"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." (Pls note: This is a comedy site and I am a comedian, so don't take anything here seriously. It's all in jest, haha. For entertainment purposes only!)
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
Bill Ackman: Why Exposing Harvard's President was a Step in the Right Direction (verbatim from X)
Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Fact Check: Ted Cruz is Awesome - Part (I've lost count)
(The following is an Op Ed by Ted Cruz written 9 years ago about the al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza, which has been much in the news since Israel was attacked by Gaza on Oct 7th this year.)
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Israel saves its enemies; Hamas endangers its friends
From The Washington Times:
If you want to judge a nation, look at how it treats its most vulnerable civilians. Hospitals are a good place to start.
Al-Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, is housed in a converted British army barracks. Some 126 miles north is Israel’s Ziv Medical Center in Zefat.
Hamas, which controls Gaza, is using the civilian population as human shields. The terrorist group has placed its missiles in schools and mosques and, even more deplorably, burrowed its command center underneath the al-Shifa hospital.
Hamas‘ activities are taking place in plain sight. Just two weeks ago, The Washington Post described al-Shifa as “a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders.” These terrorist facilities are of course well known not only to the foreign journalists who interview Hamas fighters there, but also to the Israelis, who would by necessity consider such a location a legitimate target for any action against Hamas. However, the terrorist group has tried to immunize their headquarters by digging it under a hospital, leaving Israel no option but to target al-Shifa if they want to get rid of the Hamas terrorist leadership.
Hamas sees no downside in this arrangement. Knowing that Israel prioritizes protecting civilians, the terrorists can be reasonably confident that al-Shifa will not be targeted, and they can continue their murderous activities undisturbed. If the Israelis finally decide that these activities are intolerable and that to destroy Hamas they must target their headquarters, Hamas will have pictures of the quintessentially innocent martyrs — hospital patients unable to flee — to plaster across international media in their ongoing propaganda war to demonize the Jewish state.
The medical care and even survival of the Gazan people are of no concern to these terrorists, for whom casualties are not an unintended consequence of war, but rather a deliberate objective. Like the rest of the population stationed around the many civilian institutions militarized by Hamas, they must either make do with a substandard medical facility being exploited by a terrorist organization, or die in the service of that organization’s savage campaign to destroy Israel.
Meanwhile in Israel, Ziv is a center for pediatric and orthopedic medicine. Given its proximity to Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Syria, Ziv has seen its share of violence, but despite taking direct rocket fire during the 2006 Lebanon war, it has remained in continuous operation.
During the past three years of the Syrian civil war, Ziv has treated more than 1,000 Syrians injured in that conflict — all free of charge.
In a visit to Ziv this spring, I met the social worker whose job it is to explain to the patients who wake up grievously injured and surrounded by Israelis that they are not in hell, but that the people who they have been told from birth are the devil are, in fact, working very hard to heal them.
I met a Syrian child who had lost three limbs but has been fitted with revolutionary prosthetics and will, God willing, walk again.
All of this means that many of Ziv’s hospital beds and a substantial portion of its funding are not available for Israelis, but the staff has concluded it is worth it if their work can start to reverse the intractable hate that has been relentlessly leveled at Israel by its neighbors.
The contrast in this tale of two hospitals could not be more clear: Hamas exploits their medical facilities as a human shield to launch terrorist operations against Israel, while Israel uses theirs to provide cutting-edge medical care to people whose government’s avowed goal is to destroy the Jewish state. Hamas‘ actions are a war crime. Israel’s are one of the great, unsung humanitarian missions on the planet.
Sunday, November 5, 2023
Friday, October 20, 2023
Fact Check: Why are Marines called Leathernecks?
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Fact Check: Could there be another Holocaust?
Sunday, October 8, 2023
Fact Check: The Hamas Attack on Israel 10/7/23 was Barack Hussein Obama's Dream Come True
Now that Israel has obtained Iran's secret nuke plans and U.S. intelligence has confirmed their legitimacy, we know with certainty that Barack Obama's fake "nuke deal" with Iran was an atomic bomb of deception and duplicity.
