Pied Piper
Beware…
It’s just a fairy tale really … isn’t it?
There was a Pied Piper who said,
“We live in the greatest country in the world. Help me change it!”
*And the people said, “Change is good!”
Then he said, “We are going to tax the rich fat-cats,”…*And the people said
“Sock it to them!”
“and redistribute their wealth.”
*And the people said, “Show me the money!”
And then he said, “Redistribution of wealth is good for everybody”
*And Joe the plumber said, are you kidding me?”
And Joe’s personal records were hacked and publicized.
*And one lone reporter asked, “Isn’t that Marxist policy?”
And she was banished from the kingdom!
Then someone asked, “With no foreign relations experience, how will you deal
with radical terrorists?”
And the Pied Piper said, “Simple. I’ll sit down and talk with them and show them
how nice we really are and
they’ll forget that they ever wanted to kill us all!”
Then the Pied Piper said, “I’ll give 95% of you lower taxes.”
*And one, lone voice said, “But 40% of us don’t pay ANY taxes.”
So the Pied Piper said, “Then I’ll give you some of the taxes the fat-cats pay!”
*And the people said, “Show me the money!”
Then the Pied Piper said, “I’ll tax your Capital Gains when you sell your
homes!”
*And the people yawned and the slumping housing market collapsed.
And he said, “I’ll mandate employer- funded health care for EVERY worker and
raise the minimum wage.”
*And the people said, “Gim’me some of that!”
Then he said, “I’ll penalize employers who ship jobs overseas.”
*And the people said, “Where’s my rebate check?”
Then the Pied Piper actually said, “I’ll bankrupt the coal industry and
electricity rates will skyrocket!”
*And the people said, “Coal is dirty, coal is evil, no more coal! But we don’t
care for that part about higher electric rates.”
So the Pied Piper said, “Not to worry. If your rebate isn’t enough to cover your
expenses, we’ll bail you out. Just sign up with ACORN and your troubles are
over!” Then he said, “Illegal immigrants feel scorned and slighted. Let’s grant
them amnesty, Social Security, free education, free lunches, free medical care,
bi-lingual signs and guaranteed housing.”
*And the people said, “Ole`! Bravo!” And they made him King!
And so it came to pass that employers, facing spiraling costs and ever-higher
taxes, raised their prices and laid off workers. Others simply gave up and went
out of business and the economy slowed even further. Then the Pied Piper said,
“I am the Messiah and I’m here to save you! We’ll just print more money so
everyone will have enough!” But our foreign trading partners said, “Wait a
minute. Your dollar isn’t worth what it was. You’ll have to pay more.”
*And the people said, “Wait a minute. That’s not fair!”
And the world said, “Neither are these other, idiotic programs you’ve embraced.
You’ve become a Socialist state and a second-rate power. Now you’ll play by our
rules!”
*And the people said, “What have we done?”
But it was too late.
If you think this is a fairy tale, open your eyes and ears. It’s happening RIGHT
NOW!
On the record
"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line." - President Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998
"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." - President Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998
Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face." - Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998
"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten time since 1983." - Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18,1998
"[W]e urge you, after consulting with Congress, and consistent with the U.S. Constitution and laws, to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs." - Letter to President Clinton, signed by Sens. Carl Levin (D-MI), Tom Daschle (D-SD), John Kerry( D - MA), and others Oct. 9,1998
"Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process." - Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA), Dec. 16, 1998
"Hussein has ... chosen to spend his money on building weapons of mass destruction and palaces for his cronies." > - Madeline Albright, Clinton Secretary of State, Nov. 10, 1999
"There is no doubt that ... Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf War status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies." - Letter to President Bush, Signed by Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL,) and others, December 5, 2001
"We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandated of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them." - Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002
"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country." - Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." - Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002
"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002
"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..." - Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002
"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9,2002
"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction."- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002
"He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do" - Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002
"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members.. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." - Sen. Hillary Clinton (D, NY), Oct 10, 2002
"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction." - Sen. Bob Graham (D, FL), Dec. 8, 2002
"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal, murderous dictator, leading an oppressive regime ... He presents a particularly grievous threat because he is so consistently prone to miscalculation ... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction ... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real" - Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Jan. 23. 2003
America's current mass
immigration mess is the result of a change in the laws in 1965. Prior
to 1965, despite some changes in
the 50's, America was a low-immigration country basically living under
immigration laws written in 1924. Thanks to low immigration, the swamp
of cheap labor was largely drained during this period, America became a
fundamentally middle-class society, and our many European ethnic groups
were brought together into a common national culture. In some ways,
this achievement was so complete that we started to take for granted
what we had achieved and forgot why it happened. So in a spasm of
sentimentality on the Right and lies on the Left, we opened the borders.
