Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Tribune Content Agency submission

To Tribune Content Agency submissions editor:

My name is Mark Luedtke, and for nearly three years I have written a weekly column in the Dayton City Paper titled Conspiracy Theorist. The publisher of the DCP, Paul Noah, believes Conspiracy Theorist is the most widely read column in the paper. It is by far the most commented on column. In the eight years I’ve written columns, feature and cover content for the DCP, I have never missed a deadline.

I believe my articles would be valuable to syndicate because they are unlike anything in the mainstream media. They rarely deal with conventional conspiracies or politics. I focus on economics and anti-politics, not the superficial divide between left and right. Gallup reports only 19 percent of the American people currently trust the government in Washington. Writers targeting that divide engage only those 19 percent. My subject matter engages all the people because I write about the growing political and economic gulf between America’s rulers and the people. I explain complex issues in terms everybody can understand. I challenge conventional thinking with a brash, concise style. The fundamental principles expressed in my articles interest young and old readers alike.

Every day I read newspapers are dying, but the reason is not what people claim. While the Internet is a factor, poor content is the main reason they’re dying, not the medium. The DCP is growing because it offers quality content, my articles are a big part of why the DCP continues to grow. My articles are edited by a professional editor before submission, and that still has value because people love to read it whether they agree or disagree. I believe my column would engage readers of other papers. I am flexible on word count, scheduling and other considerations.

You might notice several of the articles below are prescient because of my understanding of economics and politics.

Please consider syndicating my articles. All articles have been published by the Dayton City Paper and can be found at http://www.daytoncitypaper.com/author/mark-luedtke/

Contact the Dayton City Paper publisher at publisher@daytoncitypaper.com and editor at editor@daytoncitypaper.com. Call either or both at (937)222-8855.

Thank you for your consideration.

Mark Luedtke



Embrace Economic Freedom
Everything leftists claim about economics is demonstrably false
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: 100515

In upside-down world, Pope Francis gallivants around excoriating peaceful economic interaction - economic freedom - instead embracing systematic coercion - socialism - against all the people of the world. He embraces Cuba’s Castro brothers, among the greatest mass murderers and oppressors in history, then criticizes Americans for unbridled free markets. As if America had any free markets.
So much for advocating peace.
Whenever politicians, including the Pope, advocate socialism over free markets, as nearly all do regardless of party, I wonder whether they are stupid or evil. They have to be one or the other because economies exist to improve the wellbeing of the people, and the freer an economy is, the better it succeeds. The more government intervenes in the economy, the worse it works for the people. The people peacefully engage in economies for their own benefit, improving the lives of everybody in the process. Rulers coercively manipulate economies for their own benefit, harming the people in the process. This isn’t ideology. It’s reason. It’s also demonstrable fact.
Like me, Walter Williams believes leftists tend to be evil, not stupid, though he uses the terms idiotic and dishonest. “Many people argue that liberals, socialists and progressives do not understand basic economics. I am not totally convinced about that,” he wrote. “Take the law of demand, for example, one of the fundamental principles of economics. It holds that the lower the cost of something the more people will take or do of it. Conversely, the higher the cost the less people will take or do something. By their actions, liberals fully understand the law of demand.” Williams lists examples showing, although leftists understand the laws of economics and their consequences, they advocate damaging, coercive interventions anyway.
The consequences are unambiguous. The Fraser Institute recently released its "Economic Freedom of the World" report which unequivocally illustrates countries with greater economic freedom tend to be more prosperous. The greater the difference in economic freedom, the greater the difference in standard of living and wellbeing. But it also illustrates other trends. For example, although South Korea only embraced economic freedom in the last few decades, the standard of living of the South Korean people is rapidly approaching that of Americans even though economic freedom has only been curtailed in the US in the last century and aggressively in the last couple decades. The standard of living in the US is falling because economic freedom is declining. The US has dropped from second in the rankings in 2000 to 16th today.
This isn’t true just for countries. Gabriel Openshaw reports, “Taking into account cost-of-living differences, the top ten most economically free [US] states have an average $52,334 median household income, which is considerably higher than the $43,090 median income for the ten least free. That’s a 21 percent raise for workers by switching state government policies to a smaller government approach.”
And unlike leftists claim, everybody benefits. Openshaw continues, “The observed results are not a question of race or country of origin: African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and immigrants also earn substantially more in the more economically free states. While left liberals should be lauded for their apparent concern for the welfare of minorities, the truth is that their policies yield the worst results for them, a standard of living pay cut just for living in a more regulated and heavily taxed state.” Urban versus rural doesn’t matter either. Wellness rankings are higher in more economically free states too.
These state-level differences, because state rulers are more accountable to the people than federal rulers, explain why federal rulers are trying to eradicate federalism.
We’re all entitled to our opinions, but the tremendous benefits of economic freedom over socialism are fact. Since the benefits of economic freedom are so obvious and pronounced, it begs the question of why so few Americans know about them. They should be taught to school children all year, every year.  But because leftists dominate society, control both parties, and this information doesn’t benefit them, they bury it. Government schools are socialist, run by socialists, and socialists miseducate children to advance socialism for their own benefit. Media corporations hide it because government interventions benefit corporations. Taxes, regulations, and interventions are designed to enrich government’s corporate agents.
While rulers keep the people in general ignorant of the benefits of economic freedom, politicians, top bureaucrats, plutocrats and media propagandists understand them. They systematically lie to us about the benefits of socialism because socialism benefits them at our expense. The Pope included.