Remember this was the deal where Barack Obama plus five other countries, which desperately wanted to resume trade with Iran, lifted sanctions on Iran, flew billions of dollars in cash on secret planes to Tehran, all in return for Iran's vague promise to put off their nuclear weapons program for... a whole decade.Here's what I wrote at the time on, 4/2/15:
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"Great liars are also great magicians."
Barack Obama wants you to believe he is negotiating with Iran about nukes. Pick up a paper, watch a news show, listen to the radio, wherever you are in the world, you will be told about an historic negotiation going on with the P5+1 talks, and it's all about Iran's nuclear program.
Truth is, these talks are nothing more than cover for lifting sanctions on Iran, many of which were preemptively lifted before the talks started. The talks are Kabuki theatre, a magic trick, to distract you from seeing what's really going on. This is a trade deal with the world's number one state sponsor of terrorism - a rogue nation bent on bringing about nuclear armageddon, wiping Israel off the map, and achieving regional Shiite hegemony.
If you have any doubts about whether or not this is about nukes, I advise you to read Dan Henninger's piece in The Wall Street Journal, "Why the Iran Deal is Irrelevant" from 4/2. Mr Henninger chronicles the parallels between North Korea and Iran and the pursuit of nukes. Iran cannot be stopped by talking. Everyone knows this. Talking had zero effect on North Korea over three presidencies. Sanctions, and the perception that force is an option, are the only way to prevent a rogue nation from acquiring nukes.
Not only has Obama lifted sanctions and taken the threat of force off the table, he is guaranteeing Iran the right to spin centrifuges, enrich uranium, and follow through on their promise to nuke Israel off the map. This trade deal does nothing but make Iran richer and accelerate their ability to achieve these goals.
Barack Hussein Obama, peace be upon him, apparently shares these goals.
(Incidentally, the quote at the top is often credited to Adolf Hitler.)
Friday, July 28, 2023
Fact Check: The Truth About Global Warming [UPDATED]
A Socratic Guide To The Burning Question Of Our Time
Intro I
There's an old Jewish joke that goes something like this:
No matter what Shlomo did in bed, his wife could never achieve an orgasm.
Since by Jewish law a wife is entitled to sexual pleasure, they decide to consult their Rabbi.
The Rabbi listens to their story, strokes his beard, and makes the following suggestion: "Hire a strapping young man. While the two of you are making love, have the young man wave a towel over you. That will get God's attention and he will provide an orgasm."
They go home and follow the Rabbi's advice. They hire a handsome young man and he waves a towel over them as they make love. It does not help and the wife is still unsatisfied. Perplexed, they go back to the Rabbi.
"Okay,' he says to the husband, "Try it reversed. Have the young man make love to your wife and you wave the towel over them."
Once again, they follow the Rabbi's advice. They go home and hire the same strapping young man.
The young man gets into bed with the wife and the husband waves the towel. The young man gets to work with great enthusiasm and soon she has an enormous, room-shaking, ear-splitting, screaming orgasm.
The husband smiles, looks at the young man and says to him triumphantly, "See that, you schmuck? THAT'S how you wave a towel!"
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Intro II
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.
In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.
Michael Crichton, author of "Jurassic Park", "Andromeda Strain", "Westworld", and numerous other works of fiction and non-fiction. Crichton also held a medical degree from Harvard.
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A Brief History of the Theory of Global Warming (aka Climate Change)
In 1824, around the same time these ideas were percolating, a scientist named Joseph Fourier figured out that Earth would be much colder without its atmosphere. Air was trapping heat from the sun and keeping us warm, he said. Fourier had discovered the greenhouse effect.
Building on Fourier's work, other scientists found that about 70% of the greenhouse effect was due to water vapor, 20% was due to carbon dioxide (CO2), and the final 10% was due to methane, ozone, and other gasses. A theory developed that maybe changes in the atmosphere had ended The Great Ice Age.
