Debunking the 'Peak Oil' theory

Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) published a report which argues that the 'peak oil' theory used by some groups to scare us about our energy future is based on faulty analysis (and mentions that this is the 5th time that 'peak oil' is 'announced' by liberal 'scientists'). CERA says that 'peak oil' won't be reached until 2050, even at current production increase rates, and there will be plenty of time afterwards to find energy alternatives.

Cultural degeneration and anti-war sentiment in Europe

Thomas Sowell had a very interesting article yesterday, titled Going Quietly? It's about the decline of the European society as it's losing it's worldwide power. Here are some excerpts from Mr. Sowell's article:

Two generations of being insulated from the reality of the international jungle, of not having to defend their own survival because they have been living under the protection of the American nuclear umbrella, have allowed too many Europeans to grow soft and indulge themselves in illusions about brutal realities and dangers. The very means of their salvation have been demonized for decades in anti-nuclear movements and protesters calling themselves "antiwar." But there is a huge difference between being anti-war in words and being anti-war in deeds. How many times, in its thousands of years of history, has Europe gone 60 years without a major war, as it has since World War II? That peace has been due to American nuclear weapons, which was all that could deter the Soviet Union's armies from marching right across Europe to the Atlantic Ocean. Having overwhelming military force on your side, and letting your enemies know that you have the guts to use it, is being genuinely antiwar. Chamberlain's appeasement brought on World War II and Reagan's military buildup ended the Cold War. The famous Roman peace of ancient times did not come from negotiations, ceasefires, or pretty talk. It came from the Roman Empire's crushing defeat and annihilation of Carthage, which served as a warning to anyone else who might have had any bright ideas about messing with Rome. Only after the Roman Empire began to lose its own internal cohesion, patriotism, and fighting spirit over the centuries did it begin to succumb to its external enemies and finally collapse. That seems to be where Western civilization is heading today.

The achievements of Western civilization are buried in histories that portray every human sin found here as if they were peculiarities of the west. The classic example is slavery, which existed all over the world for thousands of years and yet is incessantly depicted as if it was a peculiarity of Europeans enslaving Africans. Barbary pirates alone brought twice as many enslaved Europeans to North Africa as there were Africans brought in bondage to the United States and the American colonies from which it was formed. How many people have any inkling that it was precisely Western civilization that eventually turned against slavery and began stamping it out when non-Western societies still saw nothing wrong with it?

The Public Debt

A few weeks ago, after I posted an article on the decreasing federal deficit, one reader raised the issue of the total outstanding debt (a record value), and I gave a tongue-in-cheek reply saying that nobody knows who we own that money and we should just not pay.

But it made me curious, so I looked for some figures on how is that 8.5 trillion debt structured, and here it is:
40.6%: Federal Reserve and government accounts. This is money that one part of the government owns to another part, so seriously, it doesn't count.
22.7%: Foreign and international. Ok, so we owe about 1.9 trillions to foreign countries. Considering how much money we gave to other countries over the history, I think they could give us a break. Just count how many foreign debts we completely erased. And actually, a careful analysis could find it more profitable to just invade those creditor countries and make them erase our debt. Maybe even impose a tribute and get some extra money to the budget.
6.5%: Private pension funds
6.3%: Mutual funds
5.4%: Misc others
4.2%: State and local governments. Well, state and local receive a lot of federal money, so if they still want it, they should ignore the debt.
4.2%: Commercial banks, S&Ls and credit unions
3.5%: State and local government pension funds
3.3%: US Savings Bonds
3.3%: Insurance companies. Everybody knows they make huge profits, so they can just pass on that debt since they still make a lot of money from ripping off customers.

So this leaves us with only 29.2%, or about 2.5 trillions of debt (mostly to pension funds, bonds and other securities), which I would say is totally manageable.