Don’t Blame China
Blame the Fed for the stock market crash
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: 091415

On Monday, August 24, the Dow plummeted 1,100 points at opening before closing down over 500 points. That followed a big loss the previous Friday, and losses continued on Tuesday. Trillions of dollars of phony wealth were wiped out in three days, but the mainstream media barely mentioned the crash as if it was nothing of import. The financial press had its story ready though. The Toledo Blade reported, “Growing concerns about a slowdown in China had already shaken markets around the world on Friday, driving the U.S. stock market sharply lower. A big sell-off in Chinese stock today caused the rout to continue.”
Blaming China was convenient - our rulers never admit blame for the problems they cause - but it wasn’t accurate. China’s troubles have been going on since June. Nothing new happened in China to trigger the crash. Blaming China for the crash was like blaming the tree you crashed your car into when you were driving drunk and tired in the dark with no lights or brakes.
What was new was the Federal Reserve (Fed) was threatening to raise interest rates in September. The Fed’s fantastic counterfeiting since 2008, expanding its balance sheet from $800 billion to over $4 trillion, has produced the biggest stock market bubble in history. This counterfeit money has disassociated the stock market from the real economy. The high price level is 100 percent dependent on the Fed continuing the zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) it started in 2008 and has kept in place since.
But while inflating the stock market, ZIRP is destroying the real economy. ZIRP is the equivalent of the Fed driving our economy drunk and tired in the dark with no lights or brakes. And we’re all stuck in the car.
ZIRP creates a zombie economy in which companies that are unprofitable and should go bankrupt continue destroying wealth because they can borrow at zero percent interest to sustain themselves. So while the economy is in the boom cycle, it’s really destroying wealth by misallocation of resources, making us all poorer in the process. The bust, while painful, is the cure, wiping out zombies, and it must be allowed to run its course. Unfortunately, the government, especially the Fed, never lets that happen.
David Stockman explains, “That the Federal Reserve’s policies have failed is now so painfully evident that even the political class is awakening to this truth. Rather than re-ignite broad-based, self-sustaining economic growth, the Fed’s loose-money policies (zero-interest rate policy a.k.a. ZIRP, and quantitative easing a.k.a. QE or free money for financiers), have perversely distorted the economy and widened wealth and income inequality.”
Stockman continues, “The abject failure of these policies to aid Main Street while heaping wealth on Wall Street greatly complicates the Fed’s endgame. Given the economy’s dependence on the Fed’s monetary heroin, declaring victory and beating a hasty retreat is not really an option: once the Fed stops delivery of monetary heroin, the economy will go into withdrawal, and the Fed’s failure will be too obvious for even its most ardent backers to deny.”
Despite knowing this, Fed Chairman Janet Yellen had hinted she intended to raise rates in September, and she wouldn’t be dissuaded. Until August 25. Stockman noted, “After just three days of market turmoil the monetary politburo swung into action. This time they sent out [Bill Dudley] to promise still another monetary sweetener. Said the head of the New York Fed,
‘From my perspective, at this moment, the decision to begin the normalization process at the September [Fed Open Market Committee] meeting seems less compelling to me than it was a few weeks ago.’”
This turnaround prompted some to wonder if the crash was engineered.
While China cannot be blamed for the recent crash, its problems are indicative of a global problem. With the Fed leading the way, central banks all around the world have been counterfeiting unprecedented amounts of money. As a result, the phony global boom is about to turn into the biggest global bust in history. We’re in the early stages of an unprecedented global meltdown.
John Ficenec writes, “From China to Brazil, the central banks have lost control and at the same time the global economy is grinding to a halt. It is only a matter of time before stock markets collapse under the weight of their lofty expectations and record valuations.” Even moms and pops are cashing out because they know the big crash is coming.

