Error Theory

Tom Burnett Sr:

A military trial will do the same thing--give them justice, give them a chance to talk--but not out, you know, in the public.

Nicely framed and edited by KSTP Minneapolis:



Second Burnett interview here. If only our government, with all its resources, could make 1/100th the sense of this honest patriot, but honesty and patriotism seem to be completely absent from the Obama/Holder makeup. Mr. Burnett says he will fight.


Mr. Burnett is also trying to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Mecca-oriented crescent atop his son's grave

Video expose of what was originally called the Crescent of Embrace design, contains footage of Mr. Burnett and Alec Rawls (author of this blogburst post) at last year's Memorial Project meeting:



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The desecration has begun. A ground-breaking ceremony was held at the Shanksville crash site on Saturday. Bulldozers will start reshaping the land this week. Never mind that the only rule for the Flight 93 memorial's design competition was that the landscape had to be left as it was. In order to complete the full arc of the Crescent of Embrace (now called a broken circle, but still a giant Islamic-shaped crescent), an earthen causeway will have to be built across the wetlands that lie about 50 vertical feet below the crash site.

A contractor posted recently about his decision to turn down work on the memorial, despite economic hard times. Our friend Jeff just could not stomach the idea of helping to build a tribute to the enemy, a sentiment that is easy to understand and much appreciated. To anyone else who might find themselves in this situation, just be aware that there are other options. Someone is going to do the work, and if the pay is lucrative, it could be better for our cause to have that money go to someone who is on our side.

Blogburst author Alec Rawls has succeeded in driving driving quite a bit of Western Pennsylvania news coverage through the purchase of a half-dozen half-page full-color ads in the local Somerset paper. If anybody wants to fund another, Alec will gladly put the ad together. Call it anti-dhimmi jiu-jitsu. We can use the Park Service's own money against them.

If we don't succeed, then you have to live with knowing that you helped to build an abomination. There is no simple answer.

On the subject of worthy causes, long-time blogburst participant Curt at the excellent Flopping Aces blog is helping to orchestrate fundraising for Project Valour-IT, which helps provide voice-controlled computers and other technology to Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines recovering from hand wounds and other severe injuries.

Soldiers Angels, which hosts Valour-IT, is also fundraising for the victims of the jihad attack on Fort Hood.

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In early June, Stratfor reported that the Obama administration has ordered our intelligence agencies to "back off" from investigating Black Muslims, possibly crippling the FBI's investigation of Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad in the run up to his attack on two soldier outside an Army recruiting center in Little Rock (murdering one and critically wounding another). Such an order would have at least some chilling effect on investigations of other American Muslims as well. Does this explain why the CIA did not follow up after the Fort Hood jihadist was caught trying to contact al Qaeda?

The official story is that Hasan was given a pass because he "gave no indication he was likely to engage in violence." In particular, we did not know that he was actually about to start killing people: "There was no indication that Major Hasan was planning an imminent attack at all, or that he was directed to do anything." All we knew is that he was on the side of al Qaeda. As Chris Matthews asks: "That's Not a Crime to Call al Qaeda, Is It?" Actually, it is the only crime defined in the Constitution.

The time frame is right for the Obama order to have chilled the Hasan investigation. According to ABC:

U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with people associated with al Qaeda.

Detected contacts between Hasan and the 9/11 Imam Anwar al-Awlaki go back further:

Intelligence agencies intercepted communications last year and this year between the military psychiatrist accused of shooting to death 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., and a radical cleric in Yemen known for his incendiary anti-American teachings.

The were watching him. Then they stopped. If Obama's order is responsible for the decision to leave Hasan free from observation and restraint, let's hope that the actors are not able to hide it from Senator Lieberman, who should include the Little Rock attack in his investigation as well.


UPDATE: Obamatons admit that they shut down Hasan investigation because Hasan's right to contact al Qaeda recruiters is "protected by the First Amendment"

So there it is. An Obama policy of curtailing investigation of the most threatening al Qaeda contacts directly enabled jihadist mass murder on American soil. Strata has more.


Order all soldiers to carry sidearms at all times, except where prohibited by law

"I was confused and just shocked," said Spc. Jerry Richard, 27, who works at the center but was not on duty during the shooting. "Overseas you are ready for it. But here you can't even defend yourself."

Soldiers at Fort Hood don't carry weapons unless they are doing training exercises.

Does Army Chief of Staff George "ignore the shouts of Allah akbar" Casey know that we are at war? Why in the world were none of the soldiers in the processing center armed? This is policy? To allow congregations of unarmed soldiers?

None of our on-duty soldiers should EVER be without at least a sidearm without good reason, and soldiers on leave should be encourage to carry as well. At least Casey seems conscience-struck by what he and others have wrought and is ordering a review. But who doesn't already know that gun-free zones are a very bad idea? Only anti-gun morons. We have anti-gun morons in charge of our military?

