—a firm hand on the wheel, experienced in matters of diplomacy, conflict, and national interest. The 3 a.m. phone call was a question mark with Barack Obama, but not for Hillary Clinton. Question her ideology, sure, but her reputation as someone prepared to lead, experienced in crises, and responsible in the face of significant challenges was firm.
.
The Benghazi story, in practice, proved this was not the case. The calls for additional security were ignored. The aftermath of the attack saw Clinton heading into spin control, where everything was perceived through the lens of domestic political priorities. And the revelations about her personal email server and eyebrow-raising lack of deference to basic security protocols showed how unserious she was about the serious business of confidential information.


Republicans only occasionally touched on the broader weakness, and Clinton’s real political vulnerability, in the context of the hearing: that is, her overall record at the State Department.


The focus on Benghazi is understandable for Republicans looking to get at what really went on in the context of the attack, in the questionably motivated advice of Sidney Blumenthal, and in understanding to what degree Clinton is obfuscating about the truth of that event. Every committee full of politicians is politically motivated. But Republicans only occasionally touched on the broader weakness, and Clinton’s real political vulnerability, in the context of the hearing: that is, her overall record at the State Department.
.
Try to name any meaningful thing Hillary Clinton accomplished in her role as Secretary of State. The small things she did accomplish have almost universally turned out badly. Around the globe, many of the policy disasters and accumulating failures we are coping with now can be traced back to her tenure in office. In his time at the State Department, John Kerry has spent much of his time dealing with the ramifications of Hillary’s poor decisions regarding America’s allies and our foes. And while Clinton had the good sense to leave before everything went absolutely south, she bears major responsibility for the seeds that were planted that are now bearing such bitter fruit.
.
So where does Hillary Clinton stand after Benghazi Day? She remains the frontrunner for the White House, and a very flawed candidate attempting to replace a two-term president in her own party. Sometimes such candidates win, like George H.W. Bush—and sometimes they lose, like Al Gore. Usually the difference in such a case is the quality of the other candidate. Just as was true before the hearing began and is true now, in this case, that candidate—not any potential legal ramifications for Hillary Clinton’s terrible decisions—is likely to be the deciding factor.
Posted by Leo Rugiens at 8:52 AM No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

Thursday, October 22, 2015

HILLARY HAS A BLUMENTAL PROBLEM THAT MAY LEAD TO HER INDICTMENT

!!!!


Politics & Ideas

Hillary’s Sidney Blumenthal Problem

Noah Rothman
COMMENTARY MAGAZINE
   Oct. 22, 2015
Sidney Blumenthal
Image by © Susan Walsh/AP/Corbis
46
Shares
A
 
.
There is a wave of deep concern for the Republicans’ political position overtaking the press. As the Benghazi Select Committee’s interview of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton began to litigate her relationship with former Clinton fixer Sidney Blumenthal, a few reporters helpfully advised the GOP’s members to back off.
.





“Gowdy going down Sid rabbit hole, starting to sound like he’s chasing conspiracy theories,” The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza opined. “Imagine if 9/11 Commission had operated like this.”
“Genuinely surprised Gowdy spent all his time asking bout Blumenthal,” The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein remarked. “Looks like a tactical mistake too: invited the blowup at the end.”
.
The “blowup” to which Stein referred related to the committee’s ranking member, Representative Elijah Cummings, who raised his voice with theatrical indignation over the line of questioning that focused on Blumenthal. Cummings demanded that the transcripts from the former Clinton’s advisor’s private interview with the committee be released to the public. How compelling Cummings to engage in this dramatic display was a mistake by the committee’s chairman, Representative Trey Gowdy, remains elusive. The committee’s ranking Democrat was showing his hand; Gowdy was right over the target.
.
While that row is almost certain to lead television news coverage of this hearing – dramatic moments, however inconsequential, always do – what was discovered before that passionate interchange is far more revelatory regarding Clinton’s conduct as secretary of state.
.
Blumenthal was a Clinton confidante long before Hillary Clinton went to work at Foggy Bottom. She appealed to the Obama administration to allow Blumenthal to join her staff as a speechwriter, but the request was declined. Blumenthal had developed a reputation as a partisan flamethrower – a fixer, of sorts, who was not above getting his hands dirty in order to protect the Clintons. Nevertheless, as Hillary Clinton’s secretive emails revealed, Blumenthal continued to work closely with Hillary Clinton, sent her numerous communications related to the sensitive ongoing workings of the American government, and was compensated for his performance.
.
How many communications would that be? In the case of Libya, a conflict zone the committee established Clinton lost interest in after the Gaddafi government was overthrown, a lot. In an open letter to his Democratic counterpart on the committee, Gowdy revealed that approximately half of all the email messages Clinton received relating to Libya were sent from Blumenthal. Gowdy called him “Secretary Clinton’s primary advisor” on that North African trouble spot.
.
Worse, one of those email communications from Clinton that was forwarded to Gowdy contained classified information – information that was apparently sensitive enough so that it was redacted when the committee received it. That email contained the name of a CIA operator, and its transmission on an unsecure cable could literally have put that person’s life in danger. “She is exposing the name of a guy who has a clandestine relationship with the CIA on her private, unprotected server,” former CIA Mideast officer John Maguire, who noted that the revelation should trigger the creation of a “crimes report” in the Department of Justice.
.
Moreover, as it was alleged in this hearing and confirmed by Hillary Clinton, there were emails she received from Blumenthal related to intelligence matters that she forwarded to the president’s team for review, but they were stripped of the identifiers that would let the White House know where the information was coming from Blumenthal. Clinton contended that she did this merely in order to ensure that the intelligence was evaluated on its merits and not its source, but the more likely explanation is that it would have enraged the White House, which had blocked Blumenthal from serving on Clinton’s staff. In a sentence, Hillary Clinton misled the President of the United States on a matter related to the conduct of American foreign affairs and national security.
.
For even those who don’t concern themselves with good governance, that should be at least modestly troubling. Even political reporters who are almost exclusively concerned with point scoring, Blumenthal represents a problem for Clinton.
.
“You got that from Sidney Blumenthal and you say Mr. Blumenthal was a friend of yours and he had your personal email address,” George Representative Lynn Westmoreland asked. “You say Chris Stevens was a friend of yours…Did he have your personal email?”
.
Clinton paused for an extended period. “I — I do not believe that he had my personal mail.”
Political reporters who are so deeply concerned with whether the Benghazi committee’s Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot should be wary of throwing too many brushback pitches. At the rate this is going, they’ll wear their arms out.
.
filed under:BenghaziHillary ClintonSidney Blumenthal
Posted by Leo Rugiens at 8:10 PM No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

