The Apostle of Unreason & Intolerance !

In his last public engagement, in front of the annual Greens Party Conference in Tasmania, Bob Brown was full of his usual hubris. He profoundly stated, "Astronomy tells that there are millions of planets in the universe that could sustain life like ours, so why aren't the intergalactic telephones ringing? Is it because the human-like intelligences on these planets evolved like ours to the point of being able to chnge their envirnoment and then 'extincted' themselves? Now it will be our turn unless we all come together fellow Earthians to save this planet."  The brain-washed, true-believers roared with agreement! A few days later he resigned from the Senate and as leader of the Greens Party.

Terry McCrann, business writer for the Herald-Sun & The Austalian newspapers, wrote a week later and gave Bob Brown the journalistic send-off that this irrational, dangerously irresponsible ideologue deserves. He wrote:

Bob Brown has been an unremittingly destructive force in the political life of the Australian nation. His career in public policy has left not a single redeeming consequence. That this has not been more universally recognised can be placed at the collective feet of the Canberra press gallery, the broadcast media in particular and the assorted current affairs programs led by the ABC's Lateline with that scumbag, Tony Jones. Everyone knows that the ABC is a sheltered workshop for the Greens and is bathed in the light from Brown's (well-worn)"brown-eye".

I think I could safely say without fear of contradiction, that he has never been been, over 20 years, subjected to any rigorous questioning by the press or TV reporters. Always their tone has been gentle; that unlike the politicians of the two major parties. Brown's motivations were as pure, if somewhat idealistic, as driven snow. Global warming of course permitting.

Year after year, neither he nor his party were held to even the slightest account for the sheer silliness of much (most) of what they proposed; nor the most absurd contradictions;  the straight-out destructiveness were they ever to get any of their major policies implemented. Destruction that would be visited, not on the billionarires, but on the great mass of ordinary Australians under their unproven, proposed climate-change restrictions.

The Way I See It....because the last Federal election had the Greens achieve a prominent position in the Parliament, Brown forced a far-to-willing Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, to sign an alliance. Gillard gave the Greens the Carbon Tax she'd promised never to impose and a $10 billion Green Energy Fund that business is now demanding be scrapped. Brown in return gave Gillard the support it would have offered her anyway (a sweet deal).

In a way, it was this deal that will destroy them both and I can only suspect that Brown is getting out while the going is good. Already, with a fellow watermelon, Christne Milne as leader, recent state elections have had the Greens losing ground and are headed for a slow decline. Now Bob and his boy friend, Paul, can sleep in, and after reeming and dreaming have leisurely breakfasts while wondering if us Earthians will actually ever get that intergalactic phone call!  Good riddence!

An Eye on History, Not on the Job !

                                                                                 

I just found out last week that on the evening of Tuesday, 30 June, 2009 (just five months into his administration) Barack Obama invited a small group of presidential historians to dine with him in the family quarters of the White House. His chief of satff, Rahm Emanuel, personally delivered a word of caution: "The meeting was to remain private and off the record." As a result, the media missed the chance to report on an important event, for the evening with these historians provided a remarkable sneak preview of why the Obama presidency would shortly go off the rails.

With Obama in full campaign mode, that event, as well as two more unreported White House dinners with the historians, is worth examining. Together, they shed light on the reason this president is likely to find it much harder than he expects to connect with the public (not including the leftist assholes in Hollywood) and win re-election to the White House.

At the time of the first dinner, the new president was still enjoying a honeymoon period with the American people. Brimming with self-confidence, Mr. Obama confided to David Axelrod, his chief strategist: "The weird thing is I know I can do this job. I think it's going to easier for me than the campaign. Much easier." That adjustment from campaigner to chief executive would prove harder...much harder...than anticipated and still had not dawned on him when he sat down to dine with the historians. They were Doris Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, Douglas Brinkley, H.W. Brands, David Kennedy, Kenneth Mack and Gery Wills.

Judging from Obama's questions, one subject was uppermost in his mnd: how could he become a "transformational" president, like Ronald Reagan, and bend the history of America's domestic and foreign policy? When one of historians brought up difficulties most other presidents had implementing such an ambitious agenda, he grew testy. He impied that he was different because he could prevail by the force of his own personality.

He could solve the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, put millions of people back to work, redistribute wealth, withdraw from Irag and reconcile the United States to a less dominant role in the world. It was, by any measure, a breathtaking display of grandiosity by a man whose entire political curriculum vitae consisted of 7 undistinguished years in the Illinios senate and 2 mostly absent years in the U.S. Senate. In those evenings, he revealed the characteristics --arrogance, conceit, egotism, vanity, hubris and above all, rank amateurism --that would mark his presidency and doom it to frustration and failure.

