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LOSS OF NATIONALITY AND TAXATION
P.L. 104-191 contains changes in the taxation of U.S. citizens who renounce or otherwise lose U.S. citizenship. In general, any person who lost U.S. citizenship within 10 years immediately preceding the close of the taxable year, whose principle purpose in losing citizenship was to avoid taxation, will be subject to continued taxation. For the purposes of this statute, persons are presumed to have a principle purpose of avoiding taxation if 1) their average annual net income tax for a five year period before the date of loss of citizenship is greater than $100,000, or 2) their net worth on the date of the loss of U.S. nationality is $500,000 or more (subject to cost of living adjustments). The effective date of the law is retroactive to February 6, 1995. Copies of approved Certificates of Loss of Nationality are provided by the Department of State to the Internal Revenue Service pursuant to P.L. 104-191. Questions regarding United States taxation consequences upon loss of U.S. nationality, should be addressed to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

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The Left's "Inequality" Obsession
...In one such study, two-thirds of subjects said that they would be happier at a company where they earned $33,000 while their colleagues earned $30,000 than at one where they earned $35,000 while their colleagues earned $38,000. In another experiment, 56% of participants chose a hypothetical job paying $50,000 per year while everyone else earned $25,000, rather than a job paying $100,000 per year while others made $200,000. ....

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War and Leviathan: The Trick that Works Every Time
...The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised—a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide. Whatever promotes the growth of the state also weakens the capacity of individuals in civil society to fend off the state’s depredations and therefore augments the public’s multifaceted victimization at the hands of state functionaries. Nothing promotes the growth of the state as much as war. Randolph Bourne’s statement “war is the health of the state” has become a cliché not simply because it is pithy, but above all because it expresses a vitally important truth.

States, by their very nature, are perpetually at war—not always against foreign foes, of course, but always against their own subjects. The state’s most fundamental purpose, the activity without which it cannot even exist, is robbery. The state gains its very sustenance from robbery, which it pretties up ideologically by giving it a different name (taxation) and by striving to sanctify its existential crime as legitimate and socially necessary. State propaganda and long-established routine combine to convince many people that they have a legitimate obligation, even a moral duty to pay taxes to the state that rules their society.

They fall into such erroneous moral reasoning because they are told incessantly that the tribute they fork over is actually a kind of price paid for essential services received, and that in the case of certain services, such as protection from foreign and domestic aggressors against their rights to life, liberty, and property, only the government can provide the service effectively. They are not permitted to test this claim by resorting to competing suppliers of law, order, and security, however, because the government enforces a monopoly over the production and distribution of its alleged “services” and brings violence to bear against would-be competitors. In so doing, it reveals the fraud at the heart of its impudent claims and gives sufficient proof that it is not a genuine protector, but a mere protection racket....

...It is a sound interpretive rule, however, that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all. The mass belief in the general beneficence of democracy represents a kind of Stockholm syndrome writ large. Yet, no matter how widely this syndrome may extend, it cannot alter the basic fact that owing to the operation of government as we know it―that is, government without genuine, express, individual consent―a minority lives on balance at the expense of the rest, and the rest therefore lose on balance in the process, while the oligarchs (elected or not, it scarcely matters) preside over the enormous organized criminal enterprise we know as the state....

...Similar movements may be seen in the Gallup polls that asked the respondents whether they viewed George W. Bush himself favorably or unfavorably: here, the opinion balance jumped from + 25 percent in August 2001 to + 76 percent in November 2001—a three-fold increase—before beginning a long downward trend and becoming negative after mid-2005....

...Not only did the events of September 11, 2001, cause the American public to look more favorably on the president as a person, as a president, and as the principal architect of U.S. foreign policy, but those events also apparently caused the public to express more trust in the federal government in general in its handling of both international and domestic problems. In the Gallup poll of September 7-10, 2001, 68 percent of the respondents expressed “a great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust and confidence in the government’s handling of international problems, whereas 31 percent expressed “not very much” or “none at all,” which implied an opinion balance of + 37 percent (= 68 – 31). A month later, in the poll conducted during October 11-14, this opinion balance had risen to 67 percent (= 83 – 16), almost doubling. The public’s perversely increased trust in the government had also spilled inexplicably onto its handling of domestic problems, increasing this opinion balance from 22 percent (= 60 – 39) in the early September poll to 56 percent (= 77 – 21) in the October poll.

A final measure of public opinion, “trust in Washington to do what is right,” which is normally a fairly stable indicator, also rose in an unusual way owing to 9/11. In the Gallup poll of July 6-9, 2000, 42 percent of the respondents expressed confidence that the government will do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time,” whereas 58 percent responded “only some of the time” or “never,” which implies an opinion balance of negative 16 percent. When the pollsters next asked this question, in October 5-6, 2001, however, the opinion balance had risen to + 21 percent (= 60 – 39), indicating a complete turnaround toward greater trust than distrust in government....