POPE FRANCIS IS HAPPY TO MEET A TRANSGENDER PERSON

!!!!

Displaying IMG_0803.JPG
Posted by Leo Rugiens at 7:28 PM No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest

IN ORDER TO FIGHT THE ECONUTS YOU MUST READ THIS

!!!!





by BREITBART LONDON15 Oct 2015552

Following his interview with Breitbart London, Greenpeace founder Dr. Patrick Moore addressed the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London last night, telling them why he left the environmentalist group and became sceptical of man-made global warming.

Here is his speech:
My Lords and Ladies, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Thank you for the opportunity to set out my views on climate change. As I have stated publicly on many occasions, there is no definitive scientific proof, through real-world observation, that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age. If there were such a proof through testing and replication it would have been written down for all to see.
The contention that human emissions are now the dominant influence on climate is simply a hypothesis, rather than a universally accepted scientific theory. It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory in the scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express certainty that “the science is settled” and “the debate is over”.
But there is certainty beyond any doubt that CO2 is the building block for all life on Earth and that without its presence in the global atmosphere at a sufficient concentration this would be a dead planet. Yet today our children and our publics are taught that CO2 is a toxic pollutant that will destroy life and bring civilization to its knees. Tonight I hope to turn this dangerous human-caused propaganda on its head. Tonight I will demonstrate that human emissions of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end. That in the absence of our emitting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all life on Earth would begin to die less than two million years from today.
But first a bit of background.
I was born and raised in the tiny floating village of Winter Harbour on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, in the rainforest by the Pacific. There was no road to my village so for eight years myself and a few other children were taken by boat each day to a one-room schoolhouse in the nearby fishing village. I didn’t realize how lucky I was playing on the tide flats by the salmon-spawning streams in the rainforest, until I was sent off to boarding school in Vancouver where I excelled in science. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia, gravitating to the life sciences – biology, biochemistry, genetics, and forestry – the environment and the industry my family has been in for more than 100 years. Then, before the word was known to the general public, I discovered the science of ecology, the science of how all living things are inter-related, and how we are related to them.
At the height of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the threat of all-out nuclear war and the newly emerging consciousness of the environment I was transformed into a radical environmental activist. While doing my PhD in ecology in 1971 I joined a group of activists who had begun to meet in the basement of the Unitarian Church, to plan a protest voyage against US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska.
We proved that a somewhat rag-tag looking group of activists could sail an old fishing boat across the north Pacific ocean and help change the course of history. We created a focal point for the media to report on public opposition to the tests.
When that H-bomb exploded in November 1971, it was the last hydrogen bomb the United States ever detonated. Even though there were four more tests planned in the series, President Nixon canceled them due to the public opposition we had helped to create. That was the birth of Greenpeace.
Flushed with victory, on our way home from Alaska we were made brothers of the Namgis Nation in their Big House at Alert Bay near my northern Vancouver Island home. For Greenpeace this began the tradition of the Warriors of the Rainbow, after a Cree Indian legend that predicted the coming together of all races and creeds to save the Earth from destruction. We named our ship the Rainbow Warrior and I spent the next fifteen years in the top committee of Greenpeace, on the front lines of the environmental movement as we evolved from that church basement into the world’s largest environmental activist organization.
Next we took on French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific. They proved a bit more difficult than the US nuclear tests. It took years to eventually drive these tests underground at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia. In 1985, under direct orders from President Mitterrand, French commandos bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, killing our photographer. Those protests continued until long after I left Greenpeace. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that nuclear testing finally ended in the South Pacific, and it most other parts of the world as well.
Going back to 1975, Greenpeace set out to save the whales from extinction at the hands of huge factory whaling fleets.  We confronted the Soviet factory whaling fleet in the North Pacific, putting ourselves in front of their harpoons in our little rubber boats to protect the fleeing whales. This was broadcast on television news around the world, bringing the Save the Whales movement into everyone’s living rooms for the first time. After four years of voyages, in 1979 factory whaling was finally banned in the North Pacific, and by 1981 in all the world’s oceans.
In 1978 I sat on a baby seal off the East Coast of Canada to protect it from the hunter’s club. I was arrested and hauled off to jail, the seal was clubbed and skinned, but a photo of me being arrested while sitting on the baby seal appeared in more than 3000 newspapers around the world the next morning. We won the hearts and minds of millions of people who saw the baby seal slaughter as outdated, cruel, and unnecessary.
