November, 2020, Part 3, Political Class Insanity: Still Stupid In Minneapolis, Cities and States Still Going Bankrupt and Still Massive Wasteful Spending in Afghanistan

It is the beginning of another month which means it is time again to review the latest political class insanity from the American political class. Each month it takes us multiple posts to cover the wasteful spending, incompetent government organizations and employees, government programs that usually make a problem worse than resolving it, inane and idiotic politician comments, etc.

To review past posts on this insanity and idiocy, just click on the first few posts in each month listed to the right of this page. After reviewing just a handful of these insanity posts we think you will agree that we are currently being served by the worst set of American politicians ever to hold office in our entire history.

1) After the tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis earlier this year at the hands of some rogue police officers, the city and the country erupted in violence and riots. As a result of the incident, many liberal cities, including Minneapolis, called for “defunding the police,” i.e. reducing the funds available for police work and shifting it to a nebulous concept that involves community something or other.

Which is all well and good if you know where you want to go on a strategic basis. But the folks in Minneapolis on the city council and mayor just started slashing police resources and bad mouthing and disrespecting the overwhelming majority of police officers that do a very difficult job very well everyday under always dangerous circumstances without having a replacement plan in place.

As a result of this insanity to rush to an undefined future while screwing up the present, a lot of bad things happened:

• Police officers either retired or just quit, not wanting to be the butt of harassment and disrespect at the hands of city politicians who have no clue.
• The ever growing number of veteran officers who have left the force. combined with the budget reductions which handicapped the police to actually do their job, led to violent crime spiking up in the city.
• This has caused both businesses and residents to strongly consider or who have already acted in getting out of the city, taking their tax revenue and jobs with them.
• The volume of violent criminal acts in the city has skyrocketed over the past few months.
• The chief of police essentially told these businesses that they were on their own from a crime perspective, that he could not guarantee their safety in the event of a criminal act being done to them or their business.
• Things got so bad that city council members, the very people who screwed everything up, decided to use taxpayer funds to hire private security guards to protect themselves from the ever rising level of crime, something not available to regular, taxpayer citizens.

What a mess. But the reality has started to set in, slowly, but setting in given the recent events in the city:

• The city police force has been so decimated that the chief had to ask the local politicians for funding to bring in outside police personnel to help fight the ever rising crime rate.
• That was the message that chief Medaria Arrandondo brought to the town council recently.
• He asked for an additional $500,000 to combat the rising crime rate: so far in 2020, 74 city residents have been killed and about 500 have been wounded in the city, the highest level in 15 years.
• Which is not surprising since the police force has 143 fewer police officers on payroll since January and another 845 are on some sort of sickness leave, including many who say they have PTSD from the job stress over the past six months.
• According to the chief, “Resources are hemorrhaging. I’m trying to do all I can to stop that bleeding.”
• He wants to bring in 20 to 40 police officers from a local county sheriff’s office.

So a voice of reason in a sea of stupidity in Minneapolis. Crime is up, police resources are down, the chief wants some more resources, pretty straightforward formula. And yet, there are still some idiots on the council who are opposed to the move but have no plan to do something better than what the chief is proposing. 

For example, Council Member Steve Fletcher voted against the additional funding with the following flawed reasoning: “So, we're going to take a thing that has not been working very well and has not been addressing carjackings, has not been addressing the rise in violent crime ... and say if we just do 5% more of it, that will get us to a better place. I'm struggling to get my head around why that is a good idea.” 

He cannot get his head around this idea and yet proposed no idea of his own to fight the dangerous rise in crime. Arradondo countered this insanity by stating the obvious: “We can go back and forth on the $185 million but that is not stopping the bloodshed that is occurring every day in our city. If you choose to say no to these victims of crime, then please stand by that.” 

Pompous politicians that have private security guards but refuse and fail to protect the lives of city residents and businesses, a basic function of government.

2) We have often and recently discussed the declining fortunes of many American cities and states. Places Like Chicago and New York City, Illinois and New York, and other places are already in a financial death spiral: current budget shortfalls, outrageously high unfunded financial liabilities, rising crime rates driving out residents and businesses, taking their tax revenue and jobs with them, etc.

In fact, we have placed our bets on Chicago (followed by New York City) and Illinois (followed by New York) as being the first city and first state to go bankrupt. Cato has some other data that verifies our own analysis:

• Of the 25 highest tax states, 24 of them have had net out-migration of residents in 2016, a trend that our data and analysis shows is still basically a true statement.
• Of the 25 lowest tax states, 17 had a net in-migration.
• The largest out-migration state in 2016 was New York with Florida having the largest in-migration, which is not surprising given the very high taxes in New York and the lack of a state income tax in Florida.
• Cato's conclusion was that the high tax states should downsize their bureaucratic state governments, cut taxes, cut spending, and reduce regulations, all of which would increase personal freedom and make their states and cities more desirable.