Born of liberal ideology, the
1965 bill abolished the national origins quota system that had regulated
the ethnic composition of immigration in fair proportion to each group's
existing presence in the population. In a misguided application spirit
of the civil rights era, the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations saw
these ethnic quotas as an archaic form of chauvinism. Moreover, as Cold
Warriors facing charges of "racism" and "imperialism," they found the
system rhetorically embarrassing. The record of debate over this
seismic change in immigration policy reveals that left-wingers, in their
visceral flight to attack "discrimination," did not reveal the
consequences of their convictions. Instead, their spokesmen set out to
assuage concerned traditionalists with a litany of lies and wishful
thinking.
Chief among national concerns
was total numeric immigration. Senate floor manager and Camelot
knight-errant Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, assured jittery senators
that "our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants
annually." Senator Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, further calmed that august
body, insisting "the total number of potential immigrants would not be
changed very much." Time has proven otherwise. Average immigration
levels before the 1965 amendments took effect hovered around 300,000 per
annum. Yet 1,045,000 legal immigrants flooded our cities in
1996 alone.
The 1965 "reform" reoriented
policy away from European ethnic groups, yet implemented numbers similar
to 1950's rates in an attempt to keep immigration under control.
However, Congressmen managed to miss a loophole large enough to allow a
300 percent in immigration, because they did not take into account two
"sentimental" provisions within the bill. Immediate family members of
U.S. citizens and political refugees face no quotas. Their likely
impact on the nation was ignored, presumably because aiding families and
the dispossessed cast the right emotive glow.
Yet leftists could sound
like hard-nosed defenders of the national interest when necessary. In
urging passage of the 1965 bill, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, D-New York,
wrote in a letter to the New York Times, "The time has come for
us to insist that the quota system be replaced by the merit system." As
if merit is the operative principle along the Rio Grande today!
Similarly, Representative Robert Sweeney, D-Ohio, insisted the bill was
"more beneficial to us." In fact, the 1965 bill made "family
reunification" - including extended family members - the key
criterion for eligibility. These new citizens may in turn send for their
families, creating an endless cycle known to sociologists as the
immigration chain. The qualifications of immigrants have predictably
fallen. Hispanic immigrants, by far the largest contingent, are eight
times more likely than natives to lack a ninth-grade education, and less
than half as likely to have a college degree.
The bill did not end
discrimination based on what President John F. Kennedy called "the
accident of birth." (This of course begs the question of whether birth
within the nation, the basis of common national community, is just an
accident, but let that pass for now.) It de facto grossly
discriminates in favor of Mexicans and certain other groups.
Not only has the bill failed in
its stated purpose, it has realized many of its critics' worst
nightmares. Concern mounted that this bill would radically change the
ethnic composition of the United States. Such things were still
considered legitimate concerns in 1965, in the same Congress that had
just passed the key civil rights legislation of the 1960's.
Specific influx predictions
that were made seem tragicomic today. Senator Robert Kennedy predicted
a total of 5,000 immigrants from India; his successor as Attorney
General, Nicholas Katzenbach, foresaw a meager 8,000. Actual
immigration from India has exceeded by 1,000-times Robert Kennedy's
prediction.
Senator Hiram Fong, R-Hawaii,
calculated that "the people from [Asia] will never reach 1 percent of
the population." Even in 1965, people were willing to admit that we
have a reasonable interest in not being inundated by culturally alien
foreigners, and it was considered acceptable to say so on the floor of
the Senate. Try that today, even as a supposed conservative! (Asians
currently account for three percent of the population, and will swell to
near 10 percent by 2050 if present trends continue.)
The only remaining Congressman
who had voted on the 1920s quotas, Representative Emanuel Celler, D-New
York, insisted, "There will not be, comparatively speaking, many Asians
or Africans entering this country." Today, the number of Asians and
Africans entering this country each year exceeds the annual average
total number of immigrants during the 1960s.
Yet the largest ethnic shift
has occurred within the ranks of Hispanics. Despite Robert Kennedy's
promise that, "Immigration from any single country would be limited to
10 percent of the total," Mexico sent 20 percent of last year's
immigrants. Hispanics have made up nearly half of all immigrants since
1968. After a 30-year experiment with open borders, whites no longer
constitute a majority of Californians or residents of New York City.
As immigrants pour in, native
Americans feel themselves pushed out. In 1965, Senator Hugh Scott,
R-Pennsylvania, opined, "I doubt if this bill will really be the cause
of crowding the present Americans out of the 50 states." Yet
half-a-million native Californians fled the state in the last decade,
while its total population increased by three million, mostly
immigrants. This phenomenon also holds true in microcosm. In tiny
Ligonier, Indiana, (population 4,357) 914 Hispanics moved in and 216
native Americans departed during the 1990s. Hispanics now outnumber the
Amish as the area's dominant minority.