The big picture on economy

An interesting article was published today by Jonah Goldberg in the National Review. Here are some of the things he argues:

Poverty, as defined for millennia, is pretty much nonexistent in the United States. Until very recently, poverty was defined by material scarcity of essentials, chiefly food, shelter and clothing. Today, some people go without these things, but scarcity isn’t the culprit.
To understand how subjective poverty in America is, one need only recognize the fact that most rich people from a century ago would be considered poor by today’s standards, and today’s poor would be considered rich by the standards of 1900. In 1900, 2 percent of homes had electricity, and 1 out of 10 homes had flush toilets. Today, pretty much all of them do. In other words, the tangible goods that defined wealth have been democratized.
Absurdly, according to the official measurements used by the federal government, fewer people lived in poverty in 1973 than today. But in 1973, most poor people didn’t have a car. Today, almost 75 percent of those officially in poverty have a motor vehicle. Today’s poor households, according to statistician Nicholas Eberstadt, are more likely to have telephones and televisions than non-poor families were in 1970. In the 1970s, undernourishment still factored into poverty. Today, obesity is a far bigger problem.
There are other factors that seem to be invisible to government bean counters. We live in a “knowledge economy,” but the folks who measure the gross domestic product don’t count the money spent on research and development (as well as money spent on training and education) as an investment. Instead, the government merely counts each iPod twice: “when it arrives from China, and when it sells. That, in effect, reduces Apple — one of the world’s greatest innovators — to a reseller of imported goods.”
Meanwhile, the single-most underreported good-news economic story of the 21st century so far is the explosion in American productivity. From 2000 to 2004, productivity in the United States grew by 17 percent. That is a staggering number which tells us more about the long-term health of the American economy than statistics about the GDP, unemployment or wage growth.

The hypocrisy of the "green" celebrities

I think everybody is sick of the various Hollywood celebrities touting their green lifestyle and fight for a better environment. For most of them, the main weapon is the hybrid car, their fantasy that driving a Prius will save the world. It's true that Priuses do great on gas, but the same celebrities usually fly private airplanes, which more than compensate for the few gallons of gas their hybrids save. TMZ has published a list of such extravagancies, among which we found:

• Brad Pitt has several hybrids, but his trip to Namibia used 11,000 gallons of jet fuel, which is enough to take a Prius to the moon.
• George Clooney has an electric car, but for his Tokyo trip he burned 7,000 gallons of fuel, which might have helped his car cross the Pacific 57 times.
• J-Lo drives a Prius, but her recent trip to New York (for which she allegedly refused to pay) burned enough gas to propel her hybrid for 45,000 miles.

Liberals again at war with Economics

Remember when the oil and gas prices were going up? Democrats claimed it's Big Oil's conspiracy to pump up their profits. Bush and Halliburton were giving a hand. Now that oil and gas prices are falling it's again Bush's "fault".

Maybe we have to think what is the root cause of all these lunatic conspiracy theories. It's because liberals are in open war against any kind of science, including Economics. They don't understand the principles of offer and demand. They don't understand price dynamics. These are concepts they can't grasp. And this is because they are all Marxist who don't believe in free economy and who have the strong conviction that the Government drives all the aspects of the economy. You think this is crazy? It's not. Remember in the spring, when the liberals wanted laws to control the gasoline prices? When they wanted a windfall tax on oil companies profits? Everything comes from their economy handbook - that's "Capital" by Marx. As long as that's their economic Bible, they'll never understand what a free economy is.

American policies in the Arab world

There's been a lot of talk in recent days about how fighting terror only produces more terror, adding to the old cliche that Muslims turn terrorist because of American policies in the Middle East. Now let's go back in history, to the 1990's, and let's see what the US policies were back then. US liberated Islamic Kuwait from secular Iraq and protected Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam, from the same enemy. America went to war along the Bosnian Muslims against their Catholic and Orthodox foes. America attacked Yugoslavia in order to protect Kosovo Muslims. American troops went to Macedonia to protect ethnic Muslims. (Actually, there still are thousands of American soldiers in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia, and nobody is asking for a timetable for their return and a rapid redeployment).

