Special Opinion by Paul Plante
In a prior edition of the always interesting, always informative, always educational, and yes, always fascinating Cape Charles Mirror, fascinating because one never knows what one will encounter next in its pages, including a veritable wealth of high intellectual content that is a feast for the inquisitive and searching mind that is not found in the pages of the dry and dusty New York Times or staid Washington Post, in an intellectually-stimulating article which confronted the reader right off the bat in the opening line with an observation by H.L. Mencken that the entire aim of politics is to keep the populace in a state of alarm by menacing it with imaginary hobgoblins, which existential thought neatly dovetailed, in my estimation, with another intellectually stimulating essay on what I consider that same subject, government manipulation of thought, titled “1984 and My Age of Anxiety,” the anxiety being caused by the menacing of imaginary hobgoblins in real life right here in our America, four logical premises were put forth in support of the now-unrefuted proposition that in the United States of America today, the Age of Reason is in fact dead and gone, to wit:
LOGICAL PREMISE 1: The AGE OF REASON in the United States of America is unequivocally and officially dead as of December 2005 when now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer, then an appeals court judge on the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, ruled that it was for the good of society-at-large that a professional engineer who would not lie to them or deceive them with “scientific falsehoods” should be declared “mentally ill and dangerous” by the State of New York and consigned to a gulag (state mental hospital) for drug-induced “mind wiping.”
LOGICAL PREMISE 2: The AGE of UN-REASON, or ANTHROPOCENE, a Greek word which translates roughly as AGE of ABSURDITY, came into being definitively in December of 2005, when society-at-large in America accepted without question the ruling of now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer, then an appeals court judge on the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, that it was for their own good that a professional engineer who would not lie to them or deceive them with “scientific falsehoods” should be declared “mentally ill and dangerous” by the State of New York and consigned to a gulag (state mental hospital) for drug-induced “mind wiping.”
LOGICAL PREMISE 3: The premise that the AGE of Reason is dead in the United States of America is a thought that follows logically from the observation of H.L. Mencken that the entire aim of politics is to keep the populace in a state of alarm by menacing it with imaginary hobgoblins as little Greta Thunberg did just recently in Davos, where little Greta told not only the Davos crowd of rich dudes but the candid world, as well, that “No political ideology or economic structure has been able to tackle the climate and environmental emergency and create a cohesive and sustainable world, because that world, in case you haven’t noticed, is currently on fire.”
LOGICAL PREMISE 4: Stark proof that we have departed the Age of Reason and advanced firmly into the depths of the ANTHROPOCENE, or AGE of the TOTAL BIZARRE can readily be found in the unchallenged statement of little Greta Thunberg in Davos that the world is on fire, when it is not on fire at all, and where I am, it snowed this morning.
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Now, with respect to these four logical premises or propositions put forth in that prior article asserting the end of the Age of Reason in the United States of America, Reason, which must itself have a tangible and palpable existence for an Age of Reason to have an existence, philosophically, is defined as the ability to form and operate upon concepts in abstraction, narrowing information to its bare content, without emotion.
In other words, an ability to reason one’s way through a statement such as “the world is on fire,” to discern the truth or falsity of it, as opposed to accepting it blindly, on faith, because of who it was said by, or where the words came from, which stands in stark contrast to the observation of H.L. Mencken above that the entire aim of modern-day politics is to keep the populace in a state of alarm by menacing it with imaginary hobgoblins, which is true post-Age of Reason, in this AGE of UN-REASON, or ANTHROPOCENE, a Greek word which translates roughly as AGE of ABSURDITY that we are now firmly entrenched in, because if one is able to use reason, as was demanded of us children by society in America when I was young right after WWII, one can clearly see that the world is not on fire, at all, and thus, the hobgoblins are not real.
And thus, the aim of modern-day politics to keep the populace in a state of alarm by menacing it with imaginary hobgoblins is easily defeated by a populace trained from the time of being children, as I was, although not perfectly so, given that I like many others got sucked in by the GREAT SHINING LIE that if we did not fight the Russians in Viet Nam, we would have had to fight them here, just as we now have to fight them in Ukraine, so we don’t have to fight them here, even though we are not at war with Russia and have no intentions of being so, given how close Bill and Hillary Clinton are with Putin of Russia.
So, what has happened to the use of Reason here in the United States of America?
Why have people in America lost the ability to use it?
An existential question for our times, when we as a nation and as a people are beset by imaginary hobgoblins all the way around!
As to the Age of Reason, that which once was in the United States of America, but is no more, for reasons being probed in here, although it is freely admitted that it is insane to try to use rational methods to delve into the reasons for or causes of irrationality, the sciences and academic disciplines including social sciences and the humanities as we knew them when I was young, back before the Anthropocene and its rigid dogmatic thinking set in, a sort of modern-day Puritanism, were based on empirical methods, which were rooted in the Age of Enlightenment, where empirical methods require the ability to use reason and critical thinking, which means to be a sceptic.
Puritanism, on the other hand, is behaviour or beliefs that are based on strict moral or religious principles, and as the original Puritans who came to this country from England to settle New England and impose their views on everyone in the Massachusetts Bay colony believed that God had formed a unique covenant, or agreement, with them, and that God expected them to live according to the Scriptures, to reform the Anglican Church, and to set a good example that would cause those who had remained in England to change their sinful ways, so are we being confronted with a new Puritanism today, this time to reform not the Anglican Church, but the whole of life itself in the United States of America.
So where is this train we are now on in this Age of the Anthropocene, or Age of Un-Reason and Dogma, taking us as a nation and as a people?
Over a cliff like a bunch of lemmings?
The candid world would like to know.
Paul Plante says
And here I have to confess that after she got done reading through all the comments in the Mirror this morning (little children up this way use it in place of the old Weekly Reader of my day in the last century of the last millennium), as well as this thread, my little four-year old granddaughter smiled up at me and said, “I think you have out-foxed yourself here, grandpa, and got yourself in logical check-mate, as well, because you are trying to prove the death or end of something that you can’t prove ever existed in the first place, that being that the Age of Reason ever extended to the United States of America, or existed in the United States of America at any stage of its existence.”
And then she cited one of those children’s learning sites on Western Civilization that she likes to visit to learn more about the world she is a part of, and who it is she might be sharing that world with, which stated as follows with respect to her side of the argument that the Age of Reason in America can’t be dead, because it never was alive in the first place, to wit:
Question: Why did the Enlightenment end?
The Enlightenment: The Enlightenment was an era when reason and empiricism were at the forefront of European intellectual circles.
It was during this time period that ideas such as the separation of church and state, and freedom of speech and the press were developed and written about.
Answer and Explanation: Many historians believe that the Enlightenment ended due to the French Revolution in 1789, and the subsequent Reign of Terror.
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To which I replied: “But granddaughter, France is in Europe, and Europe has never been the United States of America, so while the Age of Reason might have died there when Robespierre’s guillotine blades fell, which led in this country to enlightenment age thinker Thomas Jefferson being labeled a Jacobin, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t here, as well.”
And there I attempted to extricate myself from her claim of logical check-mate by going to another educational site, this time the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where we had as follows, to which I said to her, “AHA”:
American Enlightenment Thought
Although there is no consensus about the exact span of time that corresponds to the American Enlightenment, it is safe to say that it occurred during the eighteenth century among thinkers in British North America and the early United States and was inspired by the ideas of the British and French Enlightenments.
Based on the metaphor of bringing light to the Dark Age, the Age of the Enlightenment (Siècle des lumières in French and Aufklärung in German) shifted allegiances away from absolute authority, whether religious or political, to more skeptical and optimistic attitudes about human nature, religion and politics.
In the American context, thinkers such as Thomas Paine, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin invented and adopted revolutionary ideas about scientific rationality, religious toleration and experimental political organization — ideas that would have far-reaching effects on the development of the fledgling nation.
Some coupled science and religion in the notion of deism; others asserted the natural rights of man in the anti-authoritarian doctrine of liberalism; and still others touted the importance of cultivating virtue, enlightened leadership and community in early forms of republican thinking.
At least six ideas came to punctuate American Enlightenment thinking: deism, liberalism, republicanism, conservatism, toleration and scientific progress.
Many of these were shared with European Enlightenment thinkers, but in some instances took a uniquely American form.
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End of check-mate, I told her, because as we both can clearly see, there was at one time in America, an Age of Reason!
“So where then has it gone, grandpa, and why?”
Hmmm, has this little girl got me back into check-mate?
Stay tuned!
Paul Plante says
And before I get back to my little granddaughter’s take on the reality she was dealt as a four-year who wishes she were living in an Age of Reason, as opposed to an Age of Insanity and Absurdity and just plain old garden variety stupidity, this thread isn’t something that I just came up with on a whim.
To the contrary, it is something that has evolved as I have sat here as a witness since November 2, 2015. when through what I consider to be a stroke of good luck for myself I discovered the last bastion of reason and sanity that the Cape Charles is to so many of us out here in the wilds of America who thought as a result of reading the mindless drivel by the thumb-sucking snivelers and skulkers who write for the New York Times and Washington Post and that ilk that all reason and rationality had totally disappeared from the planet, to the valiant efforts of the Cape Charles Mirror to be the light of reason the sick nation now so desperately needs, especially in the light of the recent 17 January decision of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Juliana v. USA, where we learned from The Honorable Josephine L. Staton, United States District Judge for the Central District of California, as follows concerning the destructive policies imposed on the children of today, including my grandchildren, by Marxist president Barack Hussein Obama, to wit:
In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response — yet presses ahead toward calamity.
It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses.
Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation.
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That should read Barack Hussein Obama insists that as president, and this should surprise no one, he had the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy OUR Nation, and if it were not for the valiant efforts of the Cape Charles Mirror to be a beacon of truth and reason in the face of idiocy and absurdity, insanity and un-reason we are being barraged with by the Democrats in Washington, D.C. and the New York Times and Washington Post, all of whom have absolutely no problem whatsoever with Obama acting to destroy the future of our nation, as if he owned it and us, we would not be aware of that, because nothing about it was ever said in either the New York Times or Washington Post, where mum’s the word when it comes to the endemic corruption of the Barack Obama administration which has put the future of these children in America like my granddaughters in grave jeopardy, because as the judge further said:
According to plaintiffs’ evidence, our nation is crumbling — at our government’s own hand — into a wasteland.
In short, the government has directly facilitated an existential crisis to the country’s perpetuity.
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That is the world Barack Hussein Obama bequeathed as his LEGACY to my granddaughters and all the other children in America – a great big stinking mess, and again, were it not for the efforts of the Cape Charles Mirror to keep the light of reason lit here in America, no matter how feeble the flame, as the forces of ignorance of the new Dark Ages bequeathed to our children by Barack Obama close in and threaten to extinguish it forever, we truly would be in the dark, which takes us back to that decision one more time, to wit:.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that the Constitution’s commitment to perpetuity only now faces judicial scrutiny, for never before has the United States confronted an existential threat that has not only gone unremedied but is actively backed by the government.
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Never before had the Nation been confronted by an existential threat like Barack Obama, and that should actually read, an existential threat actively backed by Hussein Obama, that since, like many other messes created by Hussein and Hillary Clinton during their reign as co-rulers of the world, has been handed off to Trump to have to deal with, like Hussein and Hillary’s war in Syria.
Now, if that is not madness or insanity, what can possibly be?
