Free Republic

“It has come to our attention that Arms Trade Treaty proponents are attempting to change the rules mid-stream, prior to the upcoming Treaty negotiations in early July,” researchers Paul Gallant, Alan Chwick, and Joanne D. Eisen wrote in a breaking story published yesterday in AmmoLand Gun News. “Ted R. Bromund, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, alerted the public to the very real possibility that ATT proponents are changing the meaning of the term ‘consensus’ and to the political ramifications for the US if ATT proponents prevail,” they warn. “Until now, ‘consensus’ has been understood by the US and...

...Were this a story in any field other than "Climate Science" it would be given massive play by both the BBC and in the print media – for what has happened here is a national scandal. An institution which was manifestly good has now been made bad, for no other reason than the arrogance and egotism of three blinkered men who took it upon themselves to behave like political activists rather than scientists. You don't even need to be a climate sceptic to understand that what May, Rees and Nurse have done is wrong. All you need is a rudimentary...

In the 1960s, I came across a small training manual distributed by the Communist Party that showed how a small group of people – as few as four – could dominate a much larger group and sway the outcome of any action taken by that group. It was called the Diamond Technique. The principle is based on the fact that people in groups tend to be effected by mass psychology. They derive comfort and security from being aligned with the majority, especially if controversy or conflict is involved. Even if they do not like what the majority is doing, if...

A group of movement conservatives has called an emergency meeting in Texas next weekend to find a “consensus” Republican presidential hopeful, POLITICO has learned. “You and your spouse are cordially invited to a private meeting with national conservative leaders of faith at the ranch of Paul and Nancy Pressler near Brenham, Texas, with the purpose of attempting to unite and to come to a consensus on which Republican presidential candidate or candidates to support, or which not to support,” read an invitation that is making its way into in-boxes Wednesday morning. The meeting is being hosted by such prominent conservative...

Having watched this clip all the way through several times, I still can't stop chuckling. Here's a quick primer to prepare you for what you're about to see: The video begins as civil rights pioneer Rep. John Lewis rrives at #OccupyAtlanta, hoping to express solidarity and articulate support with some brief remarks. Unfortunately for him, the Congressman is totally unacquainted with the gathering's "rules," which make the US Senate look like a model of efficiency. The group's "leader" (the hippie with the bullhorn) speaks in three-second intervals so the rest of the assembled group can chant his partial sentences back...

The US government is offering private intelligence companies contracts to create software to manage "fake people" on social media sites and create the illusion of consensus on controversial issues. The contract calls for the development of "Persona Management Software" which would help the user create and manage a variety of distinct fake profiles online. The job listing was discussed in recently leaked emails from the private security firm HBGary after an attack by internet activist last week.Click here to view the government contract (PDF)According to the contract, the software would "protect the identity of government agencies" by employing a number...

While I think the deficit commission’s final product was less than adequate to its mission (as I argue below), it is worth remarking on the extraordinary moment we appear to be in on the deficit and debt questions—a moment which the commission has had a lot to do with creating. Between the Simpson-Bowles proposal, the Rivlin-Ryan proposal, the Domenici-Rivlin proposal (which came from outside the commission), and a number of other ideas thrown around in recent weeks, people in the center and on the right (helped no doubt by the election results) appear to be moving closer together on the...

Gosh. A “Climate rapid response team” from Minnesota? What will they be armed with? Wits and a hockey stick? So far that hasn’t worked out too well.  From the Chicago Tribune:Climate scientists plan campaign against global-warming skepticsThe American Geophysical Union plans to announce Monday that 700 researchers have agreed to speak out on the issue. The effort is a pushback against congressional conservatives who have vowed to kill regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.Reporting from Washington — By Neela Banerjee, Tribune Washington BureauFaced with rising political attacks, hundreds of climate scientists are joining a broad campaign to push back against congressional...

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper forProgress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony. “Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the...

The Obama administration said Friday it has lifted sanctions against four Russian groups that had been accused of helping Syrian and Iranian weapons programs. Russian officials have publicly suggested that the removal of the groups from U.S. blacklists was a precondition to their support of a new sanctions regime against Iran, presented to the United Nations Tuesday.