But given that Illinois politicians recently tried and failed to increase the top state income tax rate, it appears that they still do not understand the concept of economic freedom or any kind of freedom.

3) We have too often talked about the incredible amount of fraud and wasteful spending in Afghanistan since 2001, it has been a total disgrace and insult to the American taxpayer. Unfortunately, a recent Federal government audit report found that the fraud STILL continues:

• A whopping $19 billion of taxpayer wealth which was supposed to rebuild Afghanistan has been lost to fraud, wasteful spending, and abuse in just the past ten years.
• The audit found that an amazing 90% of the spending cases that were audited found that the budget was spent “carelessly, extravagantly, or to no purpose.”
• And the $19 billion came from only about half of the budget items that were in the Afghanistan budget.
• Disgraces included losing almost $500 million in oil that was supposed to go to the Afghan National Army, a $335 million power plant that is rarely used, tens of millions of dollars spent on failed drug addiction programs, and $18.5 million for a prison that was never used.
• The inspector general says that the Federal government doesn't know where, when and what impact, if any, the spending has had.
• Other failures included books purchased for an education program that were never used, a sports stadium that was built but never used because of many problems, and a $5.2 million border patrol building that was also not used.
• The audit found that “Endemic corruption, widespread insecurity, and a lack of accountability over on-budget assistance continue to make any investments made in Afghanistan vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse and may threaten the peace process as well as the perceived legitimacy and effectiveness of the Afghan government.”

Unbelievable, what an insult to the American taxpayer. To give you an idea of what could have theoretically been better uses of the wasted 19 billion, consider the following possibilities:

• We have previously discussed the reality that on average it costs about $2.94 to provide a nutritious meal to a homeless American.
• Thus, $19 billion could provide 6.5 BILLION meals to homeless Americans.
• This comes out to 11,671 meals per homeless American or 10.8 years worth of three meals a day per homeless individual, unbelievable.
• On average it costs $6,522 to provide annual resources to treat a drug addicted individual.
• Thus, that $19 billion could have treated almost 300,000 American drug addicts for ten years.

You get the idea, $19 billion could have been so much better spent on real Americans with real problems as opposed to making criminals and fraudsters rich halfway around the world.

Enough insanity for today: $19 billion wasted in Afghanistan, cities and states going bankrupt, and Minneapolis politicians still clueless and lost, endangering the lives and property of its citizens and businesses.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=loce+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&ref=nb_sb_noss

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2017, Part 3, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: The Unbent Cost Curve, A Democrat Oopsie, and Common Sense Economic Ideas To Fix Obama Care

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) Obama Care and Obama promised to “bend the cost curve,” i.e. it would finally slowdown the rise in the nation's healthcare costs. In fact, Obama promised many, many times that not only with the growth rate in health care costs be slowed but that American families could see up to a $2,500 a year reduction in their health insurance costs. Wow, what a great piece of legislation this is!

Or is it? Seven years after it has been passed, has the cost curve been bent? If you look at the real world data over the years, this appears to be another broken promise or outright deception of Obama Care. A recent article in the July, 2017 issue of Reason magazine, an article by John V.C. Nye that had nothing to do with health care, gives some insight to this additional failure of Obama Care. 

The name of the article, “Your Neighbor’s Fancy Care Should Make You Feel Better About Income Inequality,” contained a historical line graph that was developed by Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Perry took government Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 1996 and tracked how much the cost of 13 family purchases had risen in price over the past twenty years. His findings included the following results:

• Overall inflation had risen 57.1% over the past twenty years according to official government data.
• Of the 13 expenses tracked, seven expenses saw price rises less than the overall increase of 57.1% and two expenses, food and housing, were right around there 57.1%. 
• However, four expenses tracked much higher than the total inflation rate including health care costs which rose at around twice the rate of inflation.

Now one could make the case that healthcare costs were rising much faster prior to Obama Care taking effect and that Obama Care helped keep the rise in health care costs to only about twice the rate of overall inflation. You could say that and you would likely be wrong.

If you look at the rise in health care costs over the past twenty years, it is basically a straight line rise at about a 45 degree angle on the chart in the article, there has been no "bending of the cure” since Obama Care took effect. It is just an almost perfectly straight line increase that started in 1996 and continued through 2016, there is no trace of a “bending of the cost curve.” In other words, based on government data and the chart in the article, health care costs continued their long term, constant year over year increase despite the promises of Obama Care. Nothing got bent.

2) Recently, there was a racist based attack in Portland where a racist individual ended up stabbing three people who were trying to defend some women from the racist. Two of the three defenders unfortunately died and the third was seriously injured. 

A Go Fund Me page was started to help the survivor with what is likely to be extensive health care costs as he tries to recover from his heroics. Which got the attention of a Democrat in Congress, Keith Ellison who issued the following tweet:

“Our healthcare system is so cruel that one of the heroes of the Portland stabbing has to crowdfund his life saving medical care.”