Thirty-plus years of
immigration at historic levels have also had an economic impact on
America. In 1965, Ted Kennedy confidently predicted, "No immigrant visa
will be issued to a person who is likely to become a public charge."
However, political refugees qualify for public assistance upon setting
foot on U.S. soil. The exploding Somali refugee population of Lewiston,
Maine, (pop. 36,000) is largely welfare-dependent. Likewise, 2,900 of
Wausau, Wisconsin's 4,200 Hmong refugees receive public assistance. In
all, 21 percent of immigrants receive public assistance, whereas 14
percent of natives do so. Immigrants are 50 percent more likely than
natives to live in poverty.
Ted Kennedy also claimed the
1965 amendments "will not cause American workers to lose their jobs."
Teddy cannot have it both ways: either the immigrant will remain
unemployed and become a public charge, or he will take a job that
otherwise could have gone to a native American. What is presently
undisputed - except by the same economic analysts at
Wired magazine and the
Wall Street Journal
who gave us dot-com stocks - is that immigrant participation
lowers wages.
Despite the overwhelming
assurances of the bill's supporters, the 1965 Immigration Reform Act has
remade society into the image its critics most feared. Immigration
levels topping a million a year will increase U.S. population to 400
million within 50 years. Meanwhile, exponents of multiculturalism
insist new arrivals make no effort to assimilate; to do so would be
"genocidal," a notion that makes a mockery of real genocides. Instead,
long-forgotten grudges are nursed against the white populace. Native
citizens take to flight as the neighborhoods around them, the norms in
their hometowns, are debased for the convenience of low-paid
immigrants and well-heeled businessmen. All the while, indigenous
paychecks drop through lower wages and higher taxes collected to provide
social services for immigrants. And this only takes into account legal
immigration.
These results were unforeseen
by liberals easily led about by their emotions. Others were not so
blind. Jewish organizations had labored since 1924 to unweave national
origins quotas by admitting family members on non-quota visas. The
B'nai B'rith Women and the American Council for Judaism Philanthropic
Fund, among other Jewish organizations, supported this reform
legislation while it was yet in subcommittee in the winter of 1965.
Roman Catholics had the twin motivations of still-evolving social
justice doctrine and the potential windfall of a mass influx of
co-religionists from Latin America. Other organized minorities
pressured for increased immigration to benefit relatives in their
homelands. The ultra-liberal Americans for Democratic Action, the ACLU
and the National Lawyers Guild joined the chorus. Further, the
Communist Party USA supported higher immigration on the grounds that it
destabilizes working Americans.
Americans must realize
demographic trends are not inevitable, the product of
mysterious forces beyond their control. Today's population is the
result of yesterday's immigration policy, and that policy is as clearly
broken as its backers' assurances were facetious. A rational policy
will only come about when native Americans place the national interest
above liberal howls of "prejudice" and "tribalism."s article....
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http://www.wecnmagazine.com
Some people are lucky enough to enjoy their work, some are lucky enough
to love it, and then there’s Reid Bryson. At age 86, he’s still hard at
it every day, delving into the science some say he invented.
Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history
of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the
University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of
Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first
director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of
Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500
Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding
achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He
has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was
identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most
frequently cited climatologist in the world.
Long ago in the Army Air Corps, Bryson and a colleague prepared the
aviation weather forecast that predicted discovery of the jet stream by
a group of B-29s flying to and from Tokyo. Their warning to expect
westerly winds at 168 knots earned Bryson and his friend a chewing out
from a general—and the general’s apology the next day when he learned
they were right. Bryson flew into a couple of typhoons in 1944, three
years before the Weather Service officially did such things, and he
prepared the forecast for the homeward flight of the Enola Gay. Back in
Wisconsin, he built a program at the UW that’s trained some of the
nation’s leading climatologists.
How Little We Know
Bryson is a believer in climate change, in that he’s as quick as anyone
to acknowledge that Earth’s climate has done nothing but change
throughout the planet’s existence. In fact, he took that knowledge a big
step further, earlier than probably anyone else. Almost 40 years ago,
Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of
Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate.
“I
was laughed off the platform for saying that,” he told Wisconsin Energy
Cooperative News.
In
the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition.
But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction: Hardly
a day passes without some authority figure claiming that whatever the
climate happens to be doing, human activity must be part of the
explanation. And once again, Bryson is challenging the conventional
wisdom.
“Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at
various times, and so something was making it change in the past,” he
told us in an interview this past winter. “Before there were enough
people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was
changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?”
“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,”
Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the
early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out
of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide
into the air.”
Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after
they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm
Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very
likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity
in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues
extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring
data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental
temperature records existed.
We
ask about that evidence, but Bryson says it’s second-tier stuff. “Don’t
talk about proxies,” he says. “We have written evidence, eyeball
evidence. When Eric the Red went to Greenland, how did he get there?
