George Soros gave Ivanka's husband's business a $250 million credit line in 2015 per WSJ. Soros is also an investor in Jared's business.

Friday, September 30, 2011

ObamaCare is already infecting America's economy. The GOP lets us twist slowly, slowly in the wind

(With apologies to readers, I'm leaving this post up as evidence of illegal hacking, one of many examples to my blogs over the past few years. As you see, large blocks of text have been wiped out. Hopefully the link to the article still works. Thanks, Susan. 8:32AM ET, 9/30/11).

GOP backslappers love ObamaCare, could long ago have defunded it in the House with the people we gave them in Nov. 2010, but told us to drop dead. The people showed the diseased GOP establishment their power in Nov. 2010, now they're showing us theirs. They would rather re-elect Obama than allow the will of the people to happen.

9/30/11, "The unaffordable Affordable Care Act: Obamacare is already infecting America's economy," NY Daily News, Andrea Tantaros, commentary

"Someone call the doctor. The side effects of President Obama's Affordable Care Act are becoming apparent, and so is the irony. This week, nonprofit research group The Kaiser Family Foundation found that, despite the title, "affordable" health care premiums have risen steeply under the law - with the annual premium for family coverage through an employer reaching $15,073 in 2011, an increase of 9% over the previous year. Or as Politico put it: Premiums are now costing families as much as a new car.

This wasn't supposed to happen. Remember, the real reason for ramming the bill through Congress was to bring costs down. In fact, the White House is still claiming the law will lower premiums.

From their website: "The Affordable Care Act will bring down costs, improve the quality of health care delivered to all Americans and expand coverage to 32 million Americans." It continues, "Independent experts have found that the new law helps reduce costs for families and businesses, cuts the deficit and strengthens Medicare, adding years to the trust fund while maintaining seniors guaranteed benefits."

While that was the hope, it's surely not the reality, at least not yet. Not to mention the fact that the law also cut $500 billion from Medicare, hardly what I'd call "strengthening" it.

So what explains the spike in prices?

First, there are costly provisions of Obamacare that have already taken effect, even though the exchanges - the core of the bill, and the key mechanism supporters insist will drive down costs - don't come into play until 2014. Some of these include covering kids 26 years old and under, accepting patients with no preconditions and eliminating annual caps.

While these sound like good moves, there were better approaches if Obama wanted to tame rising prices. Opening up insurance purchasing over state lines would have solved the above problems.

Back in May, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a final rule that would allow the administration to "establish procedures for federal and state insurance experts to scrutinize premiums" starting in September of this year. Managed care companies were told they would have to justify any rate increases above 10%. Translation: They'd be put on the political hot seat.

Because the power to implement price controls didn't make it into the final legislation, the administration needed some way to butt its head into private business to control costs. The Sebelius rule allows HHS to call out any insurance agency and ask for its paperwork.

The Kaiser study showed that premium increases came in at 9% since the passage of Obamacare, just under 10%. What a coincidence!

Insurers pushed up costs, not only to cover anticipating an influx of new and possibly sick patience (and lack of revenue from healthy patients signing up), but also to avoid getting audited by the Obama administration before the review period kicks in.

All this will have a direct effect on quality of care. If insurers are mandated to cover patients regardless of preconditions and not enough healthy people sign up for the exchanges, they'll have to cut services to make a profit, hurting quality and access.

So premiums are going up in a down economy, despite what the White House claims. This is bad news for businesses, as many won't be able to afford to cover you or your co-workers, which means the President's claim you can keep your doctor will likely prove false.

According to a survey by McKinsey & Co, a stunning 30% of companies said they would drop employee health coverage once the taxpayer-subsidized health insurance exchanges from Obamacare start in 2014. That means whether you like your doctor or not, you may be forced into the exchanges.

As former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said in response to the survey: "Most small businesses are not going to be in the health insurance business anymore after this thing goes into effect… That's going to be the biggest boost to small business that has been done in years and years and years."

Not quite: This means that most of the cost of private insurance will be moved onto the public balance sheet, making the cost of Obamacare even greater, and leaving the taxpayer - including many of those small business owners and job creators - stuck with the bill.

Though the President has claimed that Obamacare would bring down costs, grow jobs and help maintain the best care possible by expanding access, its consequences are turning out to be far less rosy. Our best hope is the Supreme Court ruling that the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Without that glue, the entire bill falls apart and they'll have to scrap it and start over. It's our best and only prescription for real reform."


-----------


Court won't do it either. All want to be liked by media and can't stand the middle class. ed.



via Lucianne.

Wind turbine output in Scotland almost non-existent 'despite sharp increase in mumber of wind turbines installed'-BBC

Prince Charles, grab the digitalis.

9/30/11, "Renewable energy production drops in Scotland," BBC

"The total amount of renewable energy produced from wind and hydro power schemes in Scotland fell last year.

Despite a sharp increase in the number of wind turbines installed, there was

  • only a 6% increase in the amount of power they produced.

Low rainfall, meanwhile, meant hydro production fell by a third.

Energy production figures also showed a decline in oil and gas production earlier this year, which industry leaders described as "worrying".

The statistics from Whitehall's Department of Energy and Climate Change showed the second quarter of this year saw some of the

  • sharpest falls on record of oil and gas production
  • from under UK waters.

Oil production was down 16% and gas by 25% compared with the second quarter of 2010.

This was attributed to planned maintenance as well as emptying oil reservoirs.

The amount of renewable energy produced in Scotland has increased sharply since 2003,

------------------------------

10/25/10, "Queen set to earn millions from windfarm expansion," UK Independent, Andy McSmith

12/31/10, "One's in the money! Why Prince Charles's secret 20-year campaign could make him the richest king in history," UK Daily Mail, G. Levy

2/9/11, "UK's Prince Charles blasts climate-change skeptics," AP

------------------------
10/24/10, "Queen's £38m a year windfarm windfall," This is money,

"The EU has told Britain it must generate more of its energy needs from renewable sources. But critics say the plan to increase Britain's dependence on green energy is flawed and could leave homes and business suffering routine power cuts within five years.

