The Supreme Court, Gay Parenting and Science (Part 1)

What does science say about gay parenting?

By Napp Nazworth , Christian Post Reporter

March 28, 2013|5:30 pm

As the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments this week in two cases involving gay marriage, some “friend of the court” briefs are asking the court to consider social science studies that supposedly confirm there is no difference in the well-being of children raised by gay couples and children raised by a mother and a father. Those studies, though, may be deeply flawed in their methodology and the conclusions drawn from their data.

“I think … that there’s substance to the point that sociological information is new. We have five years of information to weigh against 2,000 years of history or more,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said during Tuesday’s oral arguments for the case questioning the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8, which denied same-sex couples the right to marry.

Kennedy could have been thinking about an amicus brief filed by Professor’s Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield. There is no scientific basis to make any conclusions about what gay marriage would do for children raised by gay parents or do for society at large, Kass and Mansfield argued. They, therefore, urged the justices to rule based upon the law, not science.

Kass and Mansfield are not opposed to science. Indeed, they are themselves social scientists. Kass is the Madden-Jewett scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and Addie Clark Harding Professor Emeritus in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University. Their main concern, rather, is not that the judges will base their decisions upon science, but that they will base their decisions upon weak science, or a lack of enough science to draw conclusions.

Social scientists typically look for several factors when determining whether a study’s findings offer a valuable contribution to a research question. For a quantitative study, for instance, they want to see a large number of respondents, chosen at random from the population being studied. (Random means that everyone in the population has an equal chance of being chosen for the study.) Control groups are also expected in order to tell the difference between the group being studied and everyone else. And a study’s findings should be replicable, meaning that other researchers study the same research question and come to the same conclusion.

Most studies of gay parenting display few or none of these characteristics of reliable social scientific research, Kass and Mansfield point out. The studies that gay marriage proponents rely upon to argue that same-sex parents are just as good as opposite-sex parents have small non-random samples. In fact, most of data are based upon small groups of lesbian couples with above average education and higher than average levels of income. 

Professor Douglas W. Allen, who teaches economics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, came to a similar conclusion. In a paper published last year, Allen reviewed 52 studies of gay parenting from 1995 to 2010. Most of these studies concluded that gay parents performed just as well, or better, than opposite-sex parents – a conclusion that was not warranted given the limitations of those studies, Allen found.

Besides being based upon small, non-random samples, Allen found numerous other methodological problems. One problem, for instance, was that for many of the studies the well-being of the children was determined by asking the parents. Parents, obviously, are not an objective source. This may be even more true if the parents know that their answers will be used to answer whether their lifestyle choice is the best setting for the raising of their children. One study even said that its data suggests that children in same-sex households are less susceptible to child abuse because when the study asked same-sex parents if they abused their children, they answered “no.”

Some advocates of gay parenting point to the sheer number of studies showing favorable results as evidence that the science is conclusive. But, as Allen points out, a large amount of weak research does not add up to strong research: “A series of weak research designs and exploratory studies do not amount to a growing body of advanced research.” Allen also points out that most of these studies are authored by a small number of researchers and many use some of the same data sets.

Allen was also struck by the amount of political advocacy he found in these research articles. The conclusions almost always made recommendations regarding gay parenting for lawyers, judges and the like, but the research did not support those recommendations. One common tactic was to report a non-finding as a finding. For instance, it might be reported that no evidence was found that children of gay parents were worse off than children of heterosexual parents. This is certainly true, but so is the corollary – no evidence was found that children of gay parents were as well off as children of heterosexual parents. Yet, the corollary was not mentioned.

Allen concluded that the “intended audience of this research is not the scientific community – which sees through it – but the community of lawyers, judges, and politicians who will, and do, decide the fates of gay and lesbian rights. If the literature on gay parenting is to rise to the standards of social science, then it has to move beyond the pre-occupation with advocacy.”

The social sciences are decades away from being able to say anything conclusive about gay parenting, Kass and Mansfield point out. The reason is simple: gay parenting only recently became a widespread and socially acceptable phenomenon. So researchers are only beginning to reach a point where they can gather large, random samples that might include enough same-sex parents that they can make reliable comparisons with heterosexual parents. If such data becomes available, researchers still need to wait until the children of gay parents grow up so they can compare their well-being, using measures such as incarceration, school drop-out, suicide and college graduation rates, to the children of heterosexual parents.

While the sciences cannot say anything conclusive about gay parenting, there is a plethora of reliable scientific research on children raised in intact, biological two-parent households, and the differences between mothers and fathers in parenting. Part two of this series will look at what science says about that.

 

Read more at http://www.christianpost.com/news/the-supreme-court-gay-parenting-and-science-part-1-92858/#IO628czyrjAd3VSX.99

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S STEALTH TERMINATION OF CIA GLOBAL WARMING UNIT

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S STEALTH TERMINATION OF CIA GLOBAL WARMING UNIT

 

By NWV News Writer Jim Kouri
Posted 1:00 AM Eastern
November 28, 2012
© 2012 NewsWithViews.com

More than three years later, and after spending billions of taxpayer dollars, an Inside-the-Beltway watchdog group reported on Monday that President Barack Obama ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to quietly shutdown its example of government waste and duplication: the Center on Climate Change and National Security.

The scandal-plagued government agency responsible for providing national security intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers, the military, homeland security officials and law enforcement operated an insignificant special unit that focused on global warming, according to a watchdog group that’s proudly been a thorn in the side of the Obama White House.

Regardless of the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had already possessed a multi-billion dollar intelligence center for global warming, a new report by public-interest group Judicial Watch’s blog claims that the Obama administration believed the nation’s intelligence community needed yet another taxpayer-funded entity to better determine the impact of climate change on U.S. national security.

“This waste of money is even more shameful when you consider millions and millions of Americans out of work or losing their homes and here’s ‘Mr. Green Jeans’ Obama spending money to duplicate what’s already being done by his own government and the private sector,” said political consultant Mike Baker.

It was just a few years ago that the CIA opened its top-secret global warming headquarters, the Center on Climate Change and National Security. Its charter is not the science of climate change, but the national security impact of phenomena such as desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts, and heightened competition for natural resources, according to the Judicial Watch blog.

“The Center will provide support to American policymakers as they negotiate, implement, and verify international agreements on environmental issues. That is something the CIA has done for years. Decision makers need information and analysis on the effects climate change can have on security. The CIA is well positioned to deliver that intelligence,” said then CIA Director Leon Panetta, who is now the Secretary of Defense, where the new climate change center was instituted.

The Center assumed responsibility for coordinating with intelligence community partners on the review and declassification of imagery and other data that could be of use to scientists in their own climate-related research. This effort draws on imagery and other information that is collected in any event, assisting the US scientific community without a large commitment of resources, according to Judicial Watch

“No one really knows what goes on in the exclusive unit because it operates under a cloak of secrecy that rejects all public-records requests, despite President Obama’s promise to run a transparent government. What we do know is that the unit is led by senior specialists,” the JW blogger noted.

According to the JW blogger, in the last few years the Obama Administration has been quite active in its campaign to enlighten Americans about the ills ofglobal warming. A few months ago a group of esteemed scientists from several public universities warned that climate change will make food “dangerous” and add to the malnourishment of millions worldwide.Apparently, the CIA’s staff isn’t getting the job done because the Defense Science Board (DSB), a decades-old committee appointed to provide thePentagon with scientific and technical advice, says the U.S. intelligence community needs an organization that can assess the impacts of climate change on national security. And now, President Obama is giving the CIA climate change unit the thumbs down.