The original Crescent of Embrace memorial to Flight 93 faced less than 2° from Mecca. That made it a mihrab, the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built. (Some mihrabs are pointed-arch shaped, but the classic mihrab is crescent shaped.)

The Park Service dismissed concern about the Mecca-oriented crescent on grounds that the construction drawings had not yet been finalized. “Those trees could move fifty feet, or three hundred feet,” said Project Manager Jeff Reinbold in the Spring of 2006, as if this kind of "tweaking" would make any difference (Crescent of Betrayal Ch.8 p.145-6).

The construction drawings have now been released, and yes, they moved the lower tip of the half-mile wide crescent about 300 feet, enough to change the orientation of the crescent by about 4.5°. Instead of pointing less than 2° north of Mecca, the giant Islamic-shaped crescent now points less than 3° south of Mecca.

Here is the original Crescent of Embrace:


"Qibla" is the direction to Mecca, which you can verify using any online Mecca-direction calculator (just type in Somerset PA). A person standing between the tips of the giant crescent and facing into the center of the crescent (red arrow) would be facing 1.8° north of Mecca, ± 0.1°.

Here is one of the new construction drawings:


Instead of facing a titch north of Mecca, the giant crescent now faces a titch south of Mecca (2.7° south ± 0.1°).

As with the original Crescent design, the upper crescent tip is the end of the 50’ tall Entry Portal Wall and the lower crescent tip is the last of the 50’ tall Maple trees on the bottom. The landscape overlays make the details hard to see in the thumbnail image above, but at full resolution they are fully legible. (Copy of source PDF, without the superimposed orientations lines here. Large file warning. Graphic is on p. 30 of 233.)


The Park Service was SUPPOSED to remove the Islamic symbol shapes

When architect Paul Murdoch’s winning Crescent of Embrace design was announced in September 2005, it appeared to show a bare naked Islamic crescent and star-flag planted atop the crash site:



Burned by the resulting firestorm of protest, the Park Service to agreed to get rid of the Islamic symbol shapes, but they never did. They added an extra arc of trees, and they call it a broken circle now, but the unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a giant Islamic shaped crescent.

This is explained on the Park Service's own website, where the extra arc of trees is explicitly described as a broken off part of the circle:

In summary, the memorial is shaped in a circular fashion, and the circle is symbolically "broken" or missing trees in two places, depicting the flight path of the plane, and the crash site.

Those two breaks are the two ends of the extra arc of trees:


The extra arc of trees extends from blue circle to blue circle, marking the two “breaks” in the circle referred to in the Park Service’s official explanation of the broken-circle design. One is where the flight path breaks the circle (left), the other is near the crash site (center).

What is symbolically left standing (the unbroken part of the circle) is just this:


Remove the symbolically broken off parts, and you get the original Crescent of Embrace design.

The only change is that the crescent has now been rotated clockwise a few degrees. In the construction plans it faces slightly south of Mecca instead of slightly north of Mecca. For a parallel, imagine airline security discovering a terror bomber, then playing with the fit his suicide vest before escorting him to his plane.

They said they were going to remove the giant crescent. They claim they HAVE removed it, but they haven't. Symbolically, the design remains completely unchanged. The terrorists are still depicted as smashing our peaceful circle and turning it into a giant Islamic-shaped crescent, still pointing to Mecca.


The giant crescent is actually a mihrab

Here is the mihrab at the Great Mosque in Cordoba Spain. Face into the crescent to face Mecca, just like the crescent memorial to Flight 93:



Confronted with evidence that the Crescent of Embrace is actually designed to be the world's largest mosque, the Park Service sought advice from a pair of Muslim scholars. Both acknowledged the almost exact Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent and both offered overtly dishonest excuses for it. One said not to worry about the likeness to an Islamic mihrab because no one has ever seen a mihrab this BIG before:

...most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience.

Right. That's why everybody scratches their head at Mt. Rushmore. No one has ever seen Abraham Lincoln so BIG before. They just can't figure it out.

To be fooled by this excuse, you have to really really want to be fooled. The other Muslim scholar said not to worry, the crescent cannot be seen as mihrab unless it points exactly at the Kaaba:

Mihrab orientation is either correct or not. It cannot be off by some degrees.

In fact, a mihrab does NOT have to point exactly at Mecca, for the simple reason that, throughout most of Islamic history, Muslims in far-flung parts of the world had no accurate way to determine the direction to Mecca. As a result, it was established as a matter of religious principle that what matters is intent to face Mecca. This was recently affirmed by Saudi religious authorities, after Meccans realized that even most of their local mosques do not face directly towards the Kaaba. “It does not affect the prayers” assured the Islamic Affairs Ministry.