“Colossal Financial Event” Coming
But nobody knows exactly when
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: 050415

It’s easy to predict the US economy will soon experience an unprecedented crash. It’s easy to predict the global economy will do the same. Booms and busts are created by the artificial expansion of credit triggered by the printing of counterfeit money by central banks. Central banks print money much like counterfeiters in their basements. They hand the money over to their friends, just like counterfeiters in their basements. They and their friends go on a spending spree, just like counterfeiters in their basements.
There are a few differences. Central bank counterfeiting is legal. Counterfeiting out of your basement is not. This has no effect on the economic consequences. Whether legal or not, counterfeiters use their phony money to amass wealth for themselves and their cronies, leaving less for everybody else.
Bankers buy primarily stocks and bonds first, producing bubbles in these markets. The mansions and yachts are secondary, but they feed the outrageous bubble in high-dollar real estate we’re seeing.
The third difference is banks which receive the newly counterfeited money use it as a foundation to create even more counterfeit money in an upside-down, credit-creation pyramid. While somebody in their basement might print and steal millions, central banks print and steal trillions - the Federal Reserve (Fed) has expanded its base from about $800 billion since the 2008 financial crisis to about $4 trillion today - and because banks only have to hold about 10 percent of that new money in reserves, they can create ten times more credit, flooding the economy with tens of trillions of dollars. Similar counterfeiting is happening in every developed country.
Despite this unprecedented counterfeiting, the current boom never took off like past booms, but the unprecedented bust will follow. The only question is when.
Conventional wisdom says never bet against the Fed. So far that’s been true, but the Fed ended its Quantitative Easing counterfeiting programs months ago. It still counterfeits enough money to keep interest rates at zero, but Yahoo reports, “The New York Federal Reserve officials tasked with prying interest rates off the floor have been meeting with bankers and traders to plot how best to do it, amid deep uncertainty over how much control they will really have over short-term lending markets.”
The supposed experts at the Fed have broken the economy so badly they’ve lost control.
Economist Mark Thornton explains, “It turns out that officials from the New York Fed have been asking traders, financial firms, and even other central bankers how they can increase the Federal Funds Rate by 1/4 of 1% without bringing the world financial system to its knees.”
The Fed’s expert thieves have painted us all into a corner, and they can’t find a way out.
Despite unprecedented counterfeiting by the Fed, the dollar is getting stronger. This may sound like good news, but Business Insider reports otherwise. “The surging dollar is a signal that a colossal financial event is just around the corner,” it declares. “The last four large dollar shocks in the past 45 years have been symptoms of huge financial events: the collapse of Lehman, Britain's panicky ejection from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) in 1992, the first Gulf War, and Paul Volcker's shock rate hikes in the early 1980s. Today's surge is already considerably larger than the one that surrounded Lehman's collapse, although the economic conditions are very different.”
Calling today’s economic conditions different is like saying nuclear bombs are different than firecrackers.
The reason it’s impossible to predict exactly when the event will occur is event triggers are created by human action, and people are unpredictable. Maybe the trigger will be Greece withdrawing from the Eurozone. Greece’s financial problems dropped out of the news a couple of years ago, but they didn’t go away. They’ve gotten worse. The Greek government is effectively out of money. It’s paying 24.87 percent interest on bonds while it negotiates more, comprehensive loans, but it refuses to give concessions. The rest of the PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) aren’t far behind. Maybe the trigger will be a clash between US and  Russian troops in Ukraine. Maybe an Israeli attack on Iran will trigger the crash. Nobody can know.
Although rulers will focus on the trigger to protect central bank counterfeiting, the trigger is incidental. Central banks set the economic bomb and lit the fuse. When it explodes, the counterfeiting cycle will start over, even bigger, and repeat until our rulers own everything, creating a new, feudal society.


