Governor Perdue, of North Carolina Suggests Suspending 2012 Elections

While speaking recently at the Cary Rotary Club Democrat North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue, suggested suspending congressional elections for two years to allow Congress can focus on economic recovery rather than the next election.

This notion besides being a violation of the governor’s oath of office to up hold the Constitution would not legally work the way she implied.

First of all elections are run by the individual states and not the Federal Government and there is no way to enforce a federal suspension of elections. The only way they could try would be to send armed troops and shoot any one who tries to vote or operate the poles.

Let’s say they some how succeeded in stopping the elections then the Constitution still makes what her proposal illegal. According to the 20^th Amendment U.S. Constitution the terms of all current house members and 1/3 of the senate end January 3 2013 period. If this dies not change if the election does not occur their offices would simply be vacant. Furthermore Obama’s term as President ends at noon on January 20^th 2013 with or with out an election. Therefore without an election Obama would no longer be president as of noon on January 20^th 2013. The only legal way a new president could be selected would be for the remaining 2/3 of the senate to elect a new vice president who in the absence of a newly elected president the new vice president would be come President on noon on January 20^th 2013. That 2/3 of the senate would be mostly Republicans and so the new President would be a Republican.

The result is that there is no legal way for a federal suspension of congressional elections would produce the results described by Governor Perdue. It would take a conspiracy of unprecedented proportions to pull off such a stunt, with governments of 50 states going along with it. The result of which would be that there would no longer be a legally constituted federal government and any action take by it would be null and void.

Labor Unions and the Right to Work

 In some states once a business in unionized the union is allowed to force membership in the union as a condition of employment. Furthermore when union dues are deducted from an employees pay check a dissatisfied union worker has no recourse if his graveness are not addressed by the Union. He may find himself held hostage to an organization he is forced to associate with just to earn a living.

Allowing unions to force membership as a condition of employment results in the infringement of an individual’s right to work and negotiate his own pay for his work. Don’t get wrong if workers want to bargain collectively they have every right to do so, but forced participation is wrong,

The Scourge of Socialism

Socialism is the economic system where the means of production is owned and controlled by government. Socialism is of necessity is a form of slavery since the individual can not be allowed to pursue his own interests.  By definition if the individual is not given the freedom to pursue his own interests he own and controls the means perusing that interest.  So the individual must be compelled to follow the interests of the state which is by definition a form of slavery.

The theory behind socialism is that there is a fixed amount of wealth and that reason some people are rich and others are poor is that the rich have taken from the poor what is rightfully theirs. So the remedy is to take from the rich and redistribute it to the poor called social justice. Since the rich do not automatically give away all their wealth the government takes it by force to redistribute. This appalling to those those consider them selves poor because they led to believe that it will make their lives better.

The reality is that the total amount of wreath is not constant and that it is created by the labor and productivity of people. If people are not allowed to profit from their labor and can get the same results of not putting out the effort there is not incentive to be productive and the means of producing wealth is destroyed. So the more socialistic an economy becomes in time the poorer it becomes.

In practice socialism never evenly redistributes with the people in the government enriching themselves and their friends at the expense of the general population. As a result getting ahead in a socialistic system requires being able to get politically connected and learning how to work the system. To see the truth of this look at any communist (totally socialistic) country they all show the same pattern of a rich dictatorial elite ruling over an impoverished population. As a result socialism works great for those that run the system or know how to game the system but not for the average person. Sadly we are beginning to this in the United States.

Productivity Needed Rather Than Jobs

Unemployment is over 9% so there is a lot of talk about jobs. President Obama went so far as to give a speech before congress about his so called jobs plan. Despite all the talk the real problem is not so much a lake of jobs but lack productivity. The people know only one way to be productive and that is to get a job working for some else. However there is another option. Sadly this option is not be promoted by government officials and agencies. Even worst many government officials at all levels are actively attacking this option. Further more your local unemployment office will neither encourage or giving you credit for this option. It is an option they will never mention. Following this option may even bring you criticism from friends and family. That option is to go to work for yourself.

For some treason Governments are actively attacking working for yourself.  On the local level by business licenses which are a tax on projected earnings. Municipal governments have in some cases gone as far as to shutdown children’s lemonade stands for not having a business licenses. On the federal level Obama has attacked working for yourself with regulations and threatened tax increases if you succeed.

In some cases these attacks result from politicians that want as many people a possible dependent on them for their need and working for yourself breeds independence. In other cases it making sure big business supporters have ample desperate workers. Whatever the reason the result is a lot of untapped potential productivity among people and the additional jobs created by those would need help.