The senior people in his administration proved to be just as inexperienced and inept as him when it came to the business of running the government. Members of his Inner Circle had proven their mettle in political campaigning, but they had no serious dealings with public-policy issues. If they could be said to have any policy exposure at all it was their ideological enthusiasms for the Left.

In the wake of the shellacking the Democrats took in the midterm elections in 2010, Obama held a second dinner which was devoted to the question of how he could "reconnect with the public." A third dinner took place in July, 2011, shortly after the United States government lost its triple-A credit rating for the first time in history, and revolved around "the challenge of re-election."

By this time the historians, and Obama's supporters for that matter, were shocked by the sense of disconnect between the sharply focused presidential candidate of 2008 and the dazed and confused president of the past 3 years. One historian leaked the comment that he found it hard to understand why he couldn"t translate his political savvy into effective governance. "I think I know the answer now," he volunteered, "Since the beginning, Obama hasn't been able to capture the public's imagination and inspire people to follow him. Vision isn't enough in a president."

The Way I See It....great presidents not only have to enunciate their vision; they must lead by example and inspiration. Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan both had the ability to make each American feel that they cared deeply and personally about them. The historian added, "That quality is lacking in Obama. People don't feel he doesn't connect with them and their needs. He doesn't have the answers. The irony is that he was supposed to be such a brilliant orator, when if fact he's turned out to be a failure as a communicator."

If the verdict of this historian is correct and Barack Obama's fundamental failure is lack of connection with the people, he is in far more serious trouble than most people realize as he seeks a second term.
More than that, I feel that Obama will not have the place in history he so eagerly covets. Instead of ranking with FDR, Reagan, Lincoln and the other giants, it seems more likely that he will be a case-study in presidential failure like Jimmy Carter. Read the book "The Amateur" by Edward Klein (former chief of the New York Times Magazine) for an even better insight into Barack Obama.

Global Warming Bandwagon Exposed!

Garth Paltridge, the former chief research scientist with Australia's Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), atmospheric research division, has had enough and has come out with "guns blazing"!  He has just launched a devastating attack on the creation of the global "consensus" and the corruption of his beloved CSIRO. He writes......

The broad theory of man-made global warming is acceptable in the purely qualitative sense, however the economic and social argument is whether the supposed increase, even if it were noticeable, could change the overall welfare of mankind for the worse. Considering that at the time of the Vikings, it was 3 degrees warmer than it is today and that didn't seem to stop them from running amuck and plundering. Its the presence of a lot of unpredictability and uncertainty that gives rise to strong forces encouraging public overstatement and a belief in worst-case scenarios.

But the real worry with climate research is that it is on the very edge of what is called postmodern science. Postmodern science envisages a sort of political nirvana in which scientific theory and results can be consciously and legitimately manipulated to suit either the dictates of political correctness or the polices of the government of the day.

There is little doubt that some players in the Climate Game, not a lot, but enough to have severely damaged the reputation of climate scientists in general by having stepped across the boundary into postmodern science. The Climategate scandal of 2009, wherein thousands of emails were leaked from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England, showed that certain SENIOR members of the research community were, and presumably still are, quite capable of deliberately selecting data in order to overstate the evidence for dangerous climate change.

Climate science has transformed itself from a research backwater a few decades ago into one of the greatest public-good cash cows ever devised. In Australia, there is a separate federal Department of Climate Change & Energy Efficiency specifically devoted to implementing (buying ?) the social change required to limit global warming. The livelihood of many climate scientists within the CSIRO and sadly in our universities is now dependent on grants from that department. It is truly not a situation conducive to sceptical outlook and balanced advice.

No doubt these scientists don't see themselves as intellectual harlots but genuinely believe in their own perception of the climate change story. But why do mainstream scientists go along with the inevitable overstatements associated with the activism business?  I guess one factor is a form of loyalty to colleagues. Another, bearing in mind the singular nature of the funding source, is the need to eat.

The Way I See It....a new Coalition Government should as a first step set up a bureau to audit the assumptions driving climate change policy, with a particular mandate for a proper assessment of probabilities, risks and costs. It is obvious now that it is not enough to rely upon peer review and hope for impartiality of those scientists with their snouts in the trough. NOW is the time we need to spend money to try to prove that case against CO2 is flawed. We need an organisation to do this for CO2 and for the public at large.

They have heard from too many warmist fanatics like Tim Flannery (head nut job), Clive Hamilton (academic elitist), the Greens Party (pure Watermelons) and the ABC (totally biased) that has made them lose faith in science and scientists. Something has to be done to regain the objectivity and balance to the climate discussion and we can hope a Coalition trouncing of Labor will make it so. The sooner the better, so we can see the eradication of the idiotic Carbon Tax.

The B12 Deficiency and Dementia Link!

As I was recently reviewing the medical literature from numerous sources, I found that before 1960, very few cases of Alzheimer's dementia were reported. After that year, the cases of dementia grew exponentially and do not appear to be secondary to aging alone.