Water vapor was dismissed as a cause because excess water condenses and falls-out as precipitation. CO2, methane, and ozone do not cycle as quickly, so the theory of melting ice focused primarily on CO2, which while only .04% of the atmosphere, accounts for 20% of the warming effect.
Two things were going on at the same time as all this. One was the industrial revolution and the burning of coal in newly invented steam engines. The other was the observation that the existing glaciers were continuing to melt! Could they be related and tied back to changes in CO2?
Along came a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius, who in 1898 calculated the hypothetical climate change that would result if atmospheric CO2 was cut in half. He calculated that the Earth would be glaciated...as it was during The Great Ice Age! He also calculated that if CO2 doubled, we'd have melting ice and ...global warming! So, the "modern" CO2 theory of global warming dates back to the calculations Arrhenius did 120 years ago in an attempt to explain the onset and demise of The Great Ice Age.
Meanwhile, we've been burning progressively more carbon fuels like coal, oil, and gas in the last 120 years. Finally, in 1960, an American scientist named David Keeling began measuring CO2 levels at an observatory in Hawaii. What he discovered was that CO2 was trending up at an alarming rate!
So with Keeling showing CO2 skyrocketing, Arrhenius' saying we are going to fry if CO2 rises, and glaciers continuing to melt, that eventually leads to Al Gore, Kyoto, Paris, The UN IPCC, and a scientific "consensus" saying global warming is an "existential threat". (Meaning, the end is nigh!)
In 2009, the U.S. government under Barack Obama officially declared that CO2 emissions endangered life on Earth. Whole generations now believe we are doomed. Some have even stopped having children thinking there is no future.
All from a gas that humans exhale, that plants inhale, that makes up only .04% of our atmosphere, and that formed the basis of a theory developed in the 1800s to try and explain the The Great Ice Age!
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Pop Quiz:
So, what really ended The Great Ice Age?
A. CO2
B. Mr. Milankovitch
Since this whole CO2 inquiry began as an attempt to explain The Great Ice Age, one of the first questions to ask is, was the premise right? Have we learned anything new since Fourier, Arrhenius, Keeling, et al? Do we now know what caused and ended The Great Ice Age?
You are probably certain it was CO2. After all, you've been told for years that CO2 drives climate. Since the 1800s and Arrhenius we've believed that changes in CO2 can have dramatic effects. We still believe CO2 is melting glaciers today. It's "settled science" after all.
Except, that's not what happened. It turns out, Mr. Milankovitch did it. (Yup, our climate has been hacked by the Russians! Actually, he was Serbian, just sounds Russian.) Milutin Milankovitch was a scientist who figured out in the 1920s that the Earth has a cyclical relationship to the sun. It tilts. It wobbles. It's orbit changes. Some cycles take 100,000 years to complete. Some take 41,000 years. Some take 23,000 years. The effect of all this is rather dramatic... ta da... climate change!
Of course, Milankovitch was instantly dismissed as a kook. Even today as I'm typing this, his name is unrecognized by the spell-check gremlins in my computer. Fourier, Arrhenius, and Keeling, however, are spell-check VIPs.
Until 1998, Milankovitch got no respect. But then a funny thing happened down in Antarctica. Scientists drilled an ice core at a place called Vostok (more Russians!) that gave them a 420,000 year climate history, and voila, there were major ice ages and warmings every 100,000 years. There were also shorter cycles in between. Milankovitch could no longer be dismissed, except of course by spell-check.
Then in 2000 another Antarctic ice core was obtained at Dome C that goes back 800,000 years. Again it confirmed Milankovitch. The Great Ice Age now had a plausible explanation. The Earth's relationship to the sun caused major climate change - global coolings and global warmings - going back as far as we can see.
Dome C Temperature Estimates
If major climate change happens at least every 100,000 years, as Milankovitch theorized, and the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, then there have been 45,000 of those alone. The Great Ice Age was just the latest in a countless series of coolings and warmings!