Faced with evidence of an Islamic plot, why would the Park Service send this evidence exclusively to Muslims for appraisal? Have they forgotten who attacked us on 9/11?

The Service has long since been apprised of the patent dishonesties retailed by its two Muslim advisors but they don't care. They wanted to be lied to, they knew where to go to be lied to, and they got what they wanted.


Michelle Malkin and Ed Morrissey

So where are the patriotic stalwarts like Michelle Malkin whose objections were instrumental in getting the Park Service to agree to remove the Islamic symbol shapes in the first place? If they knew in 2005 that the symbolic outcome of 9/11 should not be a giant Islamic shaped crescent why are they silent about this exact same symbolism today, after THEY were promised that this perversion would be removed?

Ed Morrissey urged his readers "to tell the National Parks Service and the Secretary of the Interior to rethink their plans," promising for his own part that "as long as that crescent remains in the design, I’m not donating a red cent to the memorial." Well Ed, the crescent does remain in the design, so please rejoin the fight.

The desertion of Malkin et. al. makes a difficult gap to fill, but we had better fill it, or the Flight 93 crash-site will soon be home to the world’s largest mosque.

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Tom Burnett Sr. and his wife Beverly did some 9/11 interviews the last couple of days, remembering their son Tom Jr., who was murdered by Islamic terrorists aboard Flight 93. Mr. Burnett has been trying for several years to stop the Park Service from planting a giant Islamic-shaped crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. In their interview with WSAU radio in Wisconsin, the Burnetts were joined half-way through the hour by Alec Rawls (the author of this blogburst post), who has written a book about the terrorist memorializing Crescent of Embrace design.

Mr. Burnett's words are always heartfelt, yet marked by a constant scrupulousness. Emotion never carries him to utter a word beyond what he actually has grounds to assert. Highly recommended listening, perhaps especially for those who are better at judging people than facts. Let's face it, show some people the Mecca-orientation of the giant crescent, and they just aren't sure what they are looking at. Point out that the central feature of every mosque is a Mecca-direction indicator, and somehow the pieces don't fall together in their brains:


What is that? Just a mysterious diagram to some.

Yet these folks can still be good judges of character. So judge the Burnetts. The WSAU interview begins with host Pat Snyder asking Mr. Burnett if America is doing enough as a nation to remember 9/11. Most of us, on being asked any question, will try to answer it, but Mr. Burnett immediately defers, and in the most polite way:

Well, I'm not a very good judge of that. We are tucked away here in the southeast corner of Minnesota...

But if he isn't interested in passing judgment on how much America should do to remember 9/11, he is very concerned that we don't honor the wrong people, and starts right in on the Flight 93 memorial (which Mr. Snyder puts off to later).

Both the Burnetts have a sophisticated understanding of American liberty. Talking about the generosity of Americans towards each other and the world, Beverly notes the change that has taken place in her lifetime, where assistance used to be all private, but now the government has gotten involved. She passes no explicit judgment on this development, but just notes what should remain constant (at 17:22):

I think about all the programs we have in the government. I come from a different generation, and my mother and father, and Tom's, that we never really looked to the government all the time. We looked to our neighbors and churches and friends for things. But our government should be there to make sure we're SAFE.

Instead, as Tom and Bev both note, our elites don't even want to acknowledge that it was Muslim terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

It is these same elites who don't want to acknowledge the Islamic symbol-shapes in the Flight 93 memorial. To witness this symbolism would be to tie Islam to 9/11, which to these people is some unconscionable bigotry, regardless of the truth. There is the rub. As Mr. Burnett put it (at 25:16):

All we want--Alec, and the thousands of Americans who back us--we want the truth. What happened? [How did we end up with an Islamist design?] And we want to honor the 40 people. I don't want anything to do with the Islamic fanatics, anything at all.

Mr. and Mrs. Burnett are very thoughtful, careful, rational people. So who is it who is "too far out"? People like the Burnetts, who are skeptical that the architect of a memorial to Flight 93 could plant a giant crescent and star flag on the crash site by mistake? Or is it the people who somehow convince themselves that a crescent and star flag is just fine, so long as we can't prove that it is intentional?



Actually, we CAN prove that the Islamic symbolism is intentional. Architect Paul Murdoch does not want history to be able to deny his achievement, so he included extensive redundant proofs of intent, such as the following. Murdoch says the crescent comes from the terror attacks breaking the circle (leaving only the giant Islamic-shaped crescent still standing, hmmm). Remove the parts of the crescent that stick out past the point where the flight path (coming down from the upper left) symbolically breaks the circle, and what symbolically remains standing is a giant Islamic-shaped crescent pointing EXACTLY at Mecca.


