Florida Pundit is catching up on the news after two and a half weeks in Central Europe with very limited internet access. Quite a bit has happened here that doesn’t get covered by European newspapers.
The Obama administration was afraid of letting the Arizona immigration law go into effect and got a liberal judge to suspend most of it. Bacteria breaking down oil seem to be attacking the Gulf oil spill a lot faster than anyone but Rush Limbaugh predicted. An agriculture department employee has been fired over racist remarks and then was offered her job back (I still have to catch up on the details of this one).
GM will be selling a “green” car whose main virtue seems to be that it has a gas-based backup engine that ensures that you won’t be stranded when the battery is exhausted after just forty miles. It takes ten hours to recharge the battery for another forty mile trip. I wonder how much coal is burned in power plants to provide the electricity to charge the battery and how that compares to the one to two gallons of fuel that would be burned by a regular gasoline engine for a forty mile drive. We’ll need to follow up on this one.
A lot more has happened, but I also have collected interesting stories from my trip that I will cover over the next couple of weeks. Here are some highlights:
1. If you think we have a lot of “green” initiatives here, Western Europe is much more extreme and believe in global warming is unquestionable dogma in the media. What is interesting though is that despite a heat wave that brought 95 degree heat for more than half my trip in places with no air conditioning, no one I talked to ever linked the heat wave to global warming.
2. There is a demographic revolution occurring in big cities causing an rise in an increasingly radicalized Muslim population. Locals seem to believe that all the women in burkas (head to toe black dress covering the entire face but the eyes) are all rich Saudi Arabian tourists. This is certainly a factor, but I find it hard to believe that it is the whole story. I will provide pictures, plus the surprisingly frank comments of a monk given during a guided tour through a monastery.
3. While Western Europe is declining in political and economic power, life during this decline can still be pleasant especially if you have no children or grandchildren to worry about.
4. A visit to Prague, which Florida Pundit first visited shortly after the fall of communism twenty years ago, illustrates how the future of Europe lies in what former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, called “new Europe”, i.e. in the former communist states stretching from Lithuania to Slovenia.
5. The European Union has brought changes that make travel a lot easier. You don’t have to worry about changing currencies when traveling between countries using the Euro and crossing the border between many countries is like crossing the state line between Florida and Georgia. The only thing that remains are the abandoned border posts. Positive developments, but a lot of these changes are imposed by a European elite and, with crises like the Greek economic collapse, one has to wonder about the long-term stability of these arrangements.
Europe is a continent with a rich history, but it is in decline and faces enormous demographic changes. It is great for many Europeans to take a month vacation in summer and a couple of weeks in winter, but they are spending at the expense of future generations. When conservative governments take over from socialists all they can really do is slow the decline. The potential exceptions are some of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe where flat taxes and less regulations have created an economic boom.
President Obama is the most European president the United States has ever had. This statement probably puzzles the American left. It is not Obama’s race that is relevant, but rather his ideas. Obama is steering the US toward policies that Europe has been implementing since World War 2 and we need to reverse this direction in the 2010 and 2012 elections.
It is good to be home. More on all of this in future posts.
The Obama administration’s ideology is seeping into every government agency. The latest example: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
NASA’s historical mission according to its own website is “to pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.” Someone forgot to update NASA’s website.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in an interview on Arab television station Al-Jazeera has made this statement:
I am here in the region – its sort of the first anniversary of President Barack Obama’s visit to Cairo – and his speech there when he gave what has now become known as Obama’s “Cairo Initiative” where he announced that he wanted this to become a new beginning of the relationship between the United States and the Muslim world. When I became the NASA Administrator – before I became the NASA Administrator – he charged me with three things: One was that he wanted me to re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, that he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”
This is not Obama’s first action to change NASA’s mission. In addition to having NASA focus on making Muslims feel good about their contributions to science, Obama has given NASA’s mission a global warming spin. The Heritage Foundation reports:
In January, we reported that President Obama was redefining NASA’s mission, and entirely cutting its role in the manned exploration of space. This was not a matter of budget prudence as NASA’s piece of the federal pie was actually increasing by $300 million. According the Orlando Sentinel at the time: “The White House will direct NASA to concentrate on Earth-science projects — principally, researching and monitoring climate change.” And unlike the rest of President Obama’s government growth strategy, this shift to make NASA a global warming centered agency resulted in net job losses.