...Perhaps most important, war has effects on the dominant ideology that work in favor of long-lasting government power and the permanent reduction of public liberties. During wartime, governments take many actions that would be more or less unthinkable in a reasonably free society during peacetime, because people would not tolerate them. Having tolerated them during wartime, however, people may come to regard them not only as permanently tolerable, but even as desirable in peacetime. For example, nearly everything the U.S. government did during the Great Depression had an obvious wartime precedent in the Great War. President Herbert Hoover declared, “We used such emergency powers to win the war; we can use them to fight the depression.” Everything from the Depression-era agricultural price controls, to the industrial cartelization program, the public housing program, the schemes to control oil and coal prices, the tax hikes, and the promotion of labor unionization had a precedent during 1917-18. Obviously, many of these war-inspired public policies became permanent after the 1930s, as, later, did the military-industrial complex created from 1940 to 1945. People can get used to almost anything, especially if it has a plausible justification. War softens up formerly free people and habituates them to government controls and abuses that they would resist except for their alleged wartime necessity. In this way, government war measures change the very character of once-free people, by breaking down their will to be free and their determination to resist tyranny....

...A peaceful state is an impossibility. Even a state that refrains from fighting foreigners goes on fighting its own subjects continuously, to keep them under its control and to suppress competitors who might try to break into the domain of its protection racket. The people cry out for security, yet they will not take responsibility for their own protection, and like the mariners of Greek mythology, they leap overboard immediately in response to the state’s siren song....

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Johnny Munkhammar: America delivers better health care than Europe
...Consequently, presidential candidates from both political parties have focused on the U.S. health care system, promising to bring health coverage to the uninsured. Most proposals involve more government, with new systems that are both paid for and run by the state.

But in Europe, we’ve already been down that road. So a word of caution is in order.

In my home of Sweden, for instance, patients in need of heart surgery often wait as long as 25 weeks, and the average wait for hip replacement is more than a year. Some patients have even been sent to veterinarians for treatment, and many Swedes now go to neighboring countries for dental care, despite having paid taxes for “free” dental coverage....

...In Britain, more than 1 million citizens who need medical care are currently waiting for hospital admission, and every year, the National Health Service cancels as many as 100,000 operations because of shortages.

Only about half of all British adults are registered with public dentists, as dental work is notoriously inadequate and roughshod. The reason? The U.K.’s dentists are paid on a per-patient basis, so their incentive is not to offer the best treatment but to treat as many patients as possible. Surgeries, complicated procedures and other time-consuming treatments are a waste of precious billing time, from the economic viewpoint of the dentist.

Meanwhile across Europe, efficiency in health care has plummeted. Whereas private-sector competitors have an incentive to adapt new technologies and reorganize, state-sponsored monopolies have no profit motive driving them to seek greater efficiency. So the taxpayers get less and less for their money.

In 1975, for instance, most Swedish doctors averaged nine consultations per day. Today, that number has plummeted to four. Much of this drop is the result of burdensome administrative tasks, as doctors now devote 80 percent of their time to paperwork. Needless to say, this greatly impacts the availability of care.

Doctors and health care staff across Europe also receive far less in pay than U.S. medical staff, as salaries are paid by the state and therefore used as a tool to cut costs. As a result, the United States attracts the world’s most competent doctors.

Further, European governments ration drugs to cut costs. Between 1998 and 2002, for instance, 85 new drugs were introduced in the U.S. market. Meanwhile, there were only 44 new drug launches in Europe.

In other words, European governments haven’t figured out a way to deliver health care for less money — they’ve simply figured out a way to ration care....

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Declaration of Dependence
...The war, not the New Deal, defeated the Depression. Franklin Roosevelt's success was in altering the practice of American politics.

This transformation was actually assisted by the misguided policies -- including government-created uncertainties that paralyzed investors -- that prolonged the Depression. This seemed to validate the notion that the crisis was permanent, so government must be forever hyperactive....

...Before the 1930s, the adjective "liberal" denoted policies of individualism and individual rights; since Roosevelt, it has primarily pertained to the politics of group interests. So writes Shlaes, a columnist for Bloomberg News, in " The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression." She says Roosevelt's wager was that, by furiously using legislation and regulations to multiply federally favored groups, and by rhetorically pitting those favored by government against the unfavored, he could create a permanent majority coalition.

In the process, says Shlaes, Roosevelt refined his definition of the "forgotten man." This man had been thought of as a general personality, compatible with the assumption that Americans were all in it together. "Now, by defining his forgotten man as the specific groups he would help, the president was in effect forgetting the rest -- creating a new forgotten man. The country was splitting into those who were Roosevelt's favorites and everyone else."