Another name that should get mentioned at this point is Eddy, as in John A. Eddy. Eddy was one of the most recent astronomers to study the cyclical output of the sun. He published a groundbreaking study in 1976 and named the most recent solar minimums and maximums. While Milankovitch cycles play out over tens of thousands of years, solar cycles can be as short as 11 years. They are also closely correlated with...ta da...climate change!
Here are some of the solar minimums and maximums from recent Earth history that resulted in major global warmings and mini-ice ages:
You can see why glaciers are melting today by looking at the right side of the solar activity graph. We are also near a peak in the Milankovitch cycle. Something would be horribly wrong if glaciers were NOT melting today!
So between Milankovitch's orbital cycles and Eddy's solar cycles, these are the bases for ice ages and their demise. These are the bases for perpetual climate change. In addition, one-time events like volcanoes and asteroids can also produce dramatic and sudden climate swings.
[UPDATE 7/31/23: In addition to volcanoes and asteroids, undersea volcanoes and exothermic releases must be considered. We are currently experiencing a dramatic and sudden rise in ocean temps which largely occurred over a 4 week period beginning in March, 2023. The theory is that heat from the Earth's core did this. An ocean cannot be rapidly heated from above due to marginally hotter air. But an exothermic release from the Earth's core (as hot as the surface of the sun!) could do that. This theory has been brilliantly fleshed-out over a few years in a post on theethicalskeptic.com website. https://theethicalskeptic.com/2020/02/16/the-climate-change-alternative-we-ignore-to-our-peril/
Moreover, in January, 2022, the largest undersea volcano ever recorded erupted and sent unprecedented amounts of water vapor into the stratosphere. As we know, 70% of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, and the amount from this undersea release is expected to take years if not decades to cycle through. Unknown is the thermal footprint this had on deep Pacific Ocean temps because our measurements are largely based on surface temps. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/tonga-eruption-blasted-unprecedented-amount-of-water-into-stratosphere ]
So, CO2 did not cause either The Great Ice Age or any of the many tens of thousands of cyclical coolings and warmings that preceded it. It's the fluctuating sun and our wonky orbit that cause climate change.
(A newer ice core at Allan Hills, Antarctica claims to go back over 1.2 million years, and it also confirms Milankovitch.)
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Still, within the Milankovitch and Eddy cycles, we know that:
A. CO2 drives climate change
B. Climate drives CO2 changeJust because Arrhenius et al were wrong about The Great Ice Age doesn't mean they are also wrong about what will happen if we add massive amounts of CO2 to our atmosphere. According to the CO2 theory of global warming, as CO2 increases, so will temperatures.
Except, that's not what happens. Along with temperature records going back 800,000 years, we also got CO2 records for the same time span.
Here's the CO2 and temperature record from the Dome C ice core:
Dome C Temperature and CO2 for 800,000 Years (Red = CO2, Blue = Temps)
Climate Change (blue) precedes CO2 Change by 1200, + or - 700 Years
Still, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere is a new thing, and that's what makes this an existential threat!
A. True
B. FalseAs everyone since Keeling knows, CO2 levels are in-fact rising. And who can forget Al Gore on the scissor lift in his movie showing CO2 going literally off the chart? And as everyone knows since Arrhenius, more CO2 makes Earth hotter, right?
Except, that's not what's happening. Yes, we are in a warm period due to both Milankovitch and Eddy, and accordingly, CO2 is rising. That's to be expected. But the question remains: is this time different because we are burning fossil fuels? Can CO2 work both ways? Can it both be driven by temperature and also drive temperatures up?
If greenhouse gasses both increase as temperatures go up, and then cause even more warming, why is the greenhouse effect not a runaway reaction? According to Arrhenius and modern global warming theory, the greenhouse effect should create a feedback loop. Why isn't that visible in the ice core data?
