budbromley

The perfect read to prepare yourself for Trump inauguration day!  A well reasoned and excellent lecture by Edward J. Erler:

Nothing has provoked the ire of America’s bipartisan political class as much as Donald Trump’s recent proposal that the U.S. should suspend the acceptance of refugees from Syria and other terrorist-supporting nations until we find a way of perfecting the screening process to ensure that we are not admitting terrorists or terror sympathizers. On its face this proposal was not unreasonable. Most of these refugees do not have adequate documentation, intelligence agencies do not have sufficient information to determine whether or not they have terrorist connections or intend to engage in terrorism, and the heads of our security agencies have warned that active terrorists will inevitably slip through security screening cracks. Nor is it as if there was no reasonable alternative. Wouldn’t it have been better, as Trump and others have suggested, to address the refugee crisis by setting up security zones in Syria or other Middle Eastern countries where refugees could find safety and where Muslim nations might feel obligated to help finance their care? In addition to making sense from a national security perspective, this would also have been a more humane solution, since it would not have uprooted the refugees from their homelands and injected them into an alien way of life.

Why are our political leaders, despite these facts, willing to expose the nation to such potential danger?—a danger that is surely greater than we now imagine. One only has to observe the results of the refugee crisis in Europe to see what is in store for the American homeland. Yet the Obama administration, following Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government in Germany, is adamant that the number of Syrian refugees— and Muslim refugees generally—must increase substantially. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who recently named Merkel as her favorite world leader, has frequently indicated that acceptance of refugees is an important reaffirmation of America’s commitment to diversity. It is a reaffirmation of “who we are as Americans,” she has said, as if the American character is defined by its unlimited openness to diversity. To show the bipartisan nature of this commitment, Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has used the same phrase to explain his approval of the refugee program. In both cases, the clear implication is that America’s commitment to diversity outweighs considerations of national security.  Indeed, in what can only be called a self-willed delusion, proponents of the refugee program seem to believe that their commitment to diversity makes us stronger and more secure as a nation, and that any opposition to the program is racist, xenophobic, and most particularly Islamophobic.

Consider what this means. Germans have been warned that it is their duty to accommodate themselves to newly arrived refugees and not to place politically incorrect demands upon them—that is, not to demand that the refugees adapt to German ways. Some have advised German women in particular that if they don’t wish to be harassed by male refugees, they should cover their heads and be accompanied outside of the home by a male. Will this be a part of America’s politically correct future?

Merkel, like Obama, bases her immigration policy on a globalist view of the world. Secretary of State John Kerry propounded this view in a recent commencement address, warning Americans that we must prepare ourselves for a “borderless world.” But a world without borders is a world without citizens, and a world without citizens is a world without the rights and privileges that attach exclusively to citizenship. Rights and liberties exist only in separate and independent nations; they are the exclusive preserve of the nation-state. Constitutional government only succeeds in the nation-state, where the just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed. By contrast, to see the globalist principle in practice, look at the European Union. The EU is not a constitutional government; it is an administrative state ruled by unelected bureaucrats. It attempts to do away with both borders and citizens, and it replaces rights and liberty with welfare and regulation as the objects of its administrative rule. Constitutional government—to say nothing of liberal democracy—will not be a part of the politically correct, borderless world into which so many of our political leaders wish to usher us.

How did we reach such an impasse? The answer is simple, but no less astounding for its simplicity. It has been frequently observed by competent thinkers that Americans have abandoned the morality engendered by what the Declaration of Independence called the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The Declaration confidently proclaimed as its first principle the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” As part of a created (and therefore intelligible) universe, rights cannot be something private or subjective; they are part of an objective order. The idea that every right has a corresponding duty or obligation was essential to the social compact understanding of the American founding. Thus whatever was destructive of the public good or public happiness, however much it might have contributed to an individual’s private pleasures or imagined pleasures, was not a part of the “pursuit of happiness” and could be proscribed by society. Liberty was understood to be rational liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was understood to be the rational pursuit of happiness—that is to say, not only a natural right but a moral obligation as well.

