The Real Inside Story On The Pilgrims and What Should Be Learned From Their Experiences

In a way, the liberal politicians of today can learn quite a lot from the real life experiences of the Pilgrims when they first landed at Plymouth in 1620. The Democratic Congress and radical Obama Administration want to effectively eviscerate capitalism and impose socialism on us which will be disastrous.

We, the American people know that.  So did the Pilgrims, but they had to find out the hard way.

The following article effectively outlines this historical perspective in an insightful way that is most applicable to our predicament today.

Thankful For Plenty
Investors Business Daily  11/24/2009

Blessings: Thanksgiving, as we all learned in school, was about Native Americans and Pilgrims feasting together in friendship to give thanks for a bountiful harvest. The truth, as is often the case, is quite different.

We've all heard about how the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth after a perilous overseas trip — and how they nearly starved until Native Americans, including the English-speaking Squanto and Wampanoag Chief Massasoit, helped them to survive by teaching them about native foods and cultivation.

There's some truth to that. The Indians did help out. But a bigger reason for why they survived to give thanks — and one that gets short shrift today — can be summed up in one word: capitalism.

After reaching land in 1620, the Pilgrims — led by Gov. William Bradford — set about organizing their society along communal lines. Each would give according to his ability, and each would receive according to his needs — a kind of primitive communism.

Profiteering would not be allowed. All land and production would be publicly owned. It was an ugly disaster from the start.

Strong men ceased working hard when it became clear others weren't pulling their weight. Frustrated at being unable to better their own lot in life, some even resorted to theft.

Within months, people were starving. Literally. Nearly half the colony of 106 died in the first awful winter of 1621. The winter of 1622 was little better. Paradise had turned into a death camp.

Gov. Bradford later wrote that the colony was beset by "confusion and discontent." Something had to change. But what?
Desperate, Bradford and the other elders abandoned the colony's cherished communalism, instead allowing settlers to "set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land."

Basic agrarian capitalism, in short.

As Bradford wrote in his "History of Plymouth Plantation," "This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been ... . (I)nstead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many."

By 1623, the bounty produced by the colony's privately owned farm parcels was substantial. Famine no longer stalked the people, and survival was no longer in doubt. That year, the first real Thanksgiving was held.

Today, in an era of bailouts and massive government spending, capitalism has come under sustained and withering criticism. Perhaps some of that criticism is deserved.

Yet we'd do well to remember it's the one system that reliably produces plenty. It lets us realize our true potential and rise above the circumstances of our birth. And it unleashes humankind's awesome creativity, making possible the material blessings we have.

Like the Pilgrims, we should be thankful for all this.

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=513434

Posted in Capitalism Congress Democrat Ideology Obama Socialism with No Comments

More:

Hacked Computers Reveal Global Warming to be an Egregious Corrupt Scientific Fraud Without Reality

There has been a tremendous and increasing amount of suspicion regarding the validity of the global warming data and related theory. The vitriol, threats, power maneuvering by proponents of global warming and their heavy handed suppression of opposing views strongly intimated that something was amiss in all this. The predicted climactic manifestations of this warming theory have been no shows. Instead, record temperature lows are being set around the globe and we have had the quietest hurricane season in years. (See The Lies, Deceptions and Suppression of Information in Order to Facilitate Passage of the Cap and Trade Fraud)

Governments, some businesses and selected individuals (Al Gore) combined stand to make trillions of dollars and further aggrandize their power by perpetuating this green movement fraud. If the Cap and Trade were to pass and be implemented, we would be paying thousands of dollars more per year in taxes and have countless restrictions in rights, freedoms, choices and activities of daily life. Our standard of living would plummet.

Through perseverance and ingenuity, possibly by hacking into critical computers containing climate “data” and correspondences, this whole fervent (self-serving) global warming movement has been exposed as a massive fraud, a scientific corruption of unparalleled magnitude.

The following article outlines this major discovery of the “smoking gun” evidence of fraud and cover-ups regarding global warming.

The Great British Climate Fraud
by James Delingpole

It has been described as the "greatest scientific scandal of the modern age." The story broke last Thursday when a person unknown -- some say it was a hacker, others an inside-leak job -- broke into the servers at Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and published at least 61megabytes of confidential data on a Russian website.

