06 March 2013

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

Hugo Chavez was a hero to the poor in Venezuela, and many here in the U.S.  What most fail to realize however is that the progress that he made in helping the poor will be short lived.  Why?  Plain and simple, he got lucky.  He took over just at the time that Oil started to skyrocket.  He used those petro dollars to improve the lives of those in Venezuela, but did nothing for the rest of the economy.  Compared to the rest of the region, the Venezuelan economy is in shambles.  To top it off, Venezuela today is even more dependent on Oil dollars than it was before, just as the world is starting to move away from oil.  Ford, GM and Chrysler are all making trucks that run on Natural Gas, cheap and plentiful here in the States and long before it runs out, the move will be to solar and Fuel Cell technology.

Instead of investing in the future, Chavez used oil as his cash cow to finance his socialist dreams.  Even worse, Chavez lavished over 100 Billion dollars on his buddies, while putting at least 1 to 2 Billion in his own pocket of the estimated Trillion Dollars in oil wealth generated since he took over.  What will happen to Venezuela in 10 years when more and more cars, buses, trucks and Power Plants are converted to run on Natural Gas and as Solar continues doubling in efficiency every few years.  Even worse, what would happen to Venezuela if a Conservative takes over the White House in 4 years, and removes most restrictions on drilling, and increases permits on Federal lands, thereby flooding the market with cheap oil?  The U.S. has  the largest untapped reserves in the world.  Just look at what happened during the Reagan era when he conspired with the Saudi's to make oil super cheap, bankrupting the Soviet Union.
Unfortunately, history will look upon Chavez as a short sighted opportunist who beat the populist drum of vilifying the U.S. and Capitalism.  He spread the disease of Socialism in Venezuela and set them up for a major fall.  The King is Dead, Long Live the King.

05 March 2013

Climate Reconstruction Shows Long Term Cooling Trend


Climate in northern Europe reconstructed for the past 2,000 years: Cooling trend calculated precisely for the first time

Calculations prepared by Mainz scientists will also influence the way current climate change is perceived / Publication of results in Nature Climate Change


An international team including scientists from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) has published a reconstruction of the climate in northern Europe over the last 2,000 years based on the information provided by tree-rings. Professor Dr. Jan Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC. In so doing, the researchers have been able for the first time to precisely demonstrate that the long-term trend over the past two millennia has been towards climatic cooling. "We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Esper. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy, as they will influence the way today's climate changes are seen in context of historical warm periods." The new study has been published in the journal Nature Climate Change.


Was the climate during Roman and Medieval times warmer than today? And why are these earlier warm periods important when assessing the global climate changes we are experiencing today? The discipline of paleoclimatology attempts to answer such questions. Scientists analyze indirect evidence of climate variability, such as ice cores and ocean sediments, and so reconstruct the climate of the past. The annual growth rings in trees are the most important witnesses over the past 1,000 to 2,000 years as they indicate how warm and cool past climate conditions were.
Researchers from Germany, Finland, Scotland, and Switzerland examined tree-ring density profiles in trees from Finnish Lapland. In this cold environment, trees often collapse into one of the numerous lakes, where they remain well preserved for thousands of years.
The international research team used these density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees in northern Scandinavia to create a sequence reaching back to 138 BC. The density measurements correlate closely with the summer temperatures in this area on the edge of the Nordic taiga. The researchers were thus able to create a temperature reconstruction of unprecedented quality. The reconstruction provides a high-resolution representation of temperature patterns in the Roman and Medieval Warm periods, but also shows the cold phases that occurred during the Migration Period and the later Little Ice Age.
In addition to the cold and warm phases, the new climate curve also exhibits a phenomenon that was not expected in this form. For the first time, researchers have now been able to use the data derived from tree-rings to precisely calculate a much longer-term cooling trend that has been playing out over the past 2,000 years. Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun.
"This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant," says Esper. "However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia."

04 March 2013

No Deal Pending on Sequestration, Because of the Opportunity it Presents


Joe Scarborough got it got it right, when he said that America won't remember the Sequester of 2013 "as some cataclysmic fiscal event", but when he goes on to say about the Republicans that "you would think its leadership would have taken to heart Mr. Obama’s warnings and struck a deal before their abysmal approval ratings sank even lower", he fails to see the point.  Obama had absolutely no intention of striking a deal.  These cuts after all, amount to a paltry 2% of PROJECTED spending (which is always a MINIMUM of 3% higher than the previous year).  As the former White House Chief of Staff to the President, Rahm Emanuel used to always say, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste".  This issue literally presents the President with yet another opportunity to slam the Republicans and get more public support for his programs, his methods, his tax increases and so on.  So what was Obama's end game?  Blow this up to an issue, even though he knew it's a non issue, then blame the Republicans!
 
Think about it, Joe himself reported on how the Republicans wanted to give the President control over exactly what would be cut, yet he refused?  Not only did he refuse, he actually threatened to VETO any bill that gave him that kind of authority and responsibility!  Why would he do this?  Simple, the President doesn't want ANY cuts whatsoever, no matter how small and no matter how much waste is pointed out, but more importantly he wants to have another issue to beat up the Republicans over.  The plan is to hype up the damage to the economy over the next year so the Republicans lose in the Midterm elections.  Obama ends up with Nancy Pelosi in charge of Congress again and he can go back to pushing things like his Climate Change agenda and other tax increases.

27 February 2013

DEBT LIMIT - A GUIDE TO AMERICAN FEDERAL DEBT MADE EASY.



For those with short attention spans:
Total Household Debt:                          $140,000.00
Household Income:                                 $21,000.00
Household Spending:                              $38,200.00
New Debt:                                             $16,500.00
Amount Cut:                                                $385.00

Translated to the Federal Government:

Total Federal Debt:             $14,000,000,000,000.00
Federal Income:                    $2,100,000,000,000.00
Federal Spending:                 $3,820,000,000,000.00
New Debt:                            $1,650,000,000,000.00
Amount Cut:                              $38,500,000,000.00

Either way you look at it, it's only about 1% of the budget.  Let's keep in mind this video was made about a year ago with the original budget deal.  The new budget deal calls for "800 Billion" in cuts... [over 10 years], or about 80 Billion a year.  Pretty much all the other numbers are about the same, except the income has increased to around 2.3 Trillion a year.  The new "cuts" will amount to only around 2% or about double the original budget deal a year ago.

If the new numbers were put into the video the amount the guy had "cut" from his budget would be around $800.00 a year, instead of $385.00 a year.  Either way we're talking about tiny, insignificant "cuts" that only perpetuate the incredible levels of spending.

Our Sponsors