Demand Truth

Remedy for preventing future oil spills

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 13:06:58 +0000

A new regulatory agency won’t fix the problem. Every industry pollutes the environment and degrades the surroundings and occasionally has massive accidents. Governments are supposed to develop infrastructure and fire departments to mitigate the environmental effects, help regulate safety concerns and provide emergency assistance during the inevitable accidents. To do so, they tax the industries. Industries naturally attempt to minimize the regulation, and the taxes by contributing to politicians, and cozying up to the regulators and spinning their PR. Then, rivers get contaminated with diseased run-off from chicken factories, or tailings piles collapse destroying a town, or a crowded cruise ship collides with an ice berg and there aren’t enough lifeboats, or a chemical plant suffers a leak and explosion and kills 10,000 people or banks start playing hanky panky with other people’s money, or an oil rig suffers a blowout and subsequent massive oil leak. You don’t need a new agency, you need an old agency with a long memory, and the moral courage to stick to their guns when a new kid with lots of money starts playing 3 card monte with the regulations.

Guantanamo is wrong. Close it, and hold trials.

admin — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:56:31 +0000

President Obama, Guantanamo prison is wrong. Close Guantanamo prison and hold open trials for those remaining prisoners. It is wrong to kidnap a person and hold them without trial. It is wrong. The worst offenses of totalitarian governments begin with kidnapping people and holding them on hearsay evidence without trials. Our outrage at corrupt governments throughout history includes their practices of capturing so-called enemies, and disappearing them without trial, or with obviously fake trials. Our sacred understanding of why the United States is a great nation includes the right to a public trial. That we have gone along with destroying this foundation of our country in the name of security is an evil stain on our hope to be a leader in modern civilization. Throughout the world, and even within ourselves, we can no longer claim to be a just and civilized nation, as long as we practice such barbarity. There must be a secret agenda that some people are protecting, in order for them to prevent proper trials for these prisoners. What secrets are people hiding, that they impede having open trials for these prisoners? What secret agents would be exposed by having these prisoners able to speak publicly? It has been more than 8 years. What sloppy procedures, torture, and malfeasance on the part of our government are people trying to protect? Whether the prisoners are terrorists or not is totally irrelevant at this point. The whole situation of secret prisoners breeds corruption. It corrupts us. It must stop. It is wrong. It is barbaric. It is corrupt. You can decide it is wrong and you can stop it.

The Universe Changes, but why are you expecting me to pay for it?

admin — Sun, 23 May 2010 15:29:42 +0000

First of all, Global change is with us. My mom had three other children after I was born and the family dynamics kept changing. There has never been a time when global climate has been stable . Throughout history civilizations have been faced with climate change, political change, societal change. Now, we are being asked to pay underdeveloped nations so they don’t have to change to respond to the climate change. I find this situation unethical and specious. We are being mugged because we are successful.
Who is responsible for these nations being underdeveloped? It reminds me of highschool, where some students study and work hard to pass their classes, and others complained that the course was too hard and they were unprepared and the teacher should consider their environment and how hard it is for them to be able to study, and grade on a curve. Is it our fault that other people can see the bus coming, but don’t get out of the road? They want to preserve their way of life, fine, but don’t expect me to pay for their privilege. I would like to go back to living the way I did when I was 10 also. Unfortunately, my parents are dead, and I have to work to buy food for myself. Things change and if you do not successfully change to address the new circumstances, you fall under the bus.
I watched a report about the glaciers melting in Bolivia. ok, so the area is warming. Ok, so the water that had been captured in the glacier over centuries is now gone. Had they expected it to have been a sustainable reservoir forever? if so, then they must have expected annual rain and snowfall to equal the amount of water that melted off the glacier each year. If not, then why are they surprised that the glacier melted? The obvious solution is to provide a man-made reservoir to capture and parcel out the precipitation on a reasonable basis. This has been an understood solution to such a problem for tens of thousands of years. Why is it suddenly my responsibility to pay for it? Their lack of foresight and industrialization makes it my problem? Why?

Abortion protesters motivated by church sponsored, church sanctioned porn

admin — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 18:50:26 +0000

Abortion protesters are motivated by church sponsored, church sanctioned sado-porn.