Why then did I leave Greenpeace after 15 years in the leadership? When Greenpeace began we had a strong humanitarian orientation, to save civilization from destruction by all-out nuclear war. Over the years the “peace” in Greenpeace was gradually lost and my organization, along with much of the environmental movement, drifted into a belief that humans are the enemies of the earth. I believe in a humanitarian environmentalism because we are part of nature, not separate from it. The first principle of ecology is that we are all part of the same ecosystem, as Barbara Ward put it, “One human family on spaceship Earth”, and to preach otherwise teaches that the world would be better off without us. As we shall see later in the presentation there is very good reason to see humans as essential to the survival of life on this planet.
In the mid 1980s I found myself the only director of Greenpeace International with a formal education in science. My fellow directors proposed a campaign to “ban chlorine worldwide”, naming it “The Devil’s Element”. I pointed out that chlorine is one of the elements in the Periodic Table, one of the building blocks of the Universe and the 11th most common element in the Earth’s crust. I argued the fact that chlorine is the most important element for public health and medicine. Adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health and the majority of our synthetic medicines are based on chlorine chemistry. This fell on deaf ears, and for me this was the final straw. I had to leave.
When I left Greenpeace I vowed to develop an environmental policy that was based on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation, anti-humanism and fear. In a classic example, a recent protest led by Greenpeace in the Philippines used the skull and crossbones to associate Golden Rice with death, when in fact Golden Rice has the potential to help save 2 million children from death due to vitamin A deficiency every year.
The Keeling curve of CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere since 1959 is the supposed smoking gun of catastrophic climate change. We presume CO2 was at 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before human activity could have caused a significant impact. I accept that most of the rise from 280 to 400 ppm is caused by human CO2 emissions with the possibility that some of it is due to outgassing from warming of the oceans.
NASA tells us that “Carbon Dioxide Controls Earth’s Temperature” in child-like denial of the many other factors involved in climate change. This is reminiscent of NASA’s contention that there might be life on Mars. Decades after it was demonstrated that there was no life on Mars, NASA continues to use it as a hook to raise public funding for more expeditions to the Red Planet. The promulgation of fear of Climate Change now serves the same purpose. As Bob Dylan prophetically pointed out, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”, even in one of the most admired science organizations in the world.
On the political front the leaders of the G7 plan to “end extreme poverty and hunger” by phasing out 85% of the world’s energy supply including 98% of the energy used to transport people and goods, including food. The Emperors of the world appear clothed in the photo taken at the close of the meeting but it was obviously Photo-shopped. They should be required to stand naked for making such a foolish statement.
The world’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, is hopelessly conflicted by its makeup and it mandate. The Panel is composed solely of the World Meteorological Organization, weather forecasters, and the United Nations Environment Program, environmentalists. Both these organizations are focused primarily on short-term timescales, days to maybe a century or two. But the most significant conflict is with the Panel’s mandate from the United Nations. They are required only to focus on “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere, and which is in addition to natural climate variability.”
So if the IPCC found that climate change was not being affected by human alteration of the atmosphere or that it is not “dangerous” there would be no need for them to exist. They are virtually mandated to find on the side of apocalypse.
Scientific certainty, political pandering, a hopelessly conflicted IPCC, and now the Pope, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, in a bold move to reinforce the concept of original sin, says the Earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” and we must go back to pre-industrial bliss, or is that squalor?
And then there is the actual immense pile of filth fed to us more than three times daily by the green-media nexus, a seething cauldron of imminent doom, like we are already condemned to Damnation in Hell and there is little chance of Redemption. I fear for the end of the Enlightenment. I fear an intellectual Gulag with Greenpeace as my prison guards.
Let’s begin with our knowledge of the long-term history of the Earth’s temperature and of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Our best inference from various proxies back indicate that CO2 was higher for the first 4 billion years of Earth’s history than it has been since the Cambrian Period until today. I will focus on the past 540 million years since modern life forms evolved. It is glaringly obvious that temperature and CO2 are in an inverse correlation at least as often as they are in any semblance of correlation. Two clear examples of reverse correlation occurred 150 million years and 50 million years ago. At the end of the Jurassic temperature fell dramatically while CO2 spiked. During the Eocene Thermal Maximum, temperature was likely higher than any time in the past 550 million years while CO2 had been on a downward track for 100 million years. This evidence alone sufficient to warrant deep speculation of any claimed lock-step causal relationship between CO2 and temperature.