Special thanks to Judicial Watch’s director of public affairs, Jill Farrell, for her continued help and valuable information. Also thanks to this reporters contact within the intelligence community for his information.

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THE AWAKENING

 By Attorney Jonathan Emord

Author of “The Rise of Tyranny” and
“Global Censorship of Health Information” and
“Restore The Republic“
July 16, 2012
NewsWithViews.com

There is a massive aluminum sculpture of a giant emerging from beneath the earth, struggling to free himself, located at the National Harbor just outside of Washington, D.C. It is some 70 feet long and is entitled the Awakening. It is a magnificent spectacle. The creation of sculptor J. Seward Johnson, Jr., the Awakening was first located at Hains Point in Washington, D.C. in 1980. The Awakening seems to me an apt metaphor for our entire nation rising from a long slumber, expressing a collective will to reject servitude in favor of freedom.

One would hope that by November 2012 Americans would awaken to the reality that another four years of Barack Obama will add greatly to the depth of the earthen grave that this President has created for American commerce. One would hope that Americans would then choose to liberate the giant of free enterprise, allowing it to emerge from the burial plot Obama has created for it and sending Obama back to Chicago and to oblivion. But if we fail to remove Obama from office, the overwhelming force of a national debt racing past $16 trillion and a regulatory state bringing disabling markets at every turn will yield in time a collapse of the economy and, in turn, of the government that lives off of it. Then, for sure, the American people will awake by necessity.

They will awake to the realization that political promises of federal programs to cure every ill were lies. They will awake to the realization that with the advance of every regulatory agency there has been a retreat of individual liberty and prosperity. They will awake to the realization that our limited federal republic is no more, replaced by a massive, costly, and economically deadening unlimited bureaucratic oligarchy and that individual sovereignty has been replaced by state sovereignty. They will awake to the realization that liberty is indeed precious, best appreciated when lost, and that while asleep our liberty was drained by rapacious political leaders. We will awake to the realization that nothing is more essential than to regain lost liberties and accept the responsibility that comes with them.

It seems to me that the struggle for freedom is the remarkable recurrent force in human history, that no matter how great a nation’s fall into the abyss of state control there is always a revolution to give freedom another chance. We are driven from birth to overcome the shackles that bind. No enfant will put up with a crib beyond the first year because with the ability to climb out comes the will to make freedom a reality. The popular Western, now a classic, Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In” comes to mind. Regardless of political stripe, when each has been reduced to a life of limited opportunity or pre-determined fate by a government that presumes to know better than the individual what is in that individual’s best interest, all become, as Jefferson remarked at the time of the American revolution, “ good . . . Whigs, cordial in [our] free principles.”

Because we have for so long endured deprivations of liberty that have come with the explosive growth of the regulatory state of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there will come with our new awakening indignation, a high degree of anger born of the agony that accompanies profound disappointment and betrayal. And then the voices of the founding generation will ring anew in every American ear. We will remember the meaning and import of the Declaration of Independence. We will appreciate as John Locke did, as Algernon Sidney did, as Edmund Burke did, as Thomas Paine did, as Sam Adams did, and as Thomas Jefferson did that, to quote Paine, “those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” We will throw off the yoke of government and put on the mantle of freedom, assuming responsibility for everything that the government falsely promised it could do for us if only we would be less than free.

At that awakening, which is in truth a reawakening, Americans will rediscover who they were meant to be and what in fact defined them as unique among the peoples of the world for over two hundred years. Around the world people have always yearned to be free but only here, and only for a brief epoch, did we actually achieve the result of a Constitution built on the premise of individual sovereignty and embued with safeguards, long since rent and violated, to ensure that the national government would be strictly limited and would not stand in the way of freedom and progress.

Those lessons were derived from centuries of servitude to absolute monarchs and a rights revolution during the Enlightenment Era that swept Europe but culminated only here in a written Constitution for a government intended to be disabled, inefficient, and largely irrelevant except in the most extraordinary of circumstances. My how things have changed, and not at all for the better.

© 2012 Jonathan W. Emord – All Rights ReservedBut the promise of liberty and the indispensability of it to our own self-determination make it irresistible. The desire to be free is a far greater force than any other influencing the mind of man. We will be free, again. We will get there even if this time we must endure a long and painful decline into the depths of despair before we all embrace a mighty hope, fed by our collective memory of who we once were; translated, that hope will yield action from all, for the simple fact remains humanity cannot long endure life without liberty.

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Jonathan W. Emord is an attorney who practices constitutional and administrative law before the federal courts and agencies. Congressman Ron Paul calls Jonathan “a hero of the health freedom revolution” and says “all freedom-loving Americans are in [his] debt . . . for his courtroom [victories] on behalf of health freedom.” He has defeated the FDA in federal court a remarkable eight times, six on First Amendment grounds, and is the author of Amazon bestsellers The Rise of Tyranny, Global Censorship of Health Information, and Restore the Republic. He is also the American Justice columnist for U.S.A. Today Magazine. For more info visitEmord.com.

Website: Emord.com

E-Mail: jwemord@gmail.com

Earth Summit Babble

- Accuracy In Media - http://www.aim.org -

Earth Summit Babble

Posted By Alan Caruba On June 22, 2012 @ 4:10 pm In Guest Columns | Comments Disabled

Why anyone still believes anything the UN Environmental Program and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to say is one of those great imponderable questions. To prepare you for the flood of totally idiotic predictions to which you will be treated during the June 20-21 Earth Summit, here are just a few and I strongly advise you to ignore all of them.

A 550-page preparatory UN report, put together by “600 experts”, the Global Environmental Outlook-intended to soften up global suckers-predicts that Earth’s environmental systems are nearly at “their biophysical limits” thus subjecting the Earth to “irreversible and possibly cataclysmic world changes” and “If humanity does not urgently change its ways” it is doomed.

Notably, the Earth Summit will abandon “global warming” and “climate change” as its main theme and instead focus on “sustainability”, the utterly bogus notion that humans are using up all of the Earth’s resources.

The people most famous for really bad predictions these days are environmentalists. Rachel Carson kicked it off fifty years ago with her book, “Silent Spring”, assuring everyone that all the birds would fall dead out of the sky because of pesticide use. These days they are more likely to be chopped to shreds by wind turbines.

Ever since the early days of environmental hysteria just about every awful scenario cooked up in the fevered brains of the Greens has become front page news. There is method to their madness and it comes down to a simple equation: Scaring People Equals Money and Power.

Environmentalism is all about controlling you while picking your pocket. By any other name it is Socialism or its big brother Communism. It depends on lies backed up by a massive propaganda machine, funded by ultra-wealthy foundations, by governments who support Green programs of all sorts, and by the members of an endless succession of environmental organizations.

For example, you may recall that global warming, a massive heating of the Earth due to carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas emissions” was predicted to occur twenty, thirty or fifty years hence when the hoax kicked off in the late 1980s. Keep that in mind when the Rio+20 United Nations Earth Summit is held in Rio de Janeiro, the site of the first conference.

Supported by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the so-called “scientists” backed up their claims with all manner of computer models, dubious graphs, and tons of “scientific” papers to convince governments and people that massive changes had to occur-primarily a huge reduction in the use of fossil fuels-or we were all doomed.

Exposed in November 2009 by the “Climategate” release of thousands of emails between the perpetrators, I still find it astonishing that not one single member of this conspiracy has gone to jail. Indeed, in 2007 the IPCC and Al Gore shared a Nobel Peace Prize.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has issued a formal request that all the “researchers” who contributed to the global warming hoax be granted immunity from prosecution. Unbelievable, eh?