Sir Martin Holdgate, former chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, said: 'There is pressure to act on climate change. But when you look at the cost per unit, it is a rather expensive way of providing electricity.'

In its latest accounts, the Crown Estate says that its offshore windfarm business is 'experiencing exponential growth and we expect it to provide a significant source of total income in the next ten years'.

Revenue to the Estate from the windfarms rose by 44% last year to a 'low base' of £2.6m."...







.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Maldives crying for climate reparations while building new airports, hotels, and yacht marinas

9/25/11, "Walking the walk: Maldives constructing 11 new airports, each with hotels and yacht marinas too?" TomNelson.blogspot.com

"2009: 11 new airports to be constructed in Maldives | Maldives Tourism Update
The Government is working to construct 11 new regional airports in 11 regions and work is under way to complete them as soon as possible
...
The Minister further said the construction work of these airports have been handed to Airports Investment Management Company which is a company established for this project. There will be a 200 bed hotel, a yacht marina and a transit hotel in every airport in order to
----------------------------




Maldives President Nasheed working underwater in cooperation with US media (see below) to effect transfer of US middle class earnings to him for his island near India which has a naturally high water table and two monsoons a year.

11/2/2009, from the NY Times: "Last month, the cabinet of Maldives donned scuba gear and held an underwater meeting to highlight the threat of global warming to that nation,



12/7/09,
"Climate change threatens Maldives," CBS "News".

CBS "News" stages a non-scientific, sensationalist event avoiding that problems in the Maldives have nothing to do with climate. CBS "News" seems to be a propaganda girl standing on the corner.
  • They could have fed and clothed hungry American children with the money they wasted on gas flying to and from a hoax.
Facts about Maldives:

The Maldives' president's wife works for the UN (item near end of page under heading, 'Post-Script'), the primary profiteer of global warming and carbon trading.

The disappearing coral reefs aren't due to global warming. Instead:
  • Maldivians use the coral reefs as their
They used it up themselves. I'm sorry, Mohamed, if a small largely uninhabited group of islands in the Indian Ocean is getting low on coral. You used coral as a construction material and thereby abused a natural resource. If you have too many people there now, do what man has done for thousands of years: relocate.

The resort islands were only set up in the 1970's.

Recently, big hotel chains invested there.

No residents are allowed to have permanent residence on resort islands, so as not to dilute their
The islands are in the Indian Ocean.

"The Maldives' principal assets are its beauty, geographical isolation, and rich marine resources. When an

Italian entrepreneur set up some uninhabited islands as resorts
  • for foreign visitors in the early 1970s,
  • the tourism sector began to develop very rapidly.
Tourists come to spend time relaxing in one of the Maldives' 85 idyllic resort islands...

The recent purchase of resorts by the multinational hotel groups, Hilton and Four Seasons, is a clear indication of the projected

growth of the Maldives' tourism sector. Yet the cultural effect of foreign influences has been controlled by the government policy of restricting tourist access to resort islands, unless they specifically apply for permission.
  • Also, no Maldivians have their permanent residence on resort islands.
The purpose of this is to maintain the population's apparent cultural unity as based upon the Islamic faith....
  • The traditional construction material, coral, is near its point of full depletion.
More importantly, the fresh water held beneath the soil surface is in rapid decline. This means that the Maldives faces the prospect of importing a large percentage of its water needs to support the growing population, unless there are fast developments in desalination services on the islands."
Reference: "Mohamed Nasheed as President of Maldives," My Voice Pakistan Forum

-------------------------------

12/8/10, "Cancun's Climate Crock," American Thinker, Brian Sussman

"And the submersion of Tuvalu and Maldives? Their surrounding waters show no measurable signs of rising. The problem is the islands of Maldives are relatively flat coral atolls. Since tourism was first introduced to the nation in 1972, Digging up coral on small islands to build large hotels and conference centers is as stupid as sucking the air out of a lifeboat to breathe. The mining has severely compromised the atolls,
  • creating the impression that the islands are sinking.
Likewise, Tuvalu's problem is not climate change. Tuvalu's mess is that the country was never meant for modern habitation. There is no fresh water available -- only what can be cached from rain. Much of the population on the main island uses a lagoon for its bathing and toilet facilities. The tiny nation ships its garbage to landfills in Fiji and New Zealand.
In a 2007 speech at the United Nations, the Deputy Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Tavau Teii, said that major greenhouse polluters should compensate Tuvalu for the impacts of climate change. "We are seeking new funding arrangements to protect us from the impacts of climate change ...

we believe that the major greenhouse polluters should pay for the impacts they are causing.""...6/11/10, "Editorial: Pacific Islands not sinking from global warming," New study debunks Al Gore's hysterical fairy tale. Washington Times

"Of all the apocalyptic imagery summoned by global warming's proponents, the most compelling has been
  • the threat of coastal devastation from rising sea levels. In his best-selling work "Earth in the Balance," Al Gore argued that the selfishness of Western industrialization would obliterate small, impoverished countries.

"Although the sea level has risen and fallen through different geological periods, never has the change been anywhere near as rapid as that now expected as a consequence of global warming," he wrote. "... [I]sland nations like the Maldives and Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), will be devastated if the projections made by scientists turn out to be accurate."

  • Mr. Gore solemnly predicted that millions of poor inhabitants would be forced to flee their homelands in a desperate bid for survival - unless we adopt his political agenda. It just isn't so.