EPW POLICY BEAT: CONSENSUS EXPOSED, PART 1Link to 'Consensus' Exposed: The CRU ControversyThe Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works recently released a new 84-page report, titled, "‘Consensus' Exposed: The CRU Controversy."  Recognizing the severe time constraints of interested readers-how can one read 84 pages amidst the daily maelstrom over global warming?-EPW Policy Beat will issue a series of excerpts from the report over the next several days.  We hope this provides our readership with the report's essential findings, and a clear understanding that the CRU email controversy is more than just "a little email squabble."  To...

Al Gore resurfaces in an op-ed to say that nobody's perfect, everybody makes mistakes and climate change is still real. And he has some oceanfront property in the Himalayas to sell you. If hyperbole and chutzpah had a child, it would be the opening paragraph of Gore's op-ed in Sunday's New York Times. Gore surfaced from the global warming witness-protection program to opine that despite admissions of error and evidence of fraud by various agencies, we still face "an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it." Perhaps he's trying to protect his investments...

The "Climategate" scandal, which broke in November 2009, revealed what many skeptics had privately suspected. Prominent climate scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) had collaborated to keep data out of skeptics' hands, subverted the peer review process, and used questionable methods to construct the temperature record on which the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) based its recommendations. Now a new "Climategate" scandal is emerging, this time based on documents released by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in response to several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) suits filed by the Competitive Enterprise...

States' Rights: A revolt against economic hardship imposed by unelected bureaucrats based on junk science is brewing. This Tea Party movement wants the faulty finding on carbon dioxide to be reviewed and dumped. They say you shouldn't mess with Texas, and on Tuesday the state filed suit to overturn the "endangerment" finding by the Environmental Protection Agency that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant that must be regulated. CO2, the basis for all plant and therefore all animal life, was targeted early by environmental activists as the root cause of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW). But the Earth has cooled...

Climate alarmists conjured a world where nothing was certain but death, taxes and catastrophic global warming. They used this presumed scientific certainty as a bludgeon against the skeptics they deemed "deniers" -- a word meant to have the noxious whiff of Holocaust denial. All in the cause of hustling the world into a grand carbon-rationing scheme. Any questions about the evidence for the cataclysmic projections, any concerns about the costs and benefits were trumped by that fearsome scientific "consensus," which had "settled" the important questions. A funny thing happened to this "consensus" on the way to its inevitable triumph, though:...

Can You Always Count on a Consensus of Experts? Maybe not When it Comes to Man-Made Global Warming! When you turn to "experts" and "authorities" the first thing that has to be done is to establish the credibility of those sources. History is full of examples where the ’consensus’ isn't only wrong, it is deadly. Some classic historical examples are the flat earth theory and the prevailing belief that the earth was the center of the universe. Galileo discovered "it is often dangerous to be right when the authorities are wrong." The Galileo discoveries had threatened the "consensus" view of...

Global Warming: The Alaskan governor who knew polar bears weren't endangered says the planet isn't either and challenges the oracle of climate change. Al Gore says despite the CRU e-mails, the situation is of the utmost gravity. In a Dec. 9 Washington Post op-ed, Sarah Palin noted that the Climate-gate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia "reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures and tried to silence their critics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." This did not sit well with Gore. "The entire North...

The science showing that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are causing a dangerous warming of the world's climate is sound, President Barack Obama's top scientists said on Wednesday, despite controversial e-mails stolen from climate researchers. E-mails from Britain's University of East Anglia, made public last month after being obtained by hackers, show climate researchers deriding global warming skeptics, who argue that the messages show that the researchers manipulated data to make climate change appear more definitive.

Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning. As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard. The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd...

ClimateGate: Britain's Climate Research Unit now says it will release all its data. Does that include the data that have been shredded, deleted and denied publication? In a statement released Saturday by the University of East Anglia, where the CRU is located, it was announced that all unit data, including data that had been denied climate skeptics, would soon be released to prove this is much ado about nothing. Unimpressed by the news is David Holland of Northampton, a grandfather with a background in electrical engineering, who is seeking prosecution of the CRU scientists involved in suppressing and even destroying...