The tweet was quickly removed from the good Congressman's account when he realized that this was certainly an indictment of Obama Care. Remember, Obama Care was supposed to:

• To reduce annual healthcare insurance costs up to $2,500 a year for families, making healthcare insurance cheap and available to anyone.
• Made sure that every American had health insurance coverage, either free via Medicaid or subsidized via an Obama Care policy.
• Bend the cost curve to make medical care and insurance less and less expensive.
• Allow every American to get health care insurance coverage.

Thus, seven years after Obama Care was passed, why does one of its supporters think that today “our healthcare system is so cruel?” Wasn’t Obama Care supposed to fix all that cruelty? You can see why that tweet disappeared almost as quickly as it was posted, this Democrat was actually pointing out the failure of Obama Care.

3) Kevin Williamson, writing for the National Review website on May 5, 2017, talked about the overall concept of economic scarcity and how it applied to healthcare costs in this country. It is an in-depth article with some very interesting economic viewpoints and common sense that I will not go into here.

However, he did have some excellent recommendations on how to fix the problem of ever rising healthcare costs in this country, recommendations that Obama Care scarcely noticed nor incorporated into the legislation:

• Prescription drug costs could be lowered by making the government approval process less expensive and time consuming.
• Drug costs could also be further reduced by “tweaking a few intellectual-property procedures.”
• Unlike Obama Care which made medical devices more expensive and reduced the amount of research money available to develop new devices, making the government approval process for devices less expensive and less cumbersome could also reduce costs.
• Increase the supply of doctors available in this country with the right immigration procedures and incentive plans to encourage doctors from around the world to come to this country to practice medicine, a simple economic concept that if you increase the supply of any economic entity, the price goes down (of course, the AMA lobbyists would fight this tooth and nail in order to protect the current domestic doctor cartel).
• Reduce the government regulation and burdens on insurance companies to make them eager to enter the health insurance market, unlike Obama Care which chased insurance companies out of the market.
• Change the paradigm on simpler, ordinary medical needs by changing it to "how people pay for food, cars, housing, and World of Warcraft expansion packs.”
• This previous change would allow “insurance to be insurance: a financial product that helps to mitigate certain risks related to unexpected health-care costs. This would allow for the emergence of robust, competitive, consumer-oriented markets like we have in cellphones and pornography and other innovative markets where choices abound and prices keep going down because the consumer is king.” 

Rational, sound ideas based on reality, unlike the entire Obama Care legislation which was based on who knows what.

That will do it for today: rational answers from an economic theory perspective, a big “oopsie” by a Congressional Democrat where he proves that Obama Care is a disaster and real world and real data proof that Obama Care never “bent the cost curve.” More disasters to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2017, Part 2: Obama Care's Big Lie About Uninsured Americans

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, sugar, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and copays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

1) If you listened to Obama and supporters of Obama Care in the run up to enacting the Obama Care legislation, you would have thought that there were millions and millions of sick and crippled Americans wandering the streets that had pre-existing medical conditions that prevented them from getting health insurance coverage. That these poor souls were at the mercy of heartless insurance companies who did not want to put out the extra money that would be needed to cover the medical costs incurred because of these pre-existing health conditions.

As a result, the Obama Care legislation was set up in a very elaborate and clumsy way to take care of these millions and millions of uninsured people with pre-existing health problems:

• The legislation tried to force tens of millions of younger, healthier Americans to buy insurance, whether they wanted to or not, in order to subsidize the costs of insurance companies coverage of people with pre-existing health conditions.
• The Federal government would collect new fees and taxes and feed billions of dollars to the insurance companies to offset their additional costs of insuring millions of Americans with pre-existing health conditions.
• The legislation changed the so-called community rating rules and processes that raised insurance costs for everyone in the insurance market to subsidize the insurance companies and those with pre-existing conditions.
• In turn, the insurance companies would be forced by the government and Obama administration to take on any customer that walked through the door even if that customer was not profitable, probably the first time in the history of the country that Washington bureaucrats and politicians forced private businesses to take on any customer.

This elaborate scheme was probably one of the reasons while the legislation was thousands of pages long. It certainly had to be in order to set up a massive government bureaucracy to collect and redistribute fees, taxes, and fines, a bureaucracy that turned out to be a massive Rube Goldberg contraption that never worked well from Day One. Millions of younger Americans did not sign up for health insurance, the insurance companies never got the government financial support it was promised, and Obama Care enrollment ended up at only half of what was promised.