Paul Plante says
“Grandpa,” my little granddaughter said to me this morning, patting the couch next to her with her little hand, “come sit next to me for a moment so I can further explain to you my point of view as a four-year old confronted with a whole new reality than what you experienced growing up, as to how I and my friends perceive the end of the Age of Reason, as you call it.”
“For us, grandpa, who do not live in an Age of Reason, and never knew an Age of Reason, and sadly, don’t expect to see an Age of Reason return in our lifetimes, although we certainly are not giving up hope of restoring an Age of Reason by our efforts, it is immaterial as to when it might have ended.”
“What matters to us little children just starting out in life as you once did is that it is gone!”
“Think about that article I showed you a little while ago, grandpa, the one from the Foundation for Economic Education with the title of ‘School Security Is Now a $3 Billion Dollar Annual Industry’ by Kerry McDonald on January 8, 2019!”
“That’s the insane world we are being stuck with, grandpa – a world where a multi-billion dollar industry based on turning our schools into literal prisons now exists.”
“According to that article, grandpa, US schools now spend an estimated $2.7 billion on security features, from automatically locking doors to video surveillance and facial recognition software, and that amount doesn’t include the additional billions of dollars spent on armed guards at schools.”
“That isn’t something we children asked for or desire, grandpa, that we should have to be in prisons so an industry based on making our schools into prisons can thrive, but it has been forced on us just the same!”
“And thing about this, grandpa, because it isn’t getting better that we children can see – Federal spending on school security is also rising, with the US Department of Homeland Security recently awarding a $2.3 million grant to train high school students how to act like first responders in the event of a mass casualty, like a school shooting.”
“That’s the kind of training you had as an infantryman in the U.S. Army before you went to Viet Nam!”
“Why should we children today have to learn the skills of a combat infantryman in order to get a high school education?”
“Can you tell me that, grandpa?”
And sadly, the answer was no – I have no explanation whatsoever as to why that should be.
Other than when reason and rationality go out of existence, that is what our children and grandchildren end up with – Mad Max World where nothing whatsoever makes any sense at all.
Paul Plante says
This discussion on not only the AGE of REASON in the United States of America, but our Republic, as well, coming to an end in December 2005 when now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer, then an appeals court judge on the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, ruled that it was for the good of society-at-large that a professional engineer and health officer who would not lie to them or deceive them with “scientific falsehoods” should be declared “mentally ill and dangerous” by the State of New York and consigned to a gulag (state mental hospital) for drug-induced “mind wiping,” and the AGE of UN-REASON, or ANTHROPOCENE, a Greek word which translates roughly as AGE of ABSURDITY, coming into being definitively in December of 2005, when society-at-large in America blindly accepted without question the ruling of now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer, then an appeals court judge on the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, that it was for their own good that a professional engineer and health officer who would not lie to them or deceive them with “scientific falsehoods” should be declared “mentally ill and dangerous” by the State of New York and consigned to a gulag (state mental hospital) for drug-induced “mind wiping,” really begins with a book that was on the bookshelf of the old country house I grew up in, a 780-page book titled “A Short History of Western Civilization” by Charles Edward Smith, Louisiana State University, and Lynn M. Case, University of Pennsylvania, copyright 1948, where in the Preface, the authors stated thusly, to wit:
This volume is the outgrowth of the author’s experience in teaching the survey course in the History of Western Civilization.
We have become convinced that the presentation of cultural history must be accompanied by a strong factual treatment of political and constitutional history, for in most cases it cannot be assumed that the student is familiar with even the commonplaces of general history.
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Now, think about that statement for a moment, people, and consider what it is saying and implying about the generations that went before, with that statement by these college professors that at that time, 1948, 72 years ago now, it could not be assumed that the student was familiar with even the commonplaces of general history, that being 3 short years after the close of WWII.
Can a nation that has no common history be a nation?
That used to be one of the questions a course in Western Civilization was supposed to provoke as a thought exercise, which requires critical thinking skills and the use of reason, neither of which we seem to have in this nation today, where out of a total population of 327.2 million souls in 2018, in the first quarter of 2019, the number of monthly active U.S. Twitter users amounted to 68 million, or roughly 21 percent of the population.
According to TechCrunch, now that the limit of a TWEET, or the maximum length of a thought by a TWEETER on TWITTER is 280 characters, the most common length of a TWEET is 33 characters, which is the size of the thoughts of a goodly portion of the citizens of the United States of America, and historically, while only 9% of TWEETS hit TWITTER’s previous 140-character limit, now it’s down 1%, which is a very powerful statement about the times my little grand daughter finds herself in, especially when you consider the children’s nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water Jack fell down and broke her crown and Jill came tumbling after” is already 25 letters long, which don’t leave a whole lot of room to say much more and keep to the average of 33, because God knows, you start using too many characters, and there will be hell to pay from all those TWEETERS whose intellectual capacity stalls out at 33.
Getting back to that Preface from 1948, the authors continued as follows:
In this revised edition, in addition to making some changes and corrections, we have attempted primarily to bring the history up to date by including two new chapters on World War II and its aftermath.
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And people, whether you realize it or not, especially the younger people in this country who don’t seem to be taught much of substance concerning citizenship at all, these times all of us are living in right now today are the AFTERMATH of World War II, especially all this business going on in Ukraine, and our push-and-shove game with Russia, which takes us back to the Preface, to wit:
While the treatment of these periods is more detailed than of earlier ones, we feel it is justified because of the need of the young college student to understand the complexities of the postwar world on the foundation of his own civilization’s past.
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That book was in the house I grew up in because my father, a Depression-era child who had to work when young to help support the family, and then became seriously injured in training for WWII, both of which events conspired to prevent him from going to college, very much believed in education, which comes from books and life experiences, and so he got books that would be used in college and educated himself at home in his spare time by actually reading them (yes, 780 pages is a lot of pages, and words, far more than what are in my posts in here, and I can’t imagine how many TWEETS it would take to say all that is in the book), and then having children like myself read them, as well.
Useless knowledge, my little grand daughter says, because today, we have no past, just an uncertain future.
Sadly, when nobody can any longer read that history, or understand it, and whether it might have implications for our future, or even cares that we once did have a history which is how we got to here, perhaps she is right.
Paul Plante says
In answer to the question of why a little girl almost 500 miles to the north of Cape Charles and the unique gravity field of the huge bolus under Chesapeake Bay would spend time reading the Cape Charles Mirror, the answer is really quite simple, to wit:
A. Because it is there; and
B. For the same reasons I read the Weekly Reader when I was young, which was to learn about the world that I was born into and would have to function in, whether I liked it or not – forewarned is forearmed, as that saying goes.
So why the Cape Charles Mirror?
Why not something closer to her home?
And the answer to that is that the Cape Charles Mirror is the closest to her home that she can find, because in New York state, there is no Cape Charles Mirror, by intent.
For a short time there was an equivalent of the Cape Charles Mirror up here.
It was called the TALK-1300 REPORT, and it was a very similar platform to the Cape Charles Mirror, where all opinions on matters of interest of the day, chiefly political issues, could be openly and candidly expressed, which was the death knell for the TALK-1300 REPORT, as can be seen in this e-mail from myself to the people who yanked the TALK-1300 REPORT out of existence after it started touching sensitive nerves, to wit:
8 July 2016
Angela Rosetti
Operations Manager
TALK 1300-WGDJ-AM,
C/O TU Center,
51 South Pearl Street,
Albany, NY 12207
RE: Suppression of TALK 1300 Report
Dear Angela:
Several days ago now, I sent an e-mail request to your radio station asking to know why the Talk 1300 Report was suddenly gone.
For the record, that e-mail request was never responded to, nor actually, did I expect it to be, to be entirely candid with you, based on what you had told me when I contacted you by phone to ask the same question.
By way of refreshing your memory, when I asked you why the Talk 1300 Report was suddenly gone, just before a long holiday weekend, along with Jim Franco’s Twitter Tweets, your response was a terse “we decided to take that in a different direction.”
That direction you chose to take, quite obviously, was to suppress the Talk 1300 Report, and with it, the truth that was being posted in there, truth you as Operations Manager obviously cannot handle.
Get it buried was your order, and so it was, the Talk 1300 Report disappearing from cyberspace as if it never had existed, along with all of Jim Franco’s posts, which were embarrassing powerful political people locally and at the county level, and the state level, which violates the rules of neutered and gelded journalism in this state today, which is why so much corruption can exist right out in plain sight – because moral cowards like yourself, to prove your own political reliability, won’t allow it to be questioned.
§8 of Article I of our NYS Constitution, the Bill of Rights, states in language a child is supposed to be able to comprehend and understand, or at least such was the case when I was in kindergarten, that “Every citizen may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of that right; and no law shall be passed to restrain or abridge the liberty of speech or of the press.”
But that obviously does not apply to you, because by suppressing the Talk 1300 Report as you did, you restrained and abridged the liberty of Jim Franco, which ranks as one of the most cowardly acts I have witnessed in the seventy years I have been alive.
Yes, Angela, you have the power to suppress the truth in New York state, I will hand you that.
But this is to inform you that with the advent of the internet being available to the common person, your power to totally suppress the truth has become limited, and thankfully so.
You are like something straight out of Orwell’s “1984,” where your version of truth can change in mid-sentence.
Sincerely,
Paul R. Plante
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That is why the little girl bothers with the Cape Charles Mirror right there!
It may well be the last bastion of truth still standing, so the little girl wants to learn as much as she can from it, before it too is forced to succumb to political pressure and disappears forever from CYBERSPACE, like the TALK-1300 REPORT which was quite literally scrubbed from the internet as if it never has been.
Paul Plante says
And here my little grand daughter would like me to make it very clear in here that she is NOT a Greta Thunberg.
She does not believe in being scared of something that is hours or days or weeks away, or years, or decades, and the last thing she wants is to be around adults who panicking because Greta Thunberg told them they had to, because Greta is scared.
Since the time she was young, she has been preparing herself to be a part of what is coming, not what I experienced when young.
What she wants from me is background so she can understand the world down the street and across the way, which is how she came to be using the Cape Charles Mirror as a modern-day version of the Weekly Reader I grew up with in a different millennium and century – because in her words, and mine to her beforehand, the Cape Charles Mirror today is the best real-time spectrum of who comprises the “members of society” in the world she is going to be more and more a part of, that she can observe and learn from in terms of how communication on-line has to be managed today, since in my youth, there was no such thing outside of Buck Rogers science fiction, or a futuristic article in Popular Science.
Being made in real-time as they are, and then frozen in time as a fly in amber, the comments in the Cape Charles Mirror are for her more than anything else what the Freudians, or maybe it is the Jungians, the more I think about it, call the “gestalt,” from German Gestalt, literally ‘form, shape,’ in this case, the form or shape of society itself as it appears from the spontaneous comments in the Cape Charles Mirror, so that for her, through these comments plus what she learns elsewhere, so that for here, “gestalt” means quite literally an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.
For her, all of these people who comment in here, especially the “SHOUTERS-DOWN” and “STIFLERS” who can stop the dialogue in a thread of interest to her dead still, which is one of the most valuable lessons she can learn about life right now from the Cape Charles Mirror, when young like she is, because those people will be out there, they always have been out there, regardless of what epoch of history one looks through, so that if she wants her voice heard as a VOICE OF REASON, which is what she is preparing herself to be by studying the Cape Charles diligently, it being the only internet site she has found where real people are talking about real issues in her times.