The full Crescent of Embrace points 1.8° north of Mecca ± 0.1°. Remove the parts of the Entry Portal walls that extend past the flight path at the upper crescent tip and the remaining “true” or thematic crescent points exactly at Mecca, ± 0.1°.

All the supposed redesign did was add an extra arc of trees that explicitly represents a broken off part of the circle, leaving Murdoch’s circle-breaking crescent-creating theme completely intact. The unbroken part of the circle, what symbolically remains standing in the wake of 9/11, is still a precisely Mecca-oriented crescent, the centerpiece for the world’s largest mosque.


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Obama is still slow with his Cash for Clunkers reimbursements, but as soon as the vouchers are paid off, the 700,000 mostly top-quality used cars that were turned in will be destroyed, decimating America’s once best-in-the-world used car market.

Do people know that most 2009 models qualified for vouchers? Democrats define “clunkers” the way Islam defines those in need of subjugation. If it is not a “green” vehicle then it is by definition a “clunker” whose demise is not to be mourned, but is to be paid for and celebrated. (Check here whether Democrats would pay for the destruction of your prized possession.)

You see a one year old crew cab Tundra, capable of hauling your business and your family and think, “what wouldn’t I do to keep that $40,000 workhorse from destruction.” Democrats see the same vehicle and think, “I would gladly pay $4,500 of other people’s money to drop that affront to my eco-religion into the crusher.”


2009 Tundra qualifies. So does every new 6 cylinder Toyota pickup, including the smaller Tacomas.


1 acre out of 1500

To document one corner of the car-slaughter that is now underway, I took pictures of every one of the full acre of “clunker” trade-ins at Fremont Toyota. Out of the 450 cars in this lot, hardly a dozen even have a dent (click pic for slideshow):



A Freemont Toyota executive offered an insight why so many of the doomed cars are in immaculate condition. He told me that an unusually small number of Cash for Clunkers participants bought on credit. These were mostly “conservative older people,” he said, the cautious frugal types, bringing in their lovingly cared for 15 or 20 year old cars and paying with a check.

1500 acres of mostly top-quality used cars. This cream of the used car market would have been sold to less wealthy folks who now will face a much tighter and more expensive used car market.


"The $3,000-to-$5,000 car is just gone."

Good for Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn for speaking up. From USA Today:

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., called that provision [to destroy the trade-ins] "nuts" during debate in the Senate last week. He said that in his state, one trade-in had less than 10,000 miles on the odometer. "We're going to destroy the opportunity for somebody less fortunate to have that automobile," he said.

Used car dealers agree. They say fewer older cars are at auction.

Too few older cars at reasonable prices could put some dealers out of business, says Tim Swift, general manager of the Corry Auto Dealers Exchange, an auction operation for dealers in Corry, Pa.

"It's was tough finding them before, and now, it's even worse," says Mike Williams, owner of Auto Wise in Shelbyville, Ky. "The $3,000-to-$5,000 car is just gone."

Albama used-car dealers say prices to them have gone up about a thousand dollars (retail will go up more):

“I bought 20 Ford Fusions from a wholesaler about 3 weeks ago,” Watkins said. “This car has now gone up over $1,000.”

.... “They’re going to be up $500 to $1,000 more, and probably $1,500,” said Selman, who deals in used vehicles for under $10,000. “What will be out there will be so high I can’t buy them.” [Hat tip Max Kuenkel.]

Manheim Consulting tracks the used car market. They don’t yet have figures for August (Cash for Clunkers began in late July and ended August 24th), but they do have some anecdotal information:

A cursory look at the vehicles already being traded-in under the program, as well as discussions with dealers, indicate that the majority of the vehicles deemed "clunkers" would have, absence the program, eventually been retailed by dealers catering to the deep subprime or Buy-Here, Pay-Here market.

These are NOT the bottom tier of cars. What got turned in were mostly cars that dealers would keep on their second hand lots. Such cars are typically resold with substantial guarantees. In other words, dealers’ impressions were that these cars not only look sharp, but would check out as reliable, just as I heard from Fremont Toyota.


“He wanted the fun of participating.”

I also visited Capitol Toyota in San Jose, where an employee offered another insight into the high quality of the cars being turned in. He was amazed at the number of $5000 to $7000 vehicles that people were taking $3500 to $4500 for. “Some just didn’t want the hassle of getting their car smogged and selling it on ebay or whatever,” he told me, while others “wanted to support the program.” He mentioned one guy who turned in a low mileage Lexus LS400 in primo condition that would easily have brought more than $10,000. The dealership itself would have given him substantially more than the $4500 Cash for Clunkers voucher, but the guy believed in the program and “wanted the fun of participating.”