Acting with what Shlaes calls "the restlessness of the invalid," Roosevelt implemented the theory that (in her words) "spending promoted growth, if government was big enough to spend enough." In only 12 months, just one Roosevelt improvisation, the National Recovery Administration, "generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789."

Before Roosevelt, the federal government was unimpressive relative to the private sector. Under Calvin Coolidge, the last pre-Depression president, its revenue averaged 4 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 18.6 percent today. In 1910, Congress legislated height limits for Washington buildings, limits that prevented skyscrapers, symbols of mighty business, from overshadowing the Capitol, the symbol of government....

...War, as has been said -- and as George W. Bush's assertion of vast presidential powers attests -- is the health of the state. But as Roosevelt demonstrated and Shlaes reminds us, compassion, understood as making the "insecure" securely dependent, also makes the state flourish.

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Unholy Alliance
In the opening scene of the 1987 film RoboCop, the megacorporation OCP unveils its newest product: Ed-209. Originally designed for the military, the robot has been modified for “urban pacification.” Its mission is to clean up a Detroit whose streets are “a war zone.”

Before a meeting of executives, the hulking monster demonstrates its crime-fighting abilities. One of the executives is asked to volunteer, so he points a gun at the robot. Rob-209 says: “Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.” The suit complies. But Rob-209 is on the fritz, it seems, and the countdown continues. At zero, the robot opens fire, tearing open the man’s chest with a torrent of bullets. Oops. “Only a glitch,” someone explains—so much for using a killing machine for police work.

At the recent National Sheriff’s Association convention in the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City, the triad of military technology, corporate manufacturing and law enforcement symbolized in RoboCop’s Ed-209 was more than just fiction.

Besides six days of seminars on everything from in-custody deaths to character building, the annual gathering of sheriffs also acts as a marketplace for law-enforcement gadgetry. Everything was on offer in the exhibition hall: tracking devices, facial-recognition technology, communication networks, paddy wagons, riot gear, surveillance equipment and guns—lots of guns.

But most conspicuous were the numerous permutations of America’s military machine—all at the disposal of the 6,000-plus sheriffs on hand. For example, Chris Kincaid, a senior consultant with the Department of Defense’s Technology Transfer Program, was present to aid law enforcement agencies with what he calls “technological transfer.” The federal program was set up in 2002 to aid the transfer of technology and equipment from the military to law enforcement. ...

...The convention’s many examples of overlapping military and police techniques concern some civil-rights advocates. Critics of this drift toward paramilitary police forces say that the increased training and equipping of police with military tactics and hardware may have deep and lasting influence on the philosophy and actions of the men and women who uphold the law....

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Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature
Human nature is one of those things that everybody talks about but no one can define precisely. Every time we fall in love, fight with our spouse, get upset about the influx of immigrants into our country, or go to church, we are, in part, behaving as a human animal with our own unique evolved nature—human nature.

This means two things. First, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are produced not only by our individual experiences and environment in our own lifetime but also by what happened to our ancestors millions of years ago. Second, our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are shared, to a large extent, by all men or women, despite seemingly large cultural differences.

Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasize biological influences on human behavior, because most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways. Our preference for sweets and fats is an evolved psychological mechanism. We do not consciously choose to like sweets and fats; they just taste good to us.

The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct.

Excerpted from Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, to be published by Perigree in September 2007....

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A Great Time Talking Faith and Politics
...Tony repeatedly appealled to the paradigm of the prophet going before the King and saying prophetically, "Thus says the Lord..." But this paradigm is rooted in the Old Testament in which both the King and the prophet were under the Israelite covenant. The JOB of the prophet under this covenant was to hold the King (and others) accountable. But America isn't Israel. It makes no more sense in America (or any other country) to proclaim "Thus says the Lord" to the President or Congress than it does to say this to a stranger on the street. Why should they care about what "the Lord" says -- or about what you or I THINK the Lord says? This is why Jesus never challenged Pilate or Caesar, though they were by any standards both very, very bad leaders....

...I suspect the reason many if not most American Christians default to political power is because the Church in America is so far from being this kind of "conscience" that most can't even imagine it. Because of the Church's lack of Christ-like sacrificial power, the only kind of power most Americans see is "power over" others -- that is, political power. So they sadly think the Church needs to acquire as much of this kind of power as possible. As I argued in The Myth of a Christian Nation, the quest for this kind of power has always, and will always, destroy the Church. Our only authority is the Cross, not the Sword. And when we pick up the Sword, we put down the Cross....

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'Sicko': Heavily Doctored
...In the case of Canada — which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation — a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called "Dead Meat," by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list — this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery — and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.

Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don't want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won't have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.")

Actually, this aspect of the Canadian health-care system is changing. In 2005, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of a man who had filed suit in Quebec over being kept on an interminable waiting list for treatment. In striking down the government health care monopoly in that province, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said, "Access to a waiting list is not access to health care." Now a similar suit has been filed in Ontario.