Then, America suffered losses while providing relief to poor Muslims in Somalia. It's been giving out over 10 billion dollars in foreign aid every year to Muslim countries like Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan and even Afghanistani Taliban. And what was the Islamic reward for all this? It was the '93 World Trade Center, the Khobar Towers, the embassies in Africa, the USS Cole and ultimately the 9/11. After 9/11, America changed its attitude and reduced many of those Islamic support activities, and what is the result? No attack on America has occured ever since, outside of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Senator James Inhofe confirms my earlier posts

Yesterday, on September 25th, Senator James Inhofe literally mocked the global warming clowns from the Senate floor. He went item by item through issues that were repeatedly mentioned on Blogging Chris, including the rapidly changing trends in media coverage, which switched for times in the last century between threatening us with global cooling and global warming (please, read this article from Time, 1974). He also refers to a letter from 60 Canadian scientists who drew attention to global warming alarmists.

Here are some quotes from the Senator's speech:
"If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist"
"From 1895 until the 1930’s the media pedaled a coming ice age. From the late 1920’s until the 1960’s they warned of global warming. From the 1950’s until the 1970’s they warned us again of a coming ice age. This makes modern global warming the fourth estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years."
"In 2006, both the National Academy of Sciences and an independent researcher further refuted the foundation of the “hockey stick.”"
"What the climate alarmists and their advocates in the media have continued to ignore is the fact that the Little Ice Age, which resulted in harsh winters which froze New York Harbor and caused untold deaths, ended about 1850. So trying to prove man-made global warming by comparing the well-known fact that today's temperatures are warmer than during the Little Ice Age is akin to comparing summer to winter to show a catastrophic temperature trend."
"Alarmists fail to adequately explain why temperatures began warming at the end of the Little Ice Age in about 1850, long before man-made CO2 emissions could have impacted the climate. Then about 1940, just as man-made CO2 emissions rose sharply, the temperatures began a decline that lasted until the 1970’s, prompting the media and many scientists to fear a coming ice age. Let me repeat, temperatures got colder after C02 emissions exploded."
"Global climate changes occur all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural ‘noise.’"
"One of the ways alarmists have pounded this mantra of “consensus” on global warming into our pop culture is through the use of computer models which project future calamity. This threat is originating from the software installed on the hard drives of the publicity seeking climate modelers."
"The history of the modern environmental movement is chock full of predictions of doom that never came true. We have all heard the dire predictions about the threat of overpopulation, resource scarcity, mass starvation, and the projected death of our oceans. None of these predictions came true."
"The Kyoto Protocol is a lot of economic pain for no climate gain."
"If we allow scientifically unfounded fears of global warming to influence policy makers to restrict future energy production and the creation of basic infrastructure in the developing world -- billions of people will continue to suffer."

Lessons learned from the Path to 9/11 movie

Here are some comments about ABC's Path to 9/11 movie. The movie didn't show anything we didn't know, but it's quite rare for the MSM to admit anything else than 'BUsh caused 9/11' or '9/11 was staged by the CIA and the Zionists'. These are some elements that everybody can learn (or remember) from watching this semi-documentary:
1. An FBI agent tells his arab informer: "The Justice Department won't hold anyone if you don't blow your cover to testify. People have a right to be protected from domestic spying". The arab guy responds: "Don't they have a right to be protected from terrorists who want to kill 250,000 americans in one day?"
2. Just take a look at Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other terrorists, their depraved lifestyle while plotting to mass-murder thousands of innocent people. These are the people to whom the liberals want to give US Constitutional rights.
3. The second biggest threat to national security, next to the muslim terrorists, are the lawyers. It's because of them that most inteligence operations never got finalized and ultimately they are accomplice to the 9/11 mass murders.
4. Madeleine Albright (or, as friends call her, Halfbright) considered that, after Osama bin Laden's operatives attacked the US embassies in Africa, launching retaliatory strikes against him would be offensive to the sovereign state of Afghanistan and would raise numerous international implications. Apparently, she didn't find any implications in attacking Serbia, although that country never attacked America and never sent terrorist groups around the world.
5. A discussion between two fed-up FBI agents: "Do you think Osama has a mole at FBI?" "He doesn't need one, hes got all of us".
6. A laptop recovered by Fillipinos foiled the Bojinka plot. Another laptop captured from terrorists foiled the Millenium plot. US lawyers denied law enforcement to investigate arrested terrorist Zacharias Moussaoui's laptop, which led to the full execution of the 9/11 plot. I'm not wondering whether those lawyers can sleep at night, but I wonder why Justice didn't indict them for treason against national security?? It's only at that point that you understand those comments from the FBI agents at the beginning of the movie: "Thank God the Filippinos found that laptop. If it were here, it would have been out of touch".
7. It takes a semi-documentary to get a movie to put Arabs in the roles of terrorists. Although Muslim Arabs make up about 99.5% of terrorists in history, for the past 10 years baddies in movies are Russians, neo-Nazis, people with Eastern European accent, religious groups, Colombians, the US Government, snakes and so on. Combined, these groups have committed less than 0.1% of terrorist acts throughout history, yet Hollywood keeps picturing them as the culprits.

