What’s the point of taking off our shoes at airport security if the screenings can’t pick up a myriad of explosives and detonators?

According to reports the “underwear bomb” worn by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was a military-grade plastic explosive called Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, and neither that nor the detonator would have been caught by standard metal detectors. Airports in the United States have a smattering of “sniffer” booths or occasional bomb-sniffing dogs that would have caught such explosives, but for the most part it would be pure luck if an explosive-laden terrorist was sent to the proper “sniffer” line.

So now we know that the vast majority of security we’ve undergone for the past 8 years has been a facade, designed to make us feel better about flying. At the end of the day it’s really vigilant passengers and malfunctioning bombs that have saved lives. While Abdulmutallab and “shoebomber” Richard Reid have both been categorized as bungling nincompoops it’s just a matter of time before one of these bombs works as designed and kills a slew of people.

Meanwhile, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab clearly received aid. If the presence of military explosives wasn’t enough to show that, at least one eye-witness claims that another man coaxed Amsterdam security officials into allowing Abdulmutallab get on the plane even though he had no passport. Abdulmutallab has since told federal authorities that there are others like him in Yemen preparing to bomb airliners. Well, that’s a no-brainer, or at least it should be. But don’t tell that to the Obama administration, which just this month sent another 6 Guantanamo detainees back to Yemen! (Of the 200 remaining detainees, 91 of them are from Yemen). Many released detainees have since returned to their terrorist roots. Indeed, Said Ali al-Shihri was released in 2007, and although Saudi, has since become the “deputy leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch.”

Not very reassuring, is it?

And yet here’s our Homeland Security Secretary, Janet Napolitano, telling us everything is fine. She’s already retracted what was a carefully worded statement that “once the incident occurred, everything went according to clockwork,” which is like saying everything went according to plan after the fox ate all the chickens, or, after all the animals left the proverbial barn. What a joke she’s become. She now agrees, after much legitimate criticism, that the system failed. No kidding? We need an overpaid bureaucrat to tell us that?

And while we’re on topic, what’s the point of all these different agency no-fly lists if they’re all so big and uncoordinated that a guy like Abdulmutallab — no passport, on at least one watch list, buys a one-way ticket, has no luggage, his own father attempts to warn authorities about him — can get on an airplane?

But we’ll just keep taking our shoes off…

Oh, and can we go back to calling it The War on Terror again? Because apparently al Qaeda didn’t get the memo or know that Obama pressed a “reset” button.

In a word: ugly. Wimpy from the Popeye cartoon was fond of promising to pay someone Tuesday for a hamburger today. ObamaCare is the inverse of that — the federal government will gladly force us to pay today for an alleged benefit years from now. Even if you support this nightmare of ObamaCare socialized medicine, the notion that one must pay for years before seeing any benefit is outrageous.

Gladly tax you today for poor quality health care later?

Dick Morris brought up the differences between health care cost and quality a little while ago, and one fact stuck out big time: “In 2008, Britain had a cancer death rate 0.25% while the United States had a rate of only 0.18%.  The UK cancer death rate was 38% higher than in the United States.” (Canada is 16% higher, by the way).

Keep that in mind as you read this commentary from Congressman Dr. Tom Coburn (R, OK):

For instance, the Reid bill (in sections 3403 and 2021) explicitly empowers Medicare to deny treatment based on cost. An Independent Medicare Advisory Board created by the bill—composed of permanent, unelected and, therefore, unaccountable members—will greatly expand the rationing practices that already occur in the program. Medicare, for example, has limited cancer patients’ access to Epogen, a costly but vital drug that stimulates red blood cell production. It has limited the use of virtual, and safer, colonoscopies due to cost concerns. And Medicare refuses medical claims at twice the rate of the largest private insurers.

Section 6301 of the Reid bill creates new comparative effectiveness research (CER) programs. CER panels have been used as rationing commissions in other countries such as the U.K., where 15,000 cancer patients die prematurely every year according to the National Cancer Intelligence Network. CER panels here could effectively dictate coverage options and ration care for plans that participate in the state insurance exchanges created by the bill.