In a forthcoming issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change, researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji documented changes in 27 vulnerable, low-lying reef islands in the Central Pacific.

  • Using aerial photographs taken as early as 1944, the areas were carefully mapped and compared with modern satellite images.
It turns out that the islands did, in fact, change over time, but they are hardly sinking. Overall, 20 grew or remained stable. The island of Funamanu, for example, expanded from 7.4 acres to 9.5 acres in size - a 28 percent growth. Only seven islands shrunk, with the biggest percentage change occurring on Tengasu, which dropped from a tiny 1.7 acres to 1.5 acres - a diminishment of 9,670 square feet, the size of Mr. Gore's Tennessee mansion.

According to various studies, sea levels appear to have risen about 8 inches since the year 1860, but these Pacific islands continue to prosper nonetheless. This new study attributed size differences over time to the effect of ocean swells pounding and eroding windward shorelines. On leeward sides protected from the swells, coastlines grew.

This research was not conducted by scientists who disputed climate change, but even they noted the suspicious absence of verification for a key alarmist claim.

  • "The lack of monitoring seems a gross oversight given the international concern over small island stability and pressing concerns of island communities to manage island landscapes," the report stated.

So the islands aren't sinking, the Hockey Stick has been thoroughly debunked, the Himalayas still have snow and the polar bears are alive and well. As just about every tenet in the Church of Global Warming has been debunked,

6/3/10: "New Zealand research shows Pacific Islands not shrinking," from New Zealand television. From journal, Global and Planetary Change: "It has been thought that as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown," Prof Kench told the New Scientist. "But they won't. " Mentions land area of





via Tom Nelson


'Delivering French banks into the hands of Islamic imperialists is a high price for bailing out Athenian deadbeats,' Mark Steyn

9/24/11, "Global Bust-Up," Mark Steyn, National Review

"On the other hand, attempting to postpone the Club Med welfare junkies’ rendezvous with self-extinction will destabilize internal German politics (which always adds to the gaiety of nations) and strain to breaking point what’s left of the European banking system. BNP Paribas, formerly Saddam’s favorite banker and Gallicly insouciant about who it climbs into bed with, was reported in recent days to be cruising the flusher sheikhdoms and emirates in search of a new sugar daddy. Delivering French banks into the hands of Islamic imperialists seems




via Weasel Zippers

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Maldives imprisons those who preach other than Islam so why are US taxpayers forced to transfer their earnings there?

8/22/11, "Stimulus Helped Equip Climate Research Facilities--In Maldives, India and Australia," CNS News, Penny Starr
-------------------------
9/17/11, "Religious Unity Regulation prohibits preaching a religion except Islam," HaveeruDaily, Maldives

"
President’s Office has gazetted the controversial Religious Unity Regulation, declaring it an offence to preach a religion
  • except Islam in the Maldives.
The 12-clause regulation makes it mandatory for preachers of Islam, both locals and foreigners, to have a first degree in a field of Islamic education from
  • a ministry-approved college, university or centre.
A list of 36 worldwide institutes recognised by the ministry has been published in the gazette. The Maldives National University and local colleges and institutes are not included in the list.

The Islamic ministry is authorised under the regulation to license experienced persons who do not possess the educational qualification required.

The regulation, which instructs scholars to consider the social harmony, states practices that should be avoided in preaching Islam in the Maldives, including the practice of making comments in contradiction with prophetic
  • traditions and majority view of the scholars.
The regulation does not allow preventing healthcare and education in the name of religion. It further instructs preachers to avoid giving sermons that support gender discrimination, racism or any other form of discrimination.

“In explaining an issue that has been disputed by scholars, the different views expressed by scholars should be explained. If the scholar favours a certain point of view, evidence to support his view should be made clear,” the regulation reads.

The regulation also prohibits comments of hatred towards people of other religions, spreading a religion other than Islam and using an object that resembles a sign of a religion
  • other than Islam.
A person who violates the regulation will be sentenced to
================

The Maldives' naturally occurring water table is apparently America's fault:

From IndianOceanIsland.com:
Islands of the Maldives "have a naturally high water table."

Maldives Islands "have not been influenced much by the western world and they keep strictly to Muslim faith"

"Climate:

"Every year the Maldives are affected by two monsoons: iruvai, which is the northeast monsoon, is hot and dry, while hulhangu, being the southwest monsoon, brings wind and rain to the islands of the Maldives....Only the far northern atolls of the Maldives are struck by cyclones."...

----------------------------

8/22/11, "Stimulus Helped Equip Climate Research Facilities--In Maldives, India and Australia," CNS News, Penny Starr

"
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced last week that it has used $60 million of the $1.2 billion given to the agency in economic stimulus funds for purchasing “advanced-technology research instruments”
  • to study climate change.

Some of this equipment was deployed at facilities in the Maldives, India and Australia."...

-----------------------------

Maldives has no income tax.

"8/21/11, "Sri Lanka gives Maldives $10m import credit," BBC

"The government of Sri Lanka has granted a $10m (£6.1m) import credit to the Republic of Maldives.

Analysts say the agreement signed in Colombo on Thursday during a visit to the island by President of Maldives, Mohammed Nasheed, is mutually beneficial to both countries.

The Maldives archipelago which mainly relies on the tourism industry is currently facing a foreign exchange crisis, according to Amal Jayasinghe, the AFP bureau chief in Colombo.

"Maldives is among few countries in the world that does not collect any income tax," he told BBC Sinhala service.

"It is therefore struggling to balance the government

  • spending sheets.""
====================




Maldives President Nasheed working underwater in cooperation with US media (see below) to effect transfer of US middle class earnings to him for his island near India which has a naturally high water table and two monsoons a year.