What's the problem with government health systems? Moore's movie doesn't ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country's National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care — and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they "would not be happy" to be patients in their own hospitals. James Christopher, the film critic of the Times of London, thinks he knows why. After marveling at Moore's rosy view of the British health care system in "Sicko," Christopher wrote, "What he hasn't done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have." Last month, the Associated Press reported that Gordon Brown — just installed this week as Britain's new prime minister — had promised to inaugurate "sweeping domestic reforms" to, among other things, "improve health care."

Moore's most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks' vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who's reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he's finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave — and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can't have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?

As it turns out, France can't. In 2004, French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told a government commission, "Our health system has gone mad. Profound reforms are urgent." Agence France-Presse recently reported that the French health-care system is running a deficit of $2.7 billion. And in the French presidential election in May, voters in surprising numbers rejected the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, who had promised actually to raise some health benefits, and elected instead the center-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy, who, according to Agence France-Presse again, "plans to move fast to overhaul the economy, with the deficit-ridden health care system a primary target." Possibly Sarkozy should first consult with Michael Moore. After all, the tax-stoked French health care system may be expensive, but at least it's "free." ...

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Digging up the roots of the IPCC
...From very early on, the relationship between science and politics around the climate change issue has been an unhealthy one, and this has had a negative impact on both the scientific and political spheres. With regard to science, it seems obvious that its objectivity is open to question once science becomes allied with advocating what should be done rather than telling us what is currently known and what the complexities and uncertainties involved with that knowledge are. Yet today, in pursuit of achieving the action on climate change that they think is right, it is striking how many in the scientific community have become extremely intolerant of dissent.

For example, the UK’s premier scientific academy, the Royal Society, has been at the forefront of policing what it regards as the scientific consensus on climate change. In September 2006, the Royal Society wrote an open letter to ExxonMobil demanding that the oil giant cut off its funding to groups that have ‘misrepresented the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence’ (27). Explaining this action by the Society to the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Bob Ward, author of the letter, said: ‘It is now more crucial than ever that we have a debate which is properly informed by the science. For people to be still producing information that misleads people about climate change is unhelpful. The next IPCC report should give people the final push that they need to take action and we can’t have people trying to undermine it.’ (28) This rather sinister notion of science giving people ‘the final push they need to take action’ shares the same assumptions that informed the activities of Hansen and others in the 1980s – that politicians and the public are not to be trusted to hear all views about the complexities and uncertainties of climate science because it will only lead them, selfishly and short-sightedly, to choose not to act in the way ‘they should’.

Hans von Storch, director of the Institute for Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre in Germany and professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, has written persuasively about his concern that science is being misused in the public debate about climate change to the detriment of science itself. Writing in Der Spiegel in January 2005, von Storch argued that while ‘climate change caused by human activity is an important issue’ we have arrived at a situation where ‘each new claim about the future of our climate and of the planet must be just a little more dramatic than the last’. According to von Storch, public expression of reservations by scientists about ‘climate catastrophe’ are ‘viewed as unfortunate within the scientific community, since they harm the “worthy cause"’. This, he argues, threatens to undermine science in an important way:

‘This self-censorship in the minds of scientists ultimately leads to a sort of deafness toward new, surprising insights that compete with or even contradict the conventional explanatory models. Science is deteriorating into a repair shop for conventional, politically opportune scientific claims. Not only does science become impotent; it also loses its ability to objectively inform the public.’

The IPCC is keen to disassociate itself from the idea that it is telling us what to do, emphasising that its work is ‘policy relevant’ not ‘policy prescriptive’ (30). However, its infamous consensus-based approach seems geared towards narrowing the terrain for political and public debate. Once the scientists have drafted their reports, they are circulated to government officials of all the countries involved. The scientists and officials come together to agree, line-by-line, the wording of each summary report for policymakers. Rajendra K Pachauri, the current chair of the IPCC, described the significance of this process at the press launch of the Working Group I Report The Physical Science Basis in February 2007:

‘It is essentially the scientists and the experts who are the ones who assess and provide the knowledge but this is something that is discussed and debated by the governments and since we accept everything by consensus this has the implication that whatever is accepted here has the stamp of acceptance of all the governments of the world.’ (31)

Once the IPCC has spoken it clearly expects there to be little scope for further debate. That such a constraining and technical ‘line-by-line’ process is accepted by so many as a useful or necessary approach speaks volumes about how neutered politics has become – apparently everyone must sign up to an agreed version of the latest ‘science’ before any debate or discussion can begin.

One historical account of the setting-up of the IPCC refers to it as a scientific issue ‘born in politics’. But the history of climate change might be more usefully understood as a reaction to politics, and shaped as much by a distrust of politics than it has been by science. Ostensibly, the establishment of the IPCC, in which the USA clearly played a key role, accepted the issue of climate change as primarily a scientific one. At a time when the Western world had become increasingly pessimistic about man’s impact on the world, when politicians had little to offer and technocratic management of issues was in the ascendancy, the framing of the issue of climate change as essentially one of science decoding ‘nature’s message’ about humanity’s destructive actions was widely accepted.

