“The US Air Force Shot Down Flight 93”

From georgewashington.blogspot.com:

The following comment was posted to my blog today (I do not know who the author is — he posted semi-anonymously; so decide for yourself whether or not you believe him):

“I am an Air Force veteran. I was serving at Langley AFB, Virginia on Sept. 11. (not to be confused with CIA headquarters at Langley, VA). The “Alert Squadron” of 4 F-16 Falcons also stationed at Langley AFB was scrambled AFTER the “plane” crashed into the Pentagon. Because of my position as a ground equipment mechanic, I had access to the flightline operations that day. My friends were Crew Cheifs and Weapons Loaders, among other professions on the flightline that day. One of my [unusual] duties that day was to drive a Loader (personal friend) along with a rack of live missiles (AIM-9’s and AIM-120’s) across the active runway to the Alert Squadron and drop them off. I was towing equipment to the flightline, so when it was time to go back and pick up the Loader (and our missile trailer) I was unable to do so, but another member of my Flight (a good friend, and later roommate) did go. According to my roommate (and I later confirmed with the Loader) the Loader was completely silent most of the trip back to our side of the base, after they crossed the active, he spoke. “They shot one down.” JJ replied “WHAT?” Loader:”One of those 16’s came back with one less missile than it left with” That was all. As they pulled back in to the squadron area, The loader was whisked away by his commanders for debriefing. I didn’t see him for a few days, but when I did, he said he couldn’t talk about it, but he confirmed that what my roommate had told me was true.

The US Air Force shot down Flight 93. I haven’t told this to many people. I told my parents and other family members shortly after I left the military. They didn’t believe it. I figured no one else would either. I kept my mouth shut. Everyone was dedicated to the president and the country (not really) And anything that went against the Official, media delivered story was viewed as unpatriotic. I knew that I loved this country, so I kept my mouth shut. I just can’t do that anymore. I know that I don’t have any documents to prove it, and I have no way of knowing where the others involved are now days, so I can’t prove anything. All I have is my word. and with God as my witness that is the truth.”

Climate Change Book Reviews

Of all the issues I cover here on LostRepublic, voicing doubts about human-induced climate change earns me by far the most consternation from friends and readers.

From the website realclimate.org:

“RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. We aim to provide a quick response to developing stories and provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science.”

Sorry, they do not take a stand on the issue. They only critique various news stories and individual studies.

Here is a book review of three climate change books: Winds of Change, Catastrophe, and The Weather Makers.

Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told’

Regarding the controversial Dr. Nils-Axel Morner.

“If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, ‘the sea is not rising,’ he says. ‘It hasn’t risen in 50 years.’ If there is any rise this century it will ‘not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm’. And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on ‘going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world’.

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown. . . .

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC’s favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a “corrective factor” of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they “needed to show a trend”.

When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an “expert reviewer” on the IPCC’s last two reports, he was “astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one”. Yet the results of all this “deliberate ignorance” and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.” (Read more from telegraph.co.uk)

The Civil Heretic – Dyson Freeman, climate change skeptic

“FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince­ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country’s most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming ‘out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,’ as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. . . .

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that ‘all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.’ . . .

A particularly distressed member of that public was Dyson’s own wife, Imme, who, after seeing [Al Gore’s] film in a local theater with Dyson when it was released in 2006, looked at her husband out on the sidewalk and, with visions of drowning polar bears still in her eyes, reproached him: ‘Everything you told me is wrong!’ she cried.

‘The polar bears will be fine,’ he assured her.” (Read more from nytimes.com)

Did Goldman Goose Oil?

“When oil prices spiked last summer to $147 a barrel, the biggest corporate casualty was oil pipeline giant Semgroup Holdings, a $14 billion (sales) private firm in Tulsa, Okla. It had racked up $2.4 billion in trading losses betting that oil prices would go down, including $290 million in accounts personally managed by then chief executive Thomas Kivisto. . . .

But now some of the people involved in cleaning up the financial mess are suggesting that Semgroup’s collapse was more than just bad judgment and worse timing. There is evidence of a malevolent hand at work: oil price manipulation by traders orchestrating a short squeeze to push up the price of West Texas Intermediate crude to the point that it would generate fatal losses in Semgroup’s accounts. . . .