11/2/2009, from the NY Times: "Last month, the cabinet of Maldives donned scuba gear and held an underwater meeting to highlight the threat of global warming to that nation,
-------------------------



12/7/09,
"Climate change threatens Maldives," CBS "News".

CBS "News" stages a non-scientific, sensationalist event avoiding that problems in the Maldives have nothing to do with climate. CBS "News" seems to be a propaganda girl standing on the corner.
  • They could have fed and clothed hungry American children with the money they wasted on gas flying to and from a hoax.
Facts about Maldives:

The Maldives' president's wife works for the UN (item near end of page under heading, 'Post-Script'), the primary profiteer of global warming and carbon trading.

The disappearing coral reefs aren't due to global warming. Instead:
  • Maldivians use the coral reefs as their
They used it up themselves. I'm sorry, Mohamed, if a small largely uninhabited group of islands in the Indian Ocean is getting low on coral. You used coral as a construction material and thereby abused a natural resource. If you have too many people there now, do what man has done for thousands of years: relocate.

The resort islands were only set up in the 1970's.

Recently, big hotel chains invested there.

No residents are allowed to have permanent residence on resort islands, so as not to dilute their
The islands are in the Indian Ocean.

"The Maldives' principal assets are its beauty, geographical isolation, and rich marine resources. When an

Italian entrepreneur set up some uninhabited islands as resorts
  • for foreign visitors in the early 1970s,
  • the tourism sector began to develop very rapidly.
Tourists come to spend time relaxing in one of the Maldives' 85 idyllic resort islands...
The recent purchase of resorts by the multinational hotel groups, Hilton and Four Seasons, is a clear indication of the projected

growth of the Maldives' tourism sector. Yet the cultural effect of foreign influences has been controlled by the government policy of restricting tourist access to resort islands, unless they specifically apply for permission.
  • Also, no Maldivians have their permanent residence on resort islands.
The purpose of this is to maintain the population's apparent cultural unity as based upon the Islamic faith....
  • The traditional construction material, coral, is near its point of full depletion.
More importantly, the fresh water held beneath the soil surface is in rapid decline. This means that the Maldives faces the prospect of importing a large percentage of its water needs to support the growing population, unless there are fast developments in desalination services on the islands."
Reference: "Mohamed Nasheed as President of Maldives," My Voice Pakistan Forum

--------------------------------

12/8/10, "Cancun's Climate Crock," American Thinker, Brian Sussman

"And the submersion of Tuvalu and Maldives? Their surrounding waters show no measurable signs of rising. The problem is the islands of Maldives are relatively flat coral atolls. Since tourism was first introduced to the nation in 1972, Digging up coral on small islands to build large hotels and conference centers is as stupid as sucking the air out of a lifeboat to breathe. The mining has severely compromised the atolls,
  • creating the impression that the islands are sinking.
Likewise, Tuvalu's problem is not climate change. Tuvalu's mess is that the country was never meant for modern habitation. There is no fresh water available -- only what can be cached from rain. Much of the population on the main island uses a lagoon for its bathing and toilet facilities. The tiny nation ships its garbage to landfills in Fiji and New Zealand.
In a 2007 speech at the United Nations, the Deputy Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Tavau Teii, said that major greenhouse polluters should compensate Tuvalu for the impacts of climate change. "We are seeking new funding arrangements to protect us from the impacts of climate change ...

we believe that the major greenhouse polluters should pay for the impacts they are causing.""...6/11/10, "Editorial: Pacific Islands not sinking from global warming," New study debunks Al Gore's hysterical fairy tale. Washington Times

"Of all the apocalyptic imagery summoned by global warming's proponents, the most compelling has been
  • the threat of coastal devastation from rising sea levels. In his best-selling work "Earth in the Balance," Al Gore argued that the selfishness of Western industrialization would obliterate small, impoverished countries.

"Although the sea level has risen and fallen through different geological periods, never has the change been anywhere near as rapid as that now expected as a consequence of global warming," he wrote. "... [I]sland nations like the Maldives and Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), will be devastated if the projections made by scientists turn out to be accurate."

  • Mr. Gore solemnly predicted that millions of poor inhabitants would be forced to flee their homelands in a desperate bid for survival - unless we adopt his political agenda. It just isn't so.

In a forthcoming issue of the journal Global and Planetary Change, researchers from the University of Auckland in New Zealand and the Pacific Islands Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji documented changes in 27 vulnerable, low-lying reef islands in the Central Pacific.

  • Using aerial photographs taken as early as 1944, the areas were carefully mapped and compared with modern satellite images.

It turns out that the islands did, in fact, change over time, but they are hardly sinking. Overall, 20 grew or remained stable. The island of Funamanu, for example, expanded from 7.4 acres to 9.5 acres in size - a 28 percent growth. Only seven islands shrunk, with the biggest percentage change occurring on Tengasu, which dropped from a tiny 1.7 acres to 1.5 acres - a diminishment of 9,670 square feet, the size of Mr. Gore's Tennessee mansion.

According to various studies, sea levels appear to have risen about 8 inches since the year 1860, but these Pacific islands continue to prosper nonetheless. This new study attributed size differences over time to the effect of ocean swells pounding and eroding windward shorelines. On leeward sides protected from the swells, coastlines grew.

This research was not conducted by scientists who disputed climate change, but even they noted the suspicious absence of verification for a key alarmist claim.

  • "The lack of monitoring seems a gross oversight given the international concern over small island stability and pressing concerns of island communities to manage island landscapes," the report stated.