… But the most fundamental flaw of the Reid bill is best captured by the story of one my patients I’ll call Sheila. When Sheila came to me at the age of 33 with a lump in her breast, traditional tests like a mammogram under the standard of care indicated she had a cyst and nothing more. Because I knew her medical history, I wasn’t convinced. I aspirated the cyst and discovered she had a highly malignant form of breast cancer. Sheila fought a heroic battle against breast cancer and enjoyed 12 good years with her family before succumbing to the disease.

If I had been practicing under the Reid bill, the government would have likely told me I couldn’t have done the test that discovered Sheila’s cancer because it wasn’t approved under CER. Under the Reid bill, Sheila may have lived another year instead of 12, and her daughters would have missed a decade with their mom.

The bottom line is that under the Reid bill the majority of America’s patients might be fine. But some will be like Sheila—patients whose lives hang in the balance and require the care of a doctor who understands the science and art of medicine, and can make decisions without government interference.

Dr. Coburn was in the news earlier this week, highlighting some key excerpts from a recent report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), which showed among other things that the biggest denier of medical claims isn’t some “greedy” insurance company, but your own federal government! Thus is destroyed another rationale — lack of access to health care — for ObamaCare.

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) – U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK), released the following statement regarding a new report by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) that shows that 60 percent of health care spending in the U.S. ($1.35 trillion out of $2.24 trillion) is controlled by state, local and federal government.

“Defenders of the Reid bill say we need ‘reform’ to keep insurance companies honest. A better question would be: ‘Who’s going to keep the government honest?’ This new report shows that the so-called ‘reform’ effort is based on a false premise. Government is already the majority-shareholder in our health care system,” Dr. Coburn said.

“Many of the problems we face today in health care, such as cost and lack of choice and access to quality care, are the consequence of government interference. These problems will only get worse if Congress spends $2.5 trillion on legislation to put the government in charge of more of our health care decisions,” Dr. Coburn said. Patients in government run health plans have fewer options and lower quality of care:

* Medicare denies medical claims at twice the rate of some of the largest private insurers.
* Nearly one in three (29 percent) Medicare beneficiaries who were looking for a primary care doctor had a problem finding one to treat them, according to a June 2008 Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) survey.
* Forty percent of physicians refuse to accept Medicaid patients.
* Patients in the Indian Health Services receive fewer options.

If our health care system is truly the problem, and government already controls the majority of the health care industry, then how will more government control solve the problem? It won’t. Worse, your access will become more problematic, not less.

Got an issue you oppose strongly enough, at least now you can pick up your phone or write an e-mail to your state and federal representatives. But who do you call once the “global bureaucrats” are in charge?

Janet Daley of the UK Telegraph explains:

… the word “global”, as in “global economic crisis”, meant: “It’s not my fault”. To the extent that the word had intelligible meaning, it also had political ramifications that were scarcely examined by those who bandied it about with such ponderous self-importance. The mere utterance of it was assumed to sweep away any consideration of what was once assumed to be the most basic principle of modern democracy: that elected national governments are responsible to their own people – that the right to govern derives from the consent of the electorate.

The dangerous idea that the democratic accountability of national governments should simply be dispensed with in favour of “global agreements” reached after closed negotiations between world leaders never, so far as I recall, entered into the arena of public discussion. Except in the United States, where it became a very contentious talking point, the US still holding firmly to the 18th-century idea that power should lie with the will of the people.

Nor was much consideration given to the logical conclusion of all this grandiose talk of global consensus as unquestionably desirable: if there was no popular choice about approving supranational “legally binding agreements”, what would happen to dissenters who did not accept their premises (on climate change, for example) when there was no possibility of fleeing to another country in protest? Was this to be regarded as the emergence of world government? And would it have powers of policing and enforcement that would supersede the authority of elected national governments? In effect, this was the infamous “democratic deficit” of the European Union elevated on to a planetary scale. And if the EU model is anything to go by, then the agencies of global authority will involve vast tracts of power being handed to unelected officials. Forget the relatively petty irritations of Euro‑bureaucracy: welcome to the era of Earth-bureaucracy, when there will be literally nowhere to run.