And given what happened to the TALK-1300 Report in 2016, how our voices were stifled when that blog disappeared from Cyberspace, literally as if it had never existed, we are both very thankful that the Cape Charles Mirror has survived as long as it has as the last bastion of citizen dissent that might exist in the United States of America today, which is a pretty powerful statement about the times we are in, especially here to the north of you, where the only voice we have is in Virginia.
Paul Plante says
As to what we to the north of Cape Charles see as unique about the Cape Charles Mirror is that to us, it carries on a tradition that we see going back to this nation’s very beginning after winning independence from Great Britain and its tyrant king George III of England that was embodied in such early publications in Virginia such as the Virginia Independent Chronicle (Richmond, Va.) published between 1786-1789, wherein we to the north who bother to study and educate ourselves about these things in our history to pass on to our grandchildren learned of “The State Soldier Essay I” published in the Virginia Independent Chronicle on January 16, 1788, to wit:
An ADDRESS to the GOOD PEOPLE of Virginia, on the new FEDERAL CONSTITUTION, by an old STATE SOLDIER, in an answer to an Officer in the late American Army.
A fellow-citizen whose life has once been devoted to your service, and knows no other interest now than what is common to you all, solicits your attention for a new few moments on the new plan of government submitted to you consideration.
Well aware of the feebleness of a Soldier’s voice after his service shall be no longer requisite, and sensible of the superiority of those who have already appeared on this subject, he does not flatter himself that what he has now to say will have much weight.
Yet it may serve to contradict some general opinions which may have grown out of circumstances too dangerous to our reputations, to remain unanswered.
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Whether anyone in America today is aware of that, or not, and my goodness, look how long ago it was, there is an unbroken line or train of thought from there right to here today, in the pages of the Cape Charles Mirror, where we are trying to do the same thing, TWO HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO (232) years later, that being to contradict some general opinions which may have grown out of circumstances too dangerous to our reputations, to remain unanswered, such as the world is on fire (it was snowing here this morning), the world is going to end in 2035 when all the Himalayan glaciers melt, and the Adam Schiff IMPEACHMENT FARCE was anything other than RINKY-DINK THEATER OF THE ABSURD in the style of Camus.
For a short time, the now-disappeared TALK-1300 REPORT was also following that tradition, until it literally disappeared from CYBERSPACE overnight as if it had never been, which I attribute to craven cowardice in the face of political pressure, which in turn has us marveling at how long the Cape Charles has been in existence, which has us in turn marveling at the courage of Wayne Creed in the face of vocal opposition to provide this outlet for public opinion on a variety of issues, such as Jimmy Hansen, the scientist responsible for “CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA” causing psychological distress in America’s children who was awarded some kind of guardianship over the children of America by the Ninth District Court of Appeals on the West Coast in Juliana v. Hussein Obama et al. decided in January of this year, appearing as a SHILL for the nuclear industry in New York state as we see in the Albany, New York Times Union article “Speaker: Nuclear power deserves a look – Hansen, pioneer in climate study, tells Kingston audience that political solutions needed” by Rick Karlin on Thursday, February 6, 2020, to wit:
KINGSTON — James Hansen is one of the founders of the modern climate activist movement.
The former NASA physicist raised warnings about global warming as early as the 1980s and created headlines more than a decade ago when he exposed the Bush Administration’s efforts to stifle discussion by federal scientists.
So it may have been something of a surprise to the roughly 300 people who filled the Kingston High School auditorium on Thursday when Hansen all but endorsed nuclear power as one of several ways to tackle the climate crisis.
He also stressed that fossil fuel use won’t be ending in the near-term, given the copious power needs of the world economy.
“You can make solar free and it still is not going to replace fossil fuels,” said Hansen.
As for nuclear power, Hansen believes the next generation of modular plants that are being explored offers much promise.
These smaller generators could be assembled in factories and transported to various sites.
“The U.S. is where it should happen,” Hansen said of such developments.
Hansen’s talk kicked off a three-day Youth Empowerment and Sustainability Summit at the Ashokan Center, a Catskills-based organization that works on sustainability as well as outdoor education issues.
The summit is bringing together middle and high school students from 22 schools for an immersion course in climate literacy.
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And what kind of warped and distorted crap exactly is Jimmy Hansen filling their heads with as he tries to peddle “GO NUKE” as our survival strategy for the future.
The Hearst-published Times Union does not tolerate dissent, so there are no comments about this proposal to have these “nuclear package bombs” sited all over America, as if that hare-brained idea of Jimmy’s is going to solve more problems that it would create, which is why we to the north are so thankful for the Cape Charles Mirror and the courage of Wayne Creed.
As to nuclear, which Guardian of the Children Jimmy Hansen is pushing, in the seminal authority “Climate, History and the Modern World,” 2d Edition by H.H. Lamb, the author, an authority in the field, stated as follows:
Worst of all the types of pollution is the accumulation of nuclear waste materials on or in the ground and the decay products in the atmosphere and terrestrial environment.
DDT that must have come from insect sprays used in the main inhabited countries of the world has been found in the snows of Antarctica, and radioactive caesium from the nuclear plants at Sellafield (Windscale) in northwest England has been found in the sea surface water in the polar ocean current moving south off the coast of East Greenland.
The range of consequential threats has been illustrated by the contamination of sheep in England, Wales and Scotland with wind-borne radioactive matter from the accident at the nuclear electricity plants at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986.
Over eight years later the contamination still persists in some of the areas across Europe reached by this fall-out.
Similar nuclear accidents have occurred elsewhere, as at Three Mile Island in the eastern United States in 1980, and more must be expected in the future.
There is nowhere near the surface of the Earth where radioactive nuclear wastes can be stored indefinitely without risk of dispersal at some later date by earthquake, volcanic activity or war.
end quotes
But if we scrub that out of the record and pretend those words don’t exist, then Jimmy6 Hansen’s proposal to “GO NUKE” seems pretty benign, I suppose.
The less we know about things, the better off we really are, because by being ignorant, we have nothing to trouble ourselves over.
Elsewhere in the book, the author states thusly, to wit:
As Schneider has written:
Nuclear power advocates have not fully solved the radioactive waste disposal problem…they have yet to make a reliable assessment of the problem of serious accidents which could release lethal quantities of radioactivity into populated areas.
end quotes
Does Jimmy Hansen have a solution today?
If he does, he never said.
And of direct relevance to this issue of “GLOBAL WARMING” Jimmy Hansen and little Greta Thunberg are screeching about, each in their own way, in the section “POSSIBLE EFFECTS OF HUMAN ACTIVITY AND POLICY DECISIONS,” H.H. Lamb stated thusly:
Mankind is doubtless capable of continuing to inhabit the Earth and survive through the next ice age, and of doing so far better than our primitive forebears who survived the last one.
And we should be at least equally able to adapt to a much warmer Earth with the productive crop belts and the deserts shifted poleward.
But there is no warrant for the unfulfillable hopes — in extraordinarily many quarters today the basic assumption — that a constant, or even a steadily rising, standard of living can be achieved.
It is agreed by most of those actively engaged in climate modelling that the main threat from human activities to the stability of the existing natural climate regime, to which our present day international order is adapted, is the warming — possibly inconveniently large — to be expected from the continuing increase of carbon dioxide.
And this, as we saw in the last chapter, may be boosted as much as 50 per cent by other pollutants which have a similar action upon the radiation balance.
Later in the twenty-first century, at some point which will depend on how much power is generated from nuclear or other fuels, the output of artificially produced heat may itself begin to have effects on a global scale.
This is certainly the major effect on climate to be expected from the large-scale use of nuclear energy.
In some ways it is analogous to the unsolved problem of disposal of the nuclear waste itself (a problem to which there may be no solution on an Earth where no part of the crust can be guaranteed earthquake-free over the periods of continuing dangerous radioactivity).
There may be climatic troubles arising from the emission of great quantities of heat whatever the locations chosen for electrical power generation.
Some studies have already been directed towards discovering what sort of effects on the world climate pattern might be expected to result from the disposal of the waste heat from nuclear power generation in various parts of the world’s oceans.
end quotes
And were it not for the Cape Charles Mirror carrying on a tradition of allowing for public comment going back 232 years now, there would be silence on this subject of what Jimmy Hansen is selling to the impressionable children of America in a setting where outside public comment and dissent is not allowed.
Paul Plante says
To see why my little grand daughter is concerned, and I think rightfully so, about the revelation in the Albany, New York Times Union article “Speaker: Nuclear power deserves a look – Hansen, pioneer in climate study, tells Kingston audience that political solutions needed” by Rick Karlin on Thursday, February 6, 2020 which has Jimmy Hansen, the “FATHER OF GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA,” out there peddling “GO NUKE” to a young and impressionable segment of the American population that is only getting one side of the story from Jimmy in a venue that kept out dissenting opinions, we need go no further than the caption of Juliana v. USA, where we have as follows:
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
KELSEY CASCADIA ROSE JULIANA; SOPHIE K., through her Guardian Dr. James Hansen; FUTURE GENERATIONS, through their Guardian Dr. James Hansen, Plaintiffs-Appellees,
v.
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA;
Filed January 17, 2020
end quotes
As a member of the future generation, of course, my little grand daughter would like some further clarification of exactly what Dr. James Hansen is a guardian of, given his glib open advocacy of proliferating nuclear all over the nation as a means of power generation so that my grand daughters generation can have a “GOOD ANTHROPOCENE,” coupled with his “HYSTERIA MONGERING” about carbon dioxide, which takes us to Juliana, as follows to see what the impact on the children of America Jimmy Hansen’s hysteria mongering has wrought, to wit:
SUMMARY
Climate Change/Standing
Some plaintiffs (children) claimed psychological harms, others impairment to recreational interests, others exacerbated medical conditions, and others damage to property.
end quotes
Why, asks my little grand daughter?
Why are children in her generation having to suffer psychological harm from “CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA” promoted and fostered by Dr. James Hansen, who we now see acting as a SHILL for the nuclear industry?
As to the “CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA” promoted and fostered by Dr. James Hansen which has helped to cause these psychological problems in these children of today who are being made terrified of the changing weather , who we now see acting as a SHILL for the nuclear industry, for that history, all we need do is to go back to November of 2016, to the ruling of District Court Judge Aiken in Juliana, to wit:
OPINION AND ORDER
Plaintiffs in this civil rights action are a group of young people between the ages of eight and nineteen (“youth plaintiffs”); Earth Guardians, an association of young environmental activists; and Dr. James Hansen, acting as guardian for future generations.
Plaintiffs filed this action against defendants the United States, President Barack Obama, and numerous executive agencies.
At oral argument, plaintiffs supplied the Court with a timeline documenting purported evidence of defendants’ knowledge of climate change.
The timeline, which dates back to 1955, includes the 1988 testimony of Dr. James Hansen before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Dr. Hansen, who appears in this lawsuit as a guardian for his granddaughter and for future generations, testified about rising global temperatures and their relationship to human activity. First Session on the Greenhouse Effect and Global Climate Change Before the Comm. on Energy & Natural Res., lOOth Cong. 39 (1988).
He urged legislators to take action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Id. at 158.
end quotes
As to rising global temperatures and their relationship to human activity, with respect to nuclear, we know that it is a major-league heat source that is heating fresh water, which already floats on top of salt water, so that we have plumes of heated water now heating the air like a giant hot water heating system, and Jimmy Hansen’s solution is more nukes!