What should have been an issue to be debated and discussed politically, informed but not dictated by the best available science, has become framed as primarily a scientific issue about learning to appreciate the limits that nature has set for human activity. As events have unfolded since the formation of the IPCC, the issue of climate change has been transformed into a moral crisis for society and turned into an illiberal campaign that constantly berates individuals about the need to modify their behaviour and reduce their ‘carbon footprint’. This moral agenda is something that the IPCC – a body that prides itself on its scientific credentials – has proved ever more willing to promote. For example, speaking at the press launch of the Working Group III Report Mitigation of Climate Change in May 2007, Pachauri stated boldly:

‘It is of great satisfaction that this report for the first time has dealt with lifestyle and consumption patterns as an important means by which we can bring about mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. So of course you can look at technologies, you can look at policies, but what is an extremely powerful message in this report is the need for human society as a whole to start looking at changes in lifestyle and consumption patterns.’ (32)

An overtly moralistic message, that emphasises behaviour change over technological innovation, is delivered without criticism from any quarter, by a body whose authority is ultimately rooted in the collapse of politics.

From the moment the IPCC was born, the scope for an overtly political approach to dealing with any questions raised or problems thrown up by climate change was compromised by politicians with little vision for society, who became increasingly attracted to the notion of ‘natural limits’ as a justification for political and economic stasis. As political convictions have withered, politicians and activists of all persuasions have come to present their arguments in terms of what ‘the science’ is telling us to do. Even Al Gore, who is seen as almost evangelical about what he describes as a ‘climate crisis’, presents his argument in morally weak terms as an ‘inconvenient truth’ brought to us by the work of scientists.

The way in which politicians, the media and civil society have come to hang on the latest pronouncements of the IPCC demonstrates how this political failure has allowed a scientific conceptualisation of a political problem to become institutionalised across the globe, to the point where conceiving of it differently has become almost unimaginable. But imagine it we must, if we are to open a genuine debate about the politics, and science, of global warming.

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QOTD
One problem he had in politics, he says, was identifying an issue too early--"'predawn' is the term I use"--to be able to act on it. But "in the business world, particularly at a time when things are moving so swiftly, if you can see it early, you can make a business opportunity out of it." He pauses. "For whatever reason, the business world rewards a long-term perspective more than the political world does."
-- Al Gore

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NHS rationing is 'necessary evil', say doctors
THE government and NHS must be more open with patients about the need to ration treatments and services in a system with a limited pot of cash, doctors said yesterday.

The British Medical Association conference heard that rationing was inevitable and a "necessary evil" in today's health service.

Scottish doctors also warned that targets which did not improve patients' care were being given preference to funding treatments which would make a difference.

It comes after growing discontent over decisions made by NHS rationing bodies in the UK, including the Scottish Medicines Consortium.

Patients have voiced anger that new, but expensive, treatments are denied them on the NHS.

In some cases they are available in Scotland, while patients in England go without.

Alex Smallwood, from the BMA's junior doctors' committee, told the meeting in Torquay it needed to be accepted that rationing must take place in the NHS, but this had to be done much more openly.

"It is no longer possible to provide all the latest to absolutely everybody without notable detriment to others," he said.

"Rationing is reduction in choice. Rationing has become a necessary evil. We need to formalise rationing to prevent an unregulated, widening, postcode-lottery of care. Government no longer has a choice." ...

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Judge can't fix government's $100 million boo-boo
WASHINGTON (AP) -- It was a $100 million mistake, and a federal judge said Friday he does not have the power to fix it.

The U.S. Justice Department erred last year and cited the wrong law in a binding plea agreement with telecommunication entrepreneur Walter Anderson, the largest known tax evader in U.S. history. That mistake made it impossible for the government to recover between $100 million and $175 million, U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman said in March.

Prosecutors urged him to reconsider, but Friedman reluctantly said Friday that his hands were tied.

"The court is not free to read something into a contract that is not there or to interpret uncertain language in the government's favor," Friedman said.

Although prosecutors described the error as "a typo" -- typographical error -- and not "something that the court should be getting wrapped up about," Friedman said he could do nothing else.

He said he would have worked around the problem by ordering Anderson to repay the money as part of his probation. But prosecutors omitted any discussion of probation, a common element of plea deals, from Anderson's paperwork....

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Winey Warriors
The British government recently unveiled plans for a massive crackdown on “excessive drinking,” particularly among the middle class. It will include all of the familiar tactics of public health officials: dire new warnings on wine bottles, public-awareness campaigns, scolding from men and women in lab coats....