Junk Science: Hacked e-mails from Britain's Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA's James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact. For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests. Now, it turns out, it's the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth. We don't know who "Deep Throat" is. But according to an interview in Investigate Magazine's...

In case you have not yet heard, the scientists behind the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) have been exposed through their own email conversations. At this time, it is not known who or how the emails were obtained, though much speculation has been done. From the servers at the University of East Anglica in the UK being illegally broken into and hacked, to a whistle blower protected by UK laws as well as US laws, to an insider job, a person with legitimate access to the emails have all been discussed. More will be revealed certainly. What is known...

Lift up a rock and another snake comes slithering out from the ongoing University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) scandal, now riding as “Climategate”. Obama Science Czar John Holdren is directly involved in CRU’s unfolding Climategate scandal. In fact, according to files released by a CEU hacker or whistleblower, Holdren is involved in what Canada Free Press (CFP) columnist Canadian climatologist Dr. Tim Ball terms “a truculent and nasty manner that provides a brief demonstration of his lack of understanding, commitment on faith and willingness to ridicule and bully people”. “The files contain so much material that...

Junk Science: The oracle of climate disaster has a new book out on global warming that should be on the fiction list. He asks us to commit economic suicide while he rakes in millions from his green investments. 'Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis," Al Gore's sequel to his 2006 tome "An Inconvenient Truth," came out Tuesday. Printed on recycled paper using low-VOC (volatile organic compound) ink, it will undoubtedly be a best-seller and on the desk of every attendee at next month's climate change conference in Copenhagen. In a press release announcing the book, the Oscar-...

Environmentalism: As polls show belief in global warming is dropping, a new study suggests that dogs and cats, like people, are a plague upon the earth. They say people should have edible pets. Here, kitty, kitty. A new Pew Research Center study conducted Sept. 30-Oct. 4 says the number of Americans who think there's solid evidence the average temperature on earth has been getting warmer over the past few decades has plummeted from 71% in April 2008 to 57% today. Over the same period, there's been a comparable decline in the proportion of Americans who say global temperatures are rising...

Public Discourse: Our energy secretary applauds and encourages companies to leave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over its position on climate change. Should any Cabinet secretary, with the powers of government behind him, be threatening U.S. companies? Part of the climate-change mantra is that the debate is over and the science is settled. Just to make sure, environmental groups have sought to pressure businesses to go green or at least keep silent. Now it would appear the whole weight of the federal government is being thrown behind this campaign to coerce and silence real and potential opposition. On Thursday, Steven...

Lord Christopher Monckton, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, delivered the closing keynote address at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, praising those in attendance for holding fast to their scientific ethics and speaking truth to power. Where are they all today, those bed-wetting moaning Minnies of the Apocalyptic Traffic-Light Tendency--those Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds?The main message of this conference to the bed-wetters is this. Stop telling lies. You are fooling fewer and fewer of us. However many lies are uttered, the scientific truth remains unalterable.The Forces of Darkness, with their “global warming” chimera, came perilously...

‘High school kids watching Gore’s movie today will be nearing AARP’s retirement age by the time warming allegedly resumes in 30 years’ WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, today delivered a floor speech on the latest global warming poll data and the continuing inconvenient science developments refuting man-made climate fears. See: Inhofe: ‘Consensus’ Continues Freefall: Science and Scientists Challenge Man-Made Global Warming Fears & Inhofe Speech: "Gallup Poll: Record-High 41% of Americans Now Say Global Warming is Exaggerated"Inhofe Speech Highlights: I come to the floor today with breaking...

I've been reading through President Obama's much touted Recovery.gov web site and thought I would share the Frequently Asked Questions part of the site. It is in fact, the Delphi Technique in action. Through the whole of that web site, the Consensus and Facilitation of the Hegelian Principle is at work. To fight this phenomenon in our country, Freedom Lovers need to understand the forces at work, and master the language and techniques that will allow us to overcome the Barrage of facilitators and change agents who have just overtaken our country, fully, at the federal level. Please take some...