Now I grant you that not every one has what it takes to work for them selves but the number that has what it takes is much greater than the number of people who actually do it. Part of the problem is that when just starting out working for yourself means lots of work with little if any income for the effort.

The best way to start working for yourself is to find something you really love to do and find a way to get paid for it. That may sound unreasonable simple but it is the only thing that gets you through the period of lots of work and no pay.  If you have a hobby find a way to do make money and you are off to a good start working for yourself .

On Science Education

A basic knowledge of science is needed if you are going to understand the world around us and since science affects most aspect of life so some knowledge of it is needed to get along. It helps students with an interest in science to pursue a scientific career by helping them discover that interest.

In  science education many pre collage science classes are taught by teachers who did not major or minor in math or science so as a result classes are often of low quality a often uninteresting.  As a result children are often thought only facts and theory and are often not taught how to actually do science. They usually are not taught how to critically evaluate scientific claims.

Even worst some times political agendas get in the way of teaching science, a good example is the teaching of man caused global warming without presenting the other side except in ridicule. Furthermore science and other topics are usually taught in a way that encourages conformity which can a actually discourage independent thinking. As a result many people can not think out side the box of what they were taught and it is the independent thinkers and that tend make the great discoveries.

This shows up big time in the way origin is taught in public school science class. Big bang to man Evolution is taught as fact. Efforts to change this to date have been blocked by the courts. Big bang to man Evolution is further pushed by TV programs and other media were in most cases if Creation Science or Intelligent Design are mention all it is in ridicule. As a result people are bombarded by Big bang to man Evolution giving them the impression that it is proven fact despite scientific reasons for questioning it. As a result some people develop a condescending attitude towards Creation Science while actually being ignorant of it, producing an arrogant ignorance that makes an intelligent discussion impossible

References

Parents Understand Importance of Science
But Student Achievement Lags Parental Expectations

 Knoxville Father Wants Biology Book Banned.

The Problem of Politicized Science

The politicization of Science is what happens when politics interferes with scientific enquiry for the purpose of political gain. This often takes the form of support for one side over the other in a scientific dispute.

When ever a particular theory is pushed for political gain the scientific process gets corrupted. The side being supported will get lots of funding while the other struggles encouraging researchers to backup the supported theory or risk loosing funding. The result is that the supported theory is given the appearance of being overwhelmingly supported by the evidence, even if it is not. Furthermore support or opposition for the theory becomes based more on politics than science. The result is that it becomes hard to find the truth, because no one is unbiased

The worst example of the politicization of Science is of Man caused Global Warming  theory, which is favored by politicians who see it as an excuse for increased government control. More conservative politicians tend to oppose this idea of global warming because of the associated big government political agenda associated with it.

However there is not only scientific against man caused global warming but the entire global warming theory as well. There evidence also indicates that the solutions being pushed by global warming proponents are the worst way to dale with it even if their science is right.

The point is that the politicization of global warming has greatly hampered the scientific process by hiding and distorting facts making it hard to find the truth. This is bad for and destructive to science. As a result when ever science is politicized the process of science is damaged.

References

Global Cooling Continues - by James M. Taylor - Environment & Climate News

                                                                                                   

The Trouble With Government Grants

The Myth of Separation of Church and State

The 1^St Amendment of the U.S. Constitution

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 The relevant part is, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”.

Note that despite the fact that the tem “separation of church and state” is often used in association with first amendment that it does not appear any ware within it. The phase is a actually based on a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a Baptist church addressing their concerns of about the possibility of a state religion being established in the U.S. like the Church of England in Britain.

There are those that want to eliminate all public religious observances and references. They try to use the establishment clause to achieve their goal.

The clause in question called says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”. What is meant by this is that there is to be no legally established official religion of the United States like the  Church of England in Britain. In essence the idea is that the United States government and by way of the 14^th Amendment the state and local governments must legally and officially be neutral on religion.

However these people are not trying to force government neutrality on religion but hostility. This rakes many forms but they include many violations of the free exercise clause which immediately follows the establishment clause and states “or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” referring to religion. Include a public high school valedictorian being threatened with jail by a judge if she mentioned God or prayed in her speech. This also violates the next clause in the 1^St Amendment which states “or abridging the freedom of speech”

What these people are actually trying to do is legally (by judges) establish the atheistic religion of Secular Humanism as the official state religion because if you ban references to God and religions observances from public functions in you are declaring the official government religion to be Atheistic Secular Humanism.

The Trouble With Government Grants

Money or other items of value given by a government to non-government individual or group to enable their activities are called a government grant.