Instead of letting his fellow countrymen buy his better-than-perfectly-good used car, he would rather take taxpayer money to destroy it. We are talking here about the absolute epitome of human manufacturing. The $50,000 price of an LS400 reflects the year of unprecedentedly efficient labor, divided among thousands of individuals, that goes into crafting one of these beauties.

Here is one of the more typical LS400 trade ins:


One of several at Capitol Honda in San Jose. (Click pic for mini-slideshow. I photographed the whole lot, but lost most from a battery glitch.) There were a bunch of LS400s at Fremont Toyota too.


Car slaughter vs. people slaughter

The loss from slaughtering cars is not comparable to the loss from slaughtering people, but the mental process that approves this wanton destruction is the same. The only value that the Communists in Cambodia accounted was value that served Communist ideology. Everything heterodox got valued at zero, or negatively, as an enemy to be dispatched. Hence, kill all the educated people.

The green religionists are the same. They have an ideology of how people should behave, and everything heterodox is valued at zero, or negatively, as an enemy to be dispatched. Hence, destroy all the cars that are big enough to fit the needs of most people. If it is not a Prius or a Scion or some other green sacrament, the world will be a better place without it. Democrats will actually PAY to get rid of it, regardless of the value of the service it provides.

Real morality consists in husbanding and following all evidence of value, then accounting the resulting discoveries of value wherever they are enough at stake to be worth accounting. It is this accounting of value that tells one how to act for most value. The communist/Democrat mental process is the opposite. They don’t start with value (the value of a person’s life, or the services provided by a car). They start with their presumptions about what is to be done, and simply refuse to account the value of anything that stands in their way, or they account it negatively BECAUSE it stands in their way.

Cash for Clunkers is the same KIND of evil as Communist mass murder, just applied to something that is important to people, instead of to people themselves. The refusal to account the value of what they destroy is the same. And of course it WILL hurt people. It does not by itself kill anyone, but it will take a couple thousand dollar bite out of the welfare of a half million less-prosperous Americans (or a lesser bite out of several million less-prosperous Americans, adding up either way to the value of the cars destroyed).

That is a big hurt for a lot of people and some will indeed lose their grip on the economic ladder because of it, especially as Obama’s intentionally-created anti-energy recession deepens.

Cash for Clunkers is just the tip of the iceberg. Obama wants to wreak the same wanton destruction on an economy-wide scale, destroying our present "dirty" energy economy so he can replace it with his preferred "clean" energy economy. Think a comparison between destroying things and destroying people is far-fetched? You won't once you see how many "things" Obama destroys: basically our entire established energy infrastructure, and without energy there is no prosperity, no modernity, just the radical contraction of civilization that green leaders so fervently desire.

Midwest Jim has some pertinent quotes from Obama's "green jobs czar" Van Jones: ‘Green Jobs’ Goal is ‘Complete Revolution’ Away From ‘Gray Capitalism’

As Dick Morris notes, if cap-and-trade becomes law, green czar Jones "would be in charge of basically deciding how American manufacturing could cope with the need to reduce carbon output, which firms lived and died."

Jones is gone from the White House now, but he will still be funneling "green jobs" money. As Phil Kerpen writes in the New York Post:

...the stimulus' "green jobs" provisions funnel federal tax dollars to unions, green groups and community organizers...

i.e. to radical leftists like Van Jones.


Priusts and Sciontists

The eco-religionists are not real priests and they are not real scientists. Theirs is a dishonest religion, justified by utterly unscientific claims of dangerous CO2-driven global warming. As my noted in my last post, solar activity accounts statistically for 60-80% of global temperature variation on all time scales, and anyone can verify it in a couple of minutes (just follow the links), yet the alarmists build it into their models that solar activity has a much smaller impact on temperature than CO2.

The graph below shows how the IPCC models are parameterized. CO2 is much more powerful than solar activity BY ASSUMPTION, the opposite of what the statistical evidence says, and the opposite of what the scientific method requires. Data is supposed to take precedence over theory, not vice versa.


From theIPCC’s 4th Assessment Report (figure 2.4 on page 39 of the Synthesis Report). The only solar activity variable that is included in the IPCC models is "solar irradiance" (usually called TSI, or Total Solar Irradiance). As you can see above, it is parameterized to have 1/14th the effect on global temperature that CO2 does (0.12 vs 1.66), when we know that solar activity is in fact the dominant driver of global temperature, accounting statistically for 60-80% of temperature variation. So CO2, 14 times more powerful according to the IPCC, accounts for 980% of temperature variation? Hey, it's Scionce.