But wait? Were there really millions and millions of sick and ailing Americans walking around the country who could not get health insurance coverage because of their conditions? Or was it just hot air, intentional deception, or pure ignorance on Obama and his supporters part when it came to counting how many Americans who actually had pre-existing health conditions? Consider some findings by Jeffrey Singer, writing for U.S. News and World Report, an article that appeared on the Cato website on May 2, 2017:

• Prior to Obama Care, employer sponsored group health insurance plans covered everyone in the group including those that had pre-existing health conditions.
• Prior to Obama Care, Medicaid covered people with pre-existing health conditions.
• Prior to Obama Care, Medicare covered everyone with pre-existing health conditions.
• Insurance policies in the individual health insurance market were “guaranteed renewable” which means that the policy could not be dropped or premiums allowed to skyrocket as long as the policyholder kept up with the regular premium payments even after they developed a “pre-existing condition.”

Given these realities, Mr. Singer identifies sources and research that put the actual number of Americans with pre-existing health conditions, that did not fall into any of the categories above, at less than a million people, far less than the hysterics put out by the Obama administration would lead you to believe.

Thus, rather than take this very, very small subpopulation aside and come up with something simple yet effective for them, the Obama Care legislation set up this elaborate and failure of a bureaucracy that forced Americans to buy insurance against their will, forced companies to accept customers against their will, and forced all Americans to cough up more money and freedom against their will to address this nit of a problem. 

And in reality, even Obama Care did not have to do anything with this nit of a problem:

• Prior to Obama Care, states such as Wisconsin and Maine had set up independent high risk programs for state citizens that had pre-existing health conditions and who could not get affordable regular health insurance and they did it without all of the negative fallout that Obama Care caused for others in the state.
• The free market was also responding with such innovations as the deployment of health status insurance policies that allowed younger people to buy health insurance when they were younger and healthier but guaranteed they would get affordable insurance protection down the road if they should ever get very, very sick and developed a pre-existing health condition.
• In some states, people were allowed to form association health plans that allowed them to get group coverage for those in their associations at a much reduced fee than individual insurance and which covered association members with pre-existing health conditions.

But as Mr. Singer writes, “Obamacare made those solutions irrelevant and unavailable.” Instead, it replaced these efficient, logical, common sense, and workable approaches and solutions with a one size fits all and one size screws all approach as a top down, out of touch Washington approach, an approach that rarely works when it comes to problem solving.

One of the outcomes of Obama Care forcing insurance companies to accept anyone who walks in the door and provide them affordable insurance rates that guarantee that certain customers will be a big drain on profitability is that the insurance companies made sure that Obama Care policies were tailored to doctor and hospital networks that were very narrow in scope. These skinny networks often excluded the medical specialists and particular hospital facilities that would be needed to serve the most common, and expensive, pre-existing conditions.

This gets back to one of the unexpected and sad consequences of Obama Care: the good news is that you have health insurance, the bad news is that you cannot use your health insurance. If you have a certain cancer for example, and your Obama Care carrier does not want any customers that have your type of cancer, then according to Mr. Singer, that insurance carrier would structure the medical network of doctors and hospitals to ensure that the best medical capabilities for treating your cancer were not available to your policy and for your use, making your Obama Care policy useless or forcing you to go elsewhere for insurance.

Another day, another unfolding disaster from Obama Care. We only covered one disaster today but it was a big one: a big lie about how many uninsured Americans were walking around without access to health insurance and a big solution that failed miserably to address this very, very small problem. More disasters to follow.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

July, 2016, Part 1, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and A Believer In Science: El Nino, A New Theory, and a List Of Global Warming Myths

Every month we have enough material to return to a continuing theme in this blog, namely that “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.” This became of interest because of people like Al Gore who fanatically and verbosely claimed that you had to be an idiot to not believe in manmade global warming. It has been my life belief that anyone that is that loud and that obnoxious is hiding something, that rather than argue facts and reality it is better to beat down and insult anyone who disagrees.

As we have dove into the whole issue of manmade global warming, or its new rebranded title of climate change, we found that Al Gore and people like him were guilty of a number of things:

Ignoring science and realities that did not support their opinions and positions.

• Rather than have an adult conversation about climate, these types of advocates like Gore sank to the level of insulting those who dared look at ALL science by calling them a variety of names including racists, homophobes, terrorists, flat earth believers, and other slanderous names.
• Continuing to insist that politicians step up their intrusions into our lives with higher taxes, more regulations, and more control of our freedoms and standards of living based on a shaky theory at best.

To see the past posts and the multitude of evidence that we have compiled that showed it is perfectly okay to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, enter the phrase "global warming doubter” in the search box above or go through the monthly historical posts listed on the right side of this page.

Thus, let’s see the latest facts and science that prove you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, regardless of what Al Gore proclaims:

1) Patrick J, Michaels, writing for the Cato Institute on July 1, 2016, reviewed the latest scientific data as it regards actual air temperatures as actually measured by satellites. His insights are important because a lot of global warming advocates were pointing to the recent hot weather as evidence that global warming was real. Global warming doubters were pointing to historical temperature trends which showed that higher temperatures should be expected since an El Nino weather pattern had formed in the Pacific and that historically, that raises temperatures in the U.S.