In the 1800s, when Arrhenius was doing his calculations, the instruments for measuring the light spectrum this accurately did not exist. (Then again, neither did antibiotics, airplanes, Model T Fords, transistors...)
Additionally, as CO2 increases, the CO2 cycle speeds up. Here's an example of how the biosphere absorbs CO2 at faster rates:
So, adding more CO2 into the atmosphere will not effect climate, and any CO2 increases will just grow the biosphere.
Pop Quiz:
Still, there is a scientific consensus that says CO2 is uniquely warming our planet, and no one can prove otherwise.
A. True
B. False
Anyone who's taken a middle school science class knows the value of a control group. Luckily, scientists have the ability to track temperature and CO2 on some of the other bodies around Earth. Venus, Mars, and the Moon are particularly close to us and have yielded some interesting data. If global warming theory is right, temperatures on those bodies should be un-correlated to Earth temps because they are free from the effects of industrialization!
Except, that's not what's happening. In an odd coincidence both Mars and the Moon are warming! (Of course, it's still man's fault!) Milankovitch is particularly relevant to the Moon, because as goes the Earth, so goes the Moon. Eddy is particularly relevant to Mars, because as goes the Sun, so goes Mars.
But there's more.
Pop Quiz:
Still, we know that global warming is true because all the predictions have been right!
A. True
B. False
Real science can accurately predict the future. If a cannon ball with a known mass, is fired from a cannon with a known amount of force, at a known trajectory, etc., science can predict exactly where it will land. That's how science works.
If global warming science is real and quantifiable, scientists would be able to similarly predict the future of climate.
Except that's not what has happened. In fact, every single dire prediction has been proven wrong. 100% wrong. Here's a brief summary of what the experts have predicted:
- Global famine by the year 2000 - Dr. Paul Ehrlich, Nobel Prize recipient, Professor
- Entire nations wiped out by 1999 - Noel Brown, U.N. Environmental Director
- Ice caps will melt away and oceans will rise causing massive flooding by 2014 - Al Gore, VPOTUS, global warming evangelist
- End of snow in England by 2015 - Dr. David Viner, climate scientist at The University of East Anglia
- Increased tornadoes and hurricanes - James Hanson, professor of climate at Columbia University & the high priest of global warming, and The U.N. IPCC
- New Ice Age in Europe - Dr. Paul Ehrlich
- Sub-Saharan Africa drying up - U.N. and World Bank
- Massive flooding in China and India - Asian Development Bank and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
- Polar Bear extinction - National Geographic, The New York Times, Guardian, among many.
- Drastic Temperature Increases - James Hanson
- The Earth will be in a “True Planetary Emergency” by 2016 unless greenhouse gasses are reduced - Al Gore
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Pop Quiz:
Still, we are under an existential threat because the Earth is progressively getting:
A: Hotter
B: Colder
Except, that's not what's happening in the long run:
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Pop quiz:
Still, in the 200,000 year history of mankind:
A. It has never been this hot
B. It's been much hotter before
No doubt you are sure it's never been this hot. It says so on the "hockey stick" graph. And just consider the melting glaciers!
Yet, we know that 1100 years ago, when the Vikings first went to Iceland, there were no glaciers there. Today, glaciers cover much of Iceland. Similarly, Vikings settled on Greenland around the same time and successfully farmed there for 500 years. But they abandoned Greenland in the mid 15th century, presumably because it got too cold. Those two events are known as the Medieval Warm Period and The Little Ice Age. Curiously, you won't find either of those events on Al Gore's graph.
Here's a graph that shows 10,000 years of climate change from ice cores on Greenland:
And here's a map of glacial retreat in Glacier Bay, Alaska going back 2 1/2 centuries. As you can see, glaciers have been in retreat since long before your SUV!
We have enough data to know that this warm period is nothing new. It's been hotter than this many times before, even in man's brief 200,000 year history.
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I was the founder of Kindzone.com, one of the first companies to test market retail carbon credits. I've been closely following the science and consensus of global warming for over 20 years.
Ron Reich