Great points. Read the rest.

It’s already a problem in Europe, but it could be crossing the Atlantic soon, if Congressional leaders like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have their way. Some Democrats are now promoting the European-style value-added tax (or VAT) to collect revenue. After all, Democrats never found a tax they didn’t like. But it has the unintended consequence of promoting billion dollar fraud and graft — Europeans have termed it “carboncarousel fraud,” because criminals take something intangible like “carbon credits” and launder it around and around.

[UK Guardian] The fraud occurs when a trader of carbon credits in one EU country buys some from another country free of VAT, then sells them on, charging the VAT to the buyer. The seller then disappears without handing the VAT to the taxman.

Some criminals re-export the credits, reclaiming VAT as they do so, then re-import them. They can do this repeatedly, reclaiming VAT many times, hence the “carousel” label.

Yet another example where even with the best of intentions government busy-bodies do more harm than good. In this case, even criminals can get behind the facade of environmentalism. Where will it end?

Environmentalism is about cash. We’ll start with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ridiculous press conference earlier this month that must have left people wondering if the Governator was preparing for his next action movie role. Mimicking the global warming doomsayers via afantasy Armageddon scenario (read: The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, etc.)  Schwarzenegger presented his constituents a map of the future in which many notable San Francisco landmarks — such as the airport — were under water.

“Within a century, Treasure Island, this place where we are right now, could be totally under water,” the governor said. “It is technology in the end that will save us.”

The Governator becomes a warming scaremonger.

Not coincidentally, Schwarzenegger has been praising President Obama’s carbon trading agenda (read: new taxes). The rationale is simple — California has a $21 billion state budget deficit, and understanding the Chicago politics style of the new administration the Republican Schwarzenegger knows he has to suck up to have any chance of overcoming his disastrous left-leaning economic strategy of the past 5 years.

Which brings us to the point: This isn’t about the environment, it’s about money, and big money at that. As many of the ClimateGate e-mails showed, proponents of global warming/climate change are using the environment as a front to tax and redistribute wealth.

The Global Warm-mongers aren’t even trying to keep it a secret anymore, their agenda is brazen.

In clear and open language, written right in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (i.e., the Copenhagen treaty) were these gems (compilation courtesy of Counting Cats in Zanzibar):

Annex 1, paragraph 33: “By 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least USD 67 billion] [in the range of USD 70-140 billion] per year.”

Annex 3, E, paragraph 17: “[[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:] (a)  Compensate for damage to the LDCs’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees; (b)  Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures.”

Annex 1, C, paragraph 41: “[Financial resources of the Convention Adaptation Fund"] [may] [shall] include: (a) [Assessed contributions [of at least 0.7% of the annual GDP of developed country parties]“

Compensation for “dignity”? Could this be any less about environment and conservation and any more about collectivist, statist, socialist wealth redistribution and societal re-engineering? This isn’t planting trees and being a good steward, it’s extortion.

Worse, the Copenhagen treaty would have American taxpayers ships billions of dollars annually to an unelected board of climate change bureaucrats, who would then redistribute funds to unelected and undemocratic regimes in South America, Africa and Asia. Think a dictator in Africa might use those funds for something other than improving the environment?

People aren’t exaggerating when they say this is an attempt to sow the seeds of world government — just wrap any issue up in the cloth of “global crisis” or other such nonsense and an unelected board of bureaucrats get to decide where you should live, what kind of car you should drive, or how many miles you can drive it. Or what kind of toilet paper you should use (no joke, folks).