Yes, we can see the connection. The desire of radical Islamic terrorists to destroy Western civilization and return us to the Stone Age will certainly decrease our emissions of green house gases.
Today a federal judge blocked President Obama’s six-month moratorium on offshore oil drilling. The Obama administration has tried to justify its decision that would put thousands of people out of work, by citing a report on offshore drilling that did contain safety recommendations, but did not advocate a halt to offshore drilling.
Obviously, we want to take prudent precautions to prevent another Deepwater Horizon spill, but in decades of drilling no such accident has ever occurred. We don’t ground all airplanes when there is a plane crash. We may ground specific types of airplanes or ground the airline if the crash was due to negligence of a specific airline.
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal reacts to the court’s decision:
Democrats have a long history of opposing all forms of drilling. Obama has claimed that we are drilling in deep waters because all the oil that is easier to get has been used up. This is a blatant lie. Actually, we are drilling in deep water because environmental activists have opposed drilling in shallower waters closer to the shore. This leak would have been stopped a long time ago if it had occurred in a few hundred feet of water rather than five thousand feet under the Gulf’s surface.
Watch this video about drilling in Alaska that demonstrates that environmentalist ideologues are opposed to any drilling even in a remote area where no people and no animals would be affected:
Obama’s actions would cause thousands of Americans to lose their jobs in the midst of a fragile economic recovery in which few private sector jobs are created because of the threat of Obama’s policies. It would increase our dependence on foreign oil, something Obama claims he wants to reduce.
If the Obama administrations were genuinely interested in reducing dependence on foreign oil, it would allow safe drilling for oil on land and offshore, expand rights to access our vast reserves of natural gas and remove regulatory obstacles to building new nuclear power plants.
The technology to take advantage of alternative energy sources like wind and solar energy is advancing, but still can only satisfy a tiny fraction of our energy needs. During the coming decades we will need to rely on oil, natural gas and coal for our energy needs. If global warming believers want to reduce the amount of carbon burned for energy needs, nuclear energy is the clean alternative.
Al Gore has been strangely silent on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. His fellow Nobel Prize winner, President Obama, has tried to use this crisis to revive his floundering cap-and-tax (aka cap-and-trade) legislation that would cripple American industry. Gore, on the other hand, has not made news with new dire warnings about global warming from greenhouse gases. The only thing we have heard from Gore, who used to be one of our favorite targets on the loony left, is that his wife Tipper has left him.
Gore seemed to thrive during George W. Bush’ presidency. He made millions writing books, making movies and giving speeches instilling fear about a coming global climate apocalypse. Maybe the reason for Gore’s sinking into oblivion is that with the reign of Barack Obama and his assumption of powers that cannot be justified by anything in the Constitution, the American people have something to fear that is much more real and immediate than the hysterical rantings of Al Gore.
We have missed him. It has been quite some time since Al Gore has provided us entertainment. Gore has emerged from hibernation during an unusually cold winter to inspire college graduates at the University of Tennessee. Well, maybe inspire is not the right word. Actually, if you subscribe to his religion of global warming you [...]
Coverage in the mainstream media of climate change still has its limitations, but at least Climategate and consistent public skepticism has forced mainstream media reports to take into account the critics of man-made global warming hysteria. Here is an example of an ABC report on Earth Day: Share and Enjoy:
Apparently last week was Earth Day. Sorry I missed it. Too busy with dealing with real work and real issues. Here is a video (via Minnesotans for Global Warming) of some crazy hippies crying about human activity on Planet Earth. Happy Earth Day! Share and Enjoy:
Last November, Minnesotans for Global Warming (M4GW) produced a video making fun of Professor Michael Mann who with “Mike’s nature trick” and other distortions became one of the top villains of the Climategate scandal. After Mann threatened to sue M4GW in March unless they took the video down, M4GW complied. The video can still be [...]
Over the past few days, a volcanic ash cloud from Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano has stopped air travel in most of Europe. This is biggest disruption to travel in Europe since World War 2. The effects of this volcanic eruption and the lingering ash over Europe where completely unexpected. Airlines face serious losses not covered by [...]
The global warming crowd apparently called for turning off lights Saturday between 8:30 and 9:30 pm to celebrate “Earth Hour.” Sorry I missed it. I must confess that I was burning carbon watching a movie with my daughter. However, while capitalist, destroy-the-earth pigs like me enjoyed a Saturday evening, Watts Up With That? reports that [...]