Getting back to that District Court decision in Juliana and Jimmy Hansen as an expert witness and guardian of America’s children, we have:
Redressability (of alleged injuries to children by policies of Barack Obama) in this case is scientifically complex, particularly in light of the specter of “irreversible climate change,” wherein greenhouse gas emissions above a certain level push the planet past “points of no return, beyond which irreversible consequences become inevitable, out of humanity’s control.” Hansen Decl. if 13 & Ex. 2 at 13 Sept. 10, 2015 (docs. 7-1 & 7-3) (quotation marks omitted).
end quotes
That, people, is the unchallenged hysteria-mongering by Jimmy Hansen that has my little grand daughter concerned, because it is seriously messing with the heads of her little friends and playmates who don’t have a public health engineer for a grandfather to set them straight and debunk the hysteria-mongering to nuclear industry shill Dr. James Hansen, who has taken upon himself the title of GUARDIAN OF THE CHILDREN OF AMERICA, without our permission and consent as parents or grandparents to do so, because we do not consider Jimmy Hansen a fit guardian.
And thank you to the Cape Charles Mirror for affording us an opportunity in here to voice that opinion.
Paul Plante says
And here we come to the GROUND ZERO of WHY the Cape Charles Mirror is so important to a little girl like my grand daughter who is not a GRETA THUNBERG, and so, does not believe in being stupid and hysterical and out there baying at the moon and chanting, over and over, “HEY HEY HO HO CLIMATE CHANGE HAS GOT TO GO,” and that is this following judicial language from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Juliana v. Obama, et al., filed January 17, 2020, to wit:
The plaintiffs have made a compelling case that action is needed; it will be increasingly difficult in light of that record for the political branches to deny that climate change is occurring, that the government has had a role in causing it, and that our elected officials have a moral responsibility to seek solutions.
We do not dispute that the broad judicial relief the plaintiffs seek could well goad the political branches into action. Diss. at 45–46, 49–50, 57–61.
We reluctantly conclude, however, that the plaintiffs’ case must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large, the latter of which can change the composition of the political branches through the ballot box.
That the other branches may have abdicated their responsibility to remediate the problem does not confer on Article III courts, no matter how well-intentioned, the ability to step into their shoes.
III. For the reasons above, we reverse the certified orders of the district court and remand this case to the district court with instructions to dismiss for lack of Article III standing.
end quotes
In other words, not only all of those children who filed that CIVIL RIGHTS lawsuit against Hussein Obama when he was president, but all other children as well, who have a legitimate interest in how the elected branches of government are fulfilling the responsibility, are now “out of court” with no real way for them to get back in at this juncture, which is to their detriment as young Americans as we can clearly see from these words from that same decision, to wit:
In these proceedings, the government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response — yet presses ahead toward calamity.
It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses.
Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation.
end quotes
Speaking of real HIGH CRIMES against humanity, that should read, “Barack Hussein Obama, in seeking to quash the suit the children of America brought against him because of his destructive policies, insists that he as president according to his interpretation of the Constitution, has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation, ” which is some pretty serious BULL**** none of us would know about, but for the Cape Charles Mirror, because to my knowledge, this discussion is happening nowhere else, and especially not in corrupt New York state where Democratic Socialist tyrant and despot Young Andy Cuomo adopted this destructive policy of Obama as his own, saying to the people of New York, that if Barack Obama as president has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation, then by damn, as governor of New York, Andy Cuomo has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the state, which was the subject of the now-disappeared TALK 1300 Report TALK RADIO 1300 which disappeared forever from CYBERSPACE around 1 July 2016, four months prior to the November 2016 presidential election from which New York’s own Hillary Clinton was expected to emerge victorious, after beginning a series of posts based on this thread, to wit:
“Opinion: T-Spin: The feds screwed up Hoosick Falls”
Jim Franco
February 17, 2016 11:30 pm
My guess is that in about a decade, Hoosick Falls will be a ghost town.
Think about it.
If you are looking for a house, one of the first things you do is go online and find something that has the amenities you want and/or need and is within your price range.
After bookmarking the house(s), you Google the community where they are located.
When you Google Hoosick Falls, though, you don’t get “quiet village” or “bucolic countryside” or “just minutes from Vermont.”
Instead, you get things like “don’t drink the water,” and “high rates of cancer” and “public not informed.”
end quotes
That thread followed a January 26, 2016 press release on this Obama/Cuomo policy from a New York State assemblyman titled “Hoosick Falls Next Flint Michigan Thanks To Cuomo And Cronies?” wherein was stated, to wit:
Assemblyman Steve McLaughlin (R,C,I-Schaghticoke) today criticized the New York State Department of Health’s (DOH) handling of the water contamination issue in Hoosick Falls.
DOH, which previously denied that the water posed a threat to residents, reversed its stance earlier this month and cautioned residents against drinking or cooking with the water.
Dr. Howard Zucker, Commissioner of DOH, testified yesterday about the situation.
”This is a serious situation that affects thousands of residents in Hoosick Falls,” McLaughlin said.
“We need to know why state and federal regulations were so far apart, and Dr. Zucker has an obligation to provide us an explanation.”
“Epitomizing the Cuomo Administration’s lack of transparency and accountability, he dodged questions about the situation at yesterday’s budget hearing and had his staff shield him from an onslaught of reporters after his testimony ended.”
“Dr. Zucker’s actions were shameful and denigrating to the residents still struggling to access clean drinking water in Hoosick Falls.
The EPA is currently considering establishing the Hoosick Falls area as a Superfund site, which would require the company responsible for the bulk of the pollution to fund an extensive clean-up.
“Right now the EPA is conducting an investigation to determine the source of the contamination and how widespread it actually is,” McLaughlin said.
end quotes
Now, unlike the specious claims of little hysterical Greta Thunberg that the world is on fire (it was snowing here this morning again), to my little grand daughter, that poisoned water in Hoosick Falls, an admittedly poor community that lacks the big bucks someplace like Chappaqua where Hillary Clinton lives has to buy political protection of their water and air, is a real and serious problem, and she wonders, given the foundation language of our nation and OUR Constitution, how these Juliana lawyers could let Obama get away with making that statement about his supposed “absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation,” without any effort on their part to challenge that incredible statement, at all!
“Think about it,” my little grand daughter says, “if whoever the president of the United States happens to be at any given time has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation as Barack Obama says he did, then we children are living in a mad house where nothing will ever make sense, or be stable, or healthful,” which she says violates the Constitution if anything does, as well as epitomizing a high crime and misdemeanor against humanity itself, and here she first makes reference to “Remarks on the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention” by James Wilson on November 28, 1787, where he stated thusly, to wit:
This will be a proper time for making an observation or two on what may be called the preamble to this constitution.
I had occasion, on a former day, to mention that the leading principle in the politics, and that which pervades the American constitutions, is, that the supreme power resides in the people.
This Constitution, Mr. President, opens with a solemn and practical recognition of that principle: “We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, etc., do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
It is announced in their name — it receives its political existence from their authority: they ordain and establish.
end quotes
If it is indeed OUR Constitution, my little grand daughter wonders, if it in fact does receive its political existence from OUR authority, then how on earth did these Juliana lawyers let Barack Hussein Obama get away from establishing on the record here that as president, he had the right to destroy OUR Nation, which is not his to destroy, and here she points to Noah Webster in his “A Citizen of America: An Examination Into the Leading Principles of America” essay on October 17, 1787, to wit:
The preamble to the constitution is declaratory of the purposes of our union, and the assumption of any powers not necessary to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, will be unconstitutional, and endanger the existence of Congress.
end quotes
How, my little grand daughter would like to know, is Barack Obama having the right to destroy the nation at all consistent with what is stated in the Preamble to OUR Constitution, and why did these Juliana lawyers not vigorously challenge him on that assertion?
What game is being played here, she wonders?
And the only place that answer is likely to come from at this juncture is the Cape Charles Mirror, which alone has the courage to keep this matter alive, which takes us back to this statement from the January 2020 Juliana decision, to wit:
We reluctantly conclude, however, that the plaintiffs’ case must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large, the latter of which can change the composition of the political branches through the ballot box.
end quotes
How, my little grand daughter would like to know, is a little girl like her going to make her case to the electorate at large, which can change the composition of the political branches through the ballot box, if all the venues where her case could be made either won’t print it, or have been shut down and put out of existence like the TALK-1300 REPORT, which has been resurrected here after a diligent search of other caches where files of the TALK-1300 Report were thankfully saved: http://thelivyjrfiles.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=139
Hence the importance of the Cape Charles Mirror because if this ship goes down, we are all screwed!
Paul Plante says
With respect to the End of the Age of Reason, which my little grand daughter argues, and eloquently so, I must say, is also the End of the Age of Rule of Law in the United States of America, and thus, to her, the End of Western Civilization, according to ”A Short History Of Western Civilization” by Charles Edward Smith, Louisiana State University, and Lynn M. Case, University of Pennyslvania, copyright 1948, which she is basing her arguments on, ”Civilized existence is possible only after social institutions such as the family, the kindred, and the tribe have in turn been integrated into political organizations such as city-states, kingdoms, or democracies, wherein governmental devices ensure harmonious relations among individuals.”
When Barack Hussein Obama, says my little grand daughter, can openly declare in a federal court setting with absolute impunity and immunity that as president of the United States, he had the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation as Barack Obama says he did in Juliana, without a word of censure from any federal judge, and without a howl of outrage by the Juliana lawyers, then Constitutional government as my generation once knew it is no longer in existence in the world Obama bequeathed her with his legacy of contempt for the law and Constitution, and as she says, children her age are now living in a mad house where nothing will ever make sense, or be stable, or healthful, and she would like to know how that came to be, which takes us back to ”A Short History Of Western Civilization,” as follows:
Civilization also anticipates the maintenance of peaceful and rational relations among political entities as well as among individuals; it is in this respect that mankind has proved most backwards, as is evidenced by the frequency of armed conflicts.
end quotes
As my little grand daughter says, and I can’t argue the point with her, when a federal appeals court judge speaks of “the other branches having abdicated their responsibility to remediate the problem,” we no longer can claim to have either peaceful or rational relations among political entities; instead, we have the hysteria, insanity, and madness which have created in their turn Greta Thunberg and her school strike movement which to my grand daughter seems to be promoting ignorance over rational thought, which again takes us back to ”A Short History Of Western Civilization,” for what my little grand daughter attributes a big part of the problem in younger generations who can’t use words to communicate any longer, having grown up with TWEETING on TWITTER, to wit:
One cannot visualize civilized existence without the anterior development of speech, language, and writing, which make possible the transfer of thought and, through the medium of literature, the bequest to posterity of the accumulated knowledge of past and present.
Educational facilities must be available to implement the transfer of community knowledge to the young and to stimulate and enlarge the contributions which they will make to the cultural heritage upon their attainment of maturity.
end quotes
According to the latest statistics, the average TWEET length today is just 33-characters, which should serve to give one an idea of how the transfer of community knowledge to the young is happening today – just 33-characters at a time, which makes for small thinking, which takes us back one more time to ”A Short History Of Western Civilization,” to wit:
All would probably agree that in our day technological advance, mastery of the forces of our physical environment, has far outstripped the evolution of social and governmental institutions, which should be adequately responsive to the changes wrought by science and invention.
Civilization therefore must not be considered as a static and final stage in human progress.
Civilized existence when once attained does not become an inalienable possession.
The cultural heritage of the past must be understood and constantly augmented by the contributions of the present.
When civilization ceases to be dynamic, it soon ceases to be civilization.