Tom Friedman’s most recent column (Going Cheney on Climate) seeks to champion action on (alleged) global warming on the basis of the “precautionary principle.” The idea behind precautionary principle is basically insurance — you make the investment not on the certainty of something adverse occurring, at least not right away, but on the likelihood that it may occur, particularly as time passes.

Put aside for a moment that Friedman breathlessly mimics the same fascist, strong-arm, brown-shirt tactics of the “consensus” scientists who promise “catastrophic” consequences for global warming, such as those consequences usually reserved for really, really poorly acted but special effects jaw-dropping movies like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, or Independence Day. Friedman has apparently learned nothing from ClimateGate except to double down.

Rather, consider that the precautionary principle’s most important aspect is economics.

That is, offer a population a life insurance policy for a few dollars a day and many or most will likely pay the cost. But offer them a policy like the TRILLION-DOLLAR price tags that such carbon-based treaties have had over the past decade and those same persons will wisely take their chances and use those funds for more pressing needs.

Friedman whiffs on that notion altogether. But it’s one that many smart people have attempted (while being vilified by the climate change scaremongers) to promote for many years.

Marlo Lewis wrote his great essay “Precautionary Foolishness” almost a decade ago.

Lewis actually uses the Precautionary principle against it’s proponents:

No one has demonstrated that the Kyoto Protocol [and other cap and trade schemes] won’t have harmful consequences. Therefore, we should oppose it.

Similarly, former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg frequently expresses his frustration that the cost of combating theoretical climate change is more deadly than the actual warming. Years ago he noted that for the price of the Kyoto treaty we could give every man, woman and child on the planet clean drinking water and proper sewage facilities.

But so long as we have Friedmans, Sontags, and other such well-intended liberal nincompoops with us, millions will continue to die for fear of what might be (cancer from DDT, climate change, FDA drug over-regulation) rather than what is (malaria, lack of energy, lack of drugs).

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P.S. — Another flaw with Friedman’s precautionary principle concept is that generally we adult consumers get to choose whether or not to buy insurance. In the case of climate change, however, our Nanny-state authoritarians on Capital Hill, or worse, unelected bureaucrats in the EPA force feed us insurance as though we were children. No thank you, Tom.

Courtesy of Prodicus:

The debate is over!

So I made the point below that one can find parallels between Climate Change and health care vis-a-vis academics constructing their desired result through manipulated data.

We’ve already read some recent studies by academics attempting to prepare the public for rationed care by advising that women get mammograms less often and later in life. More like that are sure to come. I’m sure men’s prostate exams will be next, eh?

But here’s a brazen example of academics promoting social engineering — in this case advocating single-payer, nationalized health care — through a bogus study.

A recent Harvard University study by Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein claimed that nearly 45,000 people die every year because they lack health insurance. This is a ridiculous claim that cannot possibly be justified by generally accepted standards of statistical inference, says John C. Goodman, President, CEO and the Kellye Wright fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).

According to Goodman:

* The study subjects were interviewed only once, and the study tries to link their insurance status at that time to mortality 10 years later.
* Yet over the decade, the authors have no idea whether subjects were insured or uninsured, what kind of medical care they received, or even their cause of death.

The study fails to recognize that being uninsured is like being unemployed, says Goodman. It happens to lots of people for brief periods. Most people who are uninsured can get insurance within 12 months. Being uninsured 10 years ago is no more likely to cause you to die today than being unemployed 10 years ago.

A more careful study, using a similar approach by former Congressional Budget Office Director (CBO) June O’Neill, found that for low-income people, uninsurance increased the probability of dying by only 3 percent, and for higher-income people, uninsurance had no impact on mortality, notes Goodman.

So, you could have been interviewed 10 years ago by these Harvard buffoons, perhaps between jobs and without insurance; then several years later you’re gainfully employed with insurance and die in a car wreck. No matter, these fools would include you in their “lack of insurance killed” study. Just criminal.

