Forward the Revolution?

The political party that has long resembled the Soviet Politburo in its actions won total control of our government with last November's election.
Now we are in a period of steam-rolling legislation to further an agenda that has long been a frustrated hope on their part.
Our eloquent young president put it so well: "We won--we write the bill."

And the Chicago gang let Pelosi and Reid and the rest of the gang in Congress load it up with pork and earmarks.

And a little bitty tax cut. That is to appease somebody, though some people, maybe most, do not seem to buy it.

As good socialists trying to push forward their agenda, they could have made it a little sweeter for the people they need to keep on board, but they just could not bring themselves to do that.

So the socialist revolution moves forward inexorably, or does it?

Serious and thoughtful opponents of socialist theory are people who are more likely than not to have actually read the founding documents on which our Constitution and laws were originally based.

So, a question arises--Which group will do a makeover of the American political system?

Will the college radical types prevail and make this a "fairer" country by causing incomes to become equal under heavy government control?

Or will that vast middle majority only beginning to realize what is afoot stir itself into taking actions unthinkable until now?

Which group will take to the barricades?

Who Invented (Nasty) Partisanship?

George Washington warned us about this—that is, the dangers to our form of government from “factions,” the term he used for parties, and cited a “frightful despotism” when they alternate power one after the other and extract vengeance for slights real and perceived while out of power.
Those founders—they were giants. What do we have now? Midgets, that is what we have, mental midgets to be more precise. Factionalism, that party first mentality has taken over and we the people suffer for it.
When did it start, the party first mentality? A few examples place this problem in the hands of the Democrats with the mention of just two names: Robert Bork and John Tower. These were two men nominated by Presidents for important positions in government.
Judge Robert Bork was nominated by Ronald Reagan to be a Supreme Court Justice in the seat vacated by Justice Lewis Powell. Within the hour after his nomination, Sen. Ted Kennedy was orating on the Senate floor in a famous stem-winder of a speech throwing out threats of returning to a time of back alley abortions, renewed racial segregation, and general Gestapo tactics by the government. You know, jack-booted thugs beating down doors in the middle of the night like we just had with the current Bush, at least in online rants if never in reality.
Incidentally, Democrat operatives massively invaded Bork’s privacy by going over his video rentals hoping but failing to find some good dirt there and which led to more laws to protect Americans from (Democrats’) secret police tactics. At any rate, the Democrats held together and denied this nomination to Reagan and a new verb came into use thereafter—to Bork. .
In the other case former Texas Senator John Tower was to be Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration, but Democrats were angry about losing the 1988 election, even though this was what loser Michael Dukakis helped to achieve. Still they blamed Bush and his campaign, with the key factor seen as paroled murderer Willie Horton, a gift from Democrats’ opposition research that Bush’s team used in the general election. At any rate, Tower was a drinker, a shocking thing about a current or former Senator. Also he was a womanizer, another shocking and disqualifying factor, despite his years of service in government in military matters, particularly in the Vietnam War time, and something Democrat President Lyndon Johnson appreciated in his time in office. The information came from Tower’s ex-wife, a woman with an ax to grind and the Democrats used it for grist in their mill of personal destruction.
But Johnson was not a rabid partisan since results were what he wanted, not open warfare in the halls of Congress. And he certainly knew the halls of Congress.
And rabid partisanship is pretty much where we are just now. Rabid partisanship is seen in every budget. How many know the conference committees were Democrat-only in many instances. They “forget” to invite the Republicans and do not publicize where they are meeting. Sometimes Republican Congressmen have the nerve to knock on the door and ask admittance, only to be told their input is not needed.
Sounds like a bunch of petty and arrogant partisan mental midgets to me. The only interest is their own interests—self-enrichment or even some pet political issues, but never the good of our country.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the people who blather on about their lives in public service were actually serving the people of our nation and not their party or themselves?

21st Century Architecture--I Think It Has a Curve

I live on the edge of a city, a fairly dynamic place by most accounts. There is active building in commercial areas. There are centers going in and office towers and banks and all sorts of building.
One design motif I notice repeated is a curve somewhere. Usually it is on the roof or a portico. In no instance is the curve incorporated into the structure of the building.