They can’t think about sex, because that is a sin, so they can’t think about penises and vaginas directly. But they CAN think about the womb, the unborn fetuses, and what they imagine are the mutilations and pain that a fetus undergoes during an abortion.
Since those topics indirectly deal with sex, their sexual responses are engaged (engorged) physiologically, but they aren’t technically thinking about sex, so the Church encourages it. This is the same process that happens in sexual perversion. Dwelling on the lurid details, minutely considering the graphic images, imagining the feelings of the participants over and over again and describing the processes to each other in rapturous, florid phrases.
This is all pornography. When you add the descriptions of the blood, the violence and pain, it becomes sadistic pornography. It is how they get their sexual jollies because they can’t think about sex directly. This is where the emotions and vehemence come from for the protesters. It is repressed sexuality, that allows them to think about and imagine sexual topics – pornography – that are sanctioned and encouraged by the church. Church promoted, church sanctioned pornography, so it’s ok. Except it’s not.

Blame it on the media

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 01:13:54 +0000

I am beginning to blame the major media outlets for the confused situations in both Health Care reform, and the Global Warming issue.
And particularly, I’m blaming NPR and The Christian Science Monitor. We all understand that most other media outlets are publicity whores, and shills for corporations that benefit from continued turmoil and misunderstandings, and news outlets profit from continuing crises as long as possible. Bad news and crises sell papers and air time, after all. But NPR and The Christian Science Monitor at least pay lip service to having ideals that are supposed to help mankind. And in these two issues they have failed abyssmally.
As soon as Al Gore’s movie came out, it was easy to factcheck the assertions and statements he made in that movie. I am not aware that any of them did. Much of the past several years’ confusion about climate change would have been cleared up immediately, but instead, here we are, still debating the same issues years later.
And in the Health Care debate, it was clear to me from the outset, that news reporters continually used the phrases: “Health Care Reform” and “Health Insurance Reform” interchangeably, as if they were synonyms. They are nothing of the sort. We respond differently to them, and they engage our emotions on different levels. Try it yourself. Say to yourself: The government is going to change my health care. Now, say to yourself: The government is going to change my health insurance. Different reactions. They mean different things. And I’m sure that health insurance executives react differently to those two sentences also. When all the public news reporters use them interchangeably, it significantly alters the tone and clarity of the discussion. And I’m sure news organizations are sophisticated enough to have understood this from the beginning. I have to conclude then, that they were doing it on purpose. And for that, I’m really angry.

Why we can’t trust the US government about food.

admin — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:53:43 +0000

Michael Pollan, in his 2007 article in the NY Times, “Unhappy Meals” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1, explains how and when the US government was subverted into giving us bad advice about food: …”a little-noticed political dust-up in Washington in 1977 seems to have helped propel American food culture down this dimly lighted path. Responding to an alarming increase in chronic diseases linked to diet — including heart disease, cancer and diabetes — a Senate Select Committee on Nutrition, headed by George McGovern, held hearings on the problem and prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The committee learned that while rates of coronary heart disease had soared in America since World War II, other cultures that consumed traditional diets based largely on plants had strikingly low rates of chronic disease. Epidemiologists also had observed that in America during the war years, when meat and dairy products were strictly rationed, the rate of heart disease temporarily plummeted.

Naïvely putting two and two together, the committee drafted a straightforward set of dietary guidelines calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products. Within weeks a firestorm, emanating from the red-meat and dairy industries, engulfed the committee, and Senator McGovern (who had a great many cattle ranchers among his South Dakota constituents) was forced to beat a retreat. The committee’s recommendations were hastily rewritten. Plain talk about food — the committee had advised Americans to actually “reduce consumption of meat” — was replaced by artful compromise: “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.”
A subtle change in emphasis, you might say, but a world of difference just the same. First, the stark message to “eat less” of a particular food has been deep-sixed; don’t look for it ever again in any official U.S. dietary pronouncement. Second, notice how distinctions between entities as different as fish and beef and chicken have collapsed; those three venerable foods, each representing an entirely different taxonomic class, are now lumped together as delivery systems for a single nutrient. Notice too how the new language exonerates the foods themselves; now the culprit is an obscure, invisible, tasteless — and politically unconnected — substance that may or may not lurk in them called “saturated fat.”

The entire article is well worth reading – as also the rest of Michael Pollan’s books and articles.
When politicians wonder about why the US citizens no longer trust the government, and why so many people are obese, they should realize it is because the government doesn’t tell us the truth.

UN IPCC admitting more errors. Funding motivations.

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:25:21 +0000

The agency and researcher that is the source for IPCC statement that Himalayan glaciers would all melt, used that faulty research to get research grants.