So the islands aren't sinking, the Hockey Stick has been thoroughly debunked, the Himalayas still have snow and the polar bears are alive and well. As just about every tenet in the Church of Global Warming has been debunked,

6/3/10: "New Zealand research shows Pacific Islands not shrinking," from New Zealand television. From journal, Global and Planetary Change: "It has been thought that as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown," Prof Kench told the New Scientist. "But they won't. " Mentions land area of








via Weasel Zippers

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Another resignation from prestigious American Physical Society over its global warming dogma, this time by a Nobel laureate in physics

9/14/11, "Nobel laureate resigns from American Physical Society to protest the organization’s stance on global warming," WattsUpWithThat, Anthony Watts

"WUWT may recall the late Dr. Hal Lewis led the way on this last year as I covered at WUWT and in an op-ed at the Christian Science Monitor.

From Climate Depot, who got the exclusive:

Nobel prize winner for physics in 1973 Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group’s promotion of man-made global warming fears. Climate Depot has obtained the exclusive

  • email Giaever sent to APS Executive Officer Kate Kirby to announce his formal resignation.

Dr. Giaever wrote to Kirby of APS: “Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because

I cannot live with the (APS) statement below (on global warming):

  • APS: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible:
  • Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’

Giaever announced his resignation from APS was due to the group’s belief in man-made global warming fears. Giaever explained in his email to APS: “In the APS

  • it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time
  • and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of

global warming is incontrovertible?

The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

Read the full story here at Climate Depot

Here’s the resignation letter:

From: Ivar Giaever [ mailto:giaever@XXXX.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 3:42 PM
To: kirby@xxx.xxx
Cc: Robert H. Austin; ‘William Happer’; ‘Larry Gould’; ‘S. Fred Singer’; Roger Cohen
Subject: I resign from APS

Dear Ms. Kirby

Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below:

'Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.
The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.'

In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.

Best regards,


Ivar Giaever

Nobel Laureate 1973


PS. I included a copy to a few people in case they feel like using the information.

Ivar Giaever
XXX XXX
XXX
USA
Phone XXX XXX XXX
Fax XXX XXX XXX"




.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Another TSA caper, a uniformed agent helps you pretend to be disabled to get to the front of the line....if you pay the 'agent' extra-NY Post

.
"A TSA agent, her uniform, her position and the public trust were for sale."

9/11/11, "Even TSA employees are scamming," NY Post, Phil Mushnick column

"Last month, Friday, Aug. 12, I was at Newark Airport scheduled to fly to Vancouver, British Columbia, with my wife and another couple, her cousins.

The line to pass through security was enormous, far beyond the point where the maze-like barriers feed passengers forward. The back of the line was extended deep down a long hallway. We got in it, and the long, slow post-9/11 airport shuffle began.

Suddenly, a small middle-aged woman wearing a TSA (Transportation Security Administration) uniform moved along that line, pushing a wheelchair while asking, in a thick non-English accent,

  • if anyone was in need of her help.

No one responded. But she nonetheless made it clear that one didn't need to be disabled for her to assist one of us, that she was available.

  • Stopping, she even insisted that any one of us hop in.

Really, now? OK, let's see where this caper leads . . .

We talked/dared Rich, my wife's first cousin, to sit in the chair. He balked, but then went along with it.

Zoom. Off we went, the four of us, circumventing roughly an hour's shuffle line, until we reached the screening stations. Along the way, the woman in the TSA uniform said in her broken English,

  • "I take care of you; you take care of me."

As suspected. She was working a hustle.

When we arrived at the screeners' positions, Rich arose, suddenly and

The uniformed TSA and NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) men and women working this stop didn't seem to think anything of it. They seemed familiar with this woman as

  • they allowed her to provide us the next position through the nearest scanner.
I reached into my pocket, selected a five-dollar bill from a fold, and conspicuously handed it to her. No moderately alert TSA or NTSB uniformed personnel in the vicinity could have missed it. It was clear: I was paying off a uniformed TSA worker officer for privileged access.
  • Everyone nearby in uniform seemed to know the score.

As we stepped through the scanner, our TSA wheel-woman was waiting on the other side. She indiscreetly -- well above a whisper -- told us she expected more than $5 for her official crooked services rendered. This time she was borderline angry: "Not happy. I took care of you, now you take care of me!" We gave her a few more bucks,

  • again, as conspicuously as we made the first payment.

Again, no uniformed security person even looked sideways at what was going on, or going down. On this shift and at that security position, this must have been business as usual.

Was this one TSA servicewoman working alone, or did the security personnel down the line take a cut of her action? Is cash-out payment to airport security officers for "special favors" a common occurrence, or did we just happen to run into one scammer and co-workers conditioned to look the other way?

That TSA woman, her uniform, her position and the public trust were for sale. She solicited and accepted what amounted to be a bribe, and did so in the wide open, and with impunity. And

  • at a large, international airport, post-9/11.

This uniformed airport security officer wasn't on the lookout for suspicious characters or even infirm passengers,

  • she was on the lookout for extra cash.

It frankly made us wonder and worry about how far these things go, who's involved, how deep it runs and

  • just what it takes to bribe your way through an airport.

After all, for less than 10 bucks, four of us got where we were going -- and in a hurry. Nine years and 11 months




.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

On 9/11, 200 jumped from World Trade Center for a better death than burning, 'US establishment and media' want these deaths kept quiet-UK Daily Mail

The same US establishment and media who want us to forget the whole thing and in any case stop connecting it to Islam (Bloomberg, parag. 8).

9/10/11, "The 9/11 victims America wants to forget: The 200 jumpers who flung themselves from the Twin Towers who have been 'airbrushed from history'," UK Daily Mail, Tom Leonard

"Almost all of them jumped alone, although eyewitnesses talked of a couple who held hands as they fell.

One woman, in a final act of modesty, appeared to be holding down her skirt. Others tried to make parachutes out of curtains or tablecloths, only to have them wrenched from their grip by the force of their descent.

The fall was said to take about ten seconds. It would vary according to the body position and how long it took to reach terminal velocity — around 125mph in most cases, but if someone fell head down with their body straight, as if in a dive, it could be 200mph.