Back in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert released the findings of his calculations to let the world know that U.S. oil production would “peak” between 1965 and 1970. It didn’t. What has since slowed oil production in the U.S. has been the refusal of the Obama administration to issue the permits necessary to drill on federal lands and offshore. The world is afloat on an ocean of oil and, in addition, the U.S. is not running out of coal or natural gas.

Similarly, all the population predictions made by Prof. Paul R. Erhlich and his wife in 1968 have proven false as well. A colleague of his, Dr. John Holdren, is the science advisor to the President. One of the central themes of environmentalism is that humanity is to blame for harming the Earth and that there are too many people.

The other theme is that all these people are “consuming” too much of the Earth’s natural resources and should be penned up in cities and kept out of most places on Earth in order to protect its “endangered species”, etc. Meanwhile, as this is being written, huge sections of western states’ forests are going up in flames thanks to Mother Nature setting off fires off with lightning strikes.

Does it surprise anyone that the Earth Summit is calling for a “climate fund” and wants nations to kick in $100 billion? The proposal for the fund called “The Earth We Want” covers an extraordinary range of topics that includes gender equality, woman’s empowerment, and all the usual social justice and environmental clap-trap that is intended to ensnare everyone in a web of laws, regulations, and treaties aimed directly at eliminating the freedoms the West has and that many in other parts of the world want.

There is one good reason to not ignore the Earth Summit. They are telling you just what kind of an Orwellian and totalitarian world they have in mind for you.

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Article printed from Accuracy In Media: http://www.aim.org

URL to article: http://www.aim.org/guest-column/earth-summit-babble/

 

THE NEW ECO-SCARE: WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!

HEAT OF THE MOMENT!

Exclusive: Brian Sussman covers Rio U.N. conference 20 years after Agenda 21′s birth

Published: 1 day ago

by BRIAN SUSSMANEmail | Archive

Brian Sussman is the author of “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda Will Dismantle America.” He also hosts the morning-drive radio show on KSFO in San Francisco.More ↓

• The U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development is wrapping up in Rio de Janeiro, and we’re all gonna die. That’s the claim made by the eco-tyrannists at this years’ annual international environmental confab. Just the mere presence of so many human beings, they claim, is enough to send the entire world into a complete species meltdown, much like the cataclysmic event that killed off the dinosaurs millions of years ago.

This year’s gathering of representatives from virtually every nation (and environmental organization) on the planet is meant to further the goals presented at the first Rio “Earth Summit” in 1992, via a detailed plan known as Agenda 21 – the global political agenda for the 21st century. The 1992 conference was unique in that it made global warming a household term, introduced the planet to Al Gore and presented the details of a term conjured up by U.N. masterminds nearly 10 years earlier: “sustainable development.”

In short, sustainable development insists that the human species is certainly no more significant than any other species on the planet, and in fact should be discriminated against because, left unchecked, it will do great harm or even destroy all other species. Sustainable development is described by its architect, Maurice Strong, founder of the U.N. Environmental Program, as akin to “putting our planet, Earth Incorporated, if you will, on a sound business basis.”

That “business plan” sees liberty-loving humans as carriers of a plague. It’s prescribed cure is liberty-sapping, heavy-handed regulations and laws designed to control human behavior.

As for Agenda 21, as I write in “Eco-Tyranny,” it’s sustainable development’s version of a PowerPoint presentation. The Agenda begins with a preamble that speaks “the fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own; but together we can – in a global partnership for sustainable development.”

It should be no surprise that Agenda 21 deems universal health care a “right.” It also redefines wealth, insisting on “the need for new concepts of wealth and prosperity.” The Agenda also encourages government-sponsored societal brainwashing, stating, “Achieving the goals of environmental quality and sustainable development will require … changes in consumption patterns.” Indeed, “Governments themselves [can] also play a role in [determining] consumption … and can have a considerable influence on both corporate decisions and public perceptions.”

Of course, Agenda 21 also heralds the abolition of private property rights, something Maurice Strong began pushing via the U.N. in 1976 at the Conference on Human Settlements, aka “Habitat I.” At the event Strong proclaimed:

• “Private land ownership is a principal instrument of accumulating wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable.”
• “Public ownership of land is justified in favor of the common good, rather than to protect the interest of the already privileged.”
• “Zoning and land-use planning [are to be used] as a basic instrument of land policy in general and of control of land-use changes in particular.”
• “Fiscal controls [are to be employed], e.g. property taxes, tax penalties and tax incentives [in order to eradicate private lands].

As the Agenda states, governments shall “formulate appropriate land-use policies and introduce planning regulations specially aimed at the protection of eco-sensitive zones against physical disruption by construction and construction-related activities.”

This plank from Rio has done more to abolish physical private property in the United States than any other governmental policy.

Coinciding with its plan to usher us into a brave new world, Agenda 21, is responsible for promoting “green jobs,” as well as high-speed rail and other mass transit projects that “promote the use of labor-intensive construction and maintenance technologies which generate employment in the construction sector for the underemployed labor force found in most large cities.”

And we can’t forget the hidden crown jewel of the sustainable development scheme: population control. Agenda 21 demands, “Population policy should also recognize the role played by human beings in environmental and development concerns.” Additionally the document reveals that the population-control method of choice is abortion. Cloaking their message with terms like “curative health facilities,” (a deceptive alias for abortion clinics), the Agenda declares, “Governments should take active steps to implement programs to establish and strengthen preventive and curative health facilities that include women-centered, women-managed, safe and effective reproductive health care and affordable, accessible services, as appropriate, for the responsible planning of family size.”

Now, as the U.N. doubles down on their global sustainable development ploy in Rio, they are rebranding the issue in a new agenda, alleging that the “greatest threat” facing the planet is the extinction of species.

Trouble is, just like with global warming, extinction of species is not a problem.

The massive species losses being cited in Rio are based on sloppy extrapolations, wild guesses and unfounded presumptions – all force-fed into biased, non-validated, virtual-reality computer models that assume increased carbon dioxide levels will raise global temperatures so high that plants, birds, reptiles and animals will be exterminated.

Like their ridiculous global cooling, global warming, climate change scenarios, there is no evidence to support any of these bizarre extinction scenarios.

In a nutshell – we’re not gonna die. However, if we let the U.N. have their way, liberty will be pushed to the brink.