The satellites’ recordings include the following highlights:

• Mr. Michaels sets up the science with the following El Nino summary: “For months we have been saying that, once they started dropping, the satellite temperatures—our only truly global measure—were going to go down with a vengeance, which is what usually happens after a strong El Niño event spikes a fever. El Niño is a dramatic slowdown (or even a reversal) in the trade winds that diverge surface water away from the South American coast, “upwelling” much colder subsurface waters. When that stops, global temperatures rocket upwards, but that also builds up more and more cold water to be unleashed when the trade winds resume.”
• The satellite based temperature readings in the lower atmosphere are already showing a dramatic drop in the past four months as the El Nino starts to break up.
• In fact, according to Roy Spencer of University of Alabama-Huntsville, who publishes the satellite data, the drop in temperatures the past in the last two months was the second-largest drop ever.
• It missing being the biggest drop the record by only 0.01⁰C. 
• The existing record was set, wait for it, after the slightly bigger 1997-8 El Niño. 
• In the tropics, where El Niño is the strongest, the drop was the largest in the entire 37-year record of keeping track of temps by satellite.
• Despite the current strong El Nino, the overall change in temps has been basically flat, subject to random error variation, over the past 20 years.

It is so much easier to be a global warming doubter when we have actual, government data to prove our point and so much harder to be a global warming advocate when data destroys pre-conceived notions of what they believe. We will keep an eye on this data over the next six months or so when we expect the fading of El Nino will further reduce overall air temperatures as measured by the satellites.

2) The website, www.ihavethetruth.com, probably does not have the reporting heft or reputation of say the New York Times and the Washington Post. So, it would be easy for global warming advocates to look at this tiny website and pooh pooh anything it says that would contradict what Al Gore told the advocates for global warming. In fact, they would probably ignore the following assertions by this website that was recently published on their site:

• The global “truth” that people like Al Gore and Barack Obama like to spout is that 97% of climate scientists say the science is settled and that humanity is the prime suspect in driving up Earth’s temperatures. However, the article points out, correctly, given that we have already reported on this in previous posts, that this number was passed on a too small of a sample size of only 77 people, that was selectively and biasedly drawn from a much larger sample size who responded to a survey. You cannot base government policy and laws on such a small, skewed sample.
• There are 35 “lies” in Al Gore’s global warming movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
• Only 32% of the country is really worried about global warming which is about the same percentage of people that were worried about global cooling back in the 1980s.
• If global warming is so bad and that it will eventually wipe out shore communities, why did Al Gore buy a California beach mansion a number of years ago?
• Al Gore predicted back in 2008 that the entire North Pole could be melted by 2013 but it is still there and has been growing in ice size over the past few years.

The article goes through many more “facts” about global warming. What gives this obscure website credibility is that it sources every assertion it makes which allows the reader to easily go to the link that is the basis for the assertion, links that take you to far more famous websites and research sources. To check out the above, alleged global warming fallacies and others to judge for yourself, click on the following link:

https://ihavethetruth.com/2016/06/23/greatest-hoax-of-the-21st-century-98-scientists-do-not-believe-in-man-made-climate-change/?utm_source=rwn&utm_medium=rwn&utm_campaign=rwn

I think you will be surprised how much information that Al Gore types are not telling you but are suppressing to keep their myths alive.

3) It is no secret that just about every global warming forecast over the past two decades has been a prediction disaster. These models have not come close to even remotely predicting what the Earth’s temperatures would be in the future. 

They are so bad that anyone who thinks that today’s global warming forecast models will do any better has just not been paying attention to the disaster that is climate forecasting. All of which raises a very valid question: if you have had grossly incorrect forecasts since day one, why should we believe your forecasts today will do any better job of predicting the future?

But there is a new scientific study and theory out that explains global warming and global cooling in one grand theory. To me, a non-climate scientist, the new theory seems logical and and helps explain why the Earth’s temperatures have been going up (global warming) and then followed by those temperatures going down (global cooling) over the history of the entire Earth. Rather than me trying to explain the theory, let me quote a description of it from a recent article that was on the Daily Caller website: “Now comes a new study which challenges the role that CO2 plays in our planet’s average temperature. The paper, “Modulation of ice ages via precession and dust-albedo feedbacks” by Ralph Ellis, asserts that carbon dioxide’s main mode of operation on planetary climate has to do with its interaction with terrestrial plant life: as CO2 levels decline after an extended ice-age, plants die off in areas such as the high steppes of Mongolia, causing a big upsurge in dust storms which coat the Northern Hemisphere’s ice fields, lowering their reflectiveness (albedo) resulting in the Earth coming out of an ice-age. After about 5,000 years, the planet, now with high CO2 concentrations, goes back into an ice-age as the Earth’s 23,000-year precession cycle swings the Northern Hemisphere away from the Sun.