I saw one tower where the curve was not concave. There are two convex edges moving up to join at the upper edge, much like the prow of a ship. But of course we must have asymmetry, so they meet off center so to speak.

Concave is a shape such as the inside of a bowl, while concave is the outer surface of a ball.

I think this is because the clients may allow the architects to put their curve on, but not where it will really cost money in the construction or the maintenance of the structures.

And to my mind, it is like teenagers and fashion. The trend makers all dress exactly alike. Iconoclasm has one visualization it seems.

The Political Class Today

Pres. Obama said it yesterday-we can't have elites who have more rights than the rest of us.
Who is he kidding?
This is what politicians have been morphing into over the last fifty years.
Let's say a young motorist is stopped by police and is deemed under the influence. What happens to young person? The answer is, it depends on who his parent is, and of course the political affiliation of the officer or the interests of the police department and its superiors.
Literally.
Now is this a knock on Democrats? The answer is "sometimes." It can go either way. In places where this happens, it depends on who is in charge.
We are supposed to be a nation governed by law, not men, and "without fear or favor" but we have lost this.
It is gone.
We now have an entrenched ruling class with privileges apart from those of the rest of us.
Look at Congressional pensions and health care. It is something the rest of the US does not have and that they will NOT GIVE UP when they push "universal health care" on the rest of us.
We will be stuck in crowded waiting rooms with all the coughers while they go to their taxpayer-funded special facilities.
After all, their positions make them more important than the rest of us so they should get special treatment. Of course.
They have the laws they write to ensure their perpetual reelection, and they hold on until it is time to pass the position on to their heirs.
We will always have Senators named Kennedy and Biden, for these are dynasties now.
I think it is a terrible shame, too, that we have lost our way as a nation.

Well Why Isn't It the Sun?

I live in Texas, and we have big skies and plenty of sunshine. It regularly gets hot here and always has.

We can have rapid temperature swings of thirty degrees within a matter of hours. Yesterday, Groundhog Day, we had frost in the morning and everyone had short sleeves and shorts in the afternoon. From freezing to 72 degrees. The woman in front of me at the post office had her skimpy tennis duds on.

Brilliant sunshine is what does this for us. Then, not being a scientist, and watching "The Universe" on cable last night, when they talked about Earth, they placed our planet within the atmosphere of the sun. Many phenomena in our skies are because of solar effects. Some are lovely and striking, such as Aurora Borealis, and others have effects on our climate.
The aurora is the result of the solar wind, and interaction with the gases with our magnetic field. Look it up your self. I am not a teacher nor am I a scientist, as said before.
Yet I dare think about these things.
At the same time, we are bombarded by these cosmic rays, which can... cause thunderstorms!
And thunderstorms come from...clouds.
The refrigerator door must have opened then, because a little light came on.
I know there is some researcher out there who posited that cosmic rays assist in cloud formation and said that the AGW people needed to include all this in their models. They in turn attacked his theory in a swarm of scorn and vituperation. His name is Svensmark as I recall and his clouds matter theory, according to the mad "scientists" who want to blame humanity for everything that happens, do not even think it worthy of study.
As we all know, the science is "settled," as if it were set in concrete. For my thinking, though, they put that concrete on their AGW theory's feet and have thrown it in the river.
Let's study the cloud formation and let's question everything and keep on doing it.
The La Nin~a part of the ENSO that we have just now is responsible for the terrible winter in the Northern Hemisphere, even the snow in London.
It is also why we are having a terrible drought in Texas right now. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Record heat in Australia--a climate effect that man did not cause--because they have these known cycles of such things down there.
But I still think the sun, which holds us captive to its influences has a much greater effect than the fleas infesting this planet. That is us.
And I mean it, these AGW types within science ARE mad scientists in the classic B-movie sense. Enough resources already. Go study something that matters or that we can do something about.

Why is common sense now the rarest of things?

