Sibby Online

Wind energy is not our saviour

John Stossel brings this facts forward:

We're constantly urged to "go green" – use less energy, shrink our carbon footprint, save the Earth. How? We should drive less, use ethanol, recycle plastic and buy things with the government's Energy Star label.

But what if much of going green is just bunk? Al Gore's group, Repower America, claims we can replace all our dirty energy with clean, carbon-free renewables. Gore says we can do it within 10 years.

"It's simply not possible," says Robert Bryce on my Fox Business Network show tomorrow night. "Nine out of 10 units of power that we consume are produced by hydrocarbons – coal, oil and natural gas. Any transition away from those sources is going to be a decades-long, maybe even a century-long process. ... The world consumes 200 million barrels of oil equivalent in hydrocarbons per day. We would have to find the energy equivalent of 23 Saudi Arabias."

Bryce is the author of "Power Hungry: The Myths of 'Green' Energy." He used to be a left-liberal, but then: "I educated myself about math and physics. I'm a liberal who was mugged by the laws of thermodynamics."

Bryce mocked the "green" value of my riding my bike to work:

"Let's assume you saved a gallon of oil in your commute (a generous assumption!). Global daily energy consumption is 9.5 billion gallons of oil equivalent. ... So by biking to work, you save the equivalent of one drop in 10 gasoline tanker trucks. Put another way, it's one pinch of salt in a 100-pound bag of potato chips."

How about wind power?

"Wind does not replace oil. This is one of the great fallacies, and it's one that the wind energy business continues to promote," Bryce said.

The problem is that windmills cannot provide a constant source of electricity. Wind turbines only achieve 10 percent to 20 percent of their maximum capacity because sometimes the wind doesn't blow.

"That means you have to keep conventional power plants up and running. You have to ramp them up to replace the power that disappears from wind turbines and ramp them down when power reappears."

Yet the media rave about Denmark, which gets some power from wind. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says, "If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark."

"Friedman doesn't fundamentally understand what he's talking about," Bryce said.

Bryce's book shows that Denmark uses eight times more coal and 25 times more oil than wind.

The key to happiness

The key to real happiness:

A lot of research has been done regarding how we can be truly happy people, and a lot of polls have been taken as well. Surveys by Gallup, the National Opinion Research Center and the Pew Research Center have found that spiritually committed people are twice as likely to report being very happy than the least religiously committed people.

So religious or spiritual people tend to be happier people. But I would take it a step further and add that godly people are happy people. According to the Bible, if we seek to know God and discover his plan for our lives, we will find the happiness that has eluded us for so long. In other words, happiness does not come from seeking it, but from seeking him, because "Happy are the people whose God is the Lord!" (Psalm 144:15 NKJV). God built us to turn to him and find our fulfillment, our contentment and our happiness in a relationship with him.

C. S. Lewis put it this way: "God designed the human machine to run on himself. He himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other." So the idea is to seek God, and happiness will follow.

That is the great thing that we need to know: God wants us to be happy. But here is the twist: God's definition of happiness may be a little bit different than ours. He wants us to know this state of being, but at the same time, he might look at it a little differently than we do. God reveals his definition of happiness in the greatest sermon ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, which begins with The Beatitudes. You could call them the "be happy attitudes," because the word "blessed" as used by Jesus is interchangeable with "happy."

However, "blessed" is a word that has been hijacked by our culture. If things are going well and the bills are paid and the health is reasonably good and there are no conflicts at home, someone might say they are blessed. And indeed they are. But the nonbeliever has no idea what a real blessing is, because only a child of God truly knows what it is to be blessed.

The biblical definition of blessedness, or happiness, is much different than that of our culture. Modern beatitudes would sound something like this:

Blessed are the beautiful, for they shall be admired.

Blessed are the wealthy, for they have it all.

Blessed are the popular, for they shall be loved.

Blessed are the famous, for they shall be followed on Twitter.

But Jesus began his beatitudes with a bombshell: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 5:3 NIV). Some have falsely interpreted this verse to say, "Blessed are the poor." But that is not what Jesus said. The word "poor" Jesus used is speaking of a person who is destitute and completely dependent upon others for help – but not financially. It has nothing to do with your bank account. Jesus was speaking of those who see themselves as they really are before God: lost, hopeless and helpless. Because apart from Jesus Christ, everyone is poor in spirit, regardless of their education, wealth, accomplishments or even religious knowledge. To be poor in spirit means to acknowledge your spiritual bankruptcy, to acknowledge that you are in need of God.