Ellis’ paper provides an explanation for what the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) called, “one of the major unsolved questions in climate research” — that is, what caused the large CO2 variations in the past and how they were linked to climate. Of course, one would think that such a large unanswered question might be resolved before creating dozens of climate models that all assume a dominant role for CO2 as a direct agent in making the planet warmer or cooler depending on how much of it is present in the atmosphere.”

Here you have a comprehensive, logical, and testable theory about CO2 and how it affects both global warming AND global cooling. It is so much more viable and robust than just taking a few decades of temperature data and trying to extrapolate it out for several more decades. As a trained, degreed statistician, it is my view that the proposal by Mr. Ellis has likely far more statistical validity than the failed, simplistic historic global warming forecast models. And if he is right, than Al Gore et al are wrong and it becomes more realistic to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, the type of scientific thinking espoused by Mr. Ellis.

More discussion tomorrow on why it is perfectly rational and sane to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:


http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

May, 2016, Part 2, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and A Believer In Science: Bill Nye Wants You In Jail and Al Gore Was Wrong Despite An Oscar Award

Every month we have enough material to return to a continuing theme in this blog, namely that “I am a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.” This became of interest because of people like Al Gore who fanatically and verbosely claimed that you had to be an idiot to not believe in man made global warming. It has been my life belief that anyone that is that loud and that obnoxious is hiding something, that rather than argue facts and reality it is better to beat down and insult anyone who disagrees.

As we have dove into the whole issue of man made global warming, or its new rebranded title of climate change, we found that Al Gore and people like him were guilty of a number of things:

• Ignoring science and realities that did not support their opinions and positions.
• Rather than have an adult conversation about climate, these types of advocates like Gore sank to the level of insulting those who dared look at ALL science by calling them a variety of names including racists, homophobes, terrorists, flat earth believers, and other slanderous names.
• Continuing to insist that politicians step up their intrusions into our lives with higher taxes, more regulations, and more control of our freedoms and standards of living based on a shaky theory at best.

To see the past posts and the multitude of evidence that we have compiled that showed it is perfectly okay to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, enter the phrase "global warming doubter” in the search box above or go through the monthly historical posts listed on the right side of this page.

Thus, let’s see the latest facts and science that prove you can be a global warming doubter and a believer in science, regardless of what Al Gore proclaims:

1) Bill Nye is the science guy. One would think that someone known as the science guy would want to look at all sides of a scientific argument or problem. That is what scientists do, look at all available data, research, and information and put together testable theories in the search for truth.

But apparently Mr. Nye is not a traditional scientist in this sense. Even though we have provided hundreds of examples in various forms that proves that global warming science is not settled, Nye thinks that those realities, scientists, and facts should be ignored.

Why did I reach that conclusion? In a recent interview by the Youtube channel, cfact, Nye implied that putting global warming doubters jail might be a viable option since he and non-scientists like Al Gore and Barack Obama know what is best for humanity. If it means trampling on the rights of Americans to have a different opinion, then so be it.

Throwing people in jail for having a difference of opinion, a difference that is justified in so many ways by so many scientists and research? Is that what the political class in this country has done to us, abusing the Constitution and the scientific method in one fell swoop? And suggested by someone, Bill Nye, who has a degree in mechanical engineering, a discipline quite far away from knowing anything special about climate.

You can see Nye’s implying that jail is a good option for global warming doubters at:

http://conservativevideos.com/bill-nye-the-science-guy-thinks-climate-deniers-should-be-punished-in-this-horrific-way/

2) Michael Bastasch, writing for the Daily Caller on May 3, 2016, went back in time to review the forecasts that were made in Al Gore’s Oscar winning movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.” At the time of its release, the movie and it’s scary forecasts of climate disasters due to global warming were all the rage. What Mr. Bastasch found ten years later is that Gore’s “inconvenient truths” turned out to be anything but truth:

Claim #1 - Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa will be snow free within ten years.

Reality: There is still considerable snow on Mount Kilimanjaro and that snow is there 12 months a year. In a 2014 study, ecologists found that while the snow pack on the mountain may have shrunk a tiny bit over the past ten years, they concluded that the snow would be on that mountain top for many, many years to come:

“There are ongoing several studies, but preliminary findings show that the ice is nowhere near melting,” Imani Kikoti, an ecologist at Mount Kilimanjaro National Park, told eturbonews.com. “Much as we agree that the snow has declined over centuries, but we are comfortable that its total melt will not happen in the near future.” “Over the centuries,” long before man started using a lot of carbon based fuels. 

Claim #2: Gore claimed that the Earth’s temperature rise from man made carbon usage was “uninterrupted and intensifying.”