...Britain still subscribes to a system where health care is for the most part socialized. When the bureaucrat-priesthood of the National Health Service decides that a certain behavior is unacceptable, the consequences potentially involve more than scolding. For example, in 2005, Britain’s health service started refusing certain surgeries for fat people. An official behind the decision conceded that one of the considerations was cost. Fat people would benefit from the surgery less, and so they deserved it less. As Tony Harrison, a British health-care expert, explained to the Toronto Sun at the time, “Rationing is a reality when funding is limited.”


But it’s impossible to distinguish such cost-cutting judgments from moral ones. The reasoning is obvious: Fat people, smokers and — soon — drinkers deserve less health care because they bring their problems on themselves. In short, they deserve it. This is a perfectly logical perspective, and if I were in charge of everybody’s health care, I would probably resort to similar logic.

But I’m not in charge of everybody’s health care. Nor should anyone else be. In a free-market system, bad behavior will still have high costs personally and financially, but those costs are more likely to borne by you and you alone. The more you socialize the costs of personal liberty, the more license you give others to regulate it. ...

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Dissidents Against Dogma
We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism by the weight of the global emergency. Amid the collapse of genuinely radical politics, they have seen it as the alarm clock prompting a new Great New Spiritual Awakening.

Alas for their illusions. Capitalism is ingesting global warming as happily as a python swallowing a piglet. The press, which thrives on fearmongering, promotes the nonexistent threat as vigorously as it did the imminence of Soviet attack during the cold war, in concert with the arms industry. There's money to be made, and so, as Talleyrand said, "Enrich yourselves!" I just bought two roundtrip British Airways ticket to Spain from Seattle and a BA online passenger advisory promptly instructed me that the CO2 "offset" cost would be $7.90 on each ticket, which I might care to contribute to Climate Care. ...

...The marquee slogan in the new cold war on global warming is that the scientific consensus is virtually unanimous. This is utterly false. The overwhelming majority of climate computer modelers, the beneficiaries of the $2 billion-a-year global warming grant industry, certainly believe in it but not necessarily most real climate scientists-people qualified in atmospheric physics, climatology and meteorology.

Geologists are particularly skeptical. Peter Sciaky, a retired geologist, writes to me thus:

"A geologist has a much longer perspective. There are several salient points about our earth that the greenhouse theorists overlook (or are not aware). The first of these is that the planet has never been this cool. There is abundant fossil evidence to support this--from plants of the monocot order (such as palm trees) in the rocks of Cretaceous Age in Greenland and warm water fossil in sedimentary rocks of the far north. this is hardly the first warming period in the earth's history. The present global warming is hardly unique. It is arriving pretty much "on schedule." One thing, for sure, is that the environmental community has always spurned any input from geologists (many of whom are employed by the petroleum industry). No environmental conference, such as Kyoto, has ever invited a geologist, a paleontologist, a paleoclimatologist. It would seem beneficial for any scientific investigatory to include such scientific disciplines.

...Take Warsaw-based Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, famous for his critiques of ice-core data. He's devastating on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. In his 1997 paper in the Spring 21st Century Science and Technology, he demolishes this proposition. In particular, he's very good on pointing out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there's been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the "unprecedented levels" of modern CO2. In fact, in numerous papers prior to 1985, there were plenty of instances of CO2 levels much higher than current CO2 measurements, some even six times higher. He also points out that it is highly unscientific to merge ice-core temperature measurements with modern temperature measurements....

...Move to that bane of the fearmongers, Dr. Patrick Michaels, on sabbatical from the University of Virginia, now at the Cato Institute, who has presented in papers and recently, in his book Meltdown, demolitions of almost every nightmare scenario invented by the greenhousers, particularly regarding hurricanes, tornadoes, sea rise, disappearing ice caps, drought and floods. A qualified climatologist, he analyses the data invoked to buttress each of these scenarios and shows the actual climate history not only fails to support the claims but also that in the majority of cases the opposite is true. Hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and floods and other weather extremes are currently decreasing, contrary to Hansen, Mann and the other sensationalists. Michaels is particularly good on the ludicrous claims regarding catastrophic sea rise as well as the by now universally trumpeted melting icecaps and supposed impending disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet. Michaels is sometimes slammed as a hired gun for the fossil fuel industry, but I haven't seen any significant dents or quantitative ripostes to his meticulous scientific critiques....

...Besides the inability to deal with water, the other huge embarrassment facing the modelers is the well-researched and well-established fact published in many papers that temperature changes first and CO2 levels change 600 to 1,000 years later. Any rational person would immediately conclude that CO2 could not possibly cause temperature if the rise in CO2 in comes centuries after the rise in temperature.

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Freedom, not climate, is at riskWe are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.

In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists....

...I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”....

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A climate skeptic's guest post: Why David Evans bet against Brian Schmidt over global warming
...This evidence was good enough: not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm, and actions started to happen. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 -- with the aim of curbing carbon emissions.

