Weekend potpourri

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary," H.L. Mencken, columnist.

Never let a disaster go to waste

California, like all states, has two senators. First, we have Senator Boxer, who recently tried to capitalize on the Oklahoma tornadoes:

Senator Barbara Boxer told the Senate this week that the tornado in Oklahoma was the result of global warming and it was time to implement a tax on CO2 to stop extreme weather.

Boxer said: “This is climate change . . . Carbon could cost us the planet. The least we could do is put a little charge on it so people move to clean energy.”

Experts think not

According to an article in Forbes magazine in February of this year:

. . . (In a) newly published survey of geoscientists and engineers, merely 36 percent of respondents fit the “Comply with Kyoto” model. The scientists in this group “express the strong belief that climate change is happening, that it is not a normal cycle of nature, and humans are the main or central cause.”

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

Ice cores are used like tree rings to study past climates; they show eons of climate change, warming, cooling, warming again. Does that mean that humans have no effect on climate? Nope. We just have no idea how or how much. Or what we can do, if anything, to affect the rate of change.

The world is going to freeze if we don't . . .

The April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek concerned the scientific theory that the increased number and seriousness of tornadoes was due to global climate change – but global cooling was the hobgoblin at that time.

“The longer planners delay the more difficult they will find it to cope with the realities of climate change, once it becomes grim reality.” The majority of pundits favored melting the global ice caps by spreading soot (carbon) over them.

Why demand unrelated "solutions"

But lack of knowledge about the problem doesn't stop our senator from insisting on a solution. If she has no knowledge of science, or about the opinions of experts, why does she offer a draconian solution to a problem we don’t understand? Perhaps there’s a hidden, social-engineering goal.

A (former) Canadian Environmental Minister said, “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits.... climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

A “’’think tank’ for a new world order” called the Club of Rome advocates reducing the earth’s population (two billion or more) by any means possible to balance the earth’s assets. One of their announcements states:

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention .... and thus the “real enemy,” then, is humanity itself .... believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or….one invented for the purpose.”

The other is no better

Our other Senator is Feinstein.

During Senate discussion Feinstein admitted that our US Constitution would not allow the prohibition of specific books (First Amendment). She, however, persists in trying to ban specific firearms, and, in fact, to severely restrict all firearms ownership by private citizens (Second Amendment).

As we have noted in previous blogs, the greater the percentage of the population that legally owns guns, the lower the crime. Conversely, when people are disarmed, the law-abiding citizen suffers from criminal and governmental trespass. Clear examples of the latter are Nazi Germany and Great Britain, and in the U.S. Chicago and Detroit.

(For those interested in a rigorous application of scientific research to the question we recommend a book by Economics Professor John R. Lott, Jr.: More Guns, Less Crime. . . available from Amazon and other sources. And, there’s an entertaining and very short opinion expressed HERE.)

Does surface water = stupidity and vice versa?

We could hypothesize that it is the California water that creates Senators anxious to solve problems they don’t understand. We don’t know how the Senators’ water tastes, but their behavior gives us dysgeusia, the condition of having an abnormal, bad taste in your mouth.

Costa Mesa has an independent, underground water supply and enjoys good Council Members. Mensinger’s “Contract with Costa Mesa,” and Righeimer’s “Meet the Mayor” and Leece’s Town Hall meetings suggest that our politicians want to understand the problems before they try to solve them. The Council’s COIN ordinance (governmental transparency) reinforces that idea.

This might support the "surface water causes irrational thinking" theory.

If it’s not the water, what does cause our Senators to shoot first, aim later? Schooling? Parenting? Or is it caused, like climate change, by factors not yet knowable?

They'll protect you and your diagnosis

If you like the ethics and accountability of the IRS when it uses your financial data, you’ll soon be even happier. They’ll be using your medical records as Obamacare is further implemented.

Do it right, ask  . . .

Seth Godin opined: “I don't think the right question is, ‘is the path perfect?’ It's probably, ‘Is this somewhere I'd like to go?’”

That idea should be kept in mind as Costa Mesa’s charter is written. We should be sure we really want to “go there,” that is; do we want do exactly that, exactly that way, forever? 


An expedient, “feel good” document could cause far more problems than it solves. Let's do it right.