Actually, there is no statistical evidence that the human contribution to atmospheric CO2 has any effect on global temperature at all. We know theoretically that it should have SOME heat-trapping effect, but it seems to be too small to show up in the data. Parameterizing this unobservable effect at 14 times the strength of the known primary driver of global temperature is pure anti-scientific fraud. As Fred Singer put it recently:

…by focusing only on TSI [the latest IPCC report] disingenuously considers solar influences on climate to be insignificant when compared to the forcing by greenhouse gases.

What other solar variable should the IPCC be looking at? The sun's magnetic field strength (the solar magnetic flux), and the solar wind of ionized particles that ride the sun's magnetic field (blasting towards the planets at millions of miles per hour). Here are some Google-translated quotes from the man himself, Henrik Svensmark, on what the IPCC refuses to account.

[The IPCC] only include changes in solar radiation ... too small to cause climate change, but so has closed his eyes for a second much more powerful way the sun is able to affect Earth’s climate. In 1996 we discovered a surprising influence of the sun – its impact on Earth’s cloud cover. High energy accelerated particles of exploded stars, the cosmic radiation, are helping to form clouds.

When the Sun is active its magnetic field shields better against the cosmic rays from outer space before they reach our planet, and by regulating the Earth’s cloud cover the sun can turn up and down the temperature. High solar activity obtained fewer clouds and the earth is getting warmer. Low solar activity inferior shields against cosmic radiation, and it results in increased cloud cover and hence a cooling. As the sun’s magnetism has doubled its strength during the 20th century, this natural mechanism may be responsible for a large part of global warming during this period.

Svensmark's advice? “Enjoy global warming while it lasts,” because, with solar activity headed back down (and presently at a nadir), “global warming stopped and a cooling is beginning.”

Of course Svensmark's cosmic-ray/cloud theory could be wrong. It could be that the solar wind has some other not yet understood ways of affecting our climate, or it could be that some mechanism is amplifying TSI effects (in which case it is the IPCC's parameterization of TSI that is wrong).

What we know for certain is that the IPCC's parameterization of ALL solar effects as having one 14th the impact on global temperature that changes in CO2 have had is utterly rejected by the data, which shows solar activity driving MOST temperature change, while any effects from human production of CO2 are unmeasurably small, or at most, nearly unmeasurable.


Can the destruction of the used-car market still be stopped?

The ironies are tragic. Here is the Governator, signing used vehicles for the State of California to auction off in a pathetic attempt to toss a single bucket of debt overboard while 40 ft. waves of debt crash over the gunnels. California’s two or three hundred acres of top quality Cash for Clunkers trade-ins, on the other hand, could be auctioned off for real money, enough to actually help the state’s budget while at the same time leaving the citizenry flush with inexpensive quality cars. People's productivity would be enhanced, and the money they save on used cars could be spent elsewhere in California's beleaguered economy.

Where are the advocates for such common sense? Walled off from most Americans, unfortunately.

Every elite institution in America today is controlled by the Democrats: academia, the mainstream media, the charitable foundations, the professional organizations, the public unions, the private unions, both houses of Congress and the presidency. All of them accept the lie that in order to save the planet from CO2, humanity and modernity must radically contract, a liberty-hating ideology every bit as ambitious as Nazism and Communism.

America pays thousands of professors to teach moral philosophy, yet faced with this latest society-wide eruption of moral perversity masquerading as moral rectitude, our professional moralists are silent at best. The only audible voices are riding the global warming bandwagon. Is there a single moral philosopher alive today who is not morally oblivious?

If you have a free hour, think about taking your camera to any nearby auto dealer to photograph the cars that are about to be destroyed. The decimation of America’s used-car market won’t be felt until after the hundreds of acres of non-clunker turn-ins have been destroyed, but if we can’t stop this crime we can at least document a little bit of it, to remind our impoverished future what a glory we once had: the best used car market ever seen.

At least we can take some consolation that we are only destroying 700,000 cars, unlike Germany, which destroyed 2,000,000, starting from a much smaller base. That’s okay. They’ll just make a new car their next welfare entitlement, then they won’t need a used car market. Show us the way Germany. We’ll corkscrew in behind you.

Crime 1: Another multi-billion dollar subsidy for Government Motors.

When Obama stole Chrysler from its stockholders and gave it to his union cronies, we knew he would take every opportunity to waste taxpayer dollars trying to keep this lead balloon afloat. The Cash for Clunkers subsidy is just particularly egregious, since it works by subsidizing the last people in the world who need a subsidy: those who are well off enough to buy new cars in the midst of a deep recession. Talk about a middle class welfare program!


Crime 2: Eliminating Government Motors’ competition by gratuitously slagging an expected 750,000 perfectly good used cars in the sub-$4500 price range.