Funding of science by way of government has produced many good results but it has also politicized science and the politicization of science is harmfulto the scientific process. It provides a source of funding for research making it easier for research to be funded allowing some research to be done that probably could not get funded other wise.

Sadly science has become too dependent on government grants to the point where 90% of scientific research is funded by government. Getting funding from a given source requires that you appease that source. Getting government funding requires appeasing government officials. While grant requests are peer reviewed but the money altimetry comes from politicians which has a chilling affect on science since some areas of research are funded while others are not. About 1 in 10 unsolicited grant applications are approved so some legitimate research is rejected. Furthermore some paradigms are favored by government over competing ones.  For example research in to manned caused global warming gets funded while opposing research does not get funded.

The reason for this is that politics is about acquiring and holding on to power not knowledge and as a result politicians are often not really interested is the science but sending money to their districts and pushing a political agenda.

Science needs to reduce its dependence on government funding. Priority needs to be given to private funding which can take several forms, foundations, universities, and other nonprofit organizations and for profit organizations while these are already used to some degree, private funding should be encouraged more. It is less corrupting because there is more than one source of funding. This does not mean that Government funding should be eliminated just reduced. Science should be as independent of government as possible to reduce these problems. 

References

 Science corrupted

The Trouble With Government Grants

Remembering 9/11 May We Never Forget

On 9-11-2003 the United States was attacked by Jihad Jihadist Terrorists who hijack four commercial air liners to fly them into both World Trade Towers and the Pentagon.

The tenth anniversary of this attack is here and we need to remember those who died that day. We also need to remember the heroes of that day. There were several fire fighters trying to save others. We especially should remember the hero’s of United flight 93; such as Todd Beamer. These people learning of the other attacks got together and try to take back their plane, crashing it in the ground and stopping the hijacker from carrying out their mission.

May We Never Forget!

Deficit Super Committee, the Disenfranchisement of the American People

The Deficit Super Committee created by the deal that needlessly raised the debt limit sets a dangerous precedent. Under this deal this committee of 3 Democrats from the House, 3 Republicans from the House, 3 Democrats Senators, and 3 Republicans Senators was an established to write a bill cutting 1.5 trillion the deficit. The House and Senate then vote “yes” or “no” vote with no amendments allowed with both the military and social programs like social security automatically being targeted for the cuts if the vote is no.

The empowerment of just 12 members of congress to write this bill and not allowing amendments means that the vast majority of Americans have NO representation on this committee and then our representatives are forced to choose between two bad choices.

Now increasing taxes is an option that this committee has and it will likely be used thus since most member of congress have no say in the matter other than a coerced vote. The net effect if taxes are raised by this process is taxation with out representation.

This nothing short of the disenfranchisement of the majority of the American people, we are being deprived of any real say in this process. Even worst the committee is meeting behind closed doors so that even those with representation on the committee can not hold them accountable for their actions because we will never be told what they are. The end result is the total disenfranchisement of the American people and a return of taxation with out representation.

Science and Politics

When ever science and politics interact science is usually the worst for it. This does not mean that all interactions between science and government are negative but the overall affect on science is negative.

 The Reason for this is that politics is about acquiring and holding on to power and not knowledge. In fact politics often is destructive to knowledge since ignorant people are easier to control. Also politicians are often not really interested is the science but sending money to their districts or pushing some other agenda. The biggest example of this is manned space flight which has stagnated for 30 years under government control. 

Even worst government often favors some lines of research over others in funding, education, and recognition. Some times government favors one side in a scientific dispute over others. The best examples are in origins research and climate research.

Government can block lines of research from being perused. Now sometimes this legitimate such as preventing dangerous experimenting on humans, but other times it’s pandering to irrational fears such as those against nuclear power is a good example simply because some people can’t separate reactors from bombs. Giving in to this fear has hampered the development of nuclear power.

In climate research global warming has been favored by politicians who see it as an avenue for increased government control. They have backed and promoted pro global warming claims over data to the contrary despite emails showing the hiding of climate data contrary to Global warming. This issue has become so politicized that finding the truth is hard because it is almost impossible to find an objective source on the topic.

In origins research only evolutionary research funded the government. Both Intelligent design and Creation Science gets no government funding, but they are forced to fund evolutionary research with their taxes. Intelligent design and Creation Science have been kept out of public schools on the claim that they are not science this has even been enforced by law suits whenever local education officials disagree with the claim. There is nothing more grossly anti-scientific than bringing law suits to settle scientific issues by having a judge (lawyer) decree the opposing views are not science. Regardless of your view on origins, this should disturb you.