It’s all written down.”
Bryson describes the navigational instructions provided for Norse
mariners making their way from Europe to their settlements in Greenland.
The place was named for a reason: The Norse farmed there from the 10th
century to the 13th, a somewhat longer period than the United States has
existed. But around 1200 the mariners’ instructions changed in a big
way. Ice became a major navigational reference. Today, old Viking
farmsteads are covered by glaciers.
Bryson mentions the retreat of Alpine glaciers, common grist for current
headlines. “What do they find when the ice sheets retreat, in the Alps?”
We
recall the two-year-old report saying a mature forest and agricultural
water-management structures had been discovered emerging from the ice,
seeing sunlight for the first time in thousands of years. Bryson
interrupts excitedly.
“A
silver mine! The guys had stacked up their tools because they were going
to be back the next spring to mine more silver, only the snow never
went,” he says. “There used to be less ice than now. It’s just getting
back to normal.”
What Leads, What Follows?
What is normal? Maybe continuous change is the only thing that
qualifies. There’s been warming over the past 150 years and even though
it’s less than one degree, Celsius, something had to cause it. The usual
suspect is the “greenhouse effect,” various atmospheric gases trapping
solar energy, preventing it being reflected back into space.
We
ask Bryson what could be making the key difference:
Q:
Could you rank the things that have the most significant impact and
where would you put carbon dioxide on the list?
A:
Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the
atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is
what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is
absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?
Q:
Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in
the first 30 feet by water vapor…
A:
And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one
percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go
outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.
This begs questions about the widely publicized mathematical models
researchers run through supercomputers to generate climate scenarios 50
or 100 years in the future. Bryson says the data fed into the computers
overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of
clouds—water vapor. Asked to evaluate the models’ long-range predictive
ability, he answers with another question: “Do you believe a five-day
forecast?”
Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate
conditions, for clues to future climate behavior. Trying that approach
in the weeks following our interview, Wisconsin Energy Cooperative News
soon found six separate papers about Antarctic ice core studies,
published in peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1999 and 2006.
The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate
changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found
atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with
temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather
than leading them. The time lag between temperatures moving up—or
down—and carbon dioxide following ranged from a few hundred to a few
thousand years.
Renaissance Man, Marathon Man
When others were laughing at the concept, Reid Bryson was laying the
ground floor for scientific investigation of human impacts on climate.
We asked UW Professor Ed Hopkins, the assistant state climatologist,
about the significance of Bryson’s work in advancing the science he’s
now practiced for six decades.
“His contributions are manifold,” Hopkins said. “He wrote Climates of
Hunger back in the 1970s looking at how climate changes over the last
several thousand years have affected human activity and human cultures.”
This, he suggests, is traceable to Bryson’s high-school interest in
archaeology, followed by college degrees in geology, then meteorology,
and studies in oceanography, limnology, and other disciplines. “He’s
looked at the interconnections of all these things and their impact on
human societies,” Hopkins says. “He’s one of those people I would say is
a Renaissance person.”
The Renaissance, of course, produced its share of heretics, and 21 years
after he supposedly retired, one could ponder whether Bryson’s work
today is a tale of continuing heresy, or of conventional wisdom being
outpaced by an octogenarian.
Without addressing—or being asked—that question, UW Green Bay Emeritus
Professor Joseph Moran agrees that Bryson qualifies as “the father of
the science of modern climatology.”
“In his lifetime, in his career, he has shaped the future as well as the
present state of climatology,” Moran says, adding, “We’re going to see
his legacy with us for many generations to come.”
Holding bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, Moran
became a doctoral candidate under Bryson in the late 1960s and early
’70s. “I came to Wisconsin because he was there,” Moran told us.
With Hopkins, Moran co-authored Wisconsin’s Weather and Climate, a book
aimed at teachers, students, outdoor enthusiasts, and workers with a
need to understand what the weather does and why. Bryson wrote a preface
for the book but Hopkins told us the editors “couldn’t fathom” certain
comments, thinking he was being too flippant with the remark that
“Wisconsin is not for wimps when it comes to weather.”
Clearly what those editors couldn’t fathom was that Bryson simply enjoys
mulling over the reasons weather and climate behave as they do and what
might make them—and consequently us—behave differently. This was
immediately obvious when we asked him why, at his age, he keeps showing
up for work at a job he’s no longer paid to do.
“It’s fun!” he said. Ed Hopkins and Joe Moran would undoubtedly agree.
“I
think that’s one of the reasons for his longevity,” Moran says. “He’s so
interested and inquisitive. I regard him as a pot-stirrer. Sometimes
people don’t react well when you challenge their long-held ideas, but
that’s how real science takes place.”—Dave Hoopman
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