From Pres. Obama’s just-concluded remarks at the big health-care forum in DC, kicking off his administration’s efforts to achieve major reform this year, come three examples of the kind of hype that portend . . . ill. PRES. OBAMA: I know people are skeptical about whether Washington can bring about this change. Our inability to reform healthcare in the past is just one example of how special interests have had their way and the public interest has fallen by the wayside. And I know people are afraid we’ll draw the same old lines in the sand and give into the...

After our visit to Iraq this month, it is clear that what was once unthinkable there is now taking place: A stable, safe and free Iraq is emerging. Violence has fallen to the lowest level since the first months of the war. The Sunni Arabs who once formed the core of the insurgency are today among our most steadfast allies in the fight against al-Qaeda. A status-of-forces agreement between Iraq and America will take effect next month, providing for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and a commensurate increase in Iraqi self-defense. And Iraqi politics is increasingly taking on the messy...

In today's Politickle Video, Presidential candidate John Smith explains how consensus works: "In a democracy like the United States, government is based on majority rule. But what if you're in the minority? That's a real bummer. . . ." http://www.youtube.com/politickles

Confessions of a Very Old Man My name is Benjamin. Here I lie in Philadelphia. I caught lightning with a kite. wrote an Almanac. I perfected a postal service. I coaxed a treaty with France. But most important of all, 221 years ago last week I encouraged 39 men To sign a four-page document To give you a republic, If you can keep it. Yes, the 17th of September was the 221st birthday of the Constitution, and I choose to talk about it through the three great contributions that Benjamin Franklin made to that document. Plus, of course, his summary...

Then in 1999 an obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like nothing seen before. Instead of the familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on record. This was just what the IPCC wanted, The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the record. When its next report came along in 2001, Mann's graph was given top billing, appearing right at the top of page one of...

Voter turnout this primary season has been setting records. With interest so high, some analysts are predicting another blockbuster general election in November. But can American democracy survive all this heightened interest in the political process? Half a century ago, political scientist Paul Lazarsfeld became one of the first scholars to document the link between political participation and partisanship. He discovered that partisans voted more regularly and with greater enthusiasm than those who resided in the ideological middle. Although most experts then and now agree that high voter participation is generally a good thing, Lazarsfeld observed that partisan-driven turnout also...

In 1914, there was a consensus among geologists that the earth under our feet was permanently fixed, and that it was absurd to think it could be otherwise. But in 1915, Alfred Wegener fought an enormous battle to convince them of the relevance of plate tectonics. In 1904, there was a consensus among physicists that Newtonian mechanics was, at last, the final word in explaining the workings of the world. All that was left to do was to mop up the details. But in 1905, Einstein and a few others soon convinced them that this view was false. In 1544,...

While Al Gore lies that the "The debate on global warming is over." - [Al Gore, 2006] the public is fed this propaganda; that the debate is settled and the science is in on the cause of the 0.6 degree [IPCC] mild warming over the last 100 years. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is NO 'Consensus' on "Man-Made" Global Warming and here is the overwhelming evidence.

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office's famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable� magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments. He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.� That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in...

They call this a consensus? Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post Published: Saturday, June 02, 2007 "Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled." So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway...

Two weeks ago, climate experts and government officials from 130 countries released the latest IPCC Summary for Policy Makers on the ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability of Climate Change’. The IPCC’s predictions of the future were carefully scrutinised by governments and generally accepted. Despite attempts to tone down some of the more alarming language, the latest IPCC report predicts that unrestrained warming will cause mass extinctions, devastating floods, heatwaves, storms and droughts that may trigger economic disaster and social upheaval. There can be little doubt that scientists, science organisations and the dominant science media have been instrumental in turning doom-laden computer...

Climate Change: Some in Congress think global warming is so important it should be an issue of national defense, not science. It's a wrongheaded and dangerous idea, one that shows how crazy the debate has become. Unfortunately, the proposal to make global warming a matter of national security is bipartisan, with Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, joining Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, as co-sponsors. If nothing else, this proves neither party has a monopoly on wisdom. According to the Boston Globe, their plan calls for the U.S. intelligence chief to produce a "national intelligence estimate" on global warming....