If you want to be happy, you have to see yourself as you are, you have to be sorry for it, and you have to want change in your life. As Henry Ward Beecher said, "The strength and the happiness of a man consists in finding out the way in which God is going, and going in that way, too." Which way are you going today?

The well-intended, but misguided, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Larry Elder defends Rand Paul's position on the Civil Rights Act of 1964:

So why assume that some unacceptable percentage of the "unwashed masses" will act as merchant-racists – either without harmful consequences or the willingness to accept those consequences? Why do we further assume that, whatever the number of bigots, they will be capable of meaningfully affecting the day-to-day lives of blacks? If anything, these racists would have publicly outed themselves as part of the bad and the ugly.

The consequences of government coercion are more harmful than the certainty that some will use their freedom in ways that offend. Bad behavior tends to get punished in the social and business "marketplace." The Boston Red Sox, one of the last teams to hire black ballplayers, discovered fans valued winning much more than team racial homogeneity.

The well-intended, but misguided, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – as applied to private conduct – sought to change not only whites' behavior but also their "feelings." Some blacks perceive racial hostility toward them from their local Korean grocer. But if treated with a smile and offered quality goods at fair prices, most blacks patronize the store. People expect and respond to a certain measure of respect as a customer, regardless of how the proprietors may personally "feel" about them.

Instead of defending Paul on this issue against race-card-playing leftists like MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, conservatives/Republicans/pundits panicked. How are we to get the country back on the course set by its founders if we cannot stand with the Rand Pauls of the nation on the bedrock principle of maximum personal liberty?

Calderon's hypocrisy on illegal immigration

Chuck Norris has the goods on Mexico's president:

Watching U.S. members of the House, Senate and the president's Cabinet in a joint session of Congress stand and applaud Mexican President Felipe Calderon's slam of Arizona's new immigration enforcement law, I thought, what a despicable act of disloyalty to one of their own states and a ludicrous leadership move to boot, especially when 71 percent of Arizonans agree with its new immigration law.

President Calderon, how can you possibly criticize the state of Arizona about its newly passed immigration law, when Mexico's immigration law states:

1) Immigrants can't be an economic burden.

2) Immigrants must be healthy.

3) Immigrants must have no criminal record.

4) Immigrants must show a birth certificate.

5) Immigrants must provide their own health care.

6) Government can ban foreigners due to race.

7) Illegal entry is a felony (resulting in jail time).

8) Illegal immigrants can receive no government assistance of any kind.

9) Illegal immigrants' children may not attend public schools.

10) Document fraud is subject to fine/jail.

11) Incarceration and deportation of illegals occurs without due process or a trial.

12) A Mexican who marries a foreigner with the goal of helping the foreigner live in the country is subject to up to five years in prison.

13) Federal, local and municipal police must enforce immigration laws, including checking "papers" of suspected illegals.

President Calderon, your speech in Washington, D.C., in front of our U.S. Congress sounded very hypocritical to me, to say the least! And it was very disappointing to see our Congress stand up and applaud your condemnation of Arizona's new law.

Last week, in Part 1 of this immigration series, I mentioned how it seems like the whole country is taking sides in the battle over the border in Arizona. I was wrong. It's the whole world! Yet it truly remains the tip of the iceberg of our immigration troubles, in light of the feds failure to enforce any immigration laws and how 17 other states are now cracking down on illegals and seeking to enact tougher immigration laws.

Free enterprise vs. government control

This excerpt from a Arthur C. Brook column has a great quote by Thomas Jefferson, but the column does not point out that this so-called "new" culture war has been going on since the Civil War when European plutocrats used the Civil War to gain control of our wealth. [More about that at this link.]They have continued to do so via the Federal Reserve:

America faces a new culture war.

This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise -- limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.

It is not at all clear which side will prevail. The forces of big government are entrenched and enjoy the full arsenal of the administration's money and influence. Our leaders in Washington, aided by the unprecedented economic crisis of recent years and the panic it induced, have seized the moment to introduce breathtaking expansions of state power in huge swaths of the economy, from the health-care takeover to the financial regulatory bill that the Senate approved Thursday. If these forces continue to prevail, America will cease to be a free enterprise nation.

I call this a culture war because free enterprise has been integral to American culture from the beginning, and it still lies at the core of our history and character. "A wise and frugal government," Thomas Jefferson declared in his first inaugural address in 1801, "which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." He later warned: "To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it." In other words, beware government's economic control, and woe betide the redistributors.