And the political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990's, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet!

But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed....

...A credible alternative suspect now exists. Clouds both reflect incoming radiation (albedo) and prevent heat from escaping (greenhouse), but with low clouds the albedo effect is stronger than the greenhouse effect. Thus low clouds cause net cooling (high clouds are less common and do the opposite). In October 2006 a team led by Henrik Svensmark showed experimentally that cosmic rays affect cloud formation, and thus that

Stronger sun's magnetic field

=> Less cosmic rays hit Earth

=> Fewer low clouds are formed

=> Earth heats up.

And indeed, the sun's magnetic field has been stronger than usual for the last three decades. So maybe cosmic rays cause global warming. But investigation of this cause is still in its infancy, and it's far too early to judge how much of the global warming is caused by cosmic rays.

So three of the four arguments that convinced me in 1999 that carbon emissions caused global warming are now questionable....

...By 2000 the political system had responded to the strong scientific case that carbon emissions caused global warming by creating thousands of bureaucratic and science jobs aimed at more research and at curbing carbon emissions. This was a good and sensible response by big government to what science was telling them.

But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker -- better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds. Future evidence might strengthen or further weaken the carbon emissions hypothesis. At what stage of the weakening should the science community alert the political system that carbon emissions might not be the main cause of global warming? None of the new evidence actually says that carbon emissions are definitely not the cause of global warming, there are lots of good science jobs potentially at stake, and if the scientific message wavers then it might be difficult to recapture the attention of the political system later on. What has happened is that most research effort since 2000 has assumed that carbon emissions were the cause, and the alternatives get much less research or political attention....

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The Greenhousers Strike Back and Out
I began this series of critiques of the greenhouse fearmongers with an evocation of the papal indulgences of the Middle Ages as precursors of the "carbon credits"-ready relief for carbon sinners, burdened, because all humans exhale carbon, with original sin. In the Middle Ages they burned heretics, and after reading through the hefty pile of abusive comments and supposed refutations of my initial article on global warming I'm fairly sure that the critics would be only to happy to cash in whatever carbon credits they have and torch me without further ado....

...The greenhousers endlessly propose that the consensus of "scientists" on anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming. By scientists they actually mean computer modelers. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their computer-modeling coterie include very few real climatologists or atmospheric physicists. Among qualified climatologists, meteorologists and atmospheric physicists, there are plenty who do not accept the greenhousers' propositions. Many others have been intimidated into silence by the pressures of grants, tenure and kindred academic garottes.

Peer review, heavily overworked in the rebuttals I have been reading, is actually a topic on which the greenhousers would do well to keep their mouths shut, since, as the University of Virginia's Pat Michaels has shown, the most notorious sentence in the IPCC's 1996 report ("The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate") was inserted at the last minute by a small faction on the IPCC panel after the scientific peer-review process was complete. Here's how Dr Fred Goldberg describes the probable culprit, Professor Bert Bolin, a politically driven Swede who was the first chairman of the IPCC, from 1988 to 1998. Goldberg's very interesting paper is entitled, "Has Bert Bolin fooled us all concerned climate change caused by humans?":

"In 1995 IPCC presented its second report: The Science of Climate Change". In this report a large number of researchers work through hundreds of scientific reports and delivers a comprehensive report where they conclude that there is no evidence that human beings have had an influence on the climate. This conclusion is of course very important for politicians and policymakers around the world. But what happened? The editor of the IPCC ­report then deleted or changed the text in 15 different sections of chapter 8 (The key chapter concerning whether human influence exists or not) which had been agreed upon by the panel of contributors involved in compiling the document. In practice politicians and policymakers only read the so-called Executive Summary for Policy Makers. In this document consisting of a few pages it is clearly stated that humans have influenced the climate, contrary to the conclusions of the scientific report.

"Professor Fredrik Seitz, former chairman of the American Science Academy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal already the 12th of June 1996 about a major deception on global warming: "I have never before witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report." He gave many examples of changes and redefinitions and finished by demanding that the IPCC process should be abandoned.

"Had somebody subordinate to Bert Bolin within IPCC made these changes it is reasonable to think that Bert Bolin himself would correct the errors. That he has not done is why I draw the conclusion that it must be Bert Bolin himself who is responsible for the changes and no subordinate person has dared interfere with his boss."...

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Gore Outrage on Larry King: Some Inconvenient Facts
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Vice President Al Gore, what issues caused by climate change globally are likely to affect the United States security in the next 10 years?

KING: Al?

GORE: You know, even a one-meter increase, even a three-foot increase in sea level would cause tens of millions of climate refugees.

...FACT 1. There is not one shred of evidence in the refereed scientific literature speaking of a three-foot increase in sea level in ten years. The best estimates from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change range from 0.8 to 1.7 INCHES.