Apple Is Flying High
But it can’t last
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: 051115

As a general rule, when a stock goes parabolic, it’s time to sell. Currently the richest company in the world, some analysts believe Apple has gone parabolic again. Apple had a parabolic move in 2000, right before the tech bubble popped and Apple stock with it. It had another parabolic move in 2007, right before the housing bubble popped and the financial crisis hit, and it dropped again. Now Apple is parabolic for the third time this century. Marketwatch reports, “Today, Apple is on a tear again. It has not seen a drawdown of more than 15% on a closing basis for over 37 months. It has closed outside its 3-ATR for two months in a row and is now in its third consecutive month above the rising channel.”
Marketwatch recommends shorting Apple, but not everybody agrees. Yahoo finance thinks Apple’s parabolic appearance is an artifact of the scale of the chart, not real. “For most stocks, using an arithmetic or log scale chart wouldn't make much difference if the price historically is similar to today's price,” it explains. “In Apple's case, though, price today is a lot larger than it was historically.  A $20 move today is nothing compared to a $20 move in 2005.  Using a log chart fixes this distortion and should usually be the default chart choice to prevent such discrepancies when they do occasionally occur.”
But nobody disagrees that the hype around Apple has gone parabolic with breathless predictions its Watch and the Chinese market would make it the world’s first trillion dollar company. Apple products were even hyped to cure diseases.
Don’t bet on it. It’s no coincidence Apple’s two previous hyperbolic events coincided with financial bubbles. Because Apple’s products are of standard quality but sold at a premium price, Apple is perfectly positioned to take advantage of Federal Reserve (Fed) money-printing. It’s business model is based on style. When easy money rules the economy, consumers feel rich and increase spending on luxury items, so Apple’s stock rises. When the bubble pops, consumers look for value, so Apple’s stock falls. Apple will take a big fall when the current bubble, the biggest in history, pops.
But Apple’s ride at the top will also come to an end because of more fundamental problems. Like General Motors, IBM, Microsoft and all giant corporations before it, Apple will fall because of internal socialism.
Even though they’re voluntary, giant corporations suffer from some of the same problems of socialism as governments. As they grow, they tend to absorb more and more companies in their supply and distribution chains because their executives want more control. They try to insulate the company from market forces. This is counterproductive. Like governments, they no longer have prices to guide them to make rational economic decisions. Like governments, they can’t perform economic calculation on internal processes. This produces inefficiency and paralysis and reduces the quality of products and productivity in producing them, causing delays. This is why giant corporations can’t exist without government protecting them from competition.
The more businesses they gobble up, the worse this problem becomes. Apple has acquired 67 companies since 1988, but 26 of those have been acquired since 2013. That’s out of control.
Executives of giant corporations also have a tendency to abandon their core competencies and lose focus, believing they can’t fail at anything, then they fail. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook penned an op-ed against religious freedom, showing he’s more interested in politics than products. Apple is delaying the release of its wireless charging system that customers would love. Apple is developing a self-driving car, not a core competency.
We’re seeing all these problems with the Apple Watch. Apple had to delay the launch from April to June. Yahoo suggests demand is weak. “The Apple Watch will launch with a whisper rather than a bang on Friday, an unusual start for the company that may reflect early uncertainty about demand for Apple Inc boss Tim Cook's first new product,” it writes.
The watches that have been sold have problems. The heart monitor doesn’t work on people with tattoos on their wrists. One of its components is buggy. It suffers low battery life and slow apps.
These are classic signs of a company grown so large it can no longer perform economic calculation to make rational economic decisions.
Maybe the Fed will inflate Apple’s stock valuation over $1 trillion before it crashes, but I doubt it because Apple is no longer the productive company it was.