  

National debt is simply irresponsibility on steroids

Herman Cain articulates what many of us understand to be the problems that politicians refuse to correct:

Most people are able to avoid committing all of the seven deadly sins (vanity, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and sloth), but our government has managed to solve none of the seven deadly problems that could destroy the future of our nation – health-care costs, financial reform, Social Security, Medicare, national debt, immigration law and lack of real job growth.

These seven deadly domestic problems have three things in common. First, inept politicians and bureaucrats have consistently worked on the wrong problem. They have put political agendas and political pandering ahead of what's best for the people.

Much has been written about the fact that we do not have a health-care crisis in America; we have a health-care cost crisis. The recently passed health-care deform legislation does not address the real problem, nor will it bring down the deficit as we have been falsely told. The right steps to solve the right problem have also been written about extensively, but those steps would get in the way of the all-out power grab we are seeing from this administration and the Democrats in Congress.

Congress is about to pass financial reform legislation, which will also be another "deform" bill because it establishes another unneeded oversight bureaucracy to oversee all financial institutions, except Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One would think that the two entities that were the catalyst for the financial meltdown more than a year ago would be included in any so-called reform legislation even if the new bureaucracy is un-needed. But we are not supposed to think.

Secondly, these same politicians provide lip service to the least informed voters who usually continue to re-elect them, while they let the problems grow for decades. The Social Security and Medicaresystems are in desperate need of modernization. This could start with the novel idea of just using payroll taxes for their originally intended purpose of providing benefits, but legislation introduced by Sen. Tom Coburn a few years ago to do that failed with 85 votes against.

And thirdly, we know how to solve all of these problems, but we do not have the leadership or political courage in Washington, D.C., to solve them. Instead, problems go unsolved, or we get incremental band-aids and, worse yet, more problems are created. The exponential increase in the national debt is simply irresponsibility on steroids!

America has no President

Craig R. Smith writes about the support Democrats give to criminals, then applauds Mexico's President for rebuking Arizona. Then he questions wether or not Obama can really be considered our president in spirit:

Any questions about the total crack up of the Democratic Party were put to rest Thursday as Felipe Calderon continued to promote the lie that Arizona will racially profile his fellow countrymen under our new law.

During a joint session of Congress, members of the Obama administration and his party sat on the edge of their seats and grinned with glee while the Mexican president admonished one of the 50 sovereign states of America. Calderon acted like he was scolding a group of elementary school students. The room then erupted in a 15-second Democrat applause, accompanied by a standing ovation that included our attorney general and secretary of homeland security.

So, if I have this straight, a foreign leader came to our Congress and openly rebuked a law which has the support of 72 percent of Arizonians and 60 percent of all Americans. And the Democrats applauded him?

We are seeing the disintegration of a political party right before our very eyes.

The Republicans in attendance sat horrified as they watched this spectacle, knowing any expression of objection would be noted as impolite or not fitting of protocol. One could only hope more Joe Wilsons would speak up and say, "That is a lie," but who can survive the media onslaught that would follow.

After the joint press conference with Mr. Obama and Calderon, I knew I had just watched our president not only fail to defend the country he took an oath to protect, but actually join in on the attack of our nation.

When Mr. Obama speaks, my heart fills with anger instead of the pride I used to feel with past presidents. To me, this man can't possibly be the president of the United States. Presidents defend their nations; they don't attack them.

Progressives shutting down truth sayers

[Update: What Pat Powers doesn't say is that is does not allow me to comment on his web site. Also notice he left of "Progressives", which shows he has something to hide. But what do expect from one who personally attacks the only conservative running for Governor.]

As Progressives Pat Powers and Cory Heidelberger have made efforts to silence my efforts to bring truth to the political arena, Roger Hedgecock points to that intolerance as being a standard among the far-left Progressives;

Since early 2008, with the failure of leftist competitor Air America, the left has been scheming to shut down conservative talk radio – the only part of American media not dominated by the left. It's all in the name of "fairness," of course.

The Obama "transformation of America" has been slowed and, in some cases, derailed by talk radio-driven discussions, debate and demonstrations.

With elections looming that threaten leftist control of the federal government, the scheming is over. The left is taking action.

Citizens for Civility and Accountability in Media, or CCAM, has been formed specifically to pressure radio stations to fire popular conservative talk hosts. First target: Fresno, Calif., talker KMJ (AM and FM).