The Devonian Period beginning 400 million years ago marked the culmination of the invasion of life onto the land. Plants evolved to produce lignin, which in combination with cellulose, created wood which in turn for the first time allowed plants to grow tall, in competition with each other for sunlight. As vast forests spread across the land living biomass increased by orders of magnitude, pulling down carbon as CO2 from the atmosphere to make wood. Lignin is very difficult to break down and no decomposer species possessed the enzymes to digest it. Trees died atop one another until they were 100 metres or more in depth. This was the making of the great coal beds around the world as this huge store of sequestered carbon continued to build for 90 million years. Then, fortunately for the future of life, white rot fungi evolved to produce the enzymes that can digest lignin and coincident with that the coal-making era came to an end.
There was no guarantee that fungi or any other decomposer species would develop the complex of enzymes required to digest lignin. If they had not, CO2, which had already been drawn down for the first time in Earth’s history to levels similar to todays, would have continued to decline as trees continued to grow and die. That is until CO2 approached the threshold of 150 ppm below which plants begin first to starve, then stop growing altogether, and then die. Not just woody plants but all plants. This would bring about the extinction of most, if not all, terrestrial species, as animals, insects, and other invertebrates starved for lack of food. And that would be that. The human species would never have existed. This was only the first time that there was a distinct possibility that life would come close to extinguishing itself, due to a shortage of CO2, which is essential for life on Earth.
A well-documented record of global temperature over the past 65 million years shows that we have been in a major cooling period since the Eocene Thermal Maximum 50 million years ago. The Earth was an average 16C warmer then, with most of the increased warmth at the higher latitudes. The entire planet, including the Arctic and Antarctica were ice-free and the land there was covered in forest.
The ancestors of every species on Earth today survived through what may have been the warmest time in the history of life. It makes one wonder about dire predictions that even a 2C rise in temperature from pre-industrial times would cause mass extinctions and the destruction of civilization. Glaciers began to form in Antarctica 30 million years ago and in the northern hemisphere 3 million years ago. Today, even in this interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age, we are experiencing one of the coldest climates in the Earth’s history.
Coming closer to the present we have learned from Antarctic ice cores that for the past 800,000 years there have been regular periods of major glaciation followed by interglacial periods in 100,000 year-cycles. These cycles coincide with the Milankovitch cycles that are tied to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and its axial tilt. It is highly plausible that these cycles are related to solar intensity and the seasonal distribution of solar heat on the Earth’s surface. There is a strong correlation between temperature and the level of atmospheric CO2 during these successive glaciations, indicating a possible cause-effect relationship between the two. CO2 lags temperature by an average of 800 years during the most recent 400,000-year period, indicating that temperature is the cause, as the cause never comes after the effect.
Looking at the past 50,000 years of temperature and CO2 we can see that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature. This is as one could expect, as the Milankovitch cycles are far more likely to cause a change in temperature than a change in CO2. And a change in the temperature is far more likely to cause a change in CO2 due to outgassing of CO2 from the oceans during warmer times and an ingassing (absorption) of CO2 during colder periods. Yet climate alarmists persist in insisting that CO2 is causing the change in temperature, despite the illogical nature of that assertion.
It is sobering to consider the magnitude of climate change during the past 20,000 years, since the peak of the last major glaciation. At that time there were 3.3 kilometres of ice on top of what is today the city of Montreal, a city of more than 3 million people. 95% of Canada was covered in a sheet of ice. Even as far south as Chicago there was nearly a kilometre of ice. If the Milankovitch cycle continues to prevail, and there is little reason aside from our CO2 emissions to think otherwise, this will happen gradually again during the next 80,000 years. Will our CO2 emissions stave off another glaciation as James Lovelock has suggested? There doesn’t seem to be much hope of that so far, as despite 1/3 of all our CO2 emissions being released during the past 18 years the UK Met Office contends there has been no statistically significant warming during this century.
At the height of the last glaciation the sea level was about 120 metres lower than it is today. By 7,000 years ago all the low-altitude, mid-latitude glaciers had melted. There is no consensus about the variation in sea level since then although many scientists have concluded that the sea level was higher than today during the Holocene Thermal optimum from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago when the Sahara was green. The sea level may also have been higher than today during the Medieval Warm Period.
Hundred of islands near the Equator in Papua, Indonesia, have been undercut by the sea in a manner that gives credence to the hypothesis that there has been little net change in sea level in the past thousands of years. It takes a long time for so much erosion to occur from gentle wave action in a tropical sea.
Coming back to the relationship between temperature and CO2 in the modern era we can see that temperature has risen at a steady slow rate in Central England since 1700 while human CO2 emissions were not relevant until 1850 and then began an exponential rise after 1950. This is not indicative of a direct causal relationship between the two. After freezing over regularly during the Little Ice Age the River Thames froze for the last time in 1814, as the Earth moved into what might be called the Modern Warm Period.
The IPCC states it is “extremely likely” that human emissions have been the dominant cause of global warming “since the mid-20th century”, that is since 1950. They claim that “extremely” means 95% certain, even though the number 95 was simply plucked from the air like an act of magic. And “likely” is not a scientific word but rather indicative of a judgment, another word for an opinion.
There was a 30-year period of warming from 1910-1940, then a cooling from 1940 to 1970, just as CO2 emissions began to rise exponentially, and then a 30-year warming from 1970-2000 that was very similar in duration and temperature rise to the rise from 1910-1940. One may then ask “what caused the increase in temperature from 1910-1940 if it was not human emissions? And if it was natural factors how do we know that the same natural factors were not responsible for the rise between 1970-2000.” You don’t need to go back millions of years to find the logical fallacy in the IPCC’s certainty that we are the villains in the piece.
Water is by far the most important greenhouse gas, and is the only molecule that is present in the atmosphere in all three states, gas, liquid, and solid. As a gas, water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but as a liquid and solid it is not. As a liquid water forms clouds, which send solar radiation back into space during the day and hold heat in at night. There is no possibility that computer models can predict the net effect of atmospheric water in a higher CO2 atmosphere. Yet warmists postulate that higher CO2 will result in positive feedback from water, thus magnifying the effect of CO2 alone by 2-3 times. Other scientists believe that water may have a neutral or negative feedback on CO2. The observational evidence from the early years of this century tends to reinforce the latter hypothesis.
How many politicians or members of the media or the public are aware of this statement about climate change from the IPCC in 2007?
“we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
There is a graph showing that the climate models have grossly exaggerated the rate of warming that confirms the IPCC statement. The only trends the computer models seem able to predict accurately are ones that have already occurred.
Coming to the core of my presentation, CO2 is the currency of life and the most important building block for all life on Earth. All life is carbon-based, including our own. Surely the carbon cycle and its central role in the creation of life should be taught to our children rather than the demonization of CO2, that “carbon” is a “pollutant” that threatens the continuation of life. We know for a fact that CO2 is essential for life and that it must be at a certain level in the atmosphere for the survival of plants, which are the primary food for all the other species alive today. Should we not encourage our citizens, students, teachers, politicians, scientists, and other leaders to celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is?
It is a proven fact that plants, including trees and all our food crops, are capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2 than present in the atmosphere today. Even at the today’s concentration of 400 ppm plants are relatively starved for nutrition. The optimum level of CO2 for plant growth is about 5 times higher, 2000 ppm, yet the alarmists warn it is already too high. They must be challenged every day by every person who knows the truth in this matter. CO2 is the giver of life and we should celebrate CO2 rather than denigrate it as is the fashion today.
We are witnessing the “Greening of the Earth” as higher levels of CO2, due to human emissions from the use of fossil fuels, promote increased growth of plants around the world. This has been confirmed by scientists with CSIRO in Australia, in Germany, and in North America. Only half of the CO2 we are emitting from the use of fossil fuels is showing up in the atmosphere. The balance is going somewhere else and the best science says most of it is going into an increase in global plant biomass. And what could be wrong with that, as forests and agricultural crops become more productive?
All the CO2 in the atmosphere has been created by outgassing from the Earth’s core during massive volcanic eruptions. This was much more prevalent in the early history of the Earth when the core was hotter than it is today. During the past 150 million years there has not been enough addition of CO2 to the atmosphere to offset the gradual losses due to burial in sediments.
Let’s look at where all the carbon is in the world, and how it is moving around.
Today, at just over 400 ppm CO2 there are 850 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. By comparison, when modern life-forms evolved over 500 million years ago there was nearly 15,000 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, 17 times today’s level. Plants and soils combined contain more than 2,000 billion tons of carbon, more that twice as much as the entire global atmosphere. The oceans contain 38,000 billion tons of dissolved CO2, 45 times as much as in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels, which were made from plants that pulled CO2 from the atmosphere account for 5,000 – 10,000 billion tons of carbon, 6 – 12 times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.
But the truly stunning number is the amount of carbon that has been sequestered from the atmosphere and turned into carbonaceous rocks. 100,000,000 billion tons, that’s one quadrillion tons of carbon, have been turned into stone by marine species that learned to make armour-plating for themselves by combining calcium and carbon into calcium carbonate. Limestone, chalk, and marble are all of life origin and amount to 99.9% of all the carbon ever present in the global atmosphere. The white cliffs of Dover are made of the calcium carbonate skeletons of coccolithophores, tiny marine phytoplankton.
The vast majority of the carbon dioxide that originated in the atmosphere has been sequestered and stored quite permanently in carbonaceous rocks where it cannot be used as food by plants.
Beginning 540 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Period many marine species of invertebrates evolved the ability to control calcification and to build armour plating to protect their soft bodies. Shellfish such as clams and snails, corals, coccolithofores (phytoplankton) and foraminifera (zooplankton) began to combine carbon dioxide with calcium and thus to remove carbon from the life cycle as the shells sank into sediments; 100,000,000 billion tons of carbonaceous sediment. It is ironic that life itself, by devising a protective suit of armour, determined its own eventual demise by continuously removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is carbon sequestration and storage writ large. These are the carbonaceous sediments that form the shale deposits from which we are fracking gas and oil today. And I add my support to those who say, “OK UK, get fracking”.
The past 150 million years has seen a steady drawing down of CO2 from the atmosphere. There are many components to this but what matters is the net effect, a removal on average of 37,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year for 150 million years. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was reduced by about 90% during this period. This means that volcanic emissions of CO2 have been outweighed by the loss of carbon to calcium carbonate sediments on a multi-million year basis.
If this trend continues CO2 will inevitably fall to levels that threaten the survival of plants, which require a minimum of 150 ppm to survive. If plants die all the animals, insects, and other invertebrates that depend on plants for their survival will also die.
How long will it be at the present level of CO2 depletion until most or all of life on Earth is threatened with extinction by lack of CO2 in the atmosphere?
During this Pleistocene Ice Age, CO2 tends to reach a minimum level when the successive glaciations reach their peak. During the last glaciation, which peaked 18,000 years ago, CO2 bottomed out at 180 ppm, extremely likely the lowest level CO2 has been in the history of the Earth. This is only 30 ppm above the level that plants begin to die. Paleontological research has demonstrated that even at 180 ppm there was a severe restriction of growth as plants began to starve. With the onset of the warmer interglacial period CO2 rebounded to 280 ppm.  But even today, with human emissions causing CO2 to reach 400 ppm plants are still restricted in their growth rate, which would be much higher if CO2 were at 1000-2000 ppm.
Here is the shocking news. If humans had not begun to unlock some of the carbon stored as fossil fuels, all of which had been in the atmosphere as CO2 before sequestration by plants and animals, life on Earth would have soon been starved of this essential nutrient and would begin to die. Given the present trends of glaciations and interglacial periods this would likely have occurred less than 2 million years from today, a blink in nature’s eye, 0.05% of the 3.5 billion-year history of life.
No other species could have accomplished the task of putting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere that was taken out and locked in the Earth’s crust by plants and animals over the millennia. This is why I honour James Lovelock in my lecture this evening. Jim was for many years of the belief that humans are the one-and-only rogue species on Gaia, destined to cause catastrophic global warming. I enjoy the Gaia hypothesis but I am not religious about it and for me this was too much like original sin. It was as if humans were the only evil species on the Earth.
But James Lovelock has seen the light and realized that humans may be part of Gaia’s plan, and he has good reason to do so. And I honour him because it takes courage to change your mind after investing so much of your reputation on the opposite opinion. Rather than seeing humans as the enemies of Gaia, Lovelock now sees that we may be working with Gaia to “stave of another ice age”, or major glaciation. This is much more plausible than the climate doom-and gloom scenario because our release of CO2 back into the atmosphere has definitely reversed the steady downward slide of this essential food for life, and hopefully may reduce the chance that the climate will slide into another period of major glaciation. We can be certain that higher levels of CO2 will result in increased plant growth and biomass. We really don’t know whether or not higher levels of CO2 will prevent or reduce the eventual slide into another major glaciation. Personally I am not hopeful for this because the long-term history just doesn’t support a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature.
It does boggle the mind in the face of our knowledge that the level of CO2 has been steadily falling that human CO2 emissions are not universally acclaimed as a miracle of salvation. From direct observation we already know that the extreme predictions of CO2’s impact on global temperature are highly unlikely given that about one-third of all our CO2 emissions have been discharged during the past 18 years and there has been no statistically significant warming. And even if there were some additional warming that would surely be preferable to the extermination of all or most species on the planet.
You heard it here. “Human emissions of carbon dioxide have saved life on Earth from inevitable starvation and extinction due to lack of CO2”. To use the analogy of the Atomic Clock, if the Earth were 24 hours old we were at 38 seconds to midnight when we reversed the trend towards the End Times. If that isn’t good news I don’t know what is. You don’t get to stave off Armageddon every day.
I issue a challenge to anyone to provide a compelling argument that counters my analysis of the historical record and the prediction of CO2 starvation based on the 150 million year trend. Ad hominem arguments about “deniers” need not apply. I submit that much of society has been collectively misled into believing that global CO2 and temperature are too high when the opposite is true for both. Does anyone deny that below 150 ppm CO2 that plants will die? Does anyone deny that the Earth has been in a 50 million-year cooling period and that this Pleistocene Ice Age is one of the coldest periods in the history of the planet?
If we assume human emissions have to date added some 200 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, even if we ceased using fossil fuels today we have already bought another 5 million years for life on earth. But we will not stop using fossil fuels to power our civilization so it is likely that we can forestall plant starvation for lack of CO2 by at least 65 million years. Even when the fossil fuels have become scarce we have the quadrillion tons of carbon in carbonaceous rocks, which we can transform into lime and CO2 for the manufacture of cement. And we already know how to do that with solar energy or nuclear energy. This alone, regardless of fossil fuel consumption, will more than offset the loss of CO2 due to calcium carbonate burial in marine sediments. Without a doubt the human species has made it possible to prolong the survival of life on Earth for more than 100 million years. We are not the enemy of nature but its salvation.
As a postscript I would like to make a few comments about the other side of the alleged dangerous climate change coin, our energy policy, in particular the much maligned fossil fuels; coal, oil, and natural gas.
Depending how it’s tallied, fossil fuels account for between 85-88% of global energy consumption and more than 95% of energy for the transport of people and goods, including our food.
Earlier this year the leaders of the G7 countries agreed that fossil fuels should be phased out by 2100, a most bizarre development to say the least. Of course no intelligent person really believes this will happen but it is a testament to the power of the elites that have converged around the catastrophic human-caused climate change that so many alleged world leaders must participate in the charade. How might we convince them to celebrate CO2 rather than to denigrate it?
A lot of nasty things are said about fossil fuels even though they are largely responsible for our longevity, our prosperity, and our comfortable lifestyles.
Hydrocarbons, the energy components of fossil fuels, are 100% organic, as in organic chemistry. They were produced by solar energy in ancient seas and forests. When they are burned for energy the main products are water and CO2, the two most essential foods for life. And fossil fuels are by far the largest storage battery of direct solar energy on Earth. Nothing else comes close except nuclear fuel, which is also solar in the sense that it was produced in dying stars.
Today, Greenpeace protests Russian and American oil rigs with 3000 HP diesel-powered ships and uses 200 HP outboard motors to board the rigs and hang anti-oil plastic banners made with fossil fuels. Then they issue a media release telling us we must “end our addiction to oil”. I wouldn’t mind so much if Greenpeace rode bicycles to their sailing ships and rowed their little boats into the rigs to hang organic cotton banners. We didn’t have an H-bomb on board the boat that sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign against nuclear testing.
Some of the world’s oil comes from my native country in the Canadian oil sands of northern Alberta. I had never worked with fossil fuel interests until I became incensed with the lies being spread about my country’s oil production in the capitals of our allies around the world. I visited the oil sands operations to find out for myself what was happening there.
It is true it’s not a pretty sight when the land is stripped bare to get at the sand so the oil can be removed from it. Canada is actually cleaning up the biggest natural oil spill in history, and making a profit from it. The oil was brought to the surface when the Rocky Mountains were thrust up by the colliding Pacific Plate. When the sand is returned back to the land 99% of the so-called “toxic oil” has been removed from it.
Anti-oil activists say the oil-sands operations are destroying the boreal forest of Canada. Canada’s boreal forest accounts for 10% of all the world’s forests and the oil-sands area is like a pimple on an elephant by comparison. By law, every square inch of land disturbed by oil-sands extraction must be returned to native boreal forest. When will cities like London, Brussels, and New York that have laid waste to the natural environment be returned to their native ecosystems?
The art and science of ecological restoration, or reclamation as it is called in the mining industry, is a well-established practice. The land is re-contoured, the original soil is put back, and native species of plants and trees are established. It is possible, by creating depressions where the land was flat, to increase biodiversity by making ponds and lakes where wetland plants, insects, and waterfowl can become established in the reclaimed landscape.
The tailings ponds where the cleaned sand is returned look ugly for a few years but are eventually reclaimed into grasslands. The Fort McKay First Nation is under contract to manage a herd of bison on a reclaimed tailings pond. Every tailings pond will be reclaimed in a similar manner when operations have been completed.
As an ecologist and environmentalist for more than 45 years this is good enough for me. The land is disturbed for a blink of an eye in geological time and is then returned to a sustainable boreal forest ecosystem with cleaner sand. And as a bonus we get the fuel to power our weed-eaters, scooters, motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, trains, and aircraft.
To conclude, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the staff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth.
I am honoured to have been chosen to deliver your annual lecture.
Thank you for listening to me this evening.
I hope you have seen CO2 from a new perspective and will join with me to Celebrate CO2!
Posted by Leo Rugiens at 7:19 PM No comments:
Email ThisBlogThis!Share to TwitterShare to FacebookShare to Pinterest
Newer Posts Older Posts Home
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