Al Gore's Fatwa against the scientific truth

In a much publicized ABC special last night, Al Gore issued a fatwa against anybody who'd challenge his views on global warming: "There is no debate!"

But it's been a busy week in the scientific world regarding the inconvenient truth about global warming:

1. MIT's Inconvenient Scientist is an article from the Boston Globe where Richard Lindzen, meteorology professor at MIT expresses heresies such as: "We do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change. The Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940. The evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why"
2. Another MIT researcher, Kerry Emanuel, explains how the increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes is not a real increase, but actually the result of improved observations in the satelite era, especially in the past 20-30 years. One quote: "A cyclone that hit Bangladesh in 1970 and killed up to 500,000 people is not even listed as a hurricane". Same thing should apply to most of this year tropical storms, which appeared in the middle of the Atlantic and disappeared in the middle of the Atlantic. 40 years ago, none of them would have been recorded. Read the full report here.
3. A National Geographic article presents the research of Tessa Hill, geologist at UC Davis, which shows that a more important greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide is methane, which is naturally released from undersea rock layers. They peaked several times in history, and they might peak now. It happened 16,000 years ago, and again 11,000 ago, and there were no gas-guzzling SUV back then.
4. Finally, let's remember a major danger of the 70s. "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production, with serious political implications for every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. ... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it." You might be surprised that this gloomy scenario refers to global cooling, and comes from a 1975 Newsweek cover story that helped give rise to congressional hearings that warned of an impending Ice Age that would result in worldwide famine and poverty. In the article, you can read how forcing a natural warming trend into a cooling trend (not that it would be possible) might have disastruos results.

Isn't democracy for everyone?

I heard today on the radio an argument that's pretty often used by liberals when they attack the US policies in the Middle East: that the Iraqis have been involved in clan warfare for thousands of years and that's all they know and democracy would never work for them.

Well... let's see... America has never been a democracy before 1776. For hundreds , maybe thousands of year, it had been a battlefield for tribal wars and foreign mercenaries who ravaged the lands. However, in about 10 years the world's most succesful democracy was established. France wasn't a democracy until the middle of last century. Spain had never been a democracy until the death of Franco in 1975, but after 3 years, a democratic governament was established. Israel has almost 5 thousands years of anarchy, lack of government and wars, heavily documented, until 1948, and it took a few years to become the first democracy in the Middle East. Russia was never a democracy until the early 1990s, and I think they are still building it.

So, as you see, each people had its own time to switch to democracy. What the liberal think is that some peoples are not worthy of a democratic rule, and they should never been democratized. It's one of their basic philosophies, that you must keep your minions feeling inferior, so you can rule over them. Happens here with the minorities, happens anywhere in the world.

Who killed the electric car?

According to a former GM engineer who designed it, it was reality. And not, as liberal conspiracy theorists claim in a recent movie, the big bad oil companies. You can read the full editorial from USA Today, but here is Gary Witzenburg summing it up:

Widespread acceptance of battery-powered EVs will not happen until someone develops battery technology competitive with a tank of gas (or diesel) in every way. It must be absolutely safe, long-term durable, capable of operating reliably in extreme weather and temperatures, mass-producible at low cost, able to carry comparable energy in a package of comparable size and weight, and able to be quickly recharged. None comes remotely close.

