Considerettes

We had many Christmas music albums growing up.  Every time the Firestone or Goodyear companies put one out, or another compilation hit the stores, my dad (a self-described “Christmas-aholic”) would get it.  The first one home each evening would put a stack of LPs on the record player spindle and get it started.

We knew each version of the songs, which song by which artist followed which (we’d start singing or humming the next cut immediately after the previous one finished), and we even knew where to expect a skip in the record.  The pops and crackles became as much a part of the song as the singer, the arrangement and the lyrics were.

We had our favorites, and we also laughed at some of the awful renditions.  (You haven’t lived until you’ve suffered through John Wayne singing “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”.  We love it just for how awful it is.)  One of my dad’s favorite secular Christmas songs from our LP collection is this little-known song done by Bing Crosby, “The Secret of Christmas”.  He liked it so much that I remember one afternoon he sat us down in the living room and had us write down the lyrics (one kids listened to the first line and started writing what he heard while the next kid was listening to the second line, etc.).  For a secular song, it really does a wonderful job of driving home the point that Christmas is not just a December 25th thing, and that one of the secrets of Christmas is not just smoothing things over at the end of the year, but it’s what you do the other 364 days that really matters.

Now, as a Christian, I have my own thoughts on how best to do this (and with who’s help I am able), but Christian or not, this is a song for everyone, and a message for us all.

It’s not the glow you feel when snow appears.
It’s not the Christmas card you’ve sent for years.
Not the joyful sound when sleigh bells ring,
Or the merry songs children sing.

That little gift you send on Christmas Day,
Will not bring back the friend you’ve turned away,
So may I suggest the secret of Christmas
Is not the things you do at Christmas time,
But the Christmas things you do all year through.

I found out recently that this song was done in a movie (“Say One For Me”, 1959).  This is a YouTube clip from the movie with Bing singing the tune.  It’s not the version that was on our LP, but I like the video for this one better.

The Secret of Christmas

(The LP version is also on YouTube, as well as many other versions including those by Ella Fitzgerald, Julie Andrews, and a fantastic acapella version where one guy sings all 4 parts.)

And, for those of you who know my dad, this is one of the reasons he’ll tell you “Merry Christmas” just about anytime;   Christ came to redeem the whole year.

Merry Christmas!

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Shire Network News #176 has been released. The feature interview is with Pastor Ameal Haddad of Ambassadors For Peace. His idea is that people around the world should have religious freedom. I know, crazy, right? Maybe it’s so crazy it might just work through. Click here for the show notes, links, and ways to listen to the show; directly from the web site, by downloading the mp3 file, or by subscribing with your podcatcher of choice.

Below is the text of my commentary.

Hi, this is Doug Payton for Shire Network News with a year-end edition of "Consider This!"

In January of this year, SNN contributors Meryl Yourish and I did a bit of prognostication about 2009, in which we spoke as though it were December.  Well, here we are in December and I’d like to take a look back at my predictions and find out how much of a satirical seer I was.

President Obama, while not having actually had any law enacted or treaty signed regarding global warming, managed to make this year cooler than last year.  Must have been sheer force of will.

Sure enough, some cold temperatures records were set in both Europe and America.  Indeed, it appears that, against all models, warming has stopped, and the "ClimateGate" scandal featured the head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Kevin Trenberth, proclaiming that it’s a "travesty" that they can’t "account for the lack of warming at the moment".  Clearly, due to President Obama’s force of will.

My second prediction was a bit tongue-in-cheek.  Well, OK, they all were, but this predicted the creation of an Iraqi Olympic Shoe-Throwing Team.  While the team has yet to materialize, the Iraqi reporter that threw a shoe at President Bush was the target of someone apparently trying out for the team.  An exiled reporter, supportive of US policy in Iraq, decided to make his mark.  The IOC, however, judged that the throw was disqualified because it hit a wall, making proper distance measuring impossible, and because proper safety measure were not taken.