Translate This Blog

Followers

Powered By Blogger

Subscribe To

Posts
Atom
Posts
All Comments
Atom
All Comments

Search This Blog

About Me

Leo Rugiens
Texas, United States
A Texan who loves the truth and hates the lying, cheating, and deliberate prevarication that characterizes so much of our civic discourse these days. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ RIPOSTE, n. 1. Fencing: a quick thrust after parrying a lunge 2. a quick sharp return in speech or action; counterstroke. - The Random House Dictionary of the English Language........... You can contact me by sending an email to me at: leorugiens23@gmail.com
View my complete profile

Blog Archive

  • ►  2017 (17)
    • ►  May (2)
    • ►  April (1)
    • ►  March (2)
    • ►  February (5)
    • ►  January (7)
  • ►  2016 (72)
    • ►  December (6)
    • ►  November (3)
    • ►  October (11)
    • ►  September (2)
    • ►  August (6)
    • ►  July (11)
    • ►  June (3)
    • ►  March (1)
    • ►  February (20)
    • ►  January (9)
  • ▼  2015 (125)
    • ►  December (2)
    • ►  November (5)
    • ▼  October (20)
      • HAPPY HALLOWEEN, BUT BE CAREFUL OF THE CANDY CORN
      • ALAS, POOR JEB, I KNEW HIM WELL HORATIO !!!
      • SWEDEN COMITS SUICIDE WHILE JAPAN STAYS HEALTHY
      • IN SPITE OF HER BRAVURA PERFORMANCE THE FACT OF HE...
      • HILLARY HAS A BLUMENTAL PROBLEM THAT MAY LEAD TO H...
      • POPE FRANCIS IS HAPPY TO MEET A TRANSGENDER PERSON
      • IN ORDER TO FIGHT THE ECONUTS YOU MUST READ THIS
      • LOONEY TUNES: BERNIE SANDERS' SONGS
      • WHAT A BILLBOARD !!!!!!
      • SANDERS LOVES THE SOCIALISM OF THE SWEDES OF THE PAST
      • MUSLIM EMIGRANTS ARE EXTREMELY GRATEFUL FOR THE FO...
      • OH TO BE IN PARIS FOR THE FALL FESTIVAL (WHEN MUSL...
      • PORTRAIT OF OUR NEXT PRESIDENT ???
      • SO WHAT IF I CHANGED MY MIND, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES...
      • I WAS FOR IT BEFORE I BECAME AGAINST IT
      • FIGHTING FIORINA FAULTS FATUOUS FALSIFYING RICHARD...
      • INTERESTING CHARTS
      • JIHAD BY IMMIGRATION IS HIJRAH
      • AMERICA IS TRULY THE LAND OF EL DORADO
      • WOW ! WHAT WONDERFUL NEW CAMO UNIFORMS
    • ►  September (7)
    • ►  August (29)
    • ►  July (16)
    • ►  June (6)
    • ►  May (12)
    • ►  April (12)
    • ►  March (5)
    • ►  February (7)
    • ►  January (4)
  • ►  2014 (74)
    • ►  December (8)
    • ►  November (11)
    • ►  October (14)
    • ►  September (7)
    • ►  August (13)
    • ►  July (7)
    • ►  June (2)
    • ►  May (1)
    • ►  April (4)
    • ►  March (1)
    • ►  February (4)
    • ►  January (2)
  • ►  2013 (175)
    • ►  December (4)
    • ►  November (12)
    • ►  October (15)
    • ►  September (20)
    • ►  August (11)
    • ►  July (27)
    • ►  June (15)
    • ►  May (13)
    • ►  April (4)
    • ►  March (7)
    • ►  February (21)
    • ►  January (26)
  • ►  2012 (152)
    • ►  December (17)
    • ►  November (14)
    • ►  October (25)
    • ►  September (35)
    • ►  August (7)
    • ►  July (11)
    • ►  June (4)
    • ►  May (2)
    • ►  April (4)
    • ►  March (9)
    • ►  February (2)
    • ►  January (22)
  • ►  2011 (208)
    • ►  December (23)
    • ►  November (19)
    • ►  October (21)
    • ►  September (17)
    • ►  August (35)
    • ►  July (32)
    • ►  June (6)
    • ►  May (15)
    • ►  April (4)
    • ►  March (11)
    • ►  February (9)
    • ►  January (16)
  • ►  2010 (302)
    • ►  December (4)
    • ►  November (11)
    • ►  October (6)
    • ►  September (26)
    • ►  August (48)
    • ►  July (45)
    • ►  June (22)
    • ►  May (16)
    • ►  April (22)
    • ►  March (24)
    • ►  February (33)
    • ►  January (45)
  • ►  2009 (608)
    • ►  December (11)
    • ►  November (12)
    • ►  October (29)
    • ►  September (39)
    • ►  August (42)
    • ►  July (50)
    • ►  June (32)
    • ►  May (73)
    • ►  April (88)
    • ►  March (67)
    • ►  February (59)
    • ►  January (106)
  • ►  2008 (365)
    • ►  December (64)
    • ►  November (80)
    • ►  October (109)
    • ►  September (86)
    • ►  August (26)

My Blog List

Subscribe To

Posts
Atom
Posts
All Comments
Atom
All Comments
Simple theme. Powered by Blogger.