Don’t miss Brian Sussman’s brilliant expose of the debilitating green movement: “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America”

Masters of Hypocrisy: the Union of Concerned Scientists

by Donna Laframboise A new report funded by big oil and big tobacco has the chutzpah to complain about corporate influence on the climate debate. A month ago I was contacted by a journalist who works for Greenwire, an American publication that describes itself as the “leader in energy and environmental policy news.” He sent me a series of questions, one group of which read as follows: Many of these groups (Heartland, CEI, etc.) get donations from foundations linked to the fossil fuels industry. Should that in your opinion cast any doubt on their motives in questioning climate change? Or is that unimportant? CEI stands for the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Like the Heartland Institute, it is a think tank that believes societies prosper when governments reduce – rather than expand – red tape. It believes in the power of ordinary people and small businesses to create jobs and the sort of wealth that funds schools, hospitals, the arts, and so forth. This is a perfectly legitimate – even compelling – perspective. Those who think that government bureaucrats dreaming up thousands of new regulations every year is what makes the world go round are equally entitled to their point-of-view. But one doesn’t need to do much reading on green websites before getting the impression that “right-wing” and “conservative” think tanks such as the Heartland and CEI are indistinguishable from Satan. The big piece of evidence for this, we’re told, is that they accept money from fossil fuel companies. My e-mail response to that particular line of inquiry on the part of the journalist read as follows: I have written numerous blog posts about the fossil fuels funding issue, and my analysis is quite different from the one that is normally heard. The short version is that green groups take lots of fossil fuel money directly – and lots more from fossil-fuel funded foundations. The source of the Rockefeller Foundation fortune is Standard Oil. John D. Rockefeller was its founder. If fossil fuel money is dirty when skeptics take it, why isn’t it dirty whenGreenpeace helps itself to the Rockefeller fortune? Why isn’t it dirty when Rajendra Pachauri (the chairman of the IPCC) uses it to fund his annual sustainability conference – both via direct sponsorships from oil companies, and via grants from the Rockefeller Foundation (see the bottom of my blog post here)? If people really believe that oil money taints things, why doesn’t anyone care about the 40 years of oil funding that has gone to the World Wildlife Fund? The WWF’s first corporate sponsor was Shell – see my blog post:http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/04/11/the-wwfs-vast-pool-of-oil-money/ Why isn’t there more concern about the $25 million in fossil fuel funding the Sierra Club took recently – see my blog post:http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/17/big-oil-money-for-me-but-not-for-thee/ My background is investigative journalism. It seems to me the environmental press corps has been overlooking some profound shortcomings in the greens’ standard arguments about fossil fuel funding. I can find no evidence that any of these comments made it into print. There are many potential explanations for this, some of which would have been beyond the journalist’s control. But I was reminded of the exchange while reading an absolutely brilliant pieceby Ronald Bailey over at Reason magazine. It’s about a new report issued by a left-leaning activist organization that goes by the highly misleading name of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). One need not be a scientist to be considered a member of this group. Indeed, as blogger Anthony Wattshas demonstrated, so long as you provide the UCS with a credit card it’ll sign you up. Even if you are a dog. See here, here, here, and here. The report is titled A Climate of Corporate Control: How Corporations Have Influenced the U.S. Dialogue on Climate Science and Policy. It’s 72 pages long and may be downloaded here. The first page tells us the report is a project of the “scientific integrity program” of the UCS. The Acknowledgements page informs us that it was made possible by funding from, among others, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. Ah, yes. And where does that entity get its money? As has been mentioned over at the Climate-Resistance blog, the Grantham Foundation is bankrolled by hedge-fund manager Jeremy Grantham. In August of last year his fund owned millions of shares in fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil. The total value of those shares amounted to nearly $1.5 billion. The dividends associated with that portion of his portfolio alone added $28 million to his bottom line. But wait, there’s more. According to this investment column, dated three weeks ago, Grantham’s hedge fund also has “large holdings” in tobacco giant Philip Morris (backuplink). So the Union of Concerned Scientists has released a climate-related report that has, itself, been indirectly funded by big oil and big tobacco. The primary purpose of this report is to complain that corporations are influencing the climate debate. Honestly. Moral coherence seems to get rarer by the day, doesn’t it? Bailey’s evisceration of this report makes even me squirm. He notes that the Los Angeles Times coverage of the UCS report discussed General Electric. This quote from the newspaper article provides a sense of the quality of the report’s analysis – as well as the gullible mainstream media’s presentation of it: General Electric has backed six environmental and non-partisan research groups that accept the scientific consensus on climate change, including the Brookings Institution and the Nature Conservancy. At the same time, it has funded four organizations that reject or question the consensus, including the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation. Moreover, it was a member of several organizations that have doggedly fought greater environmental regulation, including the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. [article backed up here] Notice how this works? Merely being a member of the US Chamber of Commerce is sufficient to condemn you in the paranoid, conspiracy-riddled minds of the climate activists over at the USC – the same activists who are taking Jeremy Grantham’s tobacco money. Care to guess what the title of that newspaper article was? Study accuses corporations of hypocrisy on climate change. But getting back to GE, here’s Bailey: According to the UCS report, among the four GE-supported organizations that “misrepresent” climate-change science is the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website. So what vast sums of money did the duplicitous executives at General Electric lavish on the Reason Foundation in 2008 and 2009 to support an implied campaign to traduce climate science? Exactly $325. How much did GE spend on matching and direct grants on the six think tanks identified by the UCS as being pro-climate consensus? That would be $497,744. [bold added] Bailey did some double-checking with the Reason Foundation, which confirmed that it received $225 in 2008 and $100 in 2009 from General Electric: Puzzled, I called up Dr. Francesca Grifo, a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists and director of its Scientific Integrity Program. She put me on speakerphone with her and the author of the report, Gretchen Goldman. I asked them if these minuscule donations were why GE was listed as a corporate supporter of the Reason Foundation. They answered yes. Seriously? Yes. They added that GE’s 990 forms did not disclose what the funds would be used for, darkly implying that the money might be directed to what the UCS might regard as climate disinformation campaigns. Bailey continues: In a memo (pdf) sent to me the next day (at my request), Grifo explained that the UCS did not have a threshold dollar amount for funds in their analysis. She added that GE’s 990 forms do not provide further information on the nature of these payments. But that is simply not true. The 990 forms clearly indicate to even the casual investigator that the payments are matching funds for employees’ donations, meaning that individual GE employees gave money, and the company matched it. (GE matching fund donations to the Union of Concerned Scientists for those same two years totaled $6,980, or 21 times more than was donated to the Reason Foundation.) Grifo’s memo does note that the UCS report admits “that because the details of these affiliations are not publicly available, we cannot directly link specific donations to climate-related activities.” Indeed not. But it appears that UCS nonetheless wanted credulous reporters to uncritically accept these vaguely-referenced payments as evidence of underhanded corporate influence. Digging further into GE’s 990 forms one finds that with just a few significant exceptions, all of the money donated to the various groups is in fact corporate matching funds for employee donations. In other words, GE executives had no hand in directing these donations. [link in the original; article backed-up here] This, ladies and gentleman, is a textbook case of how cavalier climate activists can be with the truth. The USC report smears General Electric for committing the unpardonable sin of matching trivial donations made by its employees. The fact that the USC itself benefited from this exact same mechanism during those same two years at a ratio of 21 to 1 apparently caused them no concern. No one at the USC, it seems, worried that the organization might be being a little unfair. Want to talk about hypocrisy ? The Union of Concerned Scientists are masters of it. . . Donna Laframboise | June 8, 2012 at 10:55 am | Tags: activist scientists, funding issues,media, tobacco, Union of Concerned Scientists | Categories: activist scientists, ethical & philosophical, media, money & funding, tobacco | URL: http://wp.me/pSEKJ-3fH

FARMER PANIC! CROPS DIE AS GOV’T BLOCKS WELLS

 

WND EXCLUSIVE

FARMER PANIC! CROPS DIE AS GOV’T BLOCKS WELLS

Big Brother refuses to allow citizens to rescue harvest

Published: 9 hours ago

 

By Jack Minor

GREELEY, Colo. – Farmers in Colorado are watching their fields dry up amid one of the worst droughts in the state’s history.

But just a few feet beneath them, the water is so plentiful it’s flooding basements and causing septic systems to overflow.

Yet the government will not permit farmers to pump the water to save their crops.

With a lower-than-normal snowpack, farmers in northeastern Colorado who rely on the South Platte River are facing severe water shortages in which they are not able to even water some of their crops.