My third prediction was simply:

The world now loves us:  They really love us, ever since we elected a Democrat.  Iraq even allows US troops to be stationed there, thanks to the splendid outcome of "Obama’s Terrorist Intervention" in that country, which began on January 20th of this year.

Sure enough, the nations of the world have been saying such nice things about us this past year.  Well, except that they haven’t actually done anything differently.  And except for Poland who we left out of a missile shield system.  And, of course, except for everyone who hated us before; they still hate us now.  But other than that, the world loves us!

And finally…

Universal Agreement:  Both sides of the political aisle have finally come together to speak with one voice.  No longer is there any disagreement, harsh criticism or mean-spirited arguing.  The recently-passed bill, entitled "The Pelosi/Reid Equal Opportunity in Talk Radio and Radical Right-Wing Internet Commentary Act" (otherwise known as the PREOITRARRWICA), has gone a long way to make sure that the voice of the people is heard loud and clear.

No return of the Fairness Doctrine yet, but the government may yet interfere with radio station management in order to get the Fairness Doctrine in effect, if not in actual law. So, I guess I got this one wrong.  But now you see why I had to take such a happy tone in this alternate timeline; it’s not just a good idea, it was the law.

So overall, except for perhaps the first 20 days, this year has shown us that America’s best days are ahead of her, if we can just pass that new $2.5 trillion spending bill.  And I’m sure we will.

Hey, with TARP, bailouts, and a potential budget-busting health care bill, my numbers weren’t that far off.  Liberals are nothing if not predictable.  No Jean Dixon necessary.  Merry Christmas, and consider this.

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That was then…

"The big step by extremists will be an attempt to eliminate the filibuster."–former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, March 29, 2005

…and this is now.

"We need to take on the way the Senate works. The filibuster, and the need for 60 votes to end debate, aren’t in the Constitution. . . . So it’s time to revise the rules."–former Enron adviser Krugman, New York Times, Dec. 18, 2009

Which James Taranto labels "his first-ever accurate prediction."  I’d call it evidence of how heavy a role politics plays into Krugman’s thoughts on economics.  He’s more political pundit than economist.

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Dan Perrin at RedState laments the very real possibility that Harry Reid has his 60 votes for health care "reform".

Word is rampant among the Senate leadership, as well as is being reported by the Wall Street Journal, that Senator Reid has got to 60 votes on cloture on the Senate ObamaCare bill.

The question of whether we live in a country ruled by leaders who refuse to listen, but do what they believe is in their own interest, has been answered.

Conservatives hate this bill. Progressives and liberals hate it too. The public is solidly against it.

But it does not matter, apparently. The implications of a country in open revolt against this bill and the elite in the Democratic party giving the public the finger are profound.

The Daily Kos and FireDogLakes of the net could not produce a single Democratic Senator or Independent to vote no. Conservatives could not produce a single Democratic Senate vote against cloture. Neither could the general public. Perhaps the left can still get one of their own to kill this nightmare. Is there not a single Dem Senator who will stand with the public, or is this merely a quaint notion we used to have about our country — that the system responds to the public?

And they have 60 votes for a bill that hasn’t even been CBO-scored yet.  The vote hasn’t come yet, so there’s still time for some reasonable Democrats to become unable to stomach the massive price tag for this.  In the meantime…

The world will understand America has changed. Our country is now run by elites who are printing money, debasing our currency to throw at massive new spending and deficit creating programs — and actually believe they are both moral and politically smart. Just 19% of the public believes this plan will not increase the deficit.

What comes next is very discomforting to think about. But we have now crossed that line from what our country was into something else, and that something else has nothing whatsoever with the country being a Republic. There will be a reckoning for this, and it will not be pleasant — not for anyone.

(Emphasis in original.)  We’ve lost a lot of ground in the slippery slope of elitist rule.

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Do you want to know the real reason behind all the meeting and agreements and doomsaying being done at the Copenhagen climate change confab?  Listen to the applause.

First, the warm-up act, so to speak, with hints of what was to come.