What’s the evidence of this? Much is circumstantial. Proving oil-trading manipulation is difficult. But numerous people familiar with the events insist that Citibank, Merrill Lynch and especially Goldman Sachs had knowledge about Semgroup’s trading positions from their vetting of an ill-fated $1.5 billion private placement deal last spring. “Nothing’s been proven, but if somebody has your book and knows every trade, it would not be difficult to bet against that book and put the company into a tremendous liquidity squeeze,” says John Tucker, who is representing Kivisto.

What’s known for sure is that Goldman Sachs, through J. Aron & Co., its commodities trading arm, was in prime position to use such data–and profited handsomely from Semgroup’s fall. J. Aron was Semgroup’s biggest counterparty, trading both physical oil flowing through pipelines and paper oil, in the form of options and futures.” (Read more from forbes.com)

US Envoy Writes of Israeli Threats

“In the wake of the accusation by Chas Freeman that his nomination to lead the National Intelligence Council was derailed by an “Israeli lobby,” a forthcoming memoir by another distinguished ambassador adds stunning new charges to the debate. The ambassador, John Gunther Dean, writes that over the years he not only came under pressure from pro-Israeli groups and officials in Washington but also was the target of an Israeli-inspired assassination attempt in 1980 in Lebanon, where he had opened links to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Dean’s suspicions that Israeli agents may have also been involved in the mysterious plane crash in 1988 that killed Pakistan’s president, General Mohammed Zia ul Haq, led finally to a decision in Washington to declare him mentally unfit, which forced his resignation from the foreign service after a thirty-year career. After he left public service, he was rehabilitated by the State Department, given a distinguished service medal and eventually encouraged to write his memoirs. Now 82, Dean sees the subsequent positive attention he has received as proof that the insanity charge (he calls it Stalinist) was phony, a supposition later confirmed by a former head of the department’s medical service.

Dean, whose memoir is titled Danger Zones: A Diplomat’s Fight for America’s Interests, was American ambassador in Lebanon in August 1980 when a three-car convoy carrying him and his family was attacked near Beirut.” (Read more from the nation.com)

Obama Administration Seeks to Help Wall Street Circumvent the Executive Pay Restrictions

Well, that didn’t take long at all.

Yesterday: “Pledging to take ‘the air out of golden parachutes,’ President Obama announced Wednesday that executives of companies receiving federal bailout money will have their pay capped at $500,000 under a revised financial compensation plan.”

Today: “The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.”

(Read more from propagandadetox.blogspot.com)

What do you say to that, Obamaniacs?

Netanyahu: “The American president must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons”

“In an interview conducted shortly before he was sworn in today as prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu laid down a challenge for Barack Obama. The American president, he said, must stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons�and quickly�or an imperiled Israel may be forced to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities itself.

‘The Obama presidency has two great missions: fixing the economy, and preventing Iran from gaining nuclear weapons,’ Netanyahu told me. He said the Iranian nuclear challenge represents a ‘hinge of history’ and added that ‘Western civilization’ will have failed if Iran is allowed to develop nuclear weapons.” (Read more from theatlantic.com)

Am I the only one who doesn’t like the idea of a foreign leader telling my president what his mission is?

See Also:
– Benjamin Netanyahu takes office with a warning to Iran
– Petraeus Says Israel Might Choose to Attack Iran
– Iran Photos

Steadfast Sanford

See also:

Why South Carolina Doesn’t Want ‘Stimulus’ by Mark Sanford
“A recent report by the American Legislative Exchange Council ranked us 47th worst in the nation for annual debt service as a percentage of tax revenue. Our state dedicates nearly 11% of its annual tax revenue to paying debt. On top of that, South Carolina has another $20 billion in unfunded, long-term political promises for pensions and other liabilities. The state budget has already been cut four times in recent months as the national economic downturn has impacted South Carolina and driven down tax revenue.

President Barack Obama recently signed a “stimulus” bill that will spend about $2 billion through ‘programmatic means’ in South Carolina