The Problem in Greece
Socialists ran out of other people’s money
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: 072815

Apologies to Margaret Thatcher for the title.
One of the ironclad laws of economics is if something is unsustainable, it will end. Socialism, a
system of theft and violence against the people, is unsustainable, and it’s ending in Greece, as it will end here and everywhere else, with impoverished people throwing molotov cocktails at a phalanx of government enforcers protecting ultra-rich rulers in Parliament. Once again Greece is leading the so-called civilized world, showing us, as socialism dies, rulers drop the pretense of working on behalf of the people. Without the pretense, we see how ugly socialism really is.
You might have heard Greece and the eurozone were saved by a last-minute deal. It’s not true. This deal, if it survives, is only good for the rulers and only temporarily while it makes the real problems worse. The punitive sales tax hike from 13 to 23 percent targets Greece’s only remaining industry, the tourist industry.
One of the common claims about this deal is it bails out the bankers at the expense of the Greek people. David Stockman explains this isn’t true either. “[Since 2009,] the French, German, Dutch and Italian banks and other private lenders, for example, outstandings have been cut from $100 billion in 2009 to barely $15 billion today,” he writes. “Moreover, as the New York Times noted with respect to this massive shift, the most aggressive punters have made a killing. One of them noted quite explicitly that when hedge funds started buying Greek government bonds in 2012:
‘“People made their careers on that trade,” Mr. Linatsas said.’ Indeed they did. And now taxpayers around the planet have been stuck with the due bill. Specifically, $250 billion or nearly 80% of Greece’s $320 billion of fiscal debt is directly owed to the [European Union] facilities and the [International Monetary Fund]; and upwards of half of the balance is indirectly owed to European taxpayers because $45 billion of Greece’s T-bills and bonds are either owned or funded by the [European Central Bank].”
The bankers already made a killing off Greek debt then offloaded the inevitable losses to taxpayers. Of course, this put governments on the hook. Stockman explains the consequences. “...what the clueless [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel actually accomplished during five years of weekend Gong Shows was to bury her taxpayers under $92 billion of liabilities—–nearly all of which are off-budget and unacknowledged,” he continued. “Her desperate and mindless temporizing in order to remain in power thus constitutes a monumental political lie and betrayal. Were this to be exposed by a major write-down of the Greek debt, it would lead to an instant fall of her government.”
But the problem is much bigger. If Europe’s rulers allowed Greece to write down its debt, the rest of the PIIGS, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Spain would demand the same, and their debts are much larger than Greece’s. Europe’s rulers legitimately fear the guillotine, thus the punitive response.
Europe’s rulers have painted themselves into a corner. They’ve guaranteed the eurozone will disintegrate, wiping out governments with it. The only question is when. This Greece deal buys them more time to loot taxpayers further before they’re forced to flee.
You might also have heard since Greeks resoundingly rejected the original deal at the polls, Greek Prime Minister Tsipras could negotiate a better deal. Europe’s rulers wouldn’t allow that. They threatened to topple Tsipras’s government, and rumors said he might be assassinated. He must have taken the threats seriously because he quickly caved, betraying voters, after winning the referendum.
The problem for the Greeks is they ran out of other people’s money, and they blame cruel Germans instead of themselves. While European and Greek rulers shoulder much blame, so do the anti-capitalist Greek people. Their excesses are legion, including getting paid for 14 months every year.
The collapse of socialism is not confined to Europe. Puerto Rico’s governor wants the territory to declare bankruptcy. Reuter’s reports, “The Caribbean island is struggling to relieve a $73 billion debt burden. It came to a crunch point on Monday - ironically at the same time as did debt-laden Greece - after a dire report on its stability by former International Monetary Fund economists was released ahead of key deadlines on Wednesday to repay debt.”
Meanwhile, China’s centrally-planned stock market bubble burst and lost 40 percent of its paper value, but the rigged US markets remain unfazed. When centrally-planned US markets crash, it will be the biggest crash of all.


