Archive for May, 2009

Middletown Honors The Greatest Generation: Our WW II Vets

May 25, 2009

(this post also appears today at Right of Middle)

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The 2009 Middletown Connecticut Memorial Day parade and ceremonies were dedicated to our World War II veterans, The Greatest Generation.

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Marty Reardon Sr., (pictured below) commander of the 7th District of the American Legion, will speak. After 15 years as commander, Reardon is stepping down.

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The keynote address was given by U.S. Army Captain Gluth, who heads the recruitment services office in New Haven.

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Am enthusiastic crowd lined both sides of Main Street to watch the hour long parade. There were contingents of marching bands, little leaguers, boy and girl scouts, fraternal and service organizations, military formations, farm tractors, and of course, a selection of fire apparatus, old and new, from Middletown and several nearby towns. Our mayor, Sebastian Giuliano, and the Connecticut Secretary of the State, Susan Bysiewicz, and Rep. Rosa Delauro were on hand as well as other local politicians.

Joy Ride Middletown Ct Memorial Parade

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The last photo is from the ceremony at the South Green where the wreath laying took place. Pictured are two vets in colorful biker regalia. Mayor Sebastian Giuliano is visible (grey suit) on the platform, between the men.

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And finally, a video of some of the parade:

Climate of Extremes: Patrick J. Michaels

May 9, 2009

Patrick J. Michaels: Cato Institute

Patrick J. Michaels: Cato Institute

This article appeared in National Review Online’s Planet Gore page (Jan 30, 2009)

Al Gore’s Climate of Extremes [Patrick J. Michaels]

Ho-hum. On January 28, in the midst of a pelting sleet storm, Al Gore told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the end is nigh from global warming.

He told the Senate that “some scientists” predict up to 11 degrees of warming in the next 91 years (while failing to note that the last 12 have seen exactly none), and that this would “bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten the fiber of life everywhere on earth.” Hey folks, this is serious!

Besides having a remarkable knack for scheduling big speeches on remarkably cold or snowy days (it’s known as the “Gore Effect” in journalistic circles), Gore has been incredibly ineffective in bringing his message home.

According to the New York Times, Gore told the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last November, “I feel, in a sense, I’ve failed badly. . . . [T]here is not anything anywhere close to an appropriate sense of urgency [about global warming]. This is an existential threat.”

And fail he has. The Pew Foundation recently asked Americans to choose which of 20 prominent issues is of most importance. They included the economy, crime, education, and, of course, global warming, which came in dead last….(read the rest here)

The video above is part 1 of 3 (be sure to watch all three parts) in which scientist Patrick J. Michaels is interviewed by Jon Caldara, president of The Independence Institute, a Colorado think tank. Patrick J. Michaels and Robert C. Balling, Jr. are the authors of Climate of Extremes, published by The Cato Institute in Jan 2009. Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at The Cato Institute in Washington D.C. Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change….

In the Preface to Climate of Extremes former Virginia State Climatologist Michaels describes how he and other state climatologists were stripped of their titles, and jobs, and told by their governors to “shut up” about the global warming hoax. Something about, in the case of Oregon’s Climatologist, contradictions interfering “with the state’s stated goals to reduce greenhouse gases.’’

Continuing from the Preface:

David Legates, at the University of Delaware, was told by Governor Ruth Ann Minner (D) that he could no longer speakon globalwarming as State Climatologist. His faculty position is a regular tenured line in the geography department. He’s free, as State Climatologist, to say anything about the weather, so long as there’s no political implication…..

Out West, things got even uglier. The Assistant State Climatologist for Washington, Mark Albright, was fired because, despite his boss’s orders, he refused to stop e-mailing—to journalists, to inquiringcitizens, to anyone—the entire snowfall record for the Cascade Mountainsrather than the cherry-picked one. For e-mailing that record,the assistant state climatologist in Washington lost his job.What had started with Oregon’s George Taylor had migratedacross the Columbia River.

For a further account of these shenanigans see NBC & Global Warming Jihad

Patrick J. Michaels and Joh Caldara

Patrick J. Michaels and Jon Caldara

For some comic relief listen to Paul Shanklin as Algore singing “Ball of Fire” (courtesy Rush Limbaugh show:

Carbon Dioxide NOT a Pollutant! ‘Tis Necessary for All Life

May 4, 2009

Science has now proven the following very important points:

  • CO2 is definitely not a pollutant. It is a friendly trace gas necessary for all life.
  • Human-produced CO2 is a miniscule fraction of a percentage of greenhouse gases.
  • 96.5% of all greenhouse gases emit from the oceans, naturally.
  • Without CO2, vegetation dies, herbivores die, you die.
  • CO2 levels used to be much higher many times in the past.
  • Higher temperatures from the sun result in CO2 levels rising long afterwards.
  • Rising CO2 is an effect of global warming, not a cause.
  • Global warming and cooling is a natural phenomenon.
  • The higher the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the greener our planet becomes.
  • Forests and plant life growth has increased by approx 40% over the last 50 years, thanks to CO2.
  • Increasing CO2 yields larger food crops. This is beneficial to a growing population.
  • The Earth is not currently warming, it is in fact cooling.
  • Temperatures in the past have often been much warmer than today.
  • Even if it were to happen, a warmer Earth is far better than a colder one, for all life.
  • Many scientists believe we are on the brink of another ice age.
  • When the planet warms and cools it is purely due to the sun. Not your car.
  • Polar ice is now at record levels and still growing.
  • Climate changes happen all the time, and have occurred much faster than anything in modern times.
  • There has been no increase in extreme weather. In fact, records show the exact opposite.

Read the whole article at I Love Carbon Dioxide

Also see Michell Malkin, June 2008: In Praise of Carbon Dioxide
Here is a You Tube interview with Ann McElhinney, producer and director of “Not Evil Just Wrong”, a feature length documentary now in release:

CO 2 NOT a Pollutant