Over the past century and more, this morality grounded in the American founding has been successfully eroded by Progressivism. This erosion is manifested today in the morality of value-free relativism. According to this new morality, all value judgments are equal. Reason cannot prove that one value is superior to or more beneficial than another, because values are not capable of rational analysis; they are merely idiosyncratic preferences. In this value-free universe, the only value that is “objectively” of higher rank is tolerance. Equal toleration of all values—what is called today a commitment to diversity—is the only “reasonable” position. And note that it is always called a commitment to diversity. It is a commitment because it cannot be rational in any strict sense—it exists in a value-free world from which reason has been expelled. The only support it can garner under such circumstances is the simple fact that it is preferred.

With respect to the commitment to diversity, the tolerance of those who are willing to tolerate you does not earn you much credit—it doesn’t require much of a commitment or sacrifice. If, however, you are willing to tolerate those who are pledged to kill you and destroy your way of life, tolerance represents a genuine commitment. Only such a deadly commitment confirms that tolerance is the highest value in a universe of otherwise equal values. Only such a deadly commitment signals a nation’s single-minded devotion to tolerance as the highest value by its willingness to sacrifice its sovereignty as proof of its commitment.

The common-sense citizen is forgiven for thinking this train of thought insane. But what other explanation could there be for the insistence of so many of our political leaders on risking the nation’s security—in light of what we see in Europe, one might even say their willingness to commit national suicide—by admitting refugees without regard to their hostility to our way of life and their wish to destroy us as a nation? Note that these leaders show no such enthusiasm for admitting Christian refugees from Middle Eastern violence, or even Yazidis, who have suffered horribly from the ravages of Islamic terror. These refugees, of course, represent no danger to America. Only by admitting those who do represent a danger can we display to the world “who we are as a people”—a people willing to sacrifice ourselves to vouchsafe our commitment to tolerance.

***

A rational concern for our liberties as well as for national security weighs in against such reckless policies. Security experts warn that we don’t have enough homeland security agents to monitor suspected terrorists who are already in our country. If we increase the number of refugees from terrorist-supporting nations, greater security can only be provided by closer cooperation between the various security agencies and closer monitoring of the private lives of all Americans. The consequent loss of liberty will be extensive and will impact all areas of American life. This, we are told, will become the “new reality” or the “new normal,” and Americans will have to develop a “new mind-set” to deal with it. Europeans are well on their way to accepting terrorism as a daily part of their lives—surely Americans, we are told, can adapt as well. But Europeans are used to sacrificing liberties to the administrative state represented by the EU. Will Americans acquiesce so easily?

The administrative state has not yet extinguished America’s love of liberty, although it surely has made significant inroads over the years as Americans have become inured to being bullied by bureaucrats of all stripes. The constant monitoring of citizens in the name of detecting terrorism will, if allowed, turn the nation into a security state where liberties will be easily and casually sacrificed to the constant threat of terrorism. Sacrificing liberty will be the price Americans pay to accommodate refugees—in other words, it is the sacrifice we must make on the altar of political correctness.

Remarkably, many politicians and pundits have argued that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free exercise of religion prohibits Congress and the president from banning the emigration of people to the U.S. based on religion. Thus they characterized the proposal to suspend the entry of Syrian refugees and others from terrorist-supporting nations as a violation of the Constitution. But we must surely wonder how those who are not American citizens or legal resident aliens—indeed, even those who have never been present in the country—can assert rights under the Constitution. By the terms of the Constitution, free exercise of religion is one of the privileges and immunities attached to citizenship; it can hardly be said to be possessed by all those who seek refuge in, or wish to emigrate to, the United States. As a sovereign nation, it is beyond dispute that the U.S. has plenary power to determine the conditions for immigration. Except in a borderless world, it can hardly be claimed that free exercise of religion is a right possessed by all persons inhabiting the globe or even those who are potentially asylum seekers.