Paul Plante says
And here my little grand daughter would like me to add that unlike all the adults in here, or out there in America, soon enough, and all too soon, she is going to have to share a classroom with all of these psychologically-impaired children who have been led to believe through media hysteria-mongering about “GLOBAL WARMING” and “CLIMATE CHANGE,” which hysteria-mongering goes back to the dire predictions of Jimmy Hansen, who now appears to be a nuclear industry SHILL and as a result, there is a high likelihood of her having to undergo peer group pressure from these children to go out on strike and not go to school because Greta Thunberg says that is the right thing to do to stop climate change, which is horse****, and she, as a result, is going to need some powerful counter-arguments to demonstrate to them that they are fools to listen to what Greta Thunberg, who wants American school children to be stupid, says.
Hence, the importance of the Cape Charles Mirror to her generation, which is the generation most impacted by all this media hysteria-mongering that has the Himalayan glaciers melting fifteen years from now to drown us all beneath the waves of the ever-rising ocean, like what happened back in the time of Noah.
Little Greta Thunberg runs around with IPCC reports tucked under her arm, calling them “the science” that she wants little children like my grand daughter to blindly except without question, which my little grand daughter refuses to do, hence her need for some rational counter-arguments before she is in the inevitable confrontation with the GRETA KIDS she is sure to run into in her future classrooms settings, where she won’t have any adults to rely on, so she will have to stand on her own two feet, which takes us back in time to an article in the TELEGRAPH entitled “Himalayan glaciers are melting, says IPCC research – The Himalayan glaciers are melting after all, according to new research released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” on 04 Dec. 2011, to wit:
The research was released in an effort to draw a line under the embarrassing mistakes made about the effects of global warming on the region in the past.
The IPCC were forced to apologise for claiming that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035.
The 2009 scandal, known as ‘Himalayagate’ led to criticism of the IPCC, a group of scientists convened by the United Nations to warn governments around the world about the effects of climate change.
end quotes
“Why does Greta Thunberg tell people to trust the IPCC when the IPCC is not trustworthy,” my little grand daughter would like to know, to which I can only respond that as far as I can determine, little Greta is so petrified by fear that she can’t think straight, and thus, cannot be trusted to be rational in her statements about anything, which takes us to an article in The Guardian entitled “Claims Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 were false, says UN scientist” by Fred Pearce published on 20 Jan. 2010, where we had as follows with respect to what has caused Greta Thunberg and her followers to be so hysterical and irrational and psychologically distressed, to wit:
One paragraph, buried in 3,000 pages of reports and published almost three years ago, has humbled the head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Facing global outcry, Rajendra Pachauri backed down and apologised today for a disputed IPCC claim that there was a very high chance the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035.
The assertion, now discredited, was included in the most recent IPCC report assessing climate change science, published in 2007.
Those reports are widely credited with convincing the world that human activity was causing global warming.
end quotes
Stated more correctly and to the point as my little grand daughter would have it, those false reports caused the hysteria mongering in the media which as resulted in all the confusion and outright lies she has been bequeathed along with her generation, buried under a mountain of bigger than Mt. Everest, with no clear way of discerning where the truth might lie, but for the Cape Charles Mirror, which takes us back to that Guardian article, to wit:
The offending paragraph, in the panel’s fourth assessment report on the impacts of climate change, said: “Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.”
In IPCC terminology a “very high” likelihood has a specific meaning: more than a 90% chance of coming true.
The report’s only quoted source for the claim was a 2005 campaigning report from the environment group WWF.
In turn, the WWF report’s only source was remarks made in 1999 by a leading Indian glaciologist, Syed Hasnain, then vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, to journalists at two magazines, New Scientist in London, and Down to Earth in New Delhi.
Hasnain had never submitted the suggestion of such an early demise to a scientific journal because, he said last week, it had always been “speculative”.
How this made it to the august pages of the IPCC report remains unclear.
But the IPCC text is almost identical to that in the Down to Earth article in April 1999.
WWF said today it regretted “any confusion caused” and would amend its report.
The panel is yet to make a similar commitment.
end quotes
The “panel,” of course, is the same IPCC that ,little Greta Thunberg wants my little grand daughter to accept as the gospel truth, when it is anything but, as we see by returning to the Guardian, as follows:
Glaciologists who spoke to the Guardian say Himalayan glaciers contain so much ice it will be 300 years before it vanishes.
The affair raises serious questions about the rigour of the IPCC’s process of sifting and assessing the thousands of research findings it includes in its reports.
It also raises questions about the competence of Pachauri, who angrily defended the report’s conclusions about Himalayan glaciers after they were called “alarmist” last autumn by India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh.
Pachauri accused Ramesh of relying on “voodoo science”, called the minister “extremely arrogant” and said Ramesh’s claims were “not peer reviewed”.
It is now clear that it was the panel’s claims that were not reviewed.
The author of the part of the panel’s report, another Indian glaciologist, Murari Lal, last week defended inclusion of 2035, saying “the error if any lies with Dr Hasnain’s assertion”.
Pachauri’s statement repudiates that position.
He said he “regrets the poor application of well-established IPCC procedures in this instance”.
end quotes
So what is my little grand daughter to believe?
An existential question for her times!
Paul Plante says
And with respect to holding Barack Hussein Obama to account for his refusal to protect the future of my grand daughter’s generation by his repudiation of OUR United States Constitution in Juliana, with his incredible claim that as president he had the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation, the little girl would have me post these words spoken on the floor of the United States House of Representatives by Congressman George S. Boutwell on Dec.2nd, 1867 as her justification for holding Obama liable now that he no longer enjoys immunity from prosecution, to wit:
I think that we can not do otherwise than believe, that he (President Andrew Johnson) has disregarded that great injunction of the Constitution to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, that there is but one remedy.
The remedy is with this House, and it is nowhere else.
If we neglect or refuse to use our powers when the case arises demanding decisive action, the Government ceases to be a Government of law and becomes a Government of men.
end quotes
One hundred fifty-three (153) years later says my little grand daughter, with President Barack Hussein Obama openly and blatantly disregarding that great injunction of the Constitution to take care that the laws be faithfully executed as he clearly did in Juliana, that is exactly what has happened – because of the failure to hold Obama to account while he was still president and still impeachable, the Government has in fact ceased to be a Government of law and has become a Government of men, and Obama gets to skate.
With respect to Obama skating, my little grand daughter points to the utter hypocrisy of Adam Schiff in Finding of Fact VI of the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence document, “The Trump-Ukraine Impeachment Inquiry Report,” to wit:
In so doing, the President undermined U.S. policy supporting anti-corruption reform and the rule of law in Ukraine, and undermined U.S. national security.
end quotes
Trump undermined rule of law in Ukraine, so the report alleges, notwithstanding Trump has no Constitutional authority in Ukraine, a small detail but vital, and for that, he was impeached.
On the other hand, right here in America, which is where it matters to my little grand daughter and her young friends, Obama not only undermined rule of law with his position in Juliana that as president he had the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation, but he made an absolute mockery of it and the Constitution, for which he must be held to account by a citizen grand jury.
And again, she thanks the Cape Charles Mirror for letting her get her message out to the other children in America affected by Obama’s dereliction of duty, and hopefully, to their parents, as well to see justice for the children done here.
Paul Plante says
Now, to understand how these Juliana children plaintiffs came to have standing in federal district court to sue Barack Hussein Obama on civil rights grounds before that standing was stripped from them in January of this year, we need to go back to November of 2016, right after the November presidential election, when Hussein Obama still had time left enough left in office for Articles of Impeachment for GROSS DERELICTION OF DUTY to be lodged against him by the House of Representatives, that had to be aware of this civil rights lawsuit filed against Obama by these aggrieved children who are now out of court, where we have, to wit:
Plaintiffs in this civil rights action are a group of young people between the ages of eight and nineteen (“youth plaintiffs”); Earth Guardians, an association of young environmental activists; and Dr. James Hansen, acting as guardian for future generations.
Plaintiffs filed this action against defendants the United States, President Barack Obama, and numerous executive agencies.
Plaintiffs allege defendants have known for more than fifty years that the carbon dioxide (“CO;’) produced by burning fossil fuels was destabilizing the climate system in a way that would “significantly endanger plaintiffs, with the damage persisting for millenia.” First. Am. Comp!
Despite that knowledge, plaintiffs assert defendants, “(b)y their exercise of sovereign authority over our country’s atmosphere and fossil fuel resources, … permitted, encouraged, and otherwise enabled continued exploitation, production, and combustion of fossil fuels, … deliberately allow[ing] atmospheric C02 concentrations to escalate to levels unprecedented in human history[.]” Id
Although many different entities contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, plaintiffs aver defendants bear “a higher degree of responsibility than any other individual, entity, or country” for exposing plaintiffs to the dangers of climate change. Id.
Plaintiffs argue defendants’ actions violate their substantive due process rights to life, liberty, and property, and that defendants have violated their obligation to hold certain natural resources in trust for the people and for future generations.
Plaintiffs assert there is a very short window in which defendants could act to phase out fossil fuel exploitation and avert environmental catastrophe.
They seek (1) a declaration their constitutional and public trust rights have been violated and (2) an order enjoining defendants from violating those rights and directing defendants to develop a plan to reduce C02 emissions.
Defendants moved to dismiss this action for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and failure to state a claim. Doc. 27.
end quotes
That was on 16 November 2016, and those words were the words of Federal District Court Judge Ann Louise Aiken who graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1979 from the University of Oregon School of Law and who subsequently was twice nominated for a seat on the United States District Court for the District of Oregon by Bill “Bubba” Clinton, Hillary’s husband, in November 1995, and again on January 7, 1997, before Aiken was finally confirmed by the United States Senate on January 28, 1998, receiving her commission on February 4, 1998.
In the section titled “BACKGROUND,” Judge Aiken wrote as follows:
This is no ordinary lawsuit.
Plaintiffs challenge the policies, acts, and omissions of the President of the United States, the Council on Environmental Quality, the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Transportation (“DOT”), the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”).
This lawsuit challenges decisions defendants have made across a vast set of topics – decisions like whether and to what extent to regulate C02 emissions from power plants and vehicles, whether to permit fossil fuel extraction and development to take place on federal lands, how much to charge for use of those lands, whether to give tax breaks to the fossil fuel industry, whether to subsidize or directly fund that industry, whether to fund the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines at home and abroad, whether to permit the export and import of fossil fuels from and to the United States, and whether to authorize new marine coal terminal projects.
Plaintiffs assert defendants’ decisions on these topics have substantially caused the planet to warm and the oceans to rise.
They draw a direct causal line between defendants’ policy choices and floods, food shortages, destruction of property, species extinction, and a host of other harms.
This lawsuit is not about proving that climate change is happening or that human activity is driving it.
For the purposes of this motion, those facts are undisputed.
end quotes
Now, there is where I have to step in as an engineer and say, “whoa, when did those alleged ‘facts’ become undisputed?”
“Right after the IPCC said all the Himalayan glaciers were going to melt by 2035?”