When they hit the pavement, their bodies were not so much broken as obliterated.

Nothing more graphically spells out the horror of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers than the grainy pictures of those poor souls frozen in mid-air as they fell to their deaths, tumbling in all manner of positions, after choosing to escape the suffocating smoke and dust, the flames and the steel-bending heat in the highest floors of the World Trade Centre.

And yet, tragically, they are in many ways the forgotten victims of September 11. Even now, nobody knows for certain who they were or exactly how many they numbered. Perhaps worst of all,

  • surprisingly few even want to know.

From the earliest days after the 9/11 attacks, the American establishment and the media showed an overwhelming reluctance to dwell on those who jumped or fell from the Twin Towers....

At the office of the New York chief medical examiner, a spokesman said this week that they did not consider these people ‘jumpers’. She insisted they fell from the 1,350ft tall, 110-floor skyscrapers, for jumping would imply suicide.

‘Jumping indicates a choice, and these people did not have that choice,’ she said. ‘That is why the deaths were ruled homicide, because the actions of other people caused them to die. The force of explosion and the fire behind them forced them out of the windows.’...

Unofficial estimates put the number of jumpers at around 200, but it is impossible to say for certain because their bodies were indistinguishable from others after the collapse of the Towers. The official account is that nearly all 2,753 victims in the Twin Towers attack officially died from ‘blunt impact’ injuries.

Ten years on, more than 1,000 have yet to be identified from remains. They were vaporised in the inferno.

After the planes hit, raging fires pushed the temperatures to 1,000c, sufficient to

  • weaken the skyscrapers’ steel frames.

The metal conducted the heat through the building at a terrifying speed and it reached the upper floors long before the flames did.

There were reports of people having to stand on desks because the floor became so hot.

Fire experts say people rarely throw themselves out of burning high-rises until they have exhausted every other option. Indeed, as survivors desperate for fresh, cool air crowded at the windows smashed open by the force of the planes’ impact, it is possible some of the ‘jumpers’ were actually pushed out in the crush.

The only research that comes close to being an official account is buried deep in an appendix of the huge report into why the towers collapsed, conducted by the

  • National Institute for Standards and Technology.

As part of its research into where the fire was at its most intense, NIST analysed camera footage and still photographs, and counted 104 jumpers, often recording the floor and exact window from which they left.

All but three leapt from the first building to be hit — the North Tower. The second plane struck the South Tower 16 minutes later but it collapsed first, giving occupants less time to react.

The first jumper is recorded plunging from the North Tower’s 149th window of the 93rd floor on the north face of the building at 8.51am, just over four minutes after it was hit by the first hijacked Boeing 757 between the 93rd and 99th floors.

Sometimes the fallers were separated by an interval of just a second. At one point nine people fell in six seconds from five adjacent windows; at another, 13 people fell in two minutes. Twenty minutes after the building was struck, two people fell simultaneously from the same window on the 95th floor.

At least four jumpers tried to climb to other windows for safety then lost their grip. One person climbed from the 93rd floor to the 92nd, clinging to the window’s edge before falling just one second after someone else plumetted from the same window — number 215 on the east face of the tower.

The early jumpers came from the crash zone where the plane entered the building — the

  • offices of the insurance brokers Marsh & McLennan.

The last jumper fell just as the North Tower collapsed 102 minutes after the building had been hit. Photographer Richard Drew says he has a picture of this person

  • clinging to some debris while falling.

What drove some to jump and others to remain? Those who were in the South Tower, just 120ft away, at the time — and managed to escape — had the clearest view and may provide the best insight.

Kelly Reyher watched from the South Tower’s 78th floor as people started to fall out of ‘the hole’ the aircraft had ripped in the North Tower. To him, they looked ‘completely confused’ rather than consciously deciding to end it all.

‘It looked like they were blinded by smoke and couldn’t breathe because their hands were over their faces,’ he says. ‘They would just walk to the edge where the jagged floor was and just fall out.’

Six floors below Mr Reyher, James Logozzo watched with stunned colleagues from the Morgan Stanley boardroom. He recalled that it took three or four jumpers to flash past him before he realised they were people. Then a woman fell, lying flat on her back and staring upwards. ‘The look on her face was shock. She wasn’t screaming,’ he recalled. ‘It was slow motion. After she hit the ground, there was nothing left.’

For those down below, the bodies landed with sickening, almost explosive thuds. Many said it was raining bodies.

One fireman, Danny Suhr, was killed as he made his way to the South Tower after a jumper landed on him, ‘coming out of the sky like a torpedo’ and breaking his neck. Compounding the tragedy, the priest who gave him the last rites was later killed by falling debris.

When she learnt how Danny died, his childhood sweetheart Nancy thought: how horrendous for that poor person who had to choose to jump; at least Danny did not have to make that choice. At least she had a body, for Danny’s colleagues took him to hospital after he was hit.

It was a decision that saved their lives — they would otherwise have been in the tower when it collapsed.

Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman says she felt like she was intruding on a sacrament as the bodies fell. She adds: ‘They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit.’

Bill Feehan, the deputy chief of the fire department, screamed at a man filming jumpers with a video camera: ‘Don’t you have any human decency?’

Fire battalion chief Joseph Pfeifer put out a desperate plea on the North Tower’s public address system. ‘Please don’t jump. We’re coming up for you,’ he said, not realising that nobody was listening — the system had long since been destroyed.