But before [Australian climate change minister Penny Wong] rose to speak the conference proceedings were interrupted by people with whistles and sirens chanting “stop green capitalism” – a sign of the anger in the developing world that the Danish host government is trying to wrest the process from the professional negotiators, who have failed to make any progress, and hand it to politicians, who might have some chance of achieving something before we all leave on Saturday.

And then the headlining act hit the stage.

Then President Chavez brought the house down.

When he said the process in Copenhagen was “not democratic, it is not inclusive, but isn’t that the reality of our world, the world is really and imperial dictatorship…down with imperial dictatorships” he got a rousing round of applause.

When he said there was a “silent and terrible ghost in the room” and that ghost was called capitalism, the applause was deafening.

But then he wound up to his grand conclusion – 20 minutes after his 5 minute speaking time was supposed to have ended and after quoting everyone from Karl Marx to Jesus Christ - “our revolution seeks to help all people…socialism, the other ghost that is probably wandering around this room, that’s the way to save the planet, capitalism is the road to hell….let’s fight against capitalism and make it obey us.”  He won a standing ovation.

Ladies and gentlemen, that is the primary purpose of the Copenhagen conference and those like it.  It’s the elites getting together to bring capitalism down and raise socialism up so that they can exert more power.  It’s a power grab, plain and simple and unashamed. 

You may have your reasons for wanting to see less carbon in the air, but those in politics and government clearly have their own agenda.  Is it yours?

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People generally quote the non-partisan CBO score when trying to figure out how much a bill will cost us.  But Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute notes that, since the CBO is quite transparent, showing how it calculates its scores, Congressional Democrats are gaming the system to make the Senate bill look far cheaper than it really would be.

For some time, I’ve suspected the answer is that congressional Democrats have very carefully tailored their individual and employer mandates to avoid CBO’s definition of what shall be counted in the federal budget. Democrats are still smarting over the CBO’s decision in 1994.  By revealing the full cost of the Clinton plan, the CBO helped to kill the bill.

Since then, keeping the cost of their private-sector mandates out of the federal budget has been Job One for Democratic health wonks.  While head of the CBO, Obama’s budget director Peter Orszag altered the CBO’s orientation to make it more open and collaborative.  One of the things about which the CBO has been more open is the criteria it uses to determine whether to include mandated private-sector spending in the federal budget.  The CBO even published a paper on the topic.  Read this profile of Orszag by Ezra Klein, and you’ll see that those criteria were also a likely area of collaboration with lawmakers.

The Medical Loss Ratios memo is the smoking gun.  It shows that indeed, Democrats have been submitting proposals to the CBO behind closed doors and tailoring their private-sector mandates to avoid having those costs appear in the federal budget.  Proposals that would result in a complete cost estimate — such as the proposal by Sen. Rockefeller discussed in the Medical Loss Ratios memo — are dropped.  Because we can’t let the public see how much this thing really costs.

Crafting the private-sector mandates such that they fall just a hair short of CBO’s criteria for inclusion in the federal budget does not reduce their cost, nor does it make those mandates any less binding.  But it dramatically reduces the apparent cost of the legislation.  It is the reason we’re all talking about an $848 billion Reid bill, rather than a $2.1 trillion Reid bill.

All the promises of reducing the total deficit or paying for the bill with Medicare cuts are as much smoke and mirrors (and outright lies) if the base cost of the bill is fudged.  You’re being led down the primrose path by folks who know full well you wouldn’t support it if you knew how much it was really going to cost.

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No, I’m not going to list all 100 reasons in the Daily Express column, but I do want to hit some highlights.  (And no, all these reasons are, in and of themselves, reasons specifically why climate change is natural.  Some do, but most of them have to do with enumerating why it’s not man-made, and others are political/scientific reasons why we should not spend billions or trillions on fixing a problem that may not be a problem.)

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.

11) Politicians and activiists (sic) claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.

23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries

26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles

33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere

38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC

42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical

52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”

64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.

76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.

78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.

91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.

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…while the world sits on its collective hands and this continues unabated.

Confidential intelligence documents obtained by The Times show that Iran is working on testing a key final component of a nuclear bomb.

The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme.

An Asian intelligence source last week confirmed to The Times that his country also believed that weapons work was being carried out as recently as 2007 — specifically, work on a neutron initiator.

The technical document describes the use of a neutron source, uranium deuteride, which independent experts confirm has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon. Uranium deuteride is the material used in Pakistan’s bomb, from where Iran obtained its blueprint.

Can we really afford to have a government so clearly desiring to destroy another country (i.e. Israel) to have a nuclear bomb?  Even if they never use it, they’d be untouchable since the threat would always be there. 

Not to mention the inevitable Middle East arms race it would spawn.

But OK, perhaps the world isn’t really sitting on its hands.  The United Nations has written letters and gotten perturbed over all this.  So there’s that.

But not much else.

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A video from my church’s All Nations Christmas Festival.  This group is from the Eretrean congregation.  It includes their pastor.

That night also included Christmas celebrations from our Spanish, Vietnamese, and Asian Indian congregations, as well as groups that were French African.  That was a great night.

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That was then:

As President Barack Obama heads to Indiana and Florida over the next two days to sell his economic stimulus plan to a somewhat skeptical Congress, White House and congressional Democrats are moving around new poll data that suggests the public is broadly supportive of the bill.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs sent out an email to reporters this morning touting the data — from a Gallup survey — that showed roughly two-thirds of the public approves of the way Obama is handling the passage of the economic stimulus package while just 31 percent say the same of congressional Republicans.

Emphasis supplied by the NewBusters article, because this is now:

"If I was a heart patient and Gallup was my EKG I’d visit my doctor," Gibbs said. "If you look back I think five days ago we were, there was an 11 point spread, now there’s a one point spread."

Gibbs continued, "you know, I mean I’m sure a six year old with a crayon could do something not unlike that. I don’t put a lot of stake in, never have, in the EKG that is the daily Gallup trend. I don’t pay a lot of attention to meaninglessness."

The difference?  The polls were with the President then, and they’re not now.  Obama himself touted Gallup when they were with him.  Now, not so much.  If you are going to push an agenda at least partially on poll numbers, you have to take the good with the bad. 

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Only in the NY Times will you find an article about how charities are attracting money that could, instead, be funneled through the inefficiency of a government bureaucracy. 

The $300 billion donated to charities last year cost the federal government more than $50 billion in lost tax revenue.

"Lost" tax revenue?  It’s not lost if it wasn’t yours in the first place.  But apparently, the Times, and reporter Stephanie Strom, thinks that’s the ‘default’ position; your money belongs to the government, except that which it loses to charities.

And as Don Surber sarcastically notes:

Why by collecting $300 billion a year from donors to provide social services, those charities are cheating the federal government out of $50 billion — money that could be used for, well, social services.

Hey, let’s try something.  If you get a mail appeal letter from the Salvation Army, reply to it and let’s steal more money from the government.  And it’ll hack off the NY Times, to boot!

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President Obama announced yesterday evening that he’s authorizing 30,000 more troops for Afghanistan.  Reactions to it have been just about what you’d expect. 

The NY Times headline is, "Qualified Support From G.O.P.; Skepticism From Democrats", and the article quotes Democrats upset at it and Republicans with guarded approval, with some concern over a specific timetable. 

Bruce McQuain at the Q&O blog expounds more regarding the timetable.  Bruce is a military man, and so he speaks with some authority on the subject.  When it comes to how quickly they will leave, and how quickly they will come home, he doesn’t quite understand the possibility of the speed going out and the purpose of the speed coming back.

Obama says these troops will deploy by fastest means possible. Additonally he said:

Let me be clear: there has never been an option before me that called for troop deployments before 2010, so there has been no delay or denial of resources necessary for the conduct of the war.

Well let me be clear – deploying troops to a theater of war takes a long lead time. Preparation and training are key. While it is probably true that there were no calls for deployments before 2010, a 3 month delay means 3 months in which the alerted units are shorted vital training time. And now the deployment cycle is going to be speeded up because he’s trying to cover his tail? Guess who suffers to make him look better?