Dennis Hoshiko, a fourth-generation onion farmer with 2,500 acres, said he has let around 15 percent of his land sit fallow this season because of a lack of water.

“We have entire sections where the seeds were planted a month ago in dry earth, and they have not sprouted yet because they have not been watered.”

While it may seem to be a case of battling Mother Nature, the problem could be solved if government officials would simply flip a switch.

Many of the farmers have wells that draw groundwater for use in situations like this. But in 2006, the Colorado Supreme Court ordered 440 wells shut down and curtailed the pumping of another 1,000.

Under long-established Colorado water doctrine, water is distributed under the principle of first in use, first in right whereby prior users have senior rights to junior users. The decision to shut down the wells came about during a historic drought in the early 2000s that caused water in the South Platte River to become scarce.

Senior right holders such as the cities of Boulder, Centennial, Highlands Ranch and Sterling, which had experienced phenomenal growth in the 1990s, became concerned their water supply in the river basin was being depleted by junior water-right well owners who were pumping water from the Alluvium Aquifer, which flows into the South Platte River Basin.

Following the shutdowns, the volume of water discharged into the artificial recharge systems in the South Platte Basin has increased, reaching more than 350,000 acre-feet in 2009. The increase in ground water has now come to the point where local basements are being flooded, causing damage to the homes.

Doug Leafgren, president of Northern Colorado Geotech, which conducts soil and percolation testing, said his organization has noticed higher groundwater levels during their subsurface investigations in the county over the past four or five years.

Glen Fritzler, a farmer who operates the nationally known Fritzler Corn Maze that has been featured on the “Today” show, said he has spent more than $50,000 in home repairs because of flooding over the past few years.

While the flooding is a concern, Fritzler said the rising groundwater levels are causing area septic systems to fail, forcing human waste to rise to the surface.

Leafgren said septic systems require four feet of soil above a “limiting zone” to work effectively.

“If an older system previously maintained four feet of suitable soil, but groundwater has since decreased this zone, there is potential for contamination of the groundwater system with human waste,” he said. “It could also be possible that higher groundwater would cause the waste to come to the ground surface.”

Despite the rising ground-water levels, officials still refuse to let the farmers turn on their wells, and that means many farmers will be out of water in the next few weeks.

“If we are not allowed to turn our wells on, our crops will dry up and we will lose everything,” Fritzler said. “What is so maddening is that we have the water we need right under our feet, and it is so plentiful it is flooding our basements. We cannot use it.”

Recognizing the severity of the situation, the state legislature recently passed a bill commissioning a study, but it is not required to be completed until June 1, 2013. There is no provision in the legislation requiring officials to permit farmers to turn the wells on before then.

State Sen. Scott Renfroe, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the legislation originally had those provisions, but it was stripped from the final legislation.

“It was not stripped by Democrats, because in Colorado water knows no party lines,” he said. “The opposition came from those who have senior water rights which are generally the big cities such as Denver and Boulder.”

Renfroe said he agrees the wells need to be turned on now. However, he said the study is at least a step in the right direction.

“We have farmers who are hurting from both a lack of water and rising water table,” he said. “Some have said the salt content is so high their soil only has two years of productive use left.”

Renfroe added: “This study should have been done five years ago when the wells were first turned off. I know it’s a baby step, but it’s a huge accomplishment when you consider the environment at the capital. There are many people who want to maintain the status quo. I understand the concerns of senior water holders, and this legislation has a lot of protections for them, but we need to find a way to benefit everybody.”

Fritzler said while he is glad the study will be conducted, he and other farmers cannot wait until next year.

“I have enough irrigation water from the South Platte for perhaps two to three more weeks. The only way we could go beyond that would be for Denver to get significant rainfall every three to five days and that isn’t going to happen.”

Hoshiko said he is in better shape than many farmers, because he has been able to purchase senior water rights but noted that many farmers are not as fortunate.

“Last night I saw a 14-year-old boy shoveling ditches and getting ready to do flood irrigation after the sun went down, and right beside him is a well that is capable of producing 1,200 gallons a minute, but they can’t touch it,” Hoshiko said. “The crops are sitting in dry dirt because we are in one of the worst droughts in Colorado history and we can’t use the water that is right under our feet.”

He said what is frustrating is that droughts like the current one are precisely the reason the wells were drilled.

“Our predecessors built these wells years ago to get us through droughts like this. If they were alive today they would slap us silly for how we are wasting this resource.”

Click here to print.

TO KILL A PIGLET

by Attorney Scott Tips, JD

May 25, 2012
NewsWithViews.com

The State of Michigan does Harper Lee one better with its “Farm Kill” Orders

There were 20 of them, cute and innocent as could be. The farmer raised his shotgun and pumped one shot after another into each one of them, killing every last piglet, and their mothers too. This was heart-wrenching for the farmer, but he knew he had no choice since the State of Michigan was about to descend upon him with a SWAT-style team intending to arrest him as a felon if any of his pigs were found alive on his property. His crime? Harboring an animal that the State had designated as an “Invasive Species.”[1] And this farmer’s tragedy was not the only one to play out in the State, there were thousands of others facing similar dilemmas.

The Invasive Species Order

The Michigan Invasive Species Order (ISO) that kick-started this series of tragedies went into effect on April 1, 2012. Issued by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) in December 2010, the ISO prohibited all “feral” swine, even on private property.[2] Unfortunately for those small family farmers breeding heritage pigs, the ISO identified invasive-species pigs using incredibly vague and common characteristics that would cover virtually all pigs and hogs.

As opponents of the ISO have contended, “Pigs can be identified as invasive – and thus eligible for slaughter – regardless of how long they have been part of animal husbandry in Michigan. They will be rounded up according to the color of their fur (black or striped), their undercoat color (lighter than the topcoat), whether their tails are straight or curly, and other arbitrary characteristics.”[3]

The MDNR alleges that it has a feral-pig problem in the State; and heritage breeds, which are raised outdoors in the Sun and with real soil beneath their hooves in fenced-in spaces on family farms, are wrongly threatened with elimination because they “might escape” and become feral. Interestingly enough, less healthy and certainly less happy pigs that are confined to concrete-floored pens and are treated like factory-line commodities have been given a pass by the MDNR. Ironically, then, the inbred “modern” pigs raised in factory farms are permitted to live while the more genetically-diverse and old-fashioned breeds are destroyed.

The civil fines for violating the cited sections of the Invasive Species Act can be daunting. They range from $1,000 to $20,000 per violation. Kick in the threat of jail time where the authorities meet resistance and you have a very motivating legal combination forcing men to shoot their pigs.

Shakespeare to Blame

On one hand, it’s hard not to sympathize with those who don’t want native species of animals wiped out through the thoughtless introduction of other species. In 1988, the Eurasian Zebra Mussel was most probably dumped out of bilge water into Lake St. Clair, one of the Great Lakes. Today, they are everywhere, clogging pipes, fouling ship hulls throughout the Great Lakes, and outcompeting and eliminating native mussels. Another problem, the foreign Tiger Shrimp, has been spotted in the Gulf of Mexico and along the U.S. East Coast in rapidly increasing numbers in the last few years. These shrimp feed on, among other things, those shrimp native to the Gulf.[4]Some say the outcome of that inter-species battle, in the decades to come, is already a foregone conclusion. Others say, pass the garlic butter.