Reality: Beginning prior to the movie, global temperatures had already flatlined and continued to flatline for the next ten years. Until the recent El Nino, there has been no statistically significant warming of the Earth for more than 21 years. So much for uninterrupted and intensifying.

Claim #3: Storms and weather would become more frequent and intense as humanity continues to use carbon based fuels: “And of course when the oceans get warmer, that causes stronger storms. That same year that we had that string of big hurricanes, we also set an all-time record for tornadoes.”

Reality: But storms did NOT get more frequent and intense over the next ten years. As a Florida resident for the past ten years, we in this state have not had a major storm hit us since we moved here in 2005. While Hurricane Katrina was terrible and devastating, nothing close to it has happened since then even though humanity has used a lot of carbon based fuel since that storm.

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an entity that has been the global advocate for global warming, eventually had to fess up relative to this claim, concluding in 2013 that there “is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century….[there has been] no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century” and “[n]o robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”

This is a major confession since Al Gore shared the Oscar for “An Inconvenient Truth” with the IPCC.

Clain #4: The Arctic would be ice free within the next 50 to 75 years. This is the best kind of forecast to make since just about everyone alive today will not live long enough to see if Gore was right. He used the scare tactic that the polar bears would go extinct since they would have no ice to live on any more at the North Pole.

Reality: But rather than play it safe, Gore blew it when in 2008 he predicted that the North Pole would be ice free by 2013 which, of course, never happened. We have discussed the reality many times in this blog that Arctic ice pack is still quite robust and no where close to being extinct and melted. “I doubt the Arctic will be free of all ice in any summer, although the total area may well be greatly reduced in the future if it continues to warm there,” said Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Such a situation should not be overly worrisome, as there is ample evidence that it has occurred in the past and clearly, polar bears, and everything else up there managed to survive.”

As an FYI, recall that we have shown a number of studies that proved that the polar bear population is large and growing despite Al Gore’s predictions of gloom and doom.

Claim #5: If Greenland’s ice sheet melts because of man made global warming, it will dump a load of cold water into the Atlantic Ocean and cause a new ice age, i.e. global warming will cause an ice age because the cold water changes the Gulf Stream: “At the end of the last ice age, as the last glacier was receding from North America, the ice melted and a giant pool of fresh water formed. An ice dam on the eastern border formed and one day it broke.”

Reality: Australian scientists totally killed the theory that the Gulf Stream, or AMOC, was weakening because of global warming or any other reason: “Claims of strengthening or reducing of the AMOC are therefore pure speculation,” the scientists wrote in a research paper published in March, 2016. 

So much for the “science being settled,” as Al Gore had loudly and and often proclaimed. For a film that was so bold in it’s predictions, it certainly was so wrong in being accurate in it’s predictions.

That will do it for today but we still have a lot of science and realities to discuss on why it is rational and sane to be a global warming doubter and a believer in science. Those discussions to happen in the coming days, assuming Bill Nye had not thrown us in jail by then.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

April, 2016, Bonus Post, The Unfolding Disaster That Is Obama Care: More Failing Numbers and ....A Retro Look Back to One of The Smug Fools That Developed The Whole Mess In the First Place

Every month for years now we have had to discuss how bad Obama Care is turning out to be under the continuing theme, “the unfolding disaster that is Obama Care.” This month is no different. As the legislation continues to march through America, driving up health care and health insurance prices as it serves as dead weight on economic growth, it cements its rightful place as the worst piece of legislation Washington has ever produced.

It never had a chance to be successful since it really never addressed the underlying root causes of our ever increasing health costs in the country:

• Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, resulting in obscenely high obesity rates for the country.
• Our food chain is infested with overdoses of high fructose corn syrup, salt, and other unhealthy additives.
• Americans smoke too much.
• Americans do not exercise enough.
• The country is in serious need of health care tort reform.
• Barriers to insurance company competition across state lines need to come down.
• Obama Care never “followed the money” to find out who is actually profiting from the ever escalating healthcare costs in this country and how to get those factors under control.
• Obama Care never got the immense amount of fraud and abuse in current government healthcare programs, Medicare and Medicaid, under control in order to save money to efficiently fund other government health care initiatives.
• Obama Care never put serious research money towards curing the major diseases that drive high healthcare costs such as high frequency cancers and dementia type diseases.

You cannot resolve any problem unless you understand and address the underlying root causes. No difference here: Obama Care legislation never addressed these listed root causes and thus, has no chance of ever being successful.

But it is not just missing the root causes of our healthcare costs that makes Obama Care so horrible. It resulted in millions of Americans losing access to their favored doctors, hospitals, and insurance policies. It has caused insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays to escalate substantially. It will likely add trillions of dollars to the national debt. It has exposed millions of Americans to higher than necessary identity theft chances. It has created government bureaucracies that are wastefully spending taxpayer wealth and being exploited by criminal elements. It has stifled economic growth and job creation.

