John Paul Stevens, Oxfordian

/

When retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens died a few weeks ago at age 99, my principal memories of him were as someone who would go along with the pro-big-government orthodoxy and groupthink on pretty much any important issue. This was the man who had written opinions including Kelo v. City of New London (allowing use of a government’s eminent domain power to take property from one private owner only to turn it over to another), Arizona v. Cant (supporting an expansive view of police ability to search a vehicle after arresting the driver), and Massachusetts v. EPA (finding that EPA must determine under the Clean Air Act whether emissions of CO2 constitute a “danger” to human health and safety, and if so, must regulate those emissions). Was there anything actually interesting about this guy?

But then, on reading a few obituaries of Stevens, I learned that he was an “Oxfordian” — that is, someone who supported the position that the true author of the Shakespeare plays and other works was not the commoner from Stratford-on-Avon about whom we have all learned, but rather Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. And Stevens wasn’t just someone who had expressed at some point a vague sympathy with the Oxfordian thesis. Instead, he had conducted a moot court exercise on the authorship question, and then actually written a substantial article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in 1992 (well into his time as a Supreme Court justice) laying out the Oxfordian position in the form of presentation of evidence in a legal case. And in 2009 (shortly before his retirement from the Court) Stevens had been given an award called “Oxfordian of the Year” by something called the Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship, a group of supporters of the Oxfordian thesis.

Have you ever gotten interested in the question of the “authorship” of the Shakespeare works? . . .

Read More

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXVI

/
The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXVI

Before moving on from this business of July 2019 supposedly being the “hottest month ever,” I want to pause to take note of some follow-on propaganda fresh out of the Washington Post.

A week ago today, on August 13, the Post published a lengthy “climate” piece with the scary headline “2°C: BEYOND THE LIMIT: Extreme climate change has arrived in America.” The piece is several thousand words long and carries the by-lines of the entire Post climate propaganda team: Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens. The gist is that “extreme” climate change — defined here as increase in annual mean temperature exceeding 2 deg C over some year in the past — has now been observed in certain areas of the United States. Not the whole U.S., mind you, but only certain areas — and not very large areas at that. Excerpt:

“These winters do not exist anymore," says Marty Kane, a lawyer and head of the Lake Hopatcong Foundation. . . . [A] century of climbing temperatures has changed the character of the Garden State. The massive ice industry and skate sailing association are but black-and-white photographs at the local museum. . . . New Jersey may seem an unlikely place to measure climate change, but it is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation. Its average temperature has climbed by close to 2 degrees Celsius since 1895 — double the average for the Lower 48 states.

Before getting into more details of this article, let me first turn to how the Post chose to use the article in its editorial section. On Sunday, August 18, the Post had an unsigned editorial with the headline “Global warming is already here. Denying it is unforgivable.” The basic idea here is to use the definitive reporting of the Post’s crack team to scare the readers and to bash President Trump: . . .

Read More

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXV

/

I posted Part XXIV of this series just three days ago, on Wednesday August 14. The subject of that post was the “homogenization” of official historical temperature data, by which the keepers of our official temperature records from ground-based thermometers use the excuses of station moves and instrumentation changes to adjust earlier temperatures downward in order to create an artificial warming trend and make recent temperatures appear to be the warmest ever.

But why would anyone engage in such a stupid game? After all, it’s been a good 50 years since the network of ground-based thermometers was recognized as completely inadequate to the task of keeping track of the earth’s changing climate. This network just had too many unfixable issues that meant that its measurement accuracy was not nearly sufficient for the task at hand. The issues include things like poor coverage of most of the earth’s surface (e.g., the whole southern hemisphere), essentially no coverage of the poles or the oceans, urban heat island issues affecting many of the most important stations, poorly tracked station moves and instrumentation changes, and so forth. These many issues are reasons why the decision was made back in the 1970s to spend some serious money to create a far superior methodology to track not just temperature readings at randomly sited ground stations, but instead to track the bulk heat content of the entire lower troposphere. Since 1979 the U.S. government has spent several billion dollars to build, launch and operate a group of satellites with instrumentation called “microwave sounding units,” designed to measure true average worldwide temperatures of the lower troposphere. Thus, since 1979, the network of ground-based thermometers has been made obsolete. We now have the far more accurate satellite temperature record to guide us. . . .