Politics and Global Warming

Proponents of global warming claim that the Earth temperature is rising out of control due to human industrial activity. The difficulty in studying this area is that politics is interfering with the science. Liberals tend to support the claims and use them to attack our capitalist economic system, while conservatives tend to discount the claims in defense of our capitalist economic system. The politics of this issue makes getting unbiased information difficult.

In any discussion about global warming there the questions that need to be answered.

1. Is the Earth actually warming or not?
2. If it is what is causes. Is it man caused or natural?
3. If it is man caused what it’s the best way deal with it?

Historical data says no to the first two questions.

The "Medieval Warm Period" lasted from 700 to 1300 AD. During this time the Vikings sailed the North Atlantic without ice burgs. They colonized Greenland and named such because it was green at the time. Greenland froze over during later cooling trends. During this warn period average global temperatures were 1-2° warmer than today.

This warm period was followed by the "Sporer Minimum" which was a cool period that lasted from 1300 to 1500 AD. This was in turn followed by a brief climatic warming from 1500 to 1560 AD.

Then came the "Little Ice Age" which occurred between 1560 and 1830 AD. During this time average global temperatures were about 1 degrees cooler than today. Then there was a brief warmer period from 1830 to 1870 AD and a brief cool period from 1870 to 1910 AD. Finally, we have the 20th century warming period which started in 1910 AD and continues through the present.

The ‘Hockey Stick’

In. a 1999 paper published in Geophysical Research Letters tree rings were used to assess temperature change back to 1000 AD. This data was then supplemented with other proxies from more recent centuries. It shows no sign of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, while showing a dramatic seemingly going out of control climate during the 20th century. This research is flawed both scientifically and statistically. The biggest problem is that of combining two totally different sets of data. The two sets of data; temperature and tree rings. They cannot be credibly combined into one data set.

Tree rings are a very poor indication of temperature, because they usually only grow the summer and they are affected by factors unrelated to temperature. By the way, the yellow area is the margin of error.

The first model seems to better represent global climate. It agrees with sun spot activity as measured sense 1600 as shown by the fact that the "Maunder Minimum" occurred at the same time as the "Little Ice Age". Sun spot activity translates into a measure of the variation into overall solar out put; including U.V. which affects the ozone layer. The 2000-2003 Solar Max should be noted here. This is the peek of the 11 years cycle of sun spot activity. It was the most active Solar Max ever observed and it coincides with current warming trend.

Mars provides additional evidence that the current warming trend is caused by the sun, because it too is experiencing global warming. None of the probes we have landed there burn fossil fuels. They are all solar or nuclear powered, so we can not be the cause. The most likely cause of global warming on two planets is the sun.

Further more the models used to make prediction about future global temperatures are based on erroneous assumptions such as increased clouds increases global warming an assumption proven wrong on every cloudy day by the easily observable fact that when clouds block the sun the temperature goes down. They also assume that when the Earth temperature goes up it radiates less heat in to space which violates the lays of thermodynamics.   

Finally it turns out that even if all of the claims made by global warming proponents and their models are correct, the solutions they are proposing in many cases are worst options available in that they are extremity expensive for little benefits in return. So as a result global warming proponents are pushing for extremely expensive policies to solve a problem that do not exist.

In addition analyzing e-mail from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia found by hackers that showed they manipulating the evidence, peer review and other parts of the scientific process. Known a climategate this shows how politicized science is bad science. It is interesting to note that politicians and new media supportive of global warming have tried to down play the significance of the contents of these emails.
The point is that global warming, climate change or what ever new term they invent in the future, is a purely political issue and not a really scientific one. Science is only involved because it is being manipulated for political purposes.

Dealing with Capitalism’s Dark Side

The are several ways capitalism’s dark side can be managed. They are government regulation, and fostering a moral business climate.

Government regulation is one way of dealing with business excesses, but the down side is that government regulations ten to grow. Also there always the danger of a developing cronyism where big, rich companies get the government to cause regulatory harm to their smaller competition. There is also the danger of politicians fostering regulations to help gain favor among certain voting blocks. Government regulations do serve as a legitimate check business excesses as long as they are few and small; the danger is the tendency for them to become many, big and destructive.

The best solution, though not necessarily the easiest to achieve is fostering a moral business climate. If the businesses in a given area have a strong sense of morality toward how they treat, employees, customers, and other business then little or no government regulation is need,

In practice minimal helpful government regulations that help smooth relationships; rather than complicate them; along with a moral business climate is most work able solution.