Images of the falling bodies disturbed and appalled all who saw them. On the first anniversary of the tragedy, an exhibition showing a work called Tumbling Woman, a bronze sculpture by artist Eric Fischl, lasted just a week in New York’s Rockefeller Centre before it was closed

  • following protests and even bomb threats.
But one picture has become an iconic image. When a man fell at 9.41am from near the top of the North Tower, Richard Drew caught a dozen frames of his descent, including one in which he is diving vertically, arms by his sides and left leg bent at the knee. The image, all the more horrific for its desolate stillness, appeared the next day in newspapers around the world.

Dubbed the Falling Man, it prompted the media to hunt for the man’s identity. None of those who jumped from the towers has ever been officially identified and, tellingly, nobody rushed to claim Falling Man as their own....

When a 9/11 Memorial Museum opens at Ground Zero next year, it will have a small display dedicated to the jumpers, but reflecting the intense feelings of unease the subject has provoked, it will be tucked away in an alcove, on the grounds that the images are considered

  • too private and too distressing.
It seems a harsh fate for those agonised mortals who faced the naked terror of that ten-second plunge to certain death. For the jumpers saved lives even as they were losing theirs.

In testimony after testimony, survivors of the South Tower say they only realised they had to ignore the official safety all-clear and get out fast

  • when they saw those terrible shapes tumbling past their windows."
----------------------------

9/9/11, "WaPo's Dionne: 'Time to Leave 9/11 Behind' as 'A Simple Day of Remembrance'," NewsBusters

---------------------------

8/13/10, "What Obama [and Bloomberg] Got Wrong About the Mosque," Daily Beast, Sam Harris

"Mayor Bloomberg said, “It is my hope that the (Ground Zero) mosque will help to bring our city even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam.” He has since said that anyone opposed to this project “ought to be ashamed of themselves.” "...(parag. 8)

George Bush even described the attackers as confused kids who wandered onto an airplane. I can't find a link for this at the moment, but I heard audio of him saying this sometime in the last year or two he was in office.

Regarding downplaying of jumpers by the establishment:

I live in Manhattan and watched tv and listened to radio constantly for the first week or more after 911. I mainly watched NY1. It's a local station I don't normally watch but assumed it would have better coverage. I never heard a word about jumpers. It's possible it was mentioned but if so it couldn't have been much. I didn't even know anyone at all had jumped until my brother mentioned it to me 2 weeks after the attack, and he lives in New Jersey. Apparently the topic was at least mentioned in some places but has been universally hushed up since. ed.





Jumper, 9/11/01





via Lucianne. Editor's note: This is almost a duplicate of a prior post. Google or whoever is my longtime hacker removed a portion of the text from my first post of the Daily Mail article. I re-posted it with the missing text.

Friday, September 9, 2011

On 9/11, 200 jumped from World Trade Center for a better death than burning, 'US establishment and media' want these deaths kept quiet-UK Daily Mail

The same US establishment and media who want us to forget the whole thing and in any case stop connecting it to Islam (Bloomberg, parag. 8).

9/10/11, "The 9/11 victims America wants to forget: The 200 jumpers who flung themselves from the Twin Towers who have been 'airbrushed from history'," UK Daily Mail, Tom Leonard

"Almost all of them jumped alone, although eyewitnesses talked of a couple who held hands as they fell.

One woman, in a final act of modesty, appeared to be holding down her skirt. Others tried to make parachutes out of curtains or tablecloths, only to have them wrenched from their grip by the force of their descent.

The fall was said to take about ten seconds. It would vary according to the body position and how long it took to reach terminal velocity — around 125mph in most cases, but if someone fell head down with their body straight, as if in a dive, it could be 200mph.

When they hit the pavement, their bodies were not so much broken as obliterated.

Nothing more graphically spells out the horror of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers than the grainy pictures of those poor souls frozen in mid-air as they fell to their deaths, tumbling in all manner of positions, after choosing to escape the suffocating smoke and dust, the flames and the steel-bending heat in the highest floors of the World Trade Centre.

And yet, tragically, they are in many ways the forgotten victims of September 11. Even now, nobody knows for certain who they were or exactly how many they numbered. Perhaps worst of all,

  • surprisingly few even want to know.

From the earliest days after the 9/11 attacks, the American establishment and the media showed an overwhelming reluctance to dwell on those who jumped or fell from the Twin Towers....

At the office of the New York chief medical examiner, a spokesman said this week that they did not consider these people ‘jumpers’. She insisted they fell from the 1,350ft tall, 110-floor skyscrapers, for jumping would imply suicide.

‘Jumping indicates a choice, and these people did not have that choice,’ she said. ‘That is why the deaths were ruled homicide, because the actions of other people caused them to die. The force of explosion and the fire behind them forced them out of the windows.’...

Unofficial estimates put the number of jumpers at around 200, but it is impossible to say for certain because their bodies were indistinguishable from others after the collapse of the Towers. The official account is that nearly all 2,753 victims in the Twin Towers attack officially died from ‘blunt impact’ injuries.

Ten years on, more than 1,000 have yet to be identified from remains. They were vaporised in the inferno.

After the planes hit, raging fires pushed the temperatures to 1,000c, sufficient to

  • weaken the skyscrapers’ steel frames.

The metal conducted the heat through the building at a terrifying speed and it reached the upper floors long before the flames did.

There were reports of people having to stand on desks because the floor became so hot.

Fire experts say people rarely throw themselves out of burning high-rises until they have exhausted every other option. Indeed, as survivors desperate for fresh, cool air crowded at the windows smashed open by the force of the planes’ impact, it is possible some of the ‘jumpers’ were actually pushed out in the crush.

The only research that comes close to being an official account is buried deep in an appendix of the huge report into why the towers collapsed, conducted by the

  • National Institute for Standards and Technology.

As part of its research into where the fire was at its most intense, NIST analysed camera footage and still photographs, and counted 104 jumpers, often recording the floor and exact window from which they left.

All but three leapt from the first building to be hit — the North Tower. The second plane struck the South Tower 16 minutes later but it collapsed first, giving occupants less time to react.