In the name of CCAM, Les Kimber, former president of the West Coast Black Publishers Association and publisher of the California Advocate newspaper in Fresno, joined by Ellie Bluestein, formerly Raging Grandmas of CodePink, demonstrated outside the studios of KMJ last Thursday demanding that KMJ fire Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative talk hosts for spreading hate and inciting violence.

Kimber charged that "KMJ programming is dominated by ... talk hosts that are anti-government, anti-President Obama ..." He went on to declare that this kind of talk "creates an atmosphere of divisiveness that allows for the real possibility of violence toward elected officials including the president of the United States."

He offered no examples of this connection between critical talk and subsequent violence because there are none to offer – unless you attend one of the lectures given by radical imams.

During the Bush years, criticism and dissent were "patriotic." Today, the left embraces its inner censor.

The Progressives biggest and most dangerous myth

From David Kupelian:

One of the few in TV news to hammer Barack Obama's extremist associations before the 2008 election, Sean Hannity still wonders aloud why so many Americans overlooked Obama's astonishing three-decades-long immersion in leftist radicalism and elected him president.

Likewise, here at WND we have focused relentlessly, month after month, on Obama's subversive, anti-American associations, activities and statements. Besides our daily news coverage, our senior reporter Jerome Corsi wrote the No. 1 New York Times best seller "The Obama Nation," exposing Obama's disturbing past way before November '08. And just recently, another of our top reporters, Aaron Klein, wrote the mega-exposé "The Manchurian President," which quickly hit No. 1 on Amazon's nonfiction list and was just named to the New York Times list.

Question: With irrefutable evidence of – to quote Klein's subtitle – "Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists" being trumpeted nonstop on talk radio, the Internet and Fox News, why do millions of Americans to this day still approve of Obama and the job he's doing as president? Why do they blithely "space out" when confronted with the reality of socialist and communist influences in his administration, even as he daily pursues his plan to transform the freest nation on earth into a European-style welfare state?

Many will correctly blame this widespread incomprehension on our long-term exposure to progressive propaganda emanating from an education establishment and news/entertainment media shaped overwhelmingly by the left.

But one particular propaganda campaign, one enduring myth, has proven so fantastically successful that it has intimidated critics of the left's disastrous ideology into virtual silence. The myth-narrative goes like this: Although it's never really been proven that communists infiltrated the U.S. government, people who nevertheless make such hurtful accusations are evil, "witch-hunters," "red-baiters," "commie-under-every-bed" fear-mongers and – the king of all such epithets – "McCarthyites."

Presto. Like a magic spell from "Harry Potter," all leftists need do to instantly make criticisms vanish and detractors cringe is to intone the powerful incantation, "This is McCarthyism all over again" or "This is worse than McCarthy."

Voters: We are not socialists

Larry Elder describes the current politcal arena:

Obama and the Democrats misread the 2008 elections, misunderstood the mood of the people and pursued an agenda voters neither expected nor wanted. Voters, unlike Democrats and many Republicans, reject the idea that financial firms deserve a taxpayer-paid rescue because they are "too big to fail."

The No. 1 issue to voters remains the economy. Unemployment sits at nearly 10 percent. Voters think the stimulus either stimulated nothing or had no effect other than spending hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. Two-thirds of those polled, according to the Pew Research Center, do not believe the stimulus created jobs. Seventy-nine percent of Republicans think it did nothing to create jobs. And only a slim majority of Democrats, 51 percent, think the stimulus helped to produce jobs.

On Obamacare, Democrats assumed that after its passage, voters would gradually come around to supporting it. They haven't. A recent Rasmussen poll of likely voters finds that 56 percent want it repealed, versus 39 percent who oppose repeal.

Voters see this administration as a bunch of leftist, redistribute-the-wealth, we-know-better-how-to-spend-your-money-and-run-your-lives-and-manage-your-businesses, smug busybodies. They see an administration that raised the debt and deficit in a year and a half to European-like levels that threaten present and future prosperity. They see an administration that believes fighting global warming takes precedence over jobs and productivity.

Tax revenues have plummeted, while government continues to grow. Banks and other companies that made bad bets or failed to effectively compete are propped up through bailouts that encourage future risky behavior.

People have been out of work for long periods of time. Homeowners are paying on homes worth less than their mortgages. There is a lot of hurt and pain and fear in the streets.

"We Are All Socialists Now," said Newsweek in a cover story last year. "No," say the voters. "We are not."