So What About this Global Warming Deal

So What About Global Warming

I’ve never been able to jump onto the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) bandwagon, though I’ve had tedious discussions with ardent believers—really credulous people. (Look up that word and you’ll know what I mean) Their consistent fallback position is that there is a consensus out there and the science is settled, so any discussion is circular and futile. I will explain my reasoning here in the hope that there are some out there who can be reached.
Their consensus comes from computer models using many climate factors, particularly surface temperature. And this is precisely where the discussion first loses my possible agreement. This is a temperature record of the past 120 years at most, while climate has fluctuated up and down for millions of years without our input. It’s as if we use the last ten minutes to sum up our lives, and that would be just as meaningless.
They also used proxy records which are guesses based on ice cores or tree rings. And plenty of data is thrown out and denied as irrelevant. Logic tells me—this is not science, but throwing out that data makes it easier to manipulate what’s left for a desired result. And that is not precisely honest. So this science is not settled, just as our climate is never settled.
Records from weather stations are not always equal and I think that a good scientific process using temperature would try to achieve sameness of instrumentation, timing and specific distributions as just a few of the distinctions, and this is certainly not the case. There cannot be uniform placement of these units, so the data is isolated and relevant for that location and cannot be extrapolated across the globe. And even that is questionable given that the locale of many has undergone a very pertinent change since initial placement--urbanization. So I question the validity of such records and relying on them makes the entire enterprise surprisingly unscientific. Then I find that the data is missing some parts, and there you go, junk science we should use to re-order everything about our world, or perhaps not.
I suspect the computer models, if run on a daily basis with daily data sets, would produce different outcomes, enough to call the whole thing into question. Science must have results that will repeat or the experiment cannot be called valid nor the theory proven. It is not a matter of what people want to believe.
Another aspect of the discussion is the fact that statisticians call the data and conclusions into question. AGW proponents have convinced themselves that only climate scientists have the right to an opinion on the reports they have rendered, and no one from another realm of study is competent to discuss or understand. This is the creepy part for me—the high priests of climate change have spoken from on high, and mere mortals may not question the pronouncements they have made. But statisticians are precisely the folks who perform postmortems on scientific results, and if they do not find the results consistent with good science, then there we are. They cannot validate the conclusions because the data is inconsistent and the methods in which it is used are inconsistent. Which makes all of it junk science and a colossal waste of resources and time.
I have tried to do my own research and draw my own conclusions, which basically means I have decided that the Sun and our oceans are the main drivers of our climate and anything we do is minuscule. Sort of like the effect of fleas—we are not running the show in other words.
The sun has cycles of activity, with warming when it is sending out flares and full of active sunspots. Just now (January, 2009) it is being extremely quiet and the Northern Hemisphere is experiencing a terrible winter, which follows the terrible winter they had in the Southern Hemisphere.
We all hear about El Niño and La Niña, the Pacific Ocean circulation and temperature phenomena that affect climate all over the globe. They come and go and drought or flood or bitter cold weather follow. Both great oceans have both large and smaller scale oscillations in temperature and current, along decades long times. These affect winds and thus climate and are well known to science. Look up decadal oscillation and see for yourselves.
I have a somewhat contrarian view of the world. I always look for the guy behind the curtain first thing, in other words. The AGW crowd (and it is a pack mentality) spend a lot of time—a whole great big bunch of time—trying to convince the world of the rightness of their findings. They want to save the planet, and anyone who speaks against them is corrupt and evil. This is a huge turn off for me, especially coming from “dispassionate” scientists. Another is any “scientist” who routinely uses alarming tag words—cataclysmic, catastrophic, etc. A main offender here is the astrophysicist James Hansen who has been flogging this issue a long time. He is the guy always talking up the tipping point that is just over the horizon, which he has been doing this for over twenty five years. He is a high priest of this ideology around the climate and mankind’s effect on it.
Well, actually, these proponents seem more like zealots. I’ve seen the websites they have, with page after page of argument to assist anyone discussing the subject. And anything that might seem to refute their stuff, the reaction is predictable and pervasive, It is like a hydra-headed monster as it keeps coming back bigger then ever.
To be honest, I think we could control the climate just as well by sacrificing a virgin somewhere. It is as valid as their theory. Now we just have to decide how to do the sacrifice.