So what is responsible for this explosion of Alzheimer's Disease? To find an answer, we need to look at a number of variables that have changed--things such as diet, exposure to environmental toxins, the mercury in the flu-shot vaccination, and changes in medical practice. All of these have likely contributed to the rise in this debilitating condition, but one factor I feel is particularly interesting because i involves modern medical practices.

In an effort to stem the public's interest in seeking alternative treatments, the medical establishment created the term "evidence-based" medical practice. This implies that anything they do not approve of must be quackery. Chiropractic has had a fair share of this misguided medical discrimination but chiros keep seeing more and more health-conscious, wellness orientated patients who are sick of taking the drugs-for-everything approach. Our evidence is based on results that speak for themselves.

When I was growing up, it was common medical practice for elderly people to regular B12 shots, at least every 6 months if not every month. But then the evidence-based medical elite decided that there was no "evidence" for this age-old practice. Unfortunately, they chose to ignore the knowledge that most elderly people, even those who were supposedly healthy, were deficient in vitamin B12, a vitamin that is essential for many metabolic functions, especially in the heart and brain.

A new 5-year study conducted at the University of Oxford in England measured brain shrinkage (atrophy) using yearly MRI scans of  elderly subjects' brains.  Researchers also measured blood levels of B12 and homocysteine (an amino acid that is commonly elevated in people with B12 deficiency).You see...homocysteine is also an excitotoxin. What researchers found was that the study subjects with the lowest B12 levels had the greatest brain shrinkage. Brain shrinkage was not correlated with elevated homocysteine levels, which indicated that the B12 deficiency did not even need to be severe to cause the brain to atrophy

The Way I See It.....brain shrinkage can be a significant indicator of future difficulties with memory, orientation, and language. The connection is there...people with Alzheimer's Disease have very low vitamin B12 levels.

In the past, the cyanocobalamin form of B12 was used to treat deficiency, but it is less compatible with the body then is methycobalamin, which can be administered by a sublingual tablet (under the tongue). I recommend a dose of 5000 mcg a day. Don't worry...vitamin B12 has no known toxicity at any dose. I guess those old country doctors were not so primitive in their thinking after all.

Obama's Phony "Fair Shot"

It's easy to see why President Barack Obama wants to talk about things other than the economy which has the latest unemployment figures still above 8% and the economy slowing down. (The actual unemployment rate is closer to 14.5% when you consider the under employed and those that have dropped off the unemployment rolls.) But now his assault on the Republican challenger, Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital--has him in trouble with influential Democrats.

Bill Clinton told CNN that Romney's "sterling" business career and time as governor of Massachusetts qualified him as a candidate in the Presidential race. He said, "Not all risky investments succeeded at Bain Capital. We ought not be saying 'this is bad work.....but on the whole it's actually good work.' In other words, "Stop Digging!"  The anti-Bain assault is revealing aspects of Obama that voters might not like. Does Obama really appreciate the role of profit in a successful economy?

This should be a given. But some Obama remarks make you wonder. Asked about his fellow Democrat's criticism of the Bain strategy last week, Obama said this was what the campaign "is going to be about". He said, "When you're president, as opposed to the head of a private equity firm, then your job is not to simply maximise profits. Your job is to figure out how everybody in the country has a "fair shot." So where does Obama think the resources to give people a fair shot come from....if not from PROFITS?

Providers of capital - pension funds, wealthy individuals or ordinary savers - won't support companies that don't provide a decent return on their investment. By maximising long-term profits, companies maximise job chances and the "fair shot". You could dismiss Obama's remarks as as campaign fluff -- the phrase "fair shot" has been a staple of his campaign since December. But he keeps trying to have his cake and eat it too, Clinton has hinted.

Obama says he's not against all private equity, just Romney's. He solicits campaign donations from private equity partners, but his chief leftist political adviser, David Axelrod, says that private equity embraces "an economic theory that isn't right for the country."  What a stupid attitude! In fact private equity is a vital part of the capitalist ecology. It came into being as a response to the failures of paternalistic managerial capitalism in the 1950's and 1960's. Private equity often mops up messes left by managerial capitalism's failures.

The Way I See it.....Obama conveniently doesn't say anything about Bain Capital's successes -Staples, The Sports Authority, Domino's Pizza - which are giving a "fair shot" to tens of thousands of workers years after Romney departed the company.

You see...private equity can take a long-term - which sounds like an economic theory we'd miss if we didn't have it. Think of the many start-up companies now thriving because some equity company believed in their initial ideas. So Romney needs to weave his Bain experience into his narrative by talking about his successes, failures and mistakes and what he learnt from them. The Obama campaign has stumbled out of the blocks by their Leftist rhetoric. So before Barack has to eat his words he ought to give it a rest.