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Measuring the political temperature
Today’s ‘global warming story’ – where the moral is always that we should calculate every bit of carbon we use – owes more to the anxious zeitgeist than scientific findings.

...But there is another way to approach this question, which is to look at the political circumstances in which climatic science is produced, a process that also has its own laws and patterns. It is strange, at a time when the social construction of science is an established idea (Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he describes science’s progress through ‘paradigms’, is on every undergraduate’s reading list) that nobody thinks to look at the social construction of global warming theories. Global warming science is being produced in highly febrile times; and history tells us that the more the political temperature rises, the more science’s view of nature is distorted....

...Yet global warming also plays a teleological role: it provides a decisive point towards which history is heading, and provides an overall meaning for events. A decade-and-a-half after Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘end of history’, environmentalists have apparently found an occasion to which we must rise. The impending ‘climate crisis’, and our need to respond, is the first post-political narrative that has aroused significant passion or conviction. It is the first post-political notion of an historic task, a decisive future event that will determine humanity’s fate. It is perhaps the only way in which today’s society can discuss the idea of the judgement of the future, or the condition of life for our children. Hence, the dramatic sweep of the campaign against global warming throughout the elite – especially members of the political elite who spent periods in the cold. This is Al Gore on what global warming means to him:

‘The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise…. When we do rise, it will fill out spirits and bind us together. Those who are now suffocating in cynicism and despair will be able to breathe freely. Those who are now suffering from a loss of meaning in their lives will find hope.’ ...

...Here’s the rub: when an environmental problem becomes a generational mission, nobody wants very much to solve it. Lynas criticises the notion that ‘the white knight of technology will come riding to the rescue’ – this is in fact ‘the most pervasive and enduring form of denial’. There is no ‘miracle energy cure’, says Lynas. Indeed, you often hear environmentalists say that the hopes of a ‘silver bullet’ to solve global warming is merely ‘avoiding’ the question. Avoiding how? What they mean is that it is not energy production that must change; it is us. Global warming is not a problem to be solved; it is a lesson to be lived. Lynas writes: ‘The faith in a “techno-fix” evades the need for any serious behavioural change.’

Global warming is so often talked about as a result of our selfishness that we do not see quite how absurd this is. Imagine telling 1950s Londoners that there is no techno-fix to the problem of air pollution, and that they need to monitor and cut their coal use. Smokeless fuels would just allow them to continue in their destructive behaviour, without reflecting on the harm caused by their actions. Their warm sitting room is killing children, and they must take responsibility for that.

Think about that quote from Gore: ‘The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence….’ Global warming offers us the chance to experience what few generations have had the privilege of knowing. It is a thrill, no less. Global warming is our Cold War. And just as American strategists worried at the end of the Cold War about the loss of the Red opposition, so environmentalists have a kind of attachment to global warming.

Of course, they talk about it being ‘inconvenient’, and they wouldn’t have wished it upon the world. Lynas says that his collapse scenarios are a ‘reluctant conclusion’; in his book Heat, George Monbiot says that it pains him greatly to conclude that people will have to stop flying. But the more that society defines itself in relation to global warming, the less willing it is to let go. Global warming is now not so much a problem to solve, as an issue around which to reorganise society. This is more Noah’s flood than Clean Air Act, and the lesson is in the sins of hubris and consumerism. Global warming is sent to show people that (in Lynas’ words) they are ‘wasting their lives commuting to work in cars’. His proposed solution – to ‘cut our need for energy by living less consumptive lifestyles’ – will apparently form the basis of a new and happier society.

I have a question: if there was a ‘miracle energy cure’, would Lynas use it? I suspect that a straight ‘yes’ would not be the reply. Which is insane, really, because if global warming is a problem, it is only a techno-fix that could solve it. All the arm-twisting in the world is not going to stop India and China flying, a fact shown by recent figures showing a massive boom in air travel. Daily media guilt-mongering has not stopped British people from enjoying weekends in Budapest or Prague, and nor should it. Governments, we can hope, will still be elected in 2050, and while that is the case carbon rations would still be ‘politically unrealistic’. Unless we live under a dictatorship of some Global Commission for the Environment then energy use will continue to rise dramatically; the only question is whether this energy comes from fossil fuels or some other source. And if it needs to come from some other source, we need a techno-fix.

Techno-fixes are not some airy-fairy notion, some leap of faith. This is otherwise known as innovation, the only way that environmental problems have ever been solved or new energy systems produced. I am not aware of a major environmental problem successfully tackled by the mass of people consciously and systematically abstaining from some or other desirable activity. The lesson of history is that techno-fixes happen, and they happen fast in societies that are looking for solutions. There were only three years between the first controlled nuclear chain reaction and the dropping of a bomb on Hiroshima in 1945; only five years separated a nuclear reaction successfully lighting a lightbulb in 1951 and the first nuclear power station in 1956. ...