Ditto.

Reflections of an over-heated brain

It's 96 degrees here in Middletown. Only one thing is on my mind... Al Gore tells us that temperatures rose 0.8 degrees since the '60s (why then? because they've been declining before that, until, you know, the Big Industrial Revolution of the 1960s). I can only dream of the relief of a 95.2 temperature right now, which would be very possible if man wouldn't have destroyed our climate.

And I'm faced with another dilemma. At the current rate, July 2107 could be 98.4 degrees!!! So what do I do? Should I stop driving, and accept an economical slowdown of about 10-15%, leading to bankruptcies and recession, just so my grand-grand-grand-kids don't bake at that awful temperature?

The Liberals War on Science

Today, throngs of liberal activists are praying that the New Year temperature will establish a new record for this day, surpassing the previous record set in 1933. Do you really understand what that mean? Since according to the Liberal Bible, global temperatures are directly influenced by human activity and industrial production, it means that today, August 1st, 2006, we could reach the industrial and human levels of 1933! That's great news for the progress of our country!

We don't know what the weather will be like tomorrow, yet liberal activists know what it will be like in 100 years. Check the weather forecasts in the morning, and you won't know the exact temperatures at noon, except for a range of 5-10 degrees, yet Al Gore knows precisely, to a 1/2 degree, what the temperature will be in 2050. You wonder how they come up with their "precise numbers"? There are tons of climate models right now, each of them predicting a wide range of temperatures 50 years from now. Let's say we have Model 1, which predicts a temperature variation of -2 to 0 degrees. Model 2, with -1.5 to 1.5 and Model 3, with -2 to 3. Liberals will obviously pick model 3, and announce its upper margin of +3 degrees as scientific proof of global warming. And New York Times tomorrow will have a big warning on the front page: Scientific Consensus Shows 3 Degrees Increase in 50 years.

What liberals will never look at is past information. We've had climate models since the '60s, and liberals have also picked the highest value in the highest model, while ignoring that actual temperature variations are somewhere in the middle of the predicted models. But they base all their science on "junk science", conspiracy theories and so on. They ignore and refuse to accept any kind of real scientific research. They are at war with real sciences like climatology, biology, medicine, chemistry, history, etc.

I'm planning to do a Grand Canyon trip in September, and I searched for some information on average temperatures for that area. Here's what I found as Hottest Temp of the Year:
1990: 119 F
1992: 115 F
1994: 116 F
2002: 115 F

We notice that for 12 years, it went down 4 degrees. If it continues like this, by 2025 the Canyon will freeze!! Shouldn't Al Gore, the Sierra Club and other extremists be worried about this??

The NSA eavesdropping

I haven't written on this subject yet... just wanted to make something clear: The Government doesn't have the time, money and resources to care too much about what you chat on the phone. That is, unless you talk to Al Qaeda, or plot terorrists act. So you liberals, stop feeling so important thinking there's a secret Task Force dedicated to each one of you. The only reason why you should logically be afraid of the "domestic spy program" is if you have something to hide. So if you complain about it, either you're logically-challenged, or are indeed fearing for your plans.

This is not Bill Clinton's Echelon. His program recorded EVERYTHING, and then selected what could be of interest for the NSA. Among these things were the Republican senators' cell phone conversations, and anything related to the Clinton's accusers and enemies (and there were a lot of them).

As a matter of fact, if Congress forces George Bush to go to FISA, then it's a clear violation of the Constitution, which states the independence of the Executive and Judicial power. This mean that the Judicial cannot meddle in the exercise of the Executive prerogatives. It's true that Jimmy Carter (as one of the worst presidents the US ever had) waived his Constitutional rights, but he did it on his own and this shouldn't have any effect ont he following presidents (as it didn't have much on Reagan or Clinton).