But I don’t get to ask those questions, or have then answered, which is not the way science is supposed to work, which takes us back to Chapter 39 of ”A Short History Of Western Civilization” by Charles Edward Smith, Louisiana State University, and Lynn M. Case, University of Pennsylvania, copyright 1948, titled “The Age of Enlightenment,” where we have as follows:
The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were characterized by the advance of rationalism and the consequent weakening of dogmatism and superstition.
end quotes
Now, scientific rationalism, that which I employ as an engineer, is defined as a belief or theory that opinions and actions should be based on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response, and the 16 November 2016 decision of Judge Aiken is devoid of scientific rationalism, and instead is an emotional response, which takes us to dogmatism, which is exactly we are seeing here in this statement of Judge Aiken that “(F)or the purposes of this motion, those facts are undisputed,” where dogmatism as practiced by Judge Aiken is the tendency to lay down principles as incontrovertibly true, without consideration of evidence or the opinions of others.
As to superstition, it is defined as an excessively credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings, which is what “carbon pollution” is becoming in our times, or an unfounded belief, such as all changes in weather today are caused by carbon dioxide in the air, and no other natural cause, which is rank horse****.
And that observation takes us to these critical words from that 16 November 2016 Aiken decision which in January 2020 are going to find them stripped of their federal standing, and out of court, to wit:
Plaintiffs could have brought a lawsuit predicated on technical regulatory violations, but they chose a different path.
As masters of their complaint, they have elected to assert constitutional rather than statutory claims.
end quotes
But these children were hardly the “masters of their complaint,” precisely because they were children who couldn’t be expected to be able to put together a federal civil rights lawsuit and to be able to pick out a legal strategy, a failing one, as it turned out, with ramifications for all children in America, not just these Juliana plaintiffs. of asserting constitutional claims rather than statutory claims.
Who were the “masters of their complaint” were the lawyers who were using the lawsuit as a fundraising tool, along with “FATHER OF CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA” Dr. Jimmy Hansen, who became involved in this lawsuit as an “expert” according to the July 12, 2017 New York Magazine article “‘The Planet Could Become Ungovernable’: Climate Scientist James Hansen on Obama’s Environmental Record, Scientific Reticence, and His Climate Lawsuit Against the Federal Government” by David Wallace-Wells, where we have, to wit:
This week, to accompany our cover story on worst-case climate scenarios, we’re publishing a series of extended interviews with climatologists on the subject — most of them from the “godfather generation” of scientists who first raised the alarm about global warming several decades ago.
James Hansen is the former head of climate research for NASA, the author of the legendary early “zero model” for climate change, and is now the lead scientific figure in a lawsuit being brought against the federal government alleging complicity on climate change, which Hansen and his fellow litigants argue is a violation of the equal protection clause — since the costs of change will fall unequally on future generations.
Q: Tell me, how did you get involved in this lawsuit?
Hansen: That was interesting.
I wrote this article, “The Threat to the Planet,” in 2006, in The New York Review of Books.
It started out, “Animals are on the run.”
It was read by Mary Wood, a legal scholar at the University of Oregon who’s most responsible for developing the Atmospheric Trust idea — that the planet is held in trust by the current generation for future generations.
A student or postdoc of hers sent an email to me — I was a government employee, involved in a lot of stuff, so I never responded until finally we set up a teleconference in 2010.
I agreed to write a paper to provide the scientific basis for a lawsuit.
Then I decided, rather than writing the paper myself, I should get a bunch of international experts to be co-authors.
It took forever.
Q: Why?
Hansen: We submitted the paper to PNAS, and I’m an Academy member, so if I submit a review, I should be able to publish.
But the editor decided it was an unusual paper, with “normative statements,” and he gave it to an anonymous editorial board member, and he said I had to take out these normative statements criticizing the government.
So we iterated back and forth two or three times.
Finally, when he said the word dangerous was normative — that’s when I withdrew the paper and submitted it to PLOS One.
And eventually finally in 2013 it was published.
The paper was used for the first lawsuit, which got as far as the D.C. District Court, just below the Supreme Court.
And we lost at that level.
end quotes
And there I am going to pause for a moment to let those words sink in, because this is truly a fascinating story of the times we are in, and the impact it is going to have on our children and grandchildren is serious, and I don’t want that reality to get buried under too many words, at once.
Paul Plante says
Before returning to Jimmy Hansen, the “FATHER OF CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA,” and self-proclaimed GUARDIAN of FUTURE GENERATIONS of American children, and the role he played in this failed Juliana appeal which has resulted in these children Jimmy was acting as guardian of getting tossed unceremoniously out of court just recently on January 17, 2020, with respect to my own “standing” to comment on this botched law suit, which I think has greatly harmed little children in America like my grand daughter, on Sunday, February 8, 2004, the Albany, New York Times Union had an article on pro se litigants taking on the corrupt state of New York in court wherein was stated as follows:
Plante, a former Rensselaer County engineer, has taken it upon himself to reverse the illegal permitting of local gravel mining and waste hauling facilities and the alleged backroom commercial rezoning of his rural community.
He has gone up against town, planning and zoning boards; Rensselaer County government; Waste Management; Showers Enterprises and R.J. Valente Gravel, Inc.; the State Department of Environmental Conservation; and the attorney general’s office, among others.
The 58-year old disabled Vietnam veteran also is a vocal activist, who is currently attempting to prove in federal court that county social services, veterans and Samaritan Hospital officials tried for forcibly commit him to a mental health facility in 2001.
“The law is far to precious a thing to be left in the hands of lawyers,” said Plante, who has been called every name in the book.
“I did an Abe Lincoln.”
“If he could stretch out on the dirt floor and learn the law, so could I.”
Cognizant of the old adage that says those who represent themselves have a fool for a client, Plante confided: “I’d rather have a fool for a client than a fool for a lawyer.”
end quotes
And all these years later, I still feel the same way.
You don’t go to court as a non-lawyer and win against full-grown lawyers like what the New York state attorney general’s office puts on the playing field to defend corrupt and criminal acts by the state of New York and win by being stupid about what you are taking on.
You win by demonstrating chapter and verse HOW the hack politicians have violated the law, by first knowing the law(s) that should apply in any situation, and yes, the Constitution is a law unto itself, and then making it clear from the record that the law could not have been followed, because there is nothing in the record to prove it was, and the burden of proof is on the hack politicians to provide that record.
In this case, the Juliana lawyers and Jimmy Hansen had the outright gift of a “SLAM-DUNK” handed to them by Hussein Obama himself with his claim that he had the right as president to ignore the law, which clearly violated Article II of our Constitution, and they never said a word about it, at all.
WHY?
Why did they let Hussein Obama slide, instead of holding him accountable?
The children of America would like to know.
Paul Plante says
Getting back to the existential question on my little grand daughter’s mind, which is how did these Juliana lawyers and Dr. Jimmy Hansen let Obama slide when they had him cold making it clear he had no intention of taking care that the laws were enforced to protect those children from Obama’s depraved indifference to their plight, which is to say, Obama was caught out admitting that he had no intention of living up to his Constitutional oath of office, we need to go back to the New York Magazine article “‘The Planet Could Become Ungovernable’: Climate Scientist James Hansen on Obama’s Environmental Record, Scientific Reticence, and His Climate Lawsuit Against the Federal Government” by David Wallace-Wells on July 12, 2017, where we have the following relevant background as to the lawsuit itself, to wit:
Q: What happened?
Hansen: The D.C. District Court judge essentially said that we hadn’t shown a constitutional basis for the lawsuit.
end quotes
And the fact is that in the end, search as one might, they never did show a constitutional basis for the lawsuit, which is why it got thrown out by the Court of Appeals on 17 January 2020, although they well could have, if they hadn’t of been stupid about it, to the detriment of not only the Juliana petitioners, but little children like my grand daughter who is just now coming on the scene.
With respect to that, consider the “Alfredus” essay of Samuel Tenny in the Freeman’s Oracle in New Hampshire on January 18, 1788, to wit:
To prevent any interference between the federal and state governments, the objects of the former are pointed out in the preamble to the Constitution, viz. “To form a more perfect union — establish justice — insure domestic tranquility — provide for the common defence — promote the general welfare — and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
end quotes
And right there is the “SLAM DUNK,” as even someone as young as my little grand daughter could tell you, because there is no way that the position taken by Obama in that lawsuit could:
* Form a more perfect union (To the contrary, Obama’s position in that lawsuit was that he had the power to destroy the Union, as we see in Juliana, to wit: Plaintiffs bring suit to enforce the most basic structural principle embedded in our system of ordered liberty: that the Constitution does not condone the Nation’s willful destruction);.
* Establish justice (Obama’s position that he could destroy the Union as president made a mockery of the concept of Justice and if anything, disestablished it here in the USA);
* Insure domestic tranquility (Obama’s position that he could destroy the nation insures not domestic tranquility, but domestic chaos, instead);
* Promote the general welfare (Obama’s denial that these children had rights and he as president had an obligation to those children to take care the laws were enforced made a mockery of the concept of promoting the general welfare); and
* Secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity; (When an American president like Barack Hussein Obama can openly proclaim in federal court with impunity that he could destroy the nation, without getting called on it by anyone, then the blessings of liberty are long since gone to us and our posterity).
end quotes
So why did the Juliana lawyers and Dr. James Hansen let Barack Hussein Obama slide?
Stay tuned as we continue to search the record for that elusive answer.
Paul Plante says
And as we continue to contemplate and document the AGE of REASON in the United States of America being unequivocally and officially dead as of December 2005 when now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer, then an appeals court judge on the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, ruled that it was for the good of society-at-large that a professional engineer who would not lie to them or deceive them with “scientific falsehoods” should be declared “mentally ill and dangerous” by the State of New York and consigned to a gulag (state mental hospital) for drug-induced “mind wiping,” and the AGE of UN-REASON, or ANTHROPOCENE, a Greek word which translates roughly as AGE of ABSURDITY, coming into being definitively in December of 2005, when society-at-large in America accepted without question the ruling of now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer, then an appeals court judge on the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, that it was for their own good that a professional engineer who would not lie to them or deceive them with “scientific falsehoods” should be declared “mentally ill and dangerous” by the State of New York and consigned to a gulag (state mental hospital) for drug-induced “mind wiping,” let’s go back to Chapter 39, “The Age of Enlightenment,” of “A Short History of Western Civilization” by Charles Edward Smith, Louisiana State University, and Lynn M. Case, University of Pennsylvania, copyright 1948, where we have as follows with respect to the development of “science,” or rather, “rational scientific thinking,” to wit:
The works of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) were a powerful factor in producing a more critical intellectual attitude.
In his “Advancement of Learning,” he held that the primary sources of error in human reasoning were reverence for antiquity, blind acceptance of popular ideas, failure to employ critical observation and experiment, and intellectual impatience, which promotes hasty acceptance of tenuous conclusions.
end quotes
Focusing for the moment on the phrase “primary sources of error in human reasoning,” the word “reasoning” itself, which is an important concept here, is defined as “the action of thinking about something in a logical, sensible way.”
And that is exactly what got the engineer who would not lie to people condemned by the corrupt State of New York, and then-Circuit judge Sonia Sotomayor of the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City in 2005 so that he can no longer practice as a professional engineer in New York State to protect and safeguard life, health and property – his refusal to do other than think about things in a logical, sensible way, which takes us back in time to 2016, when Hillary Clinton was running for president as the chosen successor to Barack Hussein Obama to carry on his legacy of gross negligence and depraved indifference to human life, and the TALK RADIO 1300 Report for March 2, 2016 at 6:45 am, to wit:
So to bring this disgusting chapter in our local history to a sort of close, since this story is going to go on whether I speak out or not, nothing has ended here with Andy Cuomo’s successful cover-up of the gross negligence which has caused this public health fiasco, the people of Rensselaer County and especially Hoosick Falls, have gotten exactly what they asked for, which is no public health protection in Rensselaer County.