Socialist Water Disaster
Socialists produce shortages then threaten victims
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: 071415

A fluke of climate, unusually wet weather over the last 100 years, caused many people to forget the western US, including California, is mostly desert. Typical hubris of socialists and boondoggles like the Hoover Dam fooled people into thinking government could permanently transform the desert into an oasis. The Desert Sun describes, “For decades, water pumped from beneath the California desert has flowed to an oasis of lawns, golf courses, pools and lakes. That lush lifestyle has sold homes, promoted growth and helped transform the Palm Springs area into a world-renowned destination.”
A mere few years of drought trampled that fantasy. Or maybe it’s not temporary. Maybe California is reverting to its normal desert climate. In the meantime, socialists have drained its water reserves, creating shortages, as they do with everything, creating water poverty. Some Californians have suffered without running water for months. Patrick Barron writes, “Ludwig von Mises explained that socialism is not an alternative economic system. It is a program for consumption. It tells us nothing about economic production.”
As a result of squandering California’s water, California’s socialists have done what they always do, threaten their victims with violence. Jerry Brown threatens heavy fines for long showers. Los Angeles mayor orders city to cut water use 20 percent by 2017. State orders San Francisco to stop taking drinking water from river, preferring it go to the ocean instead of keeping people healthy.
Government intervention has produced the usual outrages. One California city, because of its successful conservation efforts, was forced to dump 550,000 gallons of water. Despite starting in 1991, San Diego still hasn't launched its socialist desalination plant.
Socialist water control has produced socialism’s typical two-tiered system. The Daily Beast reports, “California has met the future, and it really doesn’t work. As the mounting panic surrounding the drought suggests, the Golden State, once renowned for meeting human and geographic challenges, is losing its ability to cope with crises. As a result, the great American land of opportunity is devolving into something that resembles feudalism, a society dominated by rich and poor, with little opportunity for upward mobility for the state’s middle and working classes.” Hollywood millionaires remain largely unaffected, but one man cut his water consumption by 95 percent by getting rid of showers and the toilet. He’s living the environmentalist vision for us all by reverting to the stone age.
Socialist water mismanagement isn’t limited to California. Lake Mead, which supplies most of Las Vegas’s drinking water, is at an all-time low. Forty states face water problems.
Nor is the problem limited to the US. USA Today reports, “Scientists using satellite data have found that a third of the world's largest aquifers — in places ranging from China and India to the United States — are being rapidly depleted and are seriously threatened.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. The problem is caused by socialists allocating and subsidizing water based on personal, political gain instead of allowing it to be allocated to those with greatest need in the marketplace. As Murray Rothbard wrote, “If the water industry were free and competitive, the response to a drought would be very simple: water would rise in price.”
The key to water management, like anything else, is prices, freely floating and discovered in the marketplace. Prices serve the function of matching supply to demand. If water resources were privately owned, entrepreneurs would set a price that matched supply to demand, conserving the water to maximize profit over a lifetime and to pass on to their heirs. No aquifers or lakes would be drained. In the case of a drought, a small price increase on small users, a medium increase on moderate users, and a large increase on large users would match supply to demand, conserving the resource. Customers would use less water to save money. Big industrial users and farmers would conserve or move to locations with cheaper, more abundant water. There’d be no threats, no violence and no shortages.
Fortunately for us in southwestern Ohio, the Miami Valley aquifer is not being drained, but that’s just dumb luck. We suffer the same socialist mismanagement of water resources as everywhere else. Dayton’s rulers are considering loosening environmental restrictions on water that feeds the aquifer. Since socialists have no prices to guide them, they can’t perform economic calculation to make a rational economic decision about whether this is beneficial or not, so they will decide based on personal, political gain. That’s a stupid way to manage a critical resource.