Having read many of the e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia writer James Delingpole summarizes six major categories, including: (1) Manipulation of evidence in favor of global warming, (2) Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up, (3) Suppression of evidence contrary to their views, (4) Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Skeptic scientists, (5) Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and, (6) “how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.” [Although I think that latter one could be categorized into #3].

Indeed, it is the concerted effort to politicize and demonize any scientist with a contrary view that does the most damage to scientists — that’s right, if ideologically driven scientists can manipulate not just climate change data, but also the review of that data and even the debate itself — “The debate is over!” and other such circular reasoning — then we can suspect other scientists will attempt the same on, say, health care data [but more to that in a moment]. One would think scientists everywhere would be condemning the CRU, rather than becoming apologists and excuse-makers for them.

As National Review’s Iain Murray points out, not only was there a brazen conspiracy to remove contrarians from the peer-review process, but, “There was an organized attempt to circumvent or obstruct the legal requirements of the UK’s Freedom of Information Act 2000, which appears on its face to rise to the level of criminality.” These CRU “scientists” wrote of rather destroying the data before they allowed it to be available via information act lawsuits. (Speaking of, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is suing NASA to release its raw climate change data, on the basis that NASA has previously [in 2007] extrapolated inaccurate results which Washington bureaucrats and politicians would use to effect via regulation and taxation the lives of everyday Americans).

Ironically, I’m listening to National Public Radio on my radio in the background right now talk about the latest news from the Copenhagen climate talks, and, gosh, wouldn’t ya know it, they don’t mention a word about the CRU debacle! Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along.

Which leads us to how the mainstream media has become a willing abettor to this climate scandal. Here’s Jonah Goldberg:

First, the climate-change industry is shot through with groupthink (or what climate scientist Judith Curry calls “climate tribalism”). Activists would have us believe that the overwhelming majority of “real” scientists agree with them while the few dissenters are all either crazed or greedy “deniers” akin to flat-earthers and creationists. These e-mails show that what’s really at work is a very large clique of scientists attempting to excommunicate perceived heretics for reasons that have more to do with psychology and sociology than physics or climatology.

Second, the climate industry really is an industry. Climate scientists make their money and careers from government, academia, the United Nations, and foundations. The grantors want the grantees to confirm the global-warming “consensus.” The tenure and peer-review processes likewise hinge on conformity. That doesn’t necessarily mean climate change isn’t happening, but it does mean sloppiness and bias are unavoidable.

How big a scandal this is for the scientific community is being hotly debated on the Internet. But in big newspapers and TV news, the story has gotten less attention. And that’s a scandal, too. The New York Times’s leading climate reporter, Andrew Revkin (whose name appears in some of the e-mails), won’t publish the contents of the e-mail on the grounds it would violate the scientists’ privacy. Can anyone imagine the Times being so prissy if such damning e-mails were from ExxonMobil, never mind Dick Cheney?

Exactly.

Today, the UK “Climate Change Secretary,” which is about as typical but useless as any government post could get, announced breathlessly that, “We have to beware of the climate saboteurs, the people who want to say this is somehow in doubt, and want to cast aspersions on the whole process.” By “process,” one supposes he means that very process that CRU personnel used, including lying, manipulation and obfuscation. You can’t make this stuff up! The academic elitists are shouting, “never mind that the data is fudged, just have faith we know what’s best for you.” Social engineering at its precipice.

Similarly, California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer was outraged — yes outraged! — over the CRU e-mails: not their content, mind you, but that they were allegedly hacked. “You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,” said the senator.

Suddenly the liberals have discovered that leaks of private or classified information is bad? Like Goldberg above said, had the e-mails been from a Merck server and revealed that the pharma giant was hiding something about Vioxx, do you think Sen. Boxer would be so outraged?(Meanwhile, there’s equal reason to believe that the e-mails weren’t hacked but leaked by a whistle blower — something liberals used to be in favor of, but only when pertaining to the CIA or Abu Ghraib apparently).

Same old, same old selective outrage from hypocrites on the left.