These are just a sample of the types of idiocy that we have been reviewing for the past several years in this blog relative to Obama Care., To read those past posts, just enter the phrase, “the unfolding disaster,” in the search box above.

We thought that we were done with yesterday’s post regarding the “unfolding disaster that Is Obama Care,” but true to form, just when we think we are through the current month’s disasters, a few more worthy discussion points and disasters pop up, which leads us to the following:

1) One more source of failing Obama Care data today. Some of this information we have already referenced over the past week but the following list from Michael F. Cannon’s article, “5 Things ACA Supporters Don’t Want You To Know About UnitedHealth’s Withdrawal From ObamaCare,” writing for the Cato Institute April 22, 2016, kind of neatly sums everything up:

• Unitedhealthcare,the country’s largest health insurance provider, is getting out of most of the 34 states where it sells Obama Care insurance policies in 2017 because it cannot make money in those states.
• The company lost $650 million on those policies in 2015.
• A recent report from the Kaiser Family Foundation stated that if the company leaves the state of Oklahoma, only one company will be left selling Obama Care policies in that state.
• If the company gets out of every one of those 34 states, not just most of them, the share of counties across the country with only one or two Obama Care insurers will jump from 36% to 52% and the share of Obama Care policy enrollees with only one or two carriers will double from 15% to just under 30%.
• If those former Unitedhealthcare customers go to other Obama Care carriers, you can probably expect those health insurance companies to see their financial results to also go south since they will be serving the same Unitedhealthcare customers that Unitedhealthcare could not make a profit on.
• The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, whose member companies are the biggest health insurers in the Obama Care world, reported that Obama Care policy holders are 22% more costly than the customers they serve that have employer based insurance coverage.
• Mr. Cannon points out another negative wrinkle within the whole Unitedhealthcare situation: “Unitedhealth generally didn’t have the lowest-cost premiums in the Exchanges. The fact that it still lost money provides further evidence of significant adverse selection. It suggests high cost patients are shopping for the most comprehensive benefits, regardless of premium; that Unitedhealth offered coverage that was attractive to the sick; and the company thus attracted a particularly costly group of enrollees.”
• Unitedhealthcare also assumed that its current enrollment will drop 18% over the course of this year, with a lot of the reduction driven by current customers that cannot afford their policies despite Obama promising that annmual family health insurance costs would go down by upwards of $2,500.
• A McKinsey analysis recently found that despite getting subsidized by the Federal government’s reinsurance program, 70% of Obama Care insurance companies were still losing money on those policies and the average profit margin of all Obama Care insurance companies was negative in 41 states.
• Obama Care insurance costs will continue to rise in 2017 because of how bad it program it is and because those sicker and less healthy Unitedhealthcare customers, the ones that cost that company to lose so much money, will seek out other Obama Care carriers and by law, those carriers must accept these higher cost customers.
• Given this rising premium and sicker than expected customer scenario, the author predicts that more companies will leave the program if they are not allowed to substantially raise their insurance policy costs in 2017.

As the cost of insurance goes up under Obama Care, less people will purchase insurance, leaving the Obama Care insurance carriers with only the sickest and most costly patients which will cause them to raise rates or get out of the Obama Care market which will reduce competition which will drive up costs, which will dry up customers = death spiral.

Just about any human endeavor that finds itself in a death spiral never gets out of it until that death spiral collpases into failure. That is what we are witnessing today as the Obama Care logic, structure, and realities begin their relentless trend downward.

2) Okay, last disaster review for this month, I promise. Let’s go up a few years to find out how this whole fiasco was spawned. The following paragraph contains the words of one of the academic geniuses [sarcasm] that helped to build the Obama Care legislation, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, and how it was derived and developed to confuse, divert, and sneak through the legislation, in the process assuming that Americans are too stupid to understand how we were about to get screwed by the worst piece of Washington legislation ever passed. 

I have copied some of his words below with my emphasis on how little he respected our intelligence and brains and have also included a link to the original videotape so that you can hear the contempt that this professor has for you and the rest of us: "This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed… Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass….Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelcannon/2016/02/05/obamacares-low-enrollment-numbers-also-show-why-exchange-coverage-will-get-worse-over-time/#8b7f48d5a053

“The stupidity of the American voter.” Given the epic failure of Obama Care, who is stupid today, those that pointed out how much this law sucked years ago or those that were so smug, so condescending that they viewed themselves too smart for their own good and that their work on Obama Care will be long known as an unmitigated disaster?

And you can bet that we will be back next month with more disasters, regardless of what an MIT professor claims in the above video.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

www.loathemygovernment.com

It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

Term Limits Now: http://www.howmuchworsecoulditget.com
http://www.reason.com
http://www.cato.org
http://www.bankruptingamerica.org
http://www.conventionofstates.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w