The Sunday London Times reports:
From The Sunday Times
January 24, 2010
UN climate panel blunders again over Himalayan glaciers
The Himalayan glaciers

(AP Photo/Channi Anand)

Claims of melting Himalayan glaciers have been cited in grant applications

Jonathan Leake, Science and Environment Editor

* 116 Comments

The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion’s share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 – an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.
Since then, however, The Sunday Times has discovered that the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI.

One of them, announced earlier this month just before the scandal broke, resulted in a £310,000 grant from Carnegie.

An abstract of the grant application published on Carnegie’s website said: “The Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate.

“One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region “will vanish within forty years as a result of global warming, resulting in widespread water shortages,”

The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into “the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region” as the glaciers began to disappear. Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

The money was initially given to the Global Centre, an Icelandic Foundation which then channelled it, with Carnegie’s involvement, to TERI.

The cash was acknowledged by TERI in a press release, issued on January 15, just before the glacier scandal became public, in which Pachauri repeated the claims of imminent glacial melt.

It said: “”According to predictions of scientific merit they may indeed melt away in several decades.”

The same release also quoted Dr Syed Hasnain, the glaciologist who, back in 1999, made the now discredited claim that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.

He now heads Pachauri’s glaciology unit at TERI which sought the grants and which is carrying out the glacier research.

Critics point out that Hasnain, of all people, should have known the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 was bogus because he was meant to be a leading glaciologist specialising in the Himalayas.

Any suggestion that TERI has repeated an unchecked scientific claim without checking it, in order to win grants, could prove hugely embarrassing for Pachauri and the IPCC.

The second grant, from the EU, totalled £2.5m and was designed to “to assess the impact of Himalayan glaciers retreat”.

It was part of the EU’s HighNoon project, launched last May to fund research into how India might adapt to loss of glaciers.

In one presentation at last May’s launch, Anastasios Kentarchos, of the European Commission’s Climate Change and Environmental Risks Unit, specifically cited the bogus IPCC claims about glacier melt as a reason for pouring EU taxpayers’ money into the project.

Pachauri spoke at the same presentation and Hasnain is understood to have been present in the audience.

The EU grant was split between leading European research institutions including Britain’s Met Office, with TERI getting a major but unspecified share because it represented the host country.

The “Glaciergate” affair has seen Pachauri come under increasing pressure in India, prompting him to call a press conference yesterday (Saturday) where he dismissed calls for his resignation and said no action would be taken against the authors of the erroneous section of the IPCC report.

He said: “I have no intention of resigning from my position,” adding the errors were unintentional and not significant in comparison to the entire report.

However, other questions remain. One of the most important is in connection with Pachauri’s earnings.

In an interview with The Sunday Times he said his only income came from his salary at TERI. However TERI does not publish his salary and he refused to divulge it.

In India questions are also being asked about Pachauri’s links with GloriOil, a Houston, Texas-based oil technology company that specialises in recovering extra oil from declining oil fields . Pachauri is listed as a founder and scientific advisor.

Critics say it is odd for a man committed to decarbonising energy supplies to be linked to an oil company.

The problems come at a bad time for the IPCC which is recruiting scientists for its fifth report into the science and impacts underlying global warming.

Yesterday, Pachauri said he intended to remain as director of the IPCC to oversee the fifth IPCC assessment report dealing with sea level rise and ice sheets, oceans, clouds and carbon accounting. The report is expected by 2014.

London Times reports that UN IPCC admits it was wrong!

admin — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 01:46:31 +0000

New Admission by UN that it wrongly announced recent disasters and floods were caused by global warming! The increase could just be because population increased and inflation made insurance claims more expensive. EXACTLY! and WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING FOR YEARS.http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7000063.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1