And in 1890 and 1891, a Bronx resident, Eugene Schieffelin, and his cohorts – with the addled notion that every bird mentioned in the works of Shakespeare should be introduced into the New World – released about 100 starlings from the Old World into Central Park. Today, starlings in North America number more than 200 million! Other bird species that compete for the same aviary ecological niches have correspondingly declined.

A Federal law, called the National Invasive Species Act, was passed in 1996 to try to augment existing controls for these problems.[5] It simply reauthorized and amended the 1990 Non-indigenous Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act, which dealt with water-borne species. But individual States have their own Invasive Species Orders that they have enacted and enforce with varying degrees of success. As is the trend these days with most governmental actions, the perpetrators are not the Legislatures but rather the unelected bureaucrats to whom the Legislatures or the Chief Executives have delegated (read, abdicated) their authority. In this case, the opening clause of the Michigan ISO has the MDNR announcing its right to issue an administrative order affecting the lives of millions of humans and animals.

The Usual Suspects

Lurking behind the scenes, of course, are the usual suspects – the lobbyists and their bosses, the “concerned” competitors who only want to do what is “right.” Amazingly, though, these competitors’ definition of “right” always seems to fall on the side of what will enhance their profit margins. As Karl Marx once wrote, “There is a direct connection between a person’s pocketbook and their heart.” He may have been a rotten philosopher, but when it came to this perceived link, Marx definitely had his finger on the pulse of humanity.

With the drop-dead date of April 1st (for enforcement of the ISO on pig farms) staring them in the face, Mark Baker of Bakers Green Acres, appeared in front of the Michigan Senate Agriculture Committee to ask that the Senators rescind the MDNR’s Declaratory Ruling specifying the characteristics of prohibited swine, arguing that the Ruling is both biologically and scientifically unsound. Baker’s State Senator had arranged this hearing; and, according to witnesses and the actions that subsequently took place, Baker was evidently very convincing and it seemed as if enough Senators would grant the requested rescission, or at least a 90-day stay.[6]

In a news release, Baker reiterated his arguments. “The DNR says certain breeds of pigs must be banned because there are feral pigs in Michigan,” said Baker. “My pigs, however, are not feral. They are kept inside a fence and are under the care of my family. It is impossible to genetically differentiate between swine, so the department decided certain pigs will be banned due to their appearance. The characteristics they outlined are ridiculous because all pigs have those traits. Honestly, the entire thing seems like a bad April Fool’s joke, but unfortunately for pig farmers like me, it’s not.”[7]

Not to be outdone, the Big Pork industry lobbyists, representing the Michigan Pork Producers Association, reportedly pulled Michigan State Senators out into the hall for private meetings. It was not reported what passed between the Senators and Big Pork’s representatives; but when the Senate Committee reconvened, those “hallway” Senators withdrew their support for Baker and his Senator. The ISO was confirmed and went into effect on April 1, 2012.[8] Big Money won again, using the coercive tools of government to obtain by force what it could not win fairly in the free marketplace.

The Fight Continues

Lawsuits and other actions abound. Mark Baker and three other parties have retained attorney Joseph O’Leary to carry forward their lawsuit against the MDNR to stop that Agency from continuing to overstep its authority by entering upon private property. At the same time, the MDNR has civil suits pending against pig-farmer Ronald McKendrick and of course his wife Charlene (using the old, pressure-the-wife-to-get-the-husband-to-cave tactic) as well as an Upper Peninsula pig producer, asking the Court to force them to “depopulate” their remaining prohibited swine.[9] Piling onto the fight are two on-line petitions to get the MDNR off the backs of the small farmers.[10]

The anti-MDNR petitioners have said it best: “Small family farms represent the backbone of a local, sustainable food system. While huge industrial farms dominate the market, small farms have been able to thrive by providing high-quality food raised in environmentally healthy ways. This includes livestock humanely raised on pasture.”[11]

The MDNR is actively and dramatically expanding its reach from public lands into farms and other private property. This is a wrongful and unconstitutional breach of private-property rights, especially upon persons and their livestock, neither of which have caused any harm whatsoever. There are Federal remedies available to stop these blatant violations of the McKendricks’, Baker’s, and others’ Constitutional rights and these injured parties would be well-advised to investigate filing suits in Federal court to remedy the wrongs done to them. Clearly, the MDNR has become yet another rogue agency.

Small farmers deserve every bit as much protection of their property rights as do the big factory farmers, and it should be recognized especially by a State charged with protecting the health of the public that those farmers raising heritage breeds are helping to preserve genetic diversity and hardier breeds. Just as importantly, they are providing more-ethically raised meats and a real choice for consumers. These farmers, though, are not to be supported in their legal battles simply because they are small producers, they are worthy of support because they have been legally wronged. Large or small, we should all be equally protected in our private-property rights and anything less than equal protection under the law is an injustice.

Ironically, enterprising litigants and their attorneys might consider researching the application of these ISOs, or variants thereof, as part of a legal basis to launch novel challenges in the courts against Genetically Modified/Genetically Engineered crops and seeds. “Food” crops such as Monsanto corn, soy, and other altered grains are, after all, non-native and “invasive species.” The owners of the patents will argue, naturally, that these are the same species and that therefore there is no difference; but if that were true, then it would completely undercut those same owners’ arguments before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that their patented crops are distinctive enough to deserve patent protection. They cannot have it both ways. And just maybe, as with Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird, an ISO might surprise us and turn out to be a good guy after all.P.S. ISO’s Real Promise

© 2012 – Scott Tips – All Rights Reserved

Related Article:

1- Michigan SWAT Teams Invade Farms, Forces Farmer to Kill His Own Livestock

Footnotes:

1. Bakers Green Acres, accessed May 3, 2012.
2. “Invasive Species Order,” accessed May 3, 2012.
3. “Governor, State of Michigan: Stop the Imminent Slaughter of Heritage Pigs on Small Farms in Michigan,” accessed May 3, 2012.
4. Eyewitness News, “Asian Tiger Shrimp Potential Shrimp Industry Threat,” May 1, 2012, accessed May 3, 2012.
5. “National Invasive Species Act.”
6. “Big Pig Lobbyist Uses Cloakroom Tactics to Foil Small Farm Defense,” Apr. 3, 2012, accessed May 3, 2012.
7. “Booher Calls on Governor to Rescind Invasive Species Order on Swine,” accessed on May 3, 2012; See a responsive, undated MDNR press release,which can be found here.
8. “Big Pig Lobbyist Uses Cloakroom Tactics to Foil Small Farm Defense,” Apr. 3, 2012, accessed on May 3, 2012.
9. “Invasive Swine Prompts DNR Visit to Renegade Ranch, Case in Court Friday,” accessed May 3, 2012.
10. Baker’s Green Acres; (see two petitions to be found there, which you are encouraged to sign if you live in Michigan and agree with the petitioners), accessed May 3, 2012.
11. Ibide

Scott Tips received his Bachelor of Arts degree, magna cum laude, from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1976, studied at the Sorbonne (Paris I) from 1976-1977, and obtained his Juris Doctorate degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 1980, where he was the Managing Editor of the California Law Review. A California-licensed attorney, he has specialized in food-and-drug law and trademark law, but also engages in business litigation, general business law, and nonprofit organizations, with an international clientele.

Since 1989, Mr. Tips has been the General Counsel for the National Health Federation, the World’s oldest health-freedom organization for consumers, and is now its president. He also writes a regular column for NewsWithViews.com and Whole Foods Magazine called Legal Tips, a column he started in 1984. Currently, Mr. Tips is occupying much of his time with health-freedom issues involving the Codex Alimentarius Commission and its and other attempts to limit individual freedom of choice in health matters.