No groundwater protection, because the people of Rensselaer County and Hoosick Falls, through their County Executive John L. Buono, and Kathleen Jimino after him, did not want an honest professional engineer, they wanted a political whore - someone who would look the other way while telling them sweet lies that everything is alright, don’t worry, we have you protected, when who was being protected in reality was the polluters, because profits mean more than human life in NYS and Rensselaer County.
I don’t think anyone expressed that better than did the Dean of Area Political Commentators Fred LeBrun in a commentary in the Albany Times Union on July 7, 1993 where Mr. LeBrun noted that the Rensselaer County Associate Public Health Engineer was dumped for insubordination by his boss in the county health department, Ken Van Praag.
Insubordination was the Associate Public Health Engineer’s refusal to lie for Rensselaer County on command, his refusal to mislead the people of Rensselaer County whose lives he had a duty, as quaint a term as that is today, to protect.
According to Mr. LeBrun, who would know because he has an inside track on things political in Rensselaer County, officially, the Associate Public Health Engineer was terminated for talking directly to the media after he’d been told to route through his boss his brutally candid observations concerning the competence and motivations of those around him.
But unofficially, and here Mr. LeBrun hits the nail on the head, what got the Rensselaer County Associate Public Health Engineer bounced was what Fred LeBrun called his hard-headed, uncompromising view of his official duties, a vision not always shared by others in the county health department, or few others on the planet for that matter, including the NYSDOH, and yes, the Office of Governor of the state of New York, despite the pompous bellowings of governor Andy Cuomo to the contrary.
The Rensselaer County Associate Public Health Engineer refused to lie for the politicians.
He refused to be a political whore.
In a Troy RECORD editorial dated 4 April 1989, it was stated that the Rensselaer County Associate Public Health Engineer was honest to a fault, a point not challenged by his attackers, and that, as a matter of fact, that appears to be the bone they have to pick with him that he is too honest and is unyielding in his honesty.
The message was clear and unequivocal and was accepted by the people of Rensselaer County and Hoosick Falls without challenge - we cannot and will not have unyielding honesty in either Rensselaer County or the Cauldron of Corruption of New York state where the culture of corruption grows like barnacles on a boat bottom.
So, as Fred LeBrun told it on July 7, 1993, because of the Rensselaer County Associate Public Health Engineer’s hard-headed, uncompromising view of his official duties, a vision not always shared by others in the county health department, or few others on the planet for that matter, including the NYSDOH, the Rensselaer County Associate Public Health Engineer simply had to go and did.
And so the history that leads right to today in Hoosick Falls, Rensselaer County and the state of New York was set in motion right out in the open, right before everyone’s eyes.
And that is the way it goes, people, what you sow is what you reap.
end quotes
As these children in the Juliana civil rights lawsuit just found out on 17 January 2020, when they were unceremoniously tossed out of federal court because their constitutional claims were simply stupid, that saying remains very true to this day.
Paul Plante says
Getting back to the question of why “FATHER OF CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA” Dr. Jimmy Hansen, the self-proclaimed “Guardian” of the earth’s future generations, and the Juliana lawyers let Barack Hussein Obama slide and skate and wriggle off the hook when they had him dead to rights admitting that he did not intend to “take care that the laws were enforced,” despite the admonition in Article II of OUR United States Constitution that he do so, as president, for the answer, we need to go back to the New York Magazine article “‘The Planet Could Become Ungovernable’: Climate Scientist James Hansen on Obama’s Environmental Record, Scientific Reticence, and His Climate Lawsuit Against the Federal Government” by David Wallace-Wells on July 12, 2017, where first, we have the author of the article making this statement to Jimmy about the Juliana lawsuit, itself, to wit:
David Wallace-Wells: It’s interesting to hear you talk about it, because in reading about the suit I’ve processed it as a work of protest and advocacy, not something that was aimed at really winning.
end quotes
Frankly, that is my impression, as well, that the lawyers and Jimmy never actually intended to win the suit, because I viewed it as nothing more than a fundraising tool for the Juliana lawyers and Jimmy’s own programs, which were the subject of a Science article entitled “Hansen’s Climate Science and Advocacy Project Under Way” by Eli Kintisch on Feb. 26, 2014, where we learned as follows:
James Hansen may have retired from NASA but he’s still active in the climate change wars.
Five months into its existence, his Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University is moving ahead on its unique goals.
Led by the 72-year-old climate scientist, the initiative focuses on bringing policy-relevant science to the public, building on dogged—and often controversial—efforts along those lines by its director.
The team has raised sufficient funds to support its efforts for at least 2 years, Kharecha says.
Its donors include nonprofits and foundations such as the Flora Family Foundation and ClimateWorks and individuals, including philanthropists Jeremy Grantham and H. F. “Gerry” Lenfest.
“We hope to get external grants from federal funding agencies as well,” Kharecha says.
“I’ve been able to meet with him more, as he’s not quite as slammed with the organizational duties,” says attorney Julia Olson, director of Our Children’s Trust, an advocacy group suing the U.S. government to act on climate change.
Hansen, supported by his two Columbia colleagues and other scientists, has written an amicus brief for that effort, which relies on the doctrine of environmental “public trust.”
He plans to testify in the case, which is ongoing in courts in several states.
end quotes
That was 26 February 2014 that we were told that Jimmy Hansen was going to testify in court on behalf of these children, and now we know where that all ended up, thanks to Jimmy, with the children unceremoniously tossed out of court on 17 January 2020, this after Jimmy stated as follows in that New York Magazine article “‘The Planet Could Become Ungovernable’: Climate Scientist James Hansen on Obama’s Environmental Record, Scientific Reticence, and His Climate Lawsuit Against the Federal Government” by David Wallace-Wells on July 12, 2017, as follows concerning the Juliana lawsuit, to wit:
Public trust is a common-law thing, so while you can argue it is protected by the Constitution, it isn’t explicitly in the Constitution.
But even before meeting Mary, I had started in my talks to discuss equal rights and equal protection of the law for young people.
And now, in going back and doing it again (refiling the lawsuit in Oregon instead of Washington, D.C.) , they are still using the public trust argument but also, explicitly, the idea of equal protection of the law and due process, that young people are being deprived of life, liberty, and property.
I think — I’m 99.99 percent certain we’re going to win in Oregon.
As you know, it’s—
A friendly circuit!
The West Coast is more liberal.
But I think the constitutional basis is clear.
end quotes
The federal appeals court found different, however:
The plaintiffs’ experts opine that atmospheric carbon levels of 350 parts per million are necessary to stabilize the global climate.
But, even accepting those opinions as valid, they do not suggest how an order from this Court can achieve that level, other than by ordering the government to develop a plan.
Although the plaintiffs’ invitation to get the ball rolling by simply ordering the promulgation of a plan is beguiling, it ignores that an Article III court will thereafter be required to determine whether the plan is sufficient to remediate the claimed constitutional violation of the plaintiffs’ right to a “climate system capable of sustaining human life.”
We doubt that any such plan can be supervised or enforced by an Article III court.
And, in the end, any plan is only as good as the court’s power to enforce it.
C. Our dissenting colleague quite correctly notes the gravity of the plaintiffs’ evidence; we differ only as to whether an Article III court can provide their requested redress.
In suggesting that we can, the dissent reframes the plaintiffs’ claimed constitutional right variously as an entitlement to “the country’s perpetuity,” Diss. at 35–37, 39, or as one to freedom from “the amount of fossil-fuel emissions that will irreparably devastate our Nation,” id. at 57.
But if such broad constitutional rights exist, we doubt that the plaintiffs would have Article III standing to enforce them.
Their alleged individual injuries do not flow from a violation of these claimed rights.
Indeed, any injury from the dissolution of the Republic would be felt by all citizens equally, and thus would not constitute the kind of discrete and particularized injury necessary for Article III standing. See Friends of the Earth, 528 U.S. at 180-81.
Paul Plante says
Cutting to the chase for my little grand daughter here, the answer to the question of why the “FATHER OF CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA” Dr. Jimmy Hansen, the self-proclaimed “Guardian” of the earth’s future generations, and the Juliana lawyers let Barack Hussein Obama slide and skate and wriggle off the hook when they had him dead to rights admitting that he did not intend to “take care that the laws were enforced,” despite the admonition in Article II of OUR United States Constitution that he do so, the answer from Jimmy himself is that it always was just a political game with him, and he thought that Obama was on his side, that is to say, Jimmy’s side, when the facts of the matter are that Obama was never on anybody’s “side,” but his own as we see from the Guardian article “Ex-Nasa scientist: 30 years on, world is failing ‘miserably’ to address climate change – James Hansen, who gave a climate warning in 1988 Senate testimony, says real hoax is by leaders claiming to take action” by Oliver Milman in New York @olliemilman on 19 Jun 2018, to wit:
There is particular scorn for Barack Obama.
Hansen says in a scathing upcoming book that the former president “failed miserably” on climate change and oversaw policies that were “late, ineffectual and partisan”.
Hansen even accuses Obama of passing up the opportunity to thwart Donald Trump’s destruction of US climate action, by declining to settle a lawsuit the scientist, his granddaughter and 20 other young people are waging against the government, accusing it of unconstitutionally causing peril to their living environment.
“Near the end of his administration the US said it would reduce emissions 80% by 2050,” Hansen said.
“Our lawsuit demands a reduction of 6% a year so I thought, ‘That’s close enough, let’s settle the lawsuit.’”
“We got through to Obama’s office but he decided against it.”
end quotes
And Jimmy was stunned, as we learn from the New York Magazine article “‘The Planet Could Become Ungovernable’: Climate Scientist James Hansen on Obama’s Environmental Record, Scientific Reticence, and His Climate Lawsuit Against the Federal Government” by David Wallace-Wells on July 12, 2017, to wit:
Jimmy Hansen: And finally, near the end of the Obama administration, I tried to get Obama to settle our lawsuit.
Which would have made sense.
Actually the judge in Oregon was puzzled as to why Obama was fighting us.
Because Obama, when he talked about the planet, he sounded like us.
David Wallace-Wells: He (Obama) uses the phrases “existential threat,” though I think some people don’t quite understand what he means by that.
end quotes
That was on July 12, 2017, and going on three years later, with time to reflect on what 8 years of Hussein Obama has meant for both America and the world, think Syria, for example, which is a huge humanitarian mess today because of Hussein Obama thinking the world was his to rule, and break as he pleased, we know that when Hussein used the words “existential threat,” they were nothing more than a fancy soundbite.
And because Jimmy Hansen lacked the hormones to pin Obama to the mat, Obama got to do as he had been doing since he was young, which is SKATING, which takes us back to the Guardian, as follows:
“Poor Jim Hansen.”
“He’s a tragic hero,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard academic who studies the history of science.
end quotes
And indeed there is a CULT of Jimmy Hansen, as we can see from a ClientEarth article entitled “Climate litigation a lasting legacy of Hansen’s historic testimony 30 years ago” on 25 June 2018, to wit:
Saturday marked 30 years since then NASA climate scientist James Hansen gave his historic testimony on human-induced global warming to a US Senate committee.