Read More

New York City Housing Authority Update

/
New York City Housing Authority Update

I keep returning to the case of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) because it is such a perfect illustration of the socialist economic model in practice. There about 170,000 NYCHA apartments, housing around 400,000 people. Most of the apartments were built from about the late 1940s to the 1970s, to be technically “owned” by the City of New York, although nobody expects any return on the investment. Maintenance and upkeep are in the hands of a unionized bureaucracy, headed by a Commissioner reporting to the Mayor. The unionized staff gets paid for going through the motions, rather than for assuring that the residents are receiving a good-quality housing product. Nobody ever gets an extra dollar of pay for getting the buildings ready to go for the next ten years, or for the next generation.

Actually, it’s far worse than that. The commissioners turn over every few years, and their only interest is in not having the buildings fall apart on their watch. The employees have union contracts that perversely reward inefficiency. For example, NYCHA’s plumbers have negotiated themselves a deal where all shifts are Monday through Friday, 8 AM to 4:30 PM, and any work outside those hours gets paid at “overtime” rates. Clearly, the plumbers maximize their income when the plumbing is old and prone to regular breaks, requiring emergency calls during the nights and weekends when the pay is time-and-a-half or even double. Fortunately for them, the genius economic planners who put this NYCHA thing together some 40 to 70 years ago never considered the possibility that after such a period of time the buildings would need major capital upgrades. No plan was ever put in place to provide for such upgrades. As the buildings get older, the breakdowns become more frequent and worse. The living conditions get worse and worse, while the employees make more and more money.

Mostly, NYCHA has been out of the news lately. But thank the Lord for the New York Post, which will not let go. . . .

Read More

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXIV

/
The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXIV

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time is the fraud committed by the keepers of official world temperature records, by which they intentionally adjust early year temperature records downward in order to support assertions that dangerous human-caused global warming is occurring and that the most recent year or month is the “hottest ever.” The assertions of dangerous human-caused global warming then form the necessary predicate for tens of billions of dollars of annual spending going to academic institutions; to the “climate science” industry; to wind, solar and other alternative energy projects; to electric cars; and on and on. In terms of real resources diverted from productive to unproductive activities based on falsehoods, this fraud dwarfs any other scientific fraud ever conceived in human history.

This is Part XXIV of my series on this topic. To read Parts I through XXIII, go to this link.

The previous posts in this series have mostly focused on particular weather stations, comparing the currently-reported temperature history for each station with previously-reported data. For example, the very first post in this series, from July 2013, looked at one of my favorite stations, the one located in Central Park in New York City. Somehow, the early-year temperatures reported for the month of July for that very prominent station had been substantially adjusted downward, thus notably enhancing a previously-slight warming trend: . . .

Go through the various posts in this series to find dozens more of such examples.

But how exactly are these downward adjustments accomplished? Just what are the games that they are playing? . . .

Read More

Jeffrey Epstein: Let The Conspiracy Theories Begin!

/
Jeffrey Epstein: Let The Conspiracy Theories Begin!

I’m old enough to have been around when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, on November 22, 1963. The suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was caught by Dallas police within about an hour after the shooting. They initially put him in a lock-up at Dallas police headquarters, where Oswald instantly became the highest-profile prisoner in the country. Just two days later, on November 24, the police undertook to transfer Oswald from the police headquarters to the county jail. They allowed a group of reporters into the basement of the police headquarters to observe as they escorted Oswald out to a waiting armored car to take him to the jail. Suddenly, with TV cameras rolling, a guy named Jack Ruby emerged from the group of reporters and shot Oswald dead at point blank range. By the end of the day, pretty much everybody in the country (myself included) had seen the clip of the shooting.

Who was this Ruby? He owned a couple of nightclubs in Dallas, but had a highly sketchy background that included alleged mob ties and involvement in drug dealing. No direct links between him and Oswald were ever revealed. His motive for killing Oswald? Excellent question. . . .

You can easily understand why there has been an endless profusion of alternatives to the official “lone gunman” theory of the Kennedy assassination. If Oswald had been working with or backed by some powerful interests, they would clearly want him disposed of as soon as possible once he was arrested. Now Oswald had been silenced before ever saying a word. Ruby had no obvious personal motive for the shooting, and was just the kind of guy who might be carrying out a “hit.” And the Ruby hit doesn’t gibe very well with the “lone gunman” hypothesis of the Kennedy assassination. Thus we have had half a century of theories — officially going by the name “conspiracy theories” — as to who might have been working with Oswald to kill Kennedy, and why. Multiple official inquiries, most notably the Warren Commission, have tried to put these speculations to rest, but have never fully succeeded.

And now once again, in the person of Jeffrey Epstein, the highest profile prisoner in the country has died while in official custody, this time of the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the Manhattan Correctional Center.

Read More