To understand better the Codex Alimentarius Commission and the global food standards and guidelines that it is creating, you must read Codex Alimentarius – Global Food Imperialism. This book is a collection of articles by those few health-freedom activists with first-hand knowledge of Codex and the dangers that it poses to our health and health freedom. Compiled by Scott Tips, this easy-to-read book can be purchased here.

Website: National Health Federation

E-Mail: sct@thenhf.com

America’s Real Climate and Environmental Crisis

By Paul Driessen

5/25/2012

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says we face serious threats to human health, welfare and justice. She’s absolutely right. However, the crisis is not due to factory or power plant emissions, or supposed effects of “dangerous manmade global warming.”

The crisis is the result of policies and regulations that her EPA is imposing in the name of preventing climate change and other hypothetical and exaggerated environmental problems. It is those government actions that are severely impacting Americans’ health, welfare, and pursuit of happiness and justice.

After Congress rejected cap-tax-and-trade, President Obama said there are “other ways to skin the cat.”

By hyper-regulating carbon dioxide, soot, mercury, “cross-state air pollution” from sources hundreds of miles away, and other air and water emissions, EPA intends to force numerous coal-fired power plants to shut down years before their productive life is over; block the construction of new coal-fired power plants, because none will be able to slash their carbon dioxide emissions to half of what average coal-fired plants now emit, without employing expensive (and nonexistent) CO2 capture and storage technologies; and sharply reduce emissions from cars, factories, refineries and other facilities, regardless of the cost.

EPA has also issued 588 pages of rules for hydraulic fracturing for critically needed oil and natural gas, while the Obama Administration has vetoed the Keystone XL pipeline and made 95% of all publicly owned (but government controlled) lands and resources off limits to leasing, exploration, drilling and mining.

These actions reflect President Obama’s campaign promise to “bankrupt any company that tries to build a new coal-fired power plant,” replace hydrocarbons with heavily subsidized solar, wind and biofuel energy, make energy prices “necessarily skyrocket” – and “fundamentally transform” America’s constitutional, legal, energy, economic and social structure.

Energy is the lifeblood of our nation’s economy, jobs, living standards and civil rights progress. Anything that affects energy availability, reliability and price affects every aspect of our lives. These diktats put the federal government in charge of our entire economy – and impair our health and welfare.

Moreover, the anti-hydrocarbon global warming “solutions” the Obama Administration is imposing will bring no real world benefits – even assuming carbon dioxide actually drives climate change. That’s largely because China, India and other developing countries are increasing their use of coal for electricity generation, and thus their CO2 emissions – far beyond our ability to reduce US emissions. These nations rightly refuse to sacrifice economic growth and poverty eradication on the altar of climate alarmism.

Even worse, the health, welfare and environmental justice benefits that EPA claims will result from its regulations are equally exaggerated and illusory. They exist only in the same dishonest computer-generated virtual reality that concocted its alleged climate change, health and environmental cataclysms, and in junk-science analyses that can only be described as borderline fraud.

Implementing EPA’s regulatory agenda will inflict severe economic dislocations and send shock waves through America’s factories, farmlands and families. Far from improving our health and welfare – they will make our economy, unemployment, living standards, health and welfare even worse.

EPA’s new automobile mileage standards alone will result in thousands of additional serious injuries and deaths every year, as cars are further downsized to meet its arbitrary 54.5 mpg requirements. Its anti-coal rulings and anti-fracking attitudes will severely impact electricity generation, reliability and prices; factory, office and hospital operations and budgets; American industries’ competitiveness in global markets; employment, hiring and layoffs; and the well-being of families and entire communities. Especially for areas that depend on mining and manufacturing – and the 26 states where coal-based power generation keeps electricity rates at half of what they are in states with the least coal use and toughest renewable energy mandates—it will be all pain, for no gain.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a White House letter to House Speaker John Boehner inadvertently acknowledged that EPA alone is still working on new regulations that the agency itself calculates will impose $105 billion in additional regulatory burdens and compliance costs. Win or lose in November, the Administration will likely impose these and other new rules after the elections. We, our children and grandchildren will pay for them in countless ways.

Utilities will have to spend $130 billion to retrofit or replace older coal-fired units, says energy analyst Roger Bezdek – and another $30 billion a year for operations, maintenance and extra fuel for energy-intensive scrubbers and other equipment, to generate increasingly expensive electricity.

Duke Energy’s new $3.3 billion coal gasification and carbon dioxide capture power plant will increase rates for its Indiana customers by some 15% the next two years. Hospitals, factories, shopping malls and school districts will have to pay an extra $150,000 a year in operating expenses for each million dollars in annual electricity bills. That’s four or five entry-level jobs that won’t be created or preserved.

Nationwide, 319 coal-fueled power plants totaling 42,895 megawatts (13% of the nation’s coal fleet and enough for 40 million homes and small businesses) are already slated to close, the Sierra Club joyfully proclaimed. Illinois families and businesses could pay 20% more for electricity by 2014, theChicago Tribune reports. Chicago public schools may have to find an extra $2.7 million a year to keep the lights and heat on and computers running.

Higher electricity prices will further strain refineries already struggling with soaring electricity costs and EPA’s sulfur and other regulations, restrictions on refinery upgrades and construction, constraints on moving crude oil to East Coast refineries, and other compliance costs – all of dubious environmental or health benefit. Three East Coast refineries have already closed, costing thousands of jobs and causing the Department of Energy to warn that pump prices are likely to soar even higher in Eastern states.

When we include discouraged workers who have given up looking for jobs and people who have been forced to work fewer hours or at temporary jobs, our unemployment rate is a whopping 19 percent – and double that for black and Hispanic young people. America’s labor force participation rate is at a 30-year low, its 2011 economic growth rate was a dismal 1.7 percent.

Well over a million US workers age 55 and older have now been out of work for 27 weeks or more. Not only do prospects plummet for re-employment of older workers. The longer they are unemployed, the more they are disconnected from society, the further their living standards fall, the more their physical and emotional well-being deteriorates, and the more likely they are to die prematurely.

The cumulative effect is that families have even less money to buy food, pay the rent or mortgage, repair the car or house, save for college and retirement, take a vacation – and keep people comfortable (and alive) on frigid winter nights and sweltering summer afternoons. Health and welfare, family relationships, future prospects and psychological well-being plummet. Because they spend the highest proportion of their incomes on energy, poor and minority families suffer disproportionately.

And yet EPA’s regulations, regulatory agenda and horse-blinder definition of health, welfare and justice ignore these realities – and ensure that this intolerable situation will only get worse. In fact, the only welfare EPA’s rules will ensure is the expansion of our welfare rolls, our unemployment lines and our already record-setting food stamp programs.

Worst of all, our Congress and courts have completely abdicated their obligations to provide oversight and control of this dictatorial agency and Obama Administration. If this is the hope, change and future we can look “forward” to, our nation’s health, well-being and justice will be bleak, indeed.

Paul Driessen

Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which is sponsoring the All Pain No Gain petition against global-warming hype. He also is a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death.

SMART METER = SMART SURVEILLANCE

By Michael LeMieux

May 23, 2012
NewsWithViews.com

We have all heard a lot of discussion lately on the energy department’s move toward a “smart grid” and the use of “smart meters” fueled by the stimulus funding from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This smart grid promises to “increase energy efficiency, bolster electric power grid reliability, and facilitate demand response, among other benefits.”However the devil is in the details; as they say.