While not the first warning to decision-makers, it was certainly the most publicised with news media reporting his findings that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now.”
end quotes
And the Environmental Defense Fund was gushing praise for Jimmy in the article “Hansen was right: Marking an anniversary by misleading the public” by Ilissa Ocko published July 18, 2018, to wit:
With the thirtieth anniversary of former NASA scientist Jim Hansen’s landmark testimony to Congress on the urgent need to address climate change, numerous articles marked the occasion by demonstrating that his 1988 predictions have proven to be accurate.
end quotes
Which takes us back to the Guardian once more, as follows:
“The Cassandra aspect of his (Jimmy Hansen) life is that he’s cursed to understand and diagnose what’s going on but unable to persuade people to do something about it.”
“We are all raised to believe knowledge is power but Hansen proves the untruth of that slogan.”
“Power is power.”
“Obama was committed to action but couldn’t do much with the Congress he had,” Oreskes said.
“To blame the Democrats and Obama is to misunderstand the political context.”
“There was a huge, organized network that put forward a message of confusion and doubt.”
end quotes
And Roger that, alright!
There was indeed a huge, organized network that put forward a message of confusion and doubt, and its name was and remains the IPCC!
And thanks to the Cape Charles Mirror alone, my little grand daughter is being afforded an opportunity unavailable to her elsewhere to challenge that huge, organized network known as the IPCC that is putting forward the message of confusion and doubt that fuels the climate-change hysteria created by Jimmy Hansen in 1988 when he told a US congressional hearing he could declare “with 99% confidence” that a recent sharp rise in temperatures was a result of human activity.
Paul Plante says
R.I.P. Age of Reason, indeed, and enter instead the AGE of UN-REASON, or ANTHROPOCENE, a Greek word which translates roughly as AGE of ABSURDITY, which age came into being definitively in December of 2005, when society-at-large in America accepted without question the ruling of now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer, then an appeals court judge on the 2d Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City, that it was for their own good that a professional engineer qualified as a public health engineer who would not lie to them or deceive them with “scientific falsehoods” or engage in professional misconduct by committing fraudulent acts should be declared “mentally ill and dangerous” for doing so, refusing to condone professional misconduct harmful to the public by other licensed professionals, by the State of New York and consigned to a gulag (state mental hospital) for drug-induced “mind wiping,” which is a true story that happened in the state of New York on 22 August 2001.
And that reality, for reality it now is, and then some, surreal as it has become, in turn takes us back to the Guardian article “Ex-Nasa scientist: 30 years on, world is failing ‘miserably’ to address climate change – James Hansen, who gave a climate warning in 1988 Senate testimony, says real hoax is by leaders claiming to take action” by Oliver Milman in New York @olliemilman on 19 Jun 2018, and Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard academic who studies the history of science. who was quoted in that article, as saying “(P)oor Jim Hansen, he’s a tragic hero, there was a huge, organized network that put forward a message of confusion and doubt,” which comment about “a huge, organized network that put forward a message of confusion and doubt” takes us back to November of 2016, and the district court ruling in Juliana v. USA wherein the Court stated in favor of granting the Juliana plaintiffs the standing the Appeals Court stripped from them in January of this year that “(A)t oral argument, plaintiffs supplied the Court with a timeline documenting purported evidence of defendants’ knowledge of climate change,” and “(T)he timeline, which dates back to 1955, includes the 1988 testimony of Dr. James Hansen before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources,” which statement takes us back to June 23, 1988 and what has to be the epitome of a message of confusion and doubt which is found in the Congressional Testimony of Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Space Institute to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, to wit:
Mr. Chairman and committee members, thank you for the opportunity to present the results of my research on the greenhouse effect which has been carried out with my colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
The four warmest years, as the Senator mentioned, have all been in the 1980s.
And 1988 so far is so much warmer than 1987, that barring a remarkable and improbable cooling, 1988 will the warmest year on the record.
end quotes
But was that true what Jimmy was saying to the members of the United States Senate on June 23, 1988 about the temperature differences between 1987 and 1988?
Or is that a case of a tragic hero named Jimmy Hanson putting forward a message of confusion and doubt?
For that answer, let’s go to a New York Times article entitled “Global Warmth In ’88 Is Found To Set a Record” by Philip Shabecoff, Special To the New York Times, on Feb. 4, 1989, where we have as follows:
Dr. Phil Jones, a climatologist at East Anglia, said global temperatures rose on average about one degree Fahrenheit since the beginning of the century.
But the scientists added that last year’s warm temperatures appeared to have been linked, at least in part, to natural fluctuations.
end quotes
But whoa, wait a minute, because in his June 23, 1988 Congressional Testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, our Jimmy said thusly:
So with 99 percent confidence we can state that the warming during this time period is a real warming trend.
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So is Jimmy making things up there?
Is Jimmy being overly dramatic to whip up some hysteria, as he has managed to do, which has gotten his name in the press quite a bit?
Or was Jimmy out and out insane and hysterical when he gave that address?
Let’s go back to the NYT and see if we can glean any more relevant information from that article to help us assess what the answers to those questions might be, to wit:
Last week, scientists from the United States Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said that a study of temperature readings for the contiguous 48 states over the last century showed there had been no significant change in average temperature over that period.
end quotes
HUH?
Did I read that right?
Scientists from NOAA said that a study of temperature readings for the contiguous 48 states over the last century showed there had been no significant change in average temperature over that period.
No significant change in average temperature over the last century?
But wait – that was not what Jimmy Hansen was peddling to not only the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on June 23, 1988, but to the world, as well, as we clearly can see from the New York Times article entitled “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate” by Philip Shabecoff, Special To the New York Times, on June 24, 1988, where we and the candid world were informed as follows:
The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago, and the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution, a space agency scientist reported today.
Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the ”greenhouse effect.”
But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.
end quotes
So, talk about a case of a tragic hero named Jimmy Hanson putting forward a message of confusion and doubt alright!
No wonder poor little Greta Thunberg is so confused and scared!
Paul Plante says
With respect to why the Cape Charles Mirror is so important to little girls like my grand daughter who has only come into the world we inhabit recently, what people born after the MILLENNIUM, the so-called ANTHROPOCENE generation, don’t understand and cannot comprehend is that 32 years ago, when Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Space Institute testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on June 23, 1988 and started the climate change hysteria that children of my little grand daughter’s generation are now confronted with, where it is almost impossible anymore to separate out the chaff from the wheat, with so many questionable or outright false statements are now a part of the record, starting with Jimmy’s testimony to the Senate committee on June 23, 1988, which testimony is largely hobble-gobble, malarkey, tripe and just plain fantastical garbage, there was no way for citizens like myself to challenge what Jimmy was saying then, for a host of reasons centering around even having access to the process, let alone a voice in the proceedings.
In 1988, as hard as it is for the ANTHROPOCENE generation to believe, there were no cell phones and laptops or desktop computers, nor was there an internet, and most important of all, there was no Cape Charles Mirror, so we in the countryside were effectively a bunch of mutes when it came to making our points known outside of our immediate neighborhood.
And it is doubtful that a majority of people in America even knew that Jimmy appeared before the Senate committee that day, or even knew who he was, because it wasn’t news that made it out to the countryside, or to the interior of the nation, where people do not read, as surprising as it might sound, the New York Times, and so missed out on the article “Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate” by Philip Shabecoff, Special To the New York Times, on June 24, 1988, to wit:
The earth has been warmer in the first five months of this year than in any comparable period since measurements began 130 years ago, and the higher temperatures can now be attributed to a long-expected global warming trend linked to pollution, a space agency scientist reported today.
Until now, scientists have been cautious about attributing rising global temperatures of recent years to the predicted global warming caused by pollutants in the atmosphere, known as the ”greenhouse effect.”
But today Dr. James E. Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration told a Congressional committee that it was 99 percent certain that the warming trend was not a natural variation but was caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere.
Dr. Hansen, a leading expert on climate change, said in an interview that there was no ”magic number” that showed when the greenhouse effect was actually starting to cause changes in climate and weather.
But he added, ”It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”
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And today, thanks to the internet and the Cape Charles Mirror, I can say that that is the kind of irresponsible and misleading horse****, especially that statement that “the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here,” when in fact, for the last several thousand years, it has never not been here, that Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard academic who studies the history of science and who called Jimmy Hansen “tragic hero,” referred to when she talked about “a huge, organized network that put forward a message of confusion and doubt,” which huge, organized network putting forward a message of confusion and doubt includes, Jimmy Hansen, the New York Times, the Guardian and the IPCC, but alas, as the GRETA FEVER sweeping our nation makes clear, the damage has already been done in terms of psychological harm done to the impressionable children of America by this Hansen climate change hysteria that began 32 years ago on 23 June 1988 when Jimmy Hansen of the NASA Goddard Space Institute testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources about the “greenhouse effect,” as if Jimmy had discovered something new and unknown that was not natural, when in fact, it was the opposite that was quite true, but the New York Times wouldn’t know that, nor apparently, neither did Jimmy Hansen or the members of the Senate committee, themselves.
As to the “greenhouse effect,” which Jimmy was just discovering in 1988, in his seminal scientific work titled “WORLDS IN THE MAKING – THE EVOLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE” by Svante Arrhenius, Director of the Physico-Chemical Nobel Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, published March, 1908, we find that the concept has long been known, and in fact if it were not for the greenhouse effect, life on earth as we know it would not be possible, as we clearly can see from a NASA publication entitled “Global Warming – Heating by the greenhouse effect,” where we have as follows:
Our planet’s surface is now kept at a comfortable temperature because the atmosphere traps some of the radiant heat from the Sun and keeps it near the surface, warming the planet and sustaining living creatures.
Jean Baptise Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) first conceived the mechanism in the 1820s, while wondering how the Sun’s heat could be retained to keep the Earth hot.
Fourier’s idea, still accepted today, is that the atmosphere lets some of the Sun’s radiation in, but it doesn’t let all of the radiation back out.
Visible sunlight passes through our transparent atmosphere to warm the Earth’s land and oceans, and some of this heat is reradiated in infrared form.
The longer infrared rays are less energetic than visible ones and do not slice through the atmosphere as easily as visible light.
So our atmosphere absorbs some of the infrared heat radiation, and some of the trapped heat is reradiated downward to warm the planet’s surface and the air immediately above it.
Fourier likened the thin atmospheric blanket to a huge glass bell jar, made out of clouds and gases, that holds the Earth’s heat close to its surface.
The warming by heat-trapping gases in the air is now known as the “greenhouse effect”, but this is a misnomer.
The air inside a garden greenhouse is heated because it is enclosed, preventing the circulation of air currents that would carry away heat and cool the interior.
Nevertheless, the term is now so common that we will also sometimes designate the heat-trapping gases as greenhouse gases, and let greenhouse effect designate the process by which an atmosphere traps heat near a planet’s surface.
Right now, the warming influence is literally a matter of life and death.
It keeps the average surface temperature of the planet at 288 degrees kelvin (15 degrees Celsius or 59 degrees Fahrenheit).
Without this greenhouse effect, the average surface temperature would be 255 degrees kelvin (-18 degrees Celsius or 0 degrees Fahrenheit); a temperature so low that all water on Earth would freeze, the oceans would turn into ice and life, as we know it, would not exist.
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So talk about a huge, organized network putting forward a message of confusion and doubt, alright, and its name is Dr. James Hansen, the self-proclaimed “GUARDIAN” of the earth’s children, and thankfully, we today have the Cape Charles Mirror to expose his 32 years of bull**** that have made poor little Greta Thunberg so scared she wants adults to panic so they can know the fear she lives with every day because of the hysteria mongering of Jimmy Hansen and the MSM including the New York Times!