NOAA Goes Rogue
Creates imaginary data to support Obama’s political goals
Conspiracy Theorist
by Mark Luedtke
publication date: 081015

Emperor Obama has a problem. He wants to leave a destructive legacy regarding global warming that matches the rest of his legacy, but the climate won’t cooperate. According to satellite data, which remains uncorrupted so far, there has been no statistically significant global warming - commonly called the pause - for 18 years, six months, and therefore nobody cares about global warming. Fortunately for the emperor, he has an entire taxpayer-funded bureaucracy devoted to lying about the climate, so he ordered the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to produce a bogus study that eliminated the pause from the data, and he complied.  A few months ago NOAA cherry-picked data from disparate datasets, manipulated the data, stitched them together into a pseudo-scientific Frankenstein study, then proclaimed the pause didn’t exist.
Even NOAA’s fellow global warming frauds bust out with belly laughs. They’ve all produced false studies, but nobody previously had the audacity to produce one as outrageously phony as this. But all that mattered to NOAA was the over-the-top headlines Obama wanted, and the fraudulent study produced plenty of those. The new record claims 2014 was the hottest year ever. May and June of this year were the hottest May and June ever. 2015 is on pace to be the hottest year ever. It’s very scary, which gave the emperor pseudo-scientific cover to attack our economy.
Which he did. The most lawless emperor in our lifetimes just lawlessly ordered crippling emissions cuts for all fossil fuel power plants. This will have zero impact on climate, but plants will be forced to close, and electricity prices will skyrocket. That makes Obama happy, but it means pain and suffering for the rest of us.
But from a scientific point of view, NOAA has rendered itself irrelevant. It’s abandoned the last vestiges of pretense of being a scientific organization. Even the global champion of the global warming fraud, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits the pause is real. All of its efforts for years have been to explain it away, with no success. NOAA jumped past that. More telling, NOAA has a semi-secret, highly accurate temperature record that also shows the pause. In fact, all other independent datasets show the pause, but you won’t read that in the press. It doesn’t promote the socialist agenda.
The Daily Caller describes NOAA’s rogue state. “But what [Cato global warming expert Patrick] Michaels and others say is more problematic is the growing divergence between NOAA’s new temperature data versus satellite data and records from the UK Met Office,” it wrote. “NOAA’s data shows significantly more warming than Met Office or satellite records.”
Wattsupwiththat.com documents NOAA’s history of corrupting the temperature record. “This author has been downloading NOAA monthly temperature anomaly data since 2010. The May 2015 adjustment is not the only one,” Walter Dnes wrote. “There appear to have been 8 adjustments between November 2010 and May 2015. Assuming that these changes are legitimate adjustments, one has to wonder, if they got it wrong the last 7 tries, what confidence can we have that they got it right this time, or will they change it again if Earth doesn’t cooperate?”
According to APNews, Obama referenced the corrupt data when introducing his regulations. “Obama said the limits were backed up by decades of data showing that without tough action, the world will face more extreme weather and escalating health problems like asthma,” it wrote.
Like NOAA, every government bureaucracy exists to feed the greed of our socialist rulers. All should be abolished.
(This article is shorter because it included this excellent cartoon from cartoonsbyjosh.)
from 2004.75