In order for the smart meter program to be of any benefit to the grid as a whole it would necessitate nearly universal usage across the country. The concept on the surface is actually a good idea if energy demand is the actual goal. For that matter, energy consumption demands could be ascertained at the point of separation to the public at the local power sub-stations that serve individual communities and thus alert the system of increased demand and therefore increased production requirements. So why are they pushing to install one in every home in America?

To get the answer is very easy indeed as the Congressional Research Staff has compiled a research paper on this exact topic and from which I have derived much of my article today and this is what they reported.

The report states that to fulfill their desired ends: “smart meters must record near-real time data on consumer electricity usage and transmit the data to utilities over great distances via communications networks that serve the smart grid.” Okay, that makes sense but again why every household and not at distribution points within the neighborhood which monitors the near real time usage in that local?

Well thanks to the report they also tell us that: ”Detailed electricity usage data offers a window into the lives of people inside of a home by revealing what individual appliances they are using.” Now let’s look at that statement a moment – their “stated” goal for this device was so that they could better regulate the grid reliability and better demand response. What does it matter to an energy supplier what appliances I am running in my home if their real concern was just to provide better control of the grid supply? Could it possibly be that this is a big brother conspiracy of a pending police state? And is it still a conspiracy if it is in fact true?

Within the opening paragraphs of the report they state that they are looking at this, among other things, from a 4th Amendment concern and “As we progress into the 21st century, access to personal data, including information generated from smart meters, is a new frontier for police investigations.” Just as communication interception, email interception, social media sites, etc. have become sifting pools for government spying on everyone to purportedly catch a few bad guys – kind of like treating everyone as a criminal to catch a real criminal. How great would it be if you could also gather data from inside every home in America on their electrical equipment and usage?

In fact the report mentions this exact concern stating: “courts have used the third-party doctrine to deny protection to information a customer gives to a business as part of their commercial relationship. This rule is used by police to access bank records, telephone records, and traditional utility records.” And just like these areas were once protected, requiring warrants in order to invade the privacy of these records it has set a precedent that will assist in further expansion of the government’s ability to interject itself into every aspect of our lives.

So how detailed can reading a meter really get and is this really that important to understand? Most people would be shocked by how much data can be derived by these smart meters. In the CRS report they referenced a 2010 National Institute of Science and Technology report that detailed some alarming detail that can be ascertained from this data such as:

• ‘By combining appliance usage patterns, an observer could discern the behavior of occupants in a home over a period of time. For example, the data could show whether a residence is occupied, how many people live in it, and whether it is “occupied by more people than usual.” According to the Department of Energy, smart meters may be able to reveal occupants’ “daily schedules (including times when they are at or away from home or asleep), whether their homes are equipped with alarm systems, whether they own expensive electronic equipment such as plasma TVs, and whether they use certain types of medical equipment.”’

A sample graph taken of a home energy usage shows what activity is taking place at any given time. Because the electrical “signature” of every appliance is different they are able to ascertain exactly what equipment is being used as the following graph shows.

Utilizing electrical usage data in law enforcement is not unusual. Historically if law enforcement has suspicion that a certain individual may be illegally growing drugs on their property they may get a warrant on past electrical usage of the property to determine if grow lights are being used indicated by large spikes in energy consumption. From the government’s position; how valuable would it be to have real-time data on every household in a state or the nation for that matter, on not only what they are doing but the specific equipment being used? This may be too tempting for the power elite to pass up.

Along with the potential for government/police abuse of this information, and history has shown that when government feels a compelling need to access data it will do whatever it needs to in order to obtain it, is also the potential for cyber theft and other commercial intrusions.

One example given in the report was medical insurance companies using the data to determine the use of a certain medical device within the home and how that may complicate medical coverage, or whether a device is being used improperly and therefore will void a product warranty, and marketers could use the data to determine certain equipment usage and thus target sales mailings, etc. Even worse criminals could hack the data to determine the best homes to target based on certain “signature” equipment that gives them greater sales on the black market as well as the most likely times when no one is at home.

The remaining pages of the 48 page report deals with how that data may, or may not, be protected under the 4th Amendment or other laws currently in force. One point that was made was that the data would most certainly fall under the “protected record” status and therefor would have to comply with the Federal Privacy Act statutes.

Knowing how the government has entrenched itself into every aspect of our commercial lives and communications I do not have a comfortable feeling that this data will be treated any different and over time will become just another tool the government can use to monitor the citizens activities.

Remember, all they claimed they were trying to do is “increase energy efficiency, bolster electric power grid reliability, and facilitate demand response, among other benefits.” I do not believe that knowing when each and every appliance is turned on or off in a single home will matter one iota to their stated goal and that only the aggregate of energy usage for a specific area will be of use.

However, if knowing each appliance signature and during peak usage they could limit your availability of power – sort of a purposeful brownout – in which you just would not have the necessary power available to run an appliance at peak proficiency and thus reduce your consumption and increase overall energy efficiency; now that may be of value.

But don’t worry Carol Browner is with the government and they are here to help. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and secure? But we all know the government would never do anything that would trample our rights – until they are caught doing it – then they are sorry and promise never to do it again… until they are caught again, and again. But we can trust them – right?Sound farfetched? Well during an interview on the Glen Beck show on Fox News it was revealed that: “No, not so much. This is from U.S. News and World Report. This is from Carol Browner. She’s the new climate czar. Yes. She said, quote, “We need to make sure that we’re moving electricity in the smartest way and using the most cost-effective electricity at the right time.Eventually, we can get to a system where an electric company will be able to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air-conditioner won’t operate at its peak. So you’ll still be able to cool your house, but that will be a savings to the customer.”

© 2012 Michael LeMieux – All Rights Reserved

Related Articles:

1- ‘Smart meters’ – the new silent killer
2- Update: My Fight Against the ‘Smart’ Meter

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Michael LeMieux was born in Midwest City, Oklahoma in 1956 and graduated from Weber State University in Utah with a degree in Computer Science. He served in both the US Navy and US Army (Active duty and National Guard) and trained in multiple intelligence disciplines and was a qualified paratrooper. He served with the 19th Special Forces Group, while in the National Guard, as a Special Forces tactical intelligence team member. He served tours to Kuwait and Afghanistan where he received the Purple Heart for injuries received in combat.

Mr. LeMieux left military duty at the end of 2005 after being medically discharged with over 19 years of combined military experience. He currently works as an intelligence contractor to the US government.

Michael is a strict constitutionalist who believes in interpreting the constitution by the original intent of the founding fathers. His research has led him to the conclusion that the republic founded by the Constitution is no longer honored by our government. That those who rule America today are doing so with the interest of the federal government in mind and not the Citizens. Michael believes that all three branches of government have strayed far from the checks and balances built into the Constitution and they have failed the American people. A clear example is the Second Amendment, which the Supreme Court and the founders have all said was an individual right and could not be “infringed” upon, now has more than 20,000 state and federal laws regulating every aspect of the individuals right, a definite infringement. He has traveled around the world living in 14 States of the Union including Hawaii, and visited (for various lengths of time) in Spain, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Korea, Scotland, Pakistan, Mauritius, Somalia, Diego Garcia, Australia, Philippines, England, Italy, Germany, and Puerto Rico.

Michael now lives in Nebraska with his wife, two of his three children, Mother-in-Law and grandchild. His hobbies include shooting, wood-working, writing, amateur inventor and scuba diving when he can find the time.

Contact Michael through his Website: www.constitutiondenied.com