Despite efforts in liberal quarters to play the story down as a criminal issue of no great consequence, the blogosophere almost instantly recognized it as political dynamite: perhaps even the final nail in the coffin of Al Gore's increasingly expensive theory that the world is rapidly overheating due to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

Why? Because the Climate Research Unit in the windswept fenlands of Eastern England -- together with its sister unit in the West of England, the Hadley Centre in Exeter, Devon -- is one of the primary information sources used by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Not only have its resident scientists, computer modelers and statisticians been heavily involved in drafting the IPCC's three reports; but its global temperature records (known as HadCrut) are one of the IPCC's four official sources of data.

If the CRU's data and scientific staff were shown to be unreliable, it would call into question the very basis of the IPCC's doom-laden predictions of rising sea levels and inexorably-rising temperatures due to man-made CO2.

And to judge by the leaked data -- over a decade's worth of documents and emails -- "unreliable" may be a rather polite way of putting it. As Australian blogger Andrew Bolt puts it, the CRU may well be guilty of "conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more."

The emails reveal a variety of dubious practices, quite contrary to what might reasonably be expected of a world-renowned climate research institution lavishly funded by the UK government. These include:

1.) Manipulation of evidence. In one email, the CRU's director, Professor Phil Jones apparently confesses to having played with data – most unscientifically – in order to achieve his desired end. "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline." (Professor Jones has defended himself, somewhat disingenuously you might think, by saying that "trick" – in the world of science – has no negative connotations).

2.) Concealing private doubts about whether the world is really heating up. One scientist expresses his frustration that the global temperatures are not behaving as he feels they ought to behave: "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

3.) Destruction of evidence (following a Freedom of Information request – almost certainly an illegal activity): "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

4.) Fantasizing violence against prominent climate sceptic scientists: "Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.'

5.) Gloating over news of the death of a prominent climate-change skeptic, Australian John L Daly, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site: “In an odd way this is cheering news.”

6.) Attempting to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (ie the period from about 900 to about 1200 when global mean temperatures were considerably warmer than they are now): "……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…."

7.) And, perhaps, most damningly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority: “I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

Climate change "skeptics" have long had their suspicions about the reliability of CRU. Among the first to voice these was Steve McIntyre, the statistician who exposed the “Hockey Stick” curve – the now utterly discredited graph initially used by the IPCC (and Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth) to suggest that global temperatures had risen more sharply at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the previous thousand years. (This meant ignoring the Medieval Warm Period – hence the email quoted above).

Over a period of several years, McIntyre sought to acquire from the CRU the raw data used to fuel its computer models of climate Armageddon but was constantly rebuffed. (At one stage, CRU told him that the data had been "lost"). When finally he did get hold of it, he discovered the samples used to have been flawed; just as years earlier, he had showed that the Hockey Stick computer model had been programmed with an algorithm so that whatever information you put into it, it would always come up with the same scary-looking Hockey Stick shape.

But the "Climategate" scandal is a step beyond this. Where before it was only possible to accuse the CRU of being foolish, what these emails prove beyond reasonable doubt is that it has been guilty of conspiracy too. And it is a conspiracy which implicates a good many of the world's leading AGW-promoting scientists, not just in Britain but in the US and beyond.

Besides Professor Jones, the director of the CRU (and a doughty defender in several papers of the Hockey Stick curve) the emails implicate many more of those scientists most deeply involved in drafting the IPCC's reports. They include Dr Keith Briffa, a 'lead author' on the IPCC's 2007 report; Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Ben Santer, a pro-AGW scientist at the US government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – and the man responsible for the notorious claim in the IPCC's second report that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on climate change"; and Dr Michael Mann, the physicist-turned-climate-scientist at the University of Massachusetts who created the infamous 'Hockey Stick' graph.

What is commonly misunderstood amid the IPCC's vaunted claims that its reports are approved by "2,500 scientists" is that only a tiny number – perhaps 53 in all – were actually responsible for drafting the sections predicting global eco-disaster due to AGW. These 53 scientists are a close knit circle, peer-approving one another's pro-AGW papers, banding together to shut out any dissenting voices. Almost all of them are close to the CRU; many are implicated in the offending emails.

This is what makes Climategate so significant. It is the smoking gun that climate "skeptics" have long been searching for. Or indeed, as one retired US climatologist Dr Tim Ball puts it, a "whole battery of machine guns".

URL   http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=34550

Posted in Al Gore Cap and Trade Corruption Government Control Ideology Taxes United Nations with No Comments

More: