Tag Archives: Communism

Commentary

Global warming advocates refuse to give their data to skeptics

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If you are a skeptic of global warming, and you ask for the raw data, then you will be denied access to it!

Story from National Review. (H/T ECM, Brian)

Excerpt:

Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist… politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

[…]In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Free and open debate?

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News

Understanding the long-term forecast for the federal budget

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Watch this 2 minute video from Political Math.

Mandatory spending includes entitlements like social security, medicare and medicaid. It also includes payments on the national debt, which Obama intends to grow from about 12 trillion to about 19 trillion. The problem is that mandatory spending is set to skyrocket out of control in the next 8 years, and there isn’t any money available to pay for it.

Attacking businesses and productive individuals just reduces the amounts collected in income and sales taxes. In other words, taxing the rich just lowers government revenues by destroying economic growth. No one gets out of bed in the morning to earn 50% of what they are worth.

Public Debt Outlook
Public Debt Outlook

Click the images to enlarge them.

More charts:

Jobs Lost
Jobs Lost
National Debt
National Debt
Budget Deficit
Budget Deficit

More here.

In short, we’re doomed.

UPDATE: 1RedThread advises that I post the Doom Song.

I was JUST THINKING about 1RedThread a little earlier. I am NOT KIDDING.

This video is so going into the Friday Funny post.

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Podcasts

Debate on whether atheists can be good without God

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A great debate on whether atheists can make any sense of morality without God grounding objective moral standards. This one should be very good for atheists to listen to.

The MP3 file is here.

This is part two of last week’s discussion about the RichardDawkins.net atheist who converted. Listen to that part first if you want.

I feel a bit bad about this because it is clear that one factor that works to convert people to Christianity is that Christians can exhibit self-sacrificial love to others and atheists are basically at the mercy of their own selfishness. They just cannot behave morally when it goes against their self-interest, and that is SAD. Anyway, I felt badly because I began to worry about whether I have been as loving as possible while explaining Christianity to others.

Here is my entire series of posts explaining why self-sacrificial morality is not rational, if atheism is true.

On a related topic, I think Christians can also distinguish themselves from atheists and other religions in the way that men and women relate romantically. In Christianity, there is the tradition of chivalry, courtship and romantic love. The Christian Bible requires that husbands love their wives to the point of dying for them. This is lacking Islamic cultures, and not required in Hindu cultures.

But this lack of romantic love is also a problem in the feminist West, where women eschew chastity, marriage and children. Instead, women here have empowered the state to act as a replacement for husbands/fathers. The more that the state does for women, the less a really good man can distinguish himself and make himself useful. Men don’t like to share responsibilities with the state.

My most popular posts on that issue are here:

Something to think about.

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