The Obamacrats aren’t just subsidizing cars for the well-to-do. They are destroying the cars that the less well-off are in the market for, driving up used car prices as part of their effort to make new cars more attractive:

Some parts may be kept but the engine and drive-train must be destroyed. Specifically the engine will be injected with a liquid glass solution to permanently disable the engine and it will be the responsibility of the dealer to make sure this is done to the engine.

Injected with liquid glass? Sounds like a Quentin Tarentino murder fantasy, and the reality isn't any prettier. Witness Obama's procedure for destroying the would-be cars of the non-wealthy:



Here is another one, a spiffy-looking Volvo that holds out for 4-plus minutes. Some clunker, and check out the row of semi-new cars lined up to go next:



Take THAT all you graduate students, newlyweds, store clerks, aspiring actors, single moms, non-deadbeat dads, warehouse workers, journalists, hippies, and other assorted poor relations. You want a car, you can scrape together your savings for a down payment on the privilege of paying hundreds of dollars a month to Government Motors for FIVE YEARS, just like everybody else.


How big is this crime?

A very substantial portion of the population NEVER buys a new car. I, for instance, have never bought a new car, and I never expect to. Why would I, when California has the best used car market in the world? In the last 10 years I have bought two 1984 Toyota Vans, one with 45,000 miles, one with 115,000 miles, each for $1500. Both still run great. One is set up as a work vehicle. One converts from passenger van to camper. No new vehicles would serve as well, or look as sharp.


My two uber-vans, one extra-dirty from its recent 2000 mile trek to Seattle and back. (Shasta, Crater Lake, Boeing Museum of Flight, Blue Angels, Olympic Peninsula, Fort Stevens, Oregon Dunes, North Coast, and back across the Golden Gate. Ain’t that America?)

The vehicles that are being gratuitously destroyed are newer than my two vans (which are just outside the 25 year age limit) and they are up to three times the price. For instance, the immensely popular Toyota Previa vans (1990-96) all qualify.

A good California Previa with a hundred thousand miles left on it sells for two to three thousand dollars. The government's offer of 35-45 hundred is outbidding the market even on these top quality used vehicles. Cash for Clunkers is a misnomer. Some bottom-of-the-barrel cars will be turned in, but the rules insure that most will not be these “clunkers.”

To qualify, a car must have been registered in the name of the new car buyer for the last 12 months and it must have been insured for the last 12 months. These actively-used cars of people who buy new cars are the quality core of the used car market. Most “clunkers” will be perfectly good cars that would be prize possessions for a half million less well-off Americans, wantonly destroyed only because the Obamacrats prefer that they be destroyed. Dollar for dollar, this is the equivalent of trying to solve the glut of housing foreclosures by purchasing the houses with taxpayer money then burning them down.

Any Obama supporter who claims to be motivated by distributional justice, go soak your head. You want to subsidize the better off? Be as stupid as you want. But don’t go destroying en masse what the less well-off need to survive.


All justified by a lie

Obama’s excuse for decimating the last two generations of used vans, SUV’s, pick-up trucks and full size cars is the global warming hoax. The ascendancy of Obama was, in his own narcissistic words:

...the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.

Energy consumption must be curtailed in the extreme:

…under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.

It is all about CO2 and the phony global warming industry that Vice President Al Gore created with $10b of seed money when he pioneered and administered the executive branch’s global warming portfolio (now called “climate change,” since the earth stopped warming 10 years ago). Gore’s appointees have directed almost all of the full $79b that the U.S. has spent on climate science since 1989, and they don't care at all whether CO2 is actually warming the planet. Their real motivation is an eco-religious belief that economic activity is gobbling up the natural world, so that for the natural world to survive, economic activity must contract.

To these high priests of green religion, CO2 is the perfect fall guy, no matter how insignificant its actual impact on climate. If the CO2 released by fossil fuel burning can be framed as a threat to the planet, that provides a rationale for drastically curtailing human economic activity, thereby stopping economic activity from gobbling up the natural world, whether or not CO2 itself actually has any harmful effects.


CO2 alarmists reject the scientific method

We can say with nearly complete certainty that the bulk of 20th century warming was NOT caused by CO2. This is because we know what DID cause the warming: the “grand maximum” levels of solar-magnetic activity that obtained for most solar cycles between 1930 and 2003.

Numerous studies have found a high degree of correlation (.6 to .8) between solar-magnetic activity and global temperature. That is, solar-magnetic activity "explains" statistically 60-80% of global temperature change on all time scales. That degree of correlation, observed over thousands and millions of years, HAS to be causal, and the causation can only go one way. It is not the temperature of the earth that is causing sunspots.

What is not well understood is HOW solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature. We just know that it does, just as before Einstein we did not know what mechanism causes massive objects to fall towards each other, we just knew that they do.