Disaster in Haiti

admin — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:42:17 +0000

The recent earthquake in Haiti highlights several things about the climate warming debate that I have issues with.
The earthquake is a bona fide disaster, with tens of thousands of people dead. Global warming is a predicted disaster, with a nebulous “many millions at risk, sometime in the future. But I haven’t figured out at risk of what? Rampant disease? Al Gore mentions AIDS, SARS, Tuberculosis, and dozens of other diseases in his movie – but NONE of them are caused, or promoted in any way whatsoever, by increased carbon dioxide, or even increased temperatures. Increased human crowding, increased sexual promiscuity, increased worldwide travel, increased unsanitary conditions, and breeding hogs, ducks and humans in close proximity, often the same building, yes. Carbon dioxide and increased temperatures, no. Lowland flooding as oceans rise would kill millions, but the rise is measured in fractions of an inch per year, whereas tides rise and fall sometimes dozens of feet per day, and if people are too stupid to get out of the way of water rising at the rate of a quarter of an inch per year, they truly deserve to die. I have yet to find ONE legitimate disaster caused by AGW – or one that is actually probable that might happen, caused by AGW. It’s all hand waving and dire general predictions and reminds me seriously of Professor Harold Hill telling the the people of River City they’ve got trouble – and their sons, their daughters caught by the arms of animal instinct– mass-steria! Oh, we got trouble!”
The second issue brought out by the earthquake, is that Haiti is one of the “developing” nations that was begging for support from the “developed” nations, to offset the higher costs that dealing with global warming is predicted to cost in the future, on the theory that the developed nations were further along in their industrialization/modernization, and all Haiti needed was some funding on the side to nudge their development along a little faster so they could take their proper place as a “developed nation” sometime in the future. Does anybody really think that way? Anybody? Anywhere? Haiti – and most of the so-called “developing nations” are not, in fact, developing. They are static, or failing. Their political structures do not encourage or promote development of new wealth (new sources of value), only parasitic sucking of old wealth, or sucking from developed nations, or denuding the environment of any resources. I admit, the United States, and many of its corporations, have gone along with maintaining (and in some cases, setting up) those political structures, and the systems involved in pillaging the resources of an area. But the myth and paradigm of “developing nations” is by-and-large a fraudulent concept. Is Haiti “developing?” Is Yemen? North Korea? Burma? Afghanistan? Thailand? Serbia? Bangladesh? Angola? Armenia? Botswana? Cambodia? Cameroon? Chad? Congo? Ghana? Iran? Iraq? Namibia? Nepal? Rwanda? Seychelles? Somalia? The Sudan? Tanzania? Uganda? Uraguay? Zimbabwe? The answer is obviously NO. And their political systems, or lack thereof, will continue to hold them in the muck of poverty and backwardness until their political structures and cultures are changed. No amount of money aid, no amount of development projects, no amount of infrastructure support dropped onto them from outside will ever get them to be “developed.” Anymore than pouring federal aid dollars into Detroit will bring that city back to a powerhouse industrial center. Is Detroit a “developing” city? Will it benefit from federal aid “infrastructure” projects? You tell me. The culture of entitlement, corruption and selfishness that has developed in the population of Detroit is poisonous to development, and any business that tries to start in Detroit is hampered by the attitudes of the culture and the governments that it deals with. Similarly with New Orleans. The main problem in New Orleans isn’t that it is several feet below sea level and likely to be swamped by any hurricane that comes by, but that it has been, and still is, the city where people not only expect their government to be corrupt, but demand it. And the costs of doing business in such a city are too great for much development to really occur, and when a hurricane comes by, they discover that the dikes are held together with old newspapers (true) and the legislators have tens of thousands of dollars stashed in their freezers (also true). Which brings us back to Haiti. It also has been notorious for being corrupt for decades, if not centuries. The presidential palace which collapsed, had thrones and bathroom fixtures of solid gold, and the concrete with which it was built was substandard, and despite hundreds of years of experience and building codes to the contrary, not built to withstand any sizeable earthquake. Thousands of buildings have collapsed onto themselves, and officials are blaming substandard building practices. Tens of thousands of people, possibly hundreds of thousands of people have died. Several years ago, we had an earthquake in Los Angeles comparable to the one in Haiti. Buildings and highways toppled and sixty seven people died. Now, what caused all the collapses in Haiti? That it is still “developing?” Or that its culture and political structure is, has been, and will remain for the foreseeable future, corrupt?

I hate it when my government helps terrorists

Spacedad2 — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 17:44:08 +0000

As mentioned in the previous post, The Christian Science Monitor has linked the upsurge in lone wolf terrorist acts to the more strident racism going on in the United States lately. They discuss that terrorist groups are using more “Lone Wolf” terrorism, and “Leaderless Resistance” activities, and describe how such activities developed within the terrorist and extreme communities.

They didn’t mention at all how the US government has pioneered and promoted these tactics, with the use of “Plausible deniability” going back as far as the Vietnam war, CIA death squads and assasination attempts, and the use of Extraordinary Rendition. Sigh. Not that either situation is acceptable, but pointing a finger only at the immoral acts committed by extremists and ignoring the immoral acts committed by my government makes for an untruthful view of the situation, and hinders honest attempts to understand and fix things.