The first jumper is recorded plunging from the North Tower’s 149th window of the 93rd floor on the north face of the building at 8.51am, just over four minutes after it was hit by the first hijacked Boeing 757 between the 93rd and 99th floors.

Sometimes the fallers were separated by an interval of just a second. At one point nine people fell in six seconds from five adjacent windows; at another, 13 people fell in two minutes. Twenty minutes after the building was struck, two people fell simultaneously from the same window on the 95th floor.

At least four jumpers tried to climb to other windows for safety then lost their grip. One person climbed from the 93rd floor to the 92nd, clinging to the window’s edge before falling just one second after someone else plumetted from the same window — number 215 on the east face of the tower.

The early jumpers came from the crash zone where the plane entered the building — the

  • offices of the insurance brokers Marsh & McLennan.

The last jumper fell just as the North Tower collapsed 102 minutes after the building had been hit. Photographer Richard Drew says he has a picture of this person

  • clinging to some debris while falling.

What drove some to jump and others to remain? Those who were in the South Tower, just 120ft away, at the time — and managed to escape — had the clearest view and may provide the best insight.

Kelly Reyher watched from the South Tower’s 78th floor as people started to fall out of ‘the hole’ the aircraft had ripped in the North Tower. To him, they looked ‘completely confused’ rather than consciously deciding to end it all.

‘It looked like they were blinded by smoke and couldn’t breathe because their hands were over their faces,’ he says. ‘They would just walk to the edge where the jagged floor was and just fall out.’

Six floors below Mr Reyher, James Logozzo watched with stunned colleagues from the Morgan Stanley boardroom. He recalled that it took three or four jumpers to flash past him before he realised they were people. Then a woman fell, lying flat on her back and staring upwards. ‘The look on her face was shock. She wasn’t screaming,’ he recalled. ‘It was slow motion. After she hit the ground, there was nothing left.’

For those down below, the bodies landed with sickening, almost explosive thuds. Many said it was raining bodies.

One fireman, Danny Suhr, was killed as he made his way to the South Tower after a jumper landed on him, ‘coming out of the sky like a torpedo’ and breaking his neck. Compounding the tragedy, the priest who gave him the last rites was later killed by falling debris.

When she learnt how Danny died, his childhood sweetheart Nancy thought: how horrendous for that poor person who had to choose to jump; at least Danny did not have to make that choice. At least she had a body, for Danny’s colleagues took him to hospital after he was hit.

It was a decision that saved their lives — they would otherwise have been in the tower when it collapsed.

Firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman says she felt like she was intruding on a sacrament as the bodies fell. She adds: ‘They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been. So me and another guy turned away and looked at a wall and we could still hear them hit.’

Bill Feehan, the deputy chief of the fire department, screamed at a man filming jumpers with a video camera: ‘Don’t you have any human decency?’

Fire battalion chief Joseph Pfeifer put out a desperate plea on the North Tower’s public address system. ‘Please don’t jump. We’re coming up for you,’ he said, not realising that nobody was listening — the system had long since been destroyed.

Images of the falling bodies disturbed and appalled all who saw them. On the first anniversary of the tragedy, an exhibition showing a work called Tumbling Woman, a bronze sculpture by artist Eric Fischl, lasted just a week in New York’s Rockefeller Centre before it was closed

  • following protests and even bomb threats.
But one picture has become an iconic image. When a man fell at 9.41am from near the top of the North Tower, Richard Drew caught a dozen frames of his descent, including one in which he is diving vertically, arms by his sides and left leg bent at the knee. The image, all the more horrific for its desolate stillness, appeared the next day in newspapers around the world.

Dubbed the Falling Man, it prompted the media to hunt for the man’s identity. None of those who jumped from the towers has ever been officially identified and, tellingly, nobody rushed to claim Falling Man as their own....

When a 9/11 Memorial Museum opens at Ground Zero next year, it will have a small display dedicated to the jumpers, but reflecting the intense feelings of unease the subject has provoked, it will be tucked away in an alcove, on the grounds that the images are considered

  • too private and too distressing.

It seems a harsh fate for those agonised mortals who faced the naked terror of that ten-second plunge to certain death. For the jumpers saved lives even as they were losing theirs.

In testimony after testimony, survivors of the South Tower say they only realised they had to ignore the official safety all-clear and get out fast

  • when they saw those terrible shapes tumbling past their windows."
----------------------------

9/9/11, "WaPo's Dionne: 'Time to Leave 9/11 Behind' as 'A Simple Day of Remembrance'," NewsBusters

---------------------------

8/13/10, "What Obama [and Bloomberg] Got Wrong About the Mosque," Daily Beast, Sam Harris

"Mayor Bloomberg said, “It is my hope that the (Ground Zero) mosque will help to bring our city even closer together and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam.” He has since said that anyone opposed to this project “ought to be ashamed of themselves.” "...(parag. 8)

-------------------------

George Bush even described the attackers as confused kids who wandered onto an airplane. I can't find a link for this at the moment, but I heard audio of him saying this sometime in the last year or two he was in office.

Regarding downplaying of jumpers by the establishment:

I live in Manhattan and watched tv and listened to radio constantly for the first week or more after 911. I mainly watched NY1. It's a local station I don't normally watch but assumed it would have better coverage. I never heard a word about jumpers. It's possible it was mentioned but if so it couldn't have been much. I didn't even know anyone at all had jumped until my brother mentioned it to me 2 weeks after the attack, and he lives in New Jersey. Apparently the topic was at least mentioned in some places but has been universally hushed up since. ed.





Jumper, 9/11/01







via Lucianne

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I'm the daughter of a World War II Air Force pilot and outdoorsman who settled in New Jersey.