One condition for claiming refugee status in the Refugee Act of 1980 is religious persecution. This necessarily means that any applicant for religious asylum would have to submit to questioning about his religious beliefs and (presumably) the sincerity of those beliefs. Also, it is not beyond reason that a sovereign nation would be allowed to inquire whether the religious beliefs of an asylum seeker are compatible with the American constitutional order. Should asylum be extended to the adherents of religions that do not recognize the free exercise rights of other religions? Should those religions whose adherents refuse to pledge or give evidence that they would support free exercise be ineligible for asylum? Religion—and inquiry into religious belief—has always been part of the asylum law, and there is nothing in the Constitution that bars such inquiry on national security grounds. Indeed, a quick glance at Article I of the Constitution reveals that Congress has plenary power to “establish a uniform Rule of Naturalization.” This has always been understood—by a necessary rule of inference—to mean that Congress also has plenary power to regulate immigration. Congress has wide latitude to choose the “necessary and proper” means to accomplish this end as long as it doesn’t violate some specific prohibition of the Constitution.

To sum up, only in the perfervid imaginations of the politically correct—those who reject the idea of borders—could the Syrian refugee controversy be confused with a constitutional controversy.

***

Our lax policies toward illegal immigration and the virtual open-borders policy of the Obama administration represent an attempt to move toward a borderless world as well as to aggrandize the power of the administrative state. It is now widely recognized that the Immigration Act of 1965 was intentionally designed to alter the racial and ethnic mix of the population of America. It has been an overwhelming success; demographers predict that by 2040 whites of European descent will no longer be a majority, having been displaced by people of Asian, African, Latin American, and Hispanic descent. For the most part— with the notable exception of Asians— these groups have supplied a significant clientele for the administrative state as it seeks to extend its reach and magnify its power. As such, it has redounded to the benefit of the Democratic Party—the party that favors the growth and extension of administrative state power. But make no mistake: illegal immigration has always had bipartisan support. Despite the fact that illegal immigration cuts against them politically, Republicans have always favored the cheap and exploitable labor of illegal aliens.

The Democrats, of course, have gotten the best of this bargain. After three generations, Latinos vote Democratic by more than a two-thirds majority. The Republicans cannot hope to compete for the Latino vote without becoming something very close to the Democratic Party, differing only at the margins. This is something that the Republican establishment would like to do, but it finds little support among rank-and-file Republicans. If the Republicans lose the 2016 election—if a party realignment fails—the party as currently constituted will, in all likelihood, no longer be competitive in future national elections.

Perhaps more importantly, America’s open-borders policy has allowed terrorists and criminals of all stripes to enter the country at will. In addition to Islamic terror groups, MS-13—a vicious Latin American gang involved in murder for hire, drug trafficking, human smuggling, slavery, and all other manner of crime— operates openly in the U.S. Even when illegal-alien criminals are deported, they easily return to commit further crimes. Surprisingly, this issue of illegal-alien crime has become an important issue in a presidential election for the first time this year. These criminals are aided and abetted by sanctuary cities—cities that refuse to cooperate with federal authorities in detaining illegal-alien criminals. This policy is the most baffling policy that can be imagined, as it results in criminals being deliberately released into the public where they continue to prey on innocent citizens. It is designed to show (what else?) our tolerance.

Securing our nation’s borders with a wall and by any other means necessary is favored by a majority of Americans, but the idea is considered vulgar and unacceptable by the progressive forces of History, forces which are clearing the obstacles to a borderless world. For these forces, the march of History is inevitable and any appeal to citizens and to the nation-state is anachronistic. It is not inevitable that these forces will have their way. But because of the demographic and political changes brought on by the open-borders regime, time grows short for the American people to reassert their sovereignty—that is, to stop the self-sacrifice which the political elites of both parties have determined is necessary to satisfy the gods of political correctness—those gods who are the guardians of the diversity which defines “who we are as a people.” ■

EDWARD J. ERLER is professor emeritus of political science at California State University, San Bernardino. He earned his B.A. from San Jose State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School. He has published numerous articles on constitutional topics in journals such as Interpretation, the Notre Dame Journal of Law, and the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. He was a member of the California Advisory Commission on Civil Rights from 1988-2006 and served on the California Constitutional Revision Commission in 1996. He is the author of The American Polity and co-author of The Founders on Citizenship and Immigration. This fall he is a visiting distinguished professor of politics at Hillsdale College.