I confess I was afflicted by a profound world-weariness following the release yesterday of the latest gloomy machinations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The U.N.'s global-warming caravanserai, founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, had this time pitched camp in Paris, in order to issue the "Summary for Policy Makers" relating to Working Group One of its "Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007." This is the group that focuses on "The Physical Science Basis" of climate change, and its summary was greeted with the usual razzmatazz, the Eiffel Tower's 20,000...

Our source must remain covert, but we have gained access to a series of e-mails between James A. Baker III and Lee A. Hamilton, co-chairmen of the Iraq Study Group. (Actually, the ISG designates them as "co-chairs," but even a cursory look shows neither of them to be furniture.) The messages' content sheds an interesting light on the ISG's 79 recommendations. We submit these messages below, without comment: Dear Jim: I've looked at the draft of the ISG recommendations. Do you think anybody will notice there aren't really 79, and that a bunch of them repeat or extend other recommendations?...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 11, 2006 – Winning the global war on terror requires a national consensus, with support demonstrated in actions as well as words, the Army’s chief of staff told hundreds of soldiers and defense industry representatives here yesterday. That means ensuring troops on the front lines have what they need to succeed, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker told attendees at the Association of the U.S. Army annual meeting. Soldiers have a reasonable expectation that their country will ensure they’re trained, equipped and resourced for the missions they’re called to conduct, the general said. “This resonates loud and clear,” he said....

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms -- unless we change the way we live now. Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is...

WASHINGTON, May 21 (AP) — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said Sunday that he was seeking greater consensus on the Supreme Court, adding that more consensus would be likely if controversial issues could be decided on the "narrowest possible grounds." In a 15-minute address to Georgetown University law graduates, Chief Justice Roberts, 51, sketched a vision for leading a court sharply divided on issues like abortion, the death penalty and gay rights. "If it is not necessary to decide more to a case, then in my view it is necessary not to decide more to a case," Chief Justice...

Japan reiterates support to UNSC reform by September (Kyodo) _ Japan reiterated its support Friday of a proposal by U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to decide on the expansion of the U.N. Security Council by September, a day after the United States expressed opposition to the idea. Japan has supported Annan's call to resolve the issue by September and has taken "a somewhat different stance than the United States," Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Seiken Sugiura said in a press conference. Speaking as a government spokesman, Sugiura called on Washington to get involved in reforming the powerful council as Tokyo aims...

The Supreme Court has murdered the Constitution. It was a subtle murder with no blood visible. We know they did it because they left a coded confession, in the form of what appears to be a legal decision. Like many crime scenes, this one is deceptive, at first. It looks like the Court simply decided the case of Roper v. Simmons, the juvenile death penalty case from Missouri. But a little C.S.I. investigation reveals the truth. There are two deaths in this matter. The first was a woman who was kidnaped from her home by Christopher Simmons. He told his...

The visioning process includes: “values” research, how to run "facilitated" workshops and to how to use “consensus building” to create scenarios for area “change”. When public officials and NGO's (non-government organizations) use the term "visioning" it really means Agenda 21 principles are being implemented. Television makeover programs that transform men and women from sloppy to slick are popular. Makeup artists, hair dressers and clothing specialists remake their passive subjects and the new look is shown off to gasping friends and family. Transformational changes are not limited to people these days. American neighborhoods, swarming with central planners and government funds are...

Reducing Unwanted Pregnancies and Abortion Through Prevention in Early Childhood © A Proposal By Andrew Kenny Donlan, Ph.D. Few national policy issues are as contentious as abortion, and few so polarize citizens concerned with values and government. Many citizens argue passionately for policies to reduce abortion rates, such as prohibiting late stage abortions or requiring parental and/or father notification. These policies remain divisive, as many individuals advocate fervently that abortion should remain legal and accessible. The lack of consensus among citizens leaves policy makers with insecure ground on which to form politically sustainable public policy. Cultivation of new public policy...