To this point, I’ve laid out a plausible but complex military mission. But it moves from “plausible and complex” to impossible with this line:

After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

Even getting the deployment cycle initiated as quickly as possible, the troops (most likely 3 BCTs, a Marine MEU, 4,000 trainers and a command and control element of 7,000) will take 12 to 18 months to complete their deployment. So how is this a surge if as the last unit arrives in country as the first leaves?

He also notes that, if he were part of the Taliban, who have been fighting since the 80s, holding out for 18 months is a cakewalk.

But going from those who think we need more troops to properly get the job done (especially if you include building infrastructure) to those who want less, we start with a blistering opinion piece in Der Spiegel.

Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America’s new strategy for Afghanistan. It seemed like a campaign speech combined with Bush rhetoric — and left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught.

[…]

For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama’s re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free.

This left-leaning periodical, from one of those countries that was going to love us once we jettisoned Dubya, is more polite than other domestic Democrats who are throwing their guy under the bus.

Well, OK, that last link is to a blog post discussing the chatter on Democratic Underground, a rather bottom-feeding, though very popular, site.  How about the reaction from Christians who are Democrats?  Lemme tell you, Jim Wallis ain’t happy.  And neither are most of the commenters to the post.  But this one comment, from someone disappointed in Obama’s move, puts it best.

Obama supported this war from the beginning. During his campaign, he called it a "good war" and promised to put more resources into it. He has kept his promise.

All of you who supported his candidacy while claiming to be pro-peace should be doing some major rethinking. I hope you don’t make the mistake of supporting pro-war politicians again in the future.

Reading comments from the Left today, you’d think they expected that he would break that promise; that it was just made to get enough votes to win.  Is that the way to get more honesty in Washington?  Hmmm.

But when all is said and done, I’m with Don Surber who says that, since politics stops (or, well, should stop) at the water’s edge, we should support the President’s decision, and pray for the troops who will be deployed.  We should anyway, of course, but an event like this can bring more attention to this need. 

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…they won’t release the data from which they drew that conclusion, nor the analysis showing how they got there.  They say they have their reasons…

A spokeswoman from the CDC told CNSNews.com that it is standard procedure for the agency not to release the complete data used by the task force to make recommendations on a range of issues, including adolescence health.

“Before CDC releases information to the public, it must go through the CDC’s scientific clearance process to ensure not only that the underlying data are accurate, but also that 1) it is presented in a manner that is clear and not prone to misinterpretation, and 2) any inferences drawn from the data are defensible,” spokeswoman Karen Hunter said.

She also said that all of the data will eventually be released when it is published in a “peer-reviewed journal,” which can take as long as one year.

Which begs the question, helpfully asked by CNS News:

When asked by CNSNews.com how recommendations can be made before the data are proved to be “accurate” and “defensible,” Dr. Jonathan E. Fielding, chairman of the task force and county director of Public Health, and health officer for the county of Los Angeles Department of Health Services, said he is “very comfortable” with the recommendations.

Well that make me feel better, or comfortable, eh?

There are a couple of folks on this 15-member task force, however that don’t support the findings.  They’ve come out against the non-release of the data and the methodology.

“We are concerned that the study averaged together the results of [Comprehensive Sex Education] programs that were very different from each other, such as programs in STD
clinics and programs in school classrooms, without identifying which kind of programs were effective,” [Irene] Ericksen told CNSNews.com.

“Doing this had the effect of glossing over the lack of results for the CSE programs in the schools, which is the setting where most teens receive sex ed,” Ericksen added.

“These programs did not significantly increase condom use, or reduce teen pregnancy or STDs,” Ericksen said. “To avoid comparing apples and oranges, a more meaningful study would have been a meta-analysis of school-based programs.”

This is almost like ClimateGate with doctors instead of climate scientists.  No transparency, just findings. 

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I’ve saved a boatload of links about the whole Climate Research Unit e-mail and document leak, but today I came across an article by the aptly-named author Christopher Booker that distills the issue down to 3 salient points.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

Read the rest of this entry »

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