From the October 2016 edition of Imprimis by Hillsdale College

Printable link here: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Imprimis-Who-We-Are-As-A-People-October-2016.pdf

I keep a graphic on my desktop to compare timelines in all types of science papers.  (Graphic and link below.)  You may also find it a useful reference.

The following quote from renowned physicist Freeman Dyson is worthwhile to ponder, first published in 2007.

“Another environmental danger that is even more poorly understood is the possible coming of a new ice-age. A new ice-age would mean the burial of half of North America and half of Europe under massive ice-sheets. [See graphic]  We know that there is a natural cycle that has been operating for the last eight hundred thousand years. The length of the cycle is a hundred thousand years. In each hundred-thousand year period, there is an ice-age that lasts about ninety thousand years and a warm interglacial period that lasts about ten thousand years. We are at present in a warm period that began twelve thousand years ago, so the onset of the next ice-age is overdue. If human activities were not disturbing the climate, a new ice-age might already have begun. We do not know how to answer the most important question: do our human activities in general, and our burning of fossil fuels in particular, make the onset of the next ice-age more likely or less likely?”

“There are good arguments on both sides of this question. On the one side, we know that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was much lower during past ice-ages than during warm periods, so it is reasonable to expect that an artificially high level of carbon dioxide might stop an ice-age from beginning. On the other side, the oceanographer Wallace Broecker [Broecker, 1997] has argued that the present warm climate in Europe depends on a circulation of ocean water, with the Gulf Stream flowing north on the surface and bringing warmth to Europe, and with a counter-current of cold water flowing south in the deep ocean. So a new ice-age could begin whenever the cold deep counter-current is interrupted. The counter-current could be interrupted when the surface water in the Arctic becomes less salty and fails to sink, and the water could become less salty when the warming climate increases the Arctic rainfall. Thus Broecker argues that a warm climate in the Arctic may paradoxically cause an ice-age to begin. Since we are confronted with two plausible arguments leading to opposite conclusions, the only rational response is to admit our ignorance. Until the causes of ice-ages are understood, we cannot know whether the increase of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing or decreasing the danger.”

[The Dyson quote is excerpted from Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (Page Barbour Lectures) by Freeman Dyson, University of Virgina Press, 2007.]

A study by NASA published in 2015: “At the end of the last Ice Age, the air became warmer and carried more moisture across the [Antarctica] continent, doubling the amount of snow dropped on the ice sheet,” Zwally said.

“The extra snowfall that began 10,000 years ago has been slowly accumulating on the ice sheet and compacting into solid ice over millennia, thickening the ice in East Antarctica and the interior of West Antarctica by an average of 0.7 inches (1.7 centimeters) per year. This small thickening, sustained over thousands of years and spread over the vast expanse of these sectors of Antarctica, corresponds to a very large gain of ice – enough to outweigh the losses from fast-flowing glaciers in other parts of the continent and reduce global sea level rise.”

“Zwally’s team calculated that the mass gain from the thickening of East Antarctica remained steady from 1992 to 2008 at 200 billion tons per year, while the ice losses from the coastal regions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula increased by 65 billion tons per year.”

Here is the link:

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses

The following internet link is the graphic.  It zooms well.

https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/younger_dryas_to_present_time_line1.png

“This will be a critical year for Europe. Elections in the pillars of the European Union — France and Germany — as well as potential elections in the third largest eurozone economy — Italy — will affect one another and threaten the very existence of the eurozone. As we have been writing for years, the European Union will eventually dissolve. The question for 2017 is to what degree these elections expedite its dissolution. Whether moderates or extremists claim victory in 2017, Europe will still be hurtling toward a breakup into regional blocs.”

Do what you want to do.  There is a war on for your mind. Are you in it?  Or, are you watching?

It’s well worth it to challenge yourself by watching this video to the end.  26 minutes.  It will strengthen your resolve.

Then come back and read the following from Wikipedia:

“RT has frequently been called a propaganda outlet for the Russian government^[12][13][14] and its foreign policy^{[12][14][15][16]} by news reporters,^[17][18] including former RT reporters.^[19][20][21] RT has also been accused of spreading disinformation.^{[18][22][23][24][25]} The United Kingdom media regulator, Ofcom, has repeatedly found RT to have breached rules on impartiality, and of broadcasting “materially misleading” content.^[26][27][28] RT states that it merely offers a Russian perspective on global events.^[3]”

If RT (i.e. Russia Today) is Russian propaganda, and it probably is, how is that different from Radio Free Europe or National Public Radio?

I think there is a war on for your mind.  I would appreciate knowing what you think.

Ref:  One of the most detailed wikis I have seen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)

Yep, I am another lunatic.

I lived and worked in Tokyo for HP in the ’80’s. In Nov ’88 in my exit interview as I was heading back to the U.S., I told my boss’s boss that Japan’s stock market was about to crash and Japanese banks would fail. They laughed at me.

Despite the fact that before I arrived, the business group I was responsible for had been flat for 20 years, but after I was there 4 years my business had grown 700% in Yen terms. But my managers did not, could not, accept my warning. The evidence was clear and right in front of me and them. (The Japan market crashed two months after I left.)

Japan was and is operating on 180 DSO. The true state of the economy is hidden by their Tegatta system, which is an accepted system of payment by negotiable note, and other interlocking devices. Company managers have stacks of these Tegatta notes in their safes which they use to pay off debts or buy things, with generally accepted rules of engagement. But the Tegatta debt is outside the monetary system, unrecorded and of unknown size and effect, on top of the official debt in excess of 100% of GDP.

So, not only does Japan have QE, official government debt over 100% of GDP with the requirement that banks purchase a % of government bonds, they have extensive cross holdings of corporate stocks and interlocking boards, and Zaibatzu (anti-competitive conglomerates), they are holding mountains of negotiable notes equivalent to about 6 months sales outstanding. It’s another layer of debt that Americans do not have. (But we do have student debt and credit card debt.) The weight of the Yen is enormous.

Thus you have an 18 yearlong recession in Japan, but most things appear to be OK if not prosperous. For example, retail stores are loaded with the latest and greatest inventory, but the stores do not actually own that inventory…it’s all debt. And yes, it is factored/discounted. A mountain of debt held up only by the mutual confidence of the Japanese people. Screw up and you lose face, and nothing worse can happen to you than that. Face is the ultimate result of political correctness.

Japan is still afloat because their largest market, the U.S., is still buying. But mutual diversity is not an advantage in this case.  The mutual confidence among Japanese does not exist in America or Europe.  Maybe in China and South Korea.

Taxes in Japan are very high, so high that salaries are suppressed significantly. One unacknowledged consequence: the Japanese population is not replacing itself…very low birth rate.

A long recession is spiraling downward to an eventual depression which could make the nation, as they know it, become extinct. Pushed along with some other problems caused by immigration policies, Europe already followed Japan off the debt cliff. Italy, I believe the second largest economy there after Germany, also runs on 180 DSO or more.

There also, except by the grace of God, the U.S. is heading. Except, at the moment, the U.S. has no giant export product in hand with which to save the U.S. economy from its debt crisis.

Enter Trump’s big opportunity “to make America great again:” Revive and build the U.S. energy export industry.  That’s a 10 year project in the normal course of events.  If the nation were on a highly focused mission, like going to the moon or a Manhattan Project, we could have a new market in 5 years.  Better yet, the demand is there.

Below is a link to about 1000 peer reviewed science papers which are skeptical about human-cause global warming.  This is my response regarding the following absurd and mendacious statements in The Atlantic (Ref link below):

“While scientists continue to explore the consequences of climate change, there is essentially no debate among scientists about global warming’s “connection to the actions of mankind.” 

“Nor has there been a debate for years. Since at least 1995, the balance of evidence in climate science has indicated that human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions are behind the planet’s warming. Agreement on this question has only strengthened since. By 2012, an international panel of leading researchers in the field said there was at least a 95 percent chance that human activity has caused global warming since 1950.”

Ahem.

The Atlantic is publishing a lie.  In fact, there is plenty of debate and there are plenty of skeptics.

For example:

“…Kenneth Richard published his list of 500 climate catastrophe skeptic papers appearing in scientific journals in 2016 alone. It is the latest addition to the 282 papers published in 2015, and the 248 papers published in 2014, bringing the total number of peer-reviewed papers published over the past three years to more than 1000.”…

http://notrickszone.com/2017/01/02/crumbling-consensus-500-scientific-papers-published-in-2016-support-a-skeptical-position-on-climate-alarm/#sthash.aIWSPt8g.dpbs

Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon thinks the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has strayed way off track. “I’m not surprised by the large number or empirical evidence that rejects the CO2 dangerous global warming alarmism,” wrote Soon in an e-mail. “This sort of literature review ought to put the sort of biased, if not anti-science, reports by the UN IPCC to shame.”

Dr. Soon added: “It is high time for the wider public to not only bear witness to the unbalance and corruption of our science institutions, but also to demand answers on why there has been such a disregard for truth and fact.”

Mike Hulme said, “I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric. It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the [catastrophe] skeptics. How the wheel turns. Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science’s predictions?  To state that climate change will be ‘catastrophic’ hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which DO NOT emerge from empirical or theoretical science.” (emphasis added by Bud.)

(Mike Hulme, director of UK’s Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, told the BBC in November, 2006. The Tyndall Center advocates human-caused climate change.)

But this quote from the UN’s Own “Agenda 21” says: “Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”

And Al Gore, former U.S. vice president, and a large CO2 producer says: “Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with our planet. Unless we quickly and profoundly change the course of our civilization, we face an immediate and grave danger of destroying the worldwide ecological system that sustains life as we know it.”

Chris Folland of UK Meteorological Office says: “The data don’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models.”

It seems to me that there is plenty of debate about almost everything related to human-caused climate change/global warming.  So why did The Atlantic publish that?  It is beyond a biased opinion; The Atlantic is publishing a lie.

In fact, there is plenty of debate.  In a previous post I provided  an attachment in which Professor Lindzen clearly explained the few areas upon which scientists agree.  Climate science is an enormously complex field.  We do not yet know what we do not know.

The climate models, upon which proponents of human-caused global warming are basing their geo and human engineering recommendations, have not produced accurate forecasts.  Their models don’t work.  Their recommendations are based on models not data.  Chris Folland of UK Meteorological Office says: “The data don’t matter.” The models are not verified by data.  And, they want to shut down debate.

What could go wrong?  Plenty.   One model from Russia is producing far more accurate forecasts of world temperatures, though it has only been run a few times.  The model is forecasting global cooling as a result of periodic changes in the sun.  And man’s influence is so small it is not measurable and thus irrelevant.  It’s got nothing to do with man, which is the opposite of what The Atlantic published.

Shiver me timbers.  Proponents of human-caused climate change have obscured an important topic about ocean currents with “a cascade of value-laden assumptions which DO NOT emerge from empirical or theoretical science.” (emphasis added by Bud.)

Ref: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/01/what-a-real-debate-looks-like-in-climate-science/512444/

Paper with article by Professor Richard Lindzen:  http://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-Climate-Surprise-CO2C.pdf