We actually have some pretty good theories of how solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature but set that aside. The eco-religionists, who thanks to Al Gore control ALL of the research funds for the “climate change” industry, use uncertainty about HOW solar-magnetic activity drives global temperature as an excuse for completely omitting the solar-magnetic variable from their models. They explicitly put theory over data, exactly the opposite of the scientific method, which says that data is always supposed to trump theory.

This anti-scientific method misattributes to CO2 the warming caused by high 20th century levels of solar-magnetic activity. Put solar-magnetic activity back into the equation, attributing to it what warming has historically been correlated with high levels of solar-magnetic activity, and the levels of warming that could possibly be attributable to CO2 become small. In particular, they become benign.

Warming in general is good. When Greenland was green, civilization prospered, as did plants and other living things. Nothing gobbles up the natural world like ice. It is only by claiming that CO2 could cause some unprecedented “runaway warming” that the alarmists have been able to present CO2 as dangerous. Stop misattributing solar-magnetic warming to CO2 and that possibility is off the table.

The dominant driver of global climate is solar-magnetic activity and any modicum of warming we can get out CO2 is all to the good. If our fossil fuel burning has the side effect of making our warm times a little warmer and our cold times a little less cold, that is a happy bit of luck for a world that ALWAYS seems to be colder than the optimum, with the next glacial period due any millennium.


Proof that the IPCC completely omits the solar-magnetic variable

Just look at any of the IPCC assessment reports. They all include the following graphic (slightly updated over the years):


From the 4th Assessment Report (figure 2.4 on page 39 of the Synthesis Report).

The only "natural" climate influence accounted by the IPCC is "solar irradiance," which means visible light and other electro-magnetic radiation. It does not in any way include the solar-magnetic flux, which is completely omitted from all IPCC models, even though every climate scientists knows full well that, according to the raw data, magnetic effects are the primary driver of global temperature.


EVERY educated person who accepts CO2 alarmism on the authority of the global warming anti-scientists is failing the most basic due diligence.

Technically, the alarmists’ anti-scientific inversion of theory and evidence takes the form of what is called “omitted variable fraud,” where the omission of any important explanatory variable causes its explanatory effect to be misattributed to whatever correlated variables are included (in this case CO2 which, like solar activity, also went up in the 20th century). This is the most basic, the most common, the most familiar form of statistical fraud. Everyone who has ever studied not just any physical science but any social science at any moderately high level is fully competent recognize for themselves the statistical fraud that is being committed by the CO2 alarmists.

The educated Democrat-voting elites who are pushing to unplug industrial capitalism on the authority of alarmist anti-scientists have an obligation of due diligence to check for themselves whether the facts of the matter are beyond their own competence, and they are ALL failing this basic obligation. They are just assuming that they have to accept on authority that the survival of the planet requires the radical curtailment of CO2, when even a quick look at the facts reveals that the statistically most important variable is omitted from the alarmist models.

Why this willingness to uncritically enlist as foot-soldiers for the destruction of modernity? Because like the CO2 anti-scientists themselves, these Democrat elites also don’t care whether CO2 is actually a threat. They too are eco-religionists who are glad for any excuse to curtail the economic growth that according to their presumptions is gobbling up the natural world.


Wrong about economics too

Of course the eco-religionists are also wrong about economic growth being bad for the environment. Economic growth creates and is created by technological advance, and it is technological advance that is allowing mankind and the natural world to both thrive at once. Economic activity is not the enemy of the natural world. It is the salvation of the natural world.

Having dedicated their intellectual resources to maintaining their religious presumptions instead of following reason and evidence, our Democrat elites have become pure political animals in the lowest sense, driven entirely by their lust for power. Every excuse, be it phony concern for distributive justice or phony concern for the environment, is wielded with complete dishonesty, utterly heedless of how distributive justice or the environment are actually affected, until all that is left is their ultimate presumption: that the one thing most necessary is that THEY have power.

This pathology finds its epitome in President Obama. Cash for Clunkers is just one paltry multi-billion dollar program, but the same coming-and-going perversity is manifest in Obama’s larger jihad against CO2—his push for cap and trade legislation. If we would uncork energy, the economy would rebound tomorrow, but Obama is determined to close the energy spigot down, not open it up.

Anybody who thinks this recession is ending is out of their minds. Obama is draining the oil and pouring in the silica slurry. What part of "under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket," do Americans not understand?

If you want to hear where the economy is headed, listen to the “squirk” from the end of the Obama-car-death video, when the engine jerks at the end of the hangman’s rope:



This is the sound of a valuable helper being sacrificed by government to the false idols of green religion. It isn’t just barbarous. It is a clear violation of the establishment clause. Execute the worst human criminals, yes, but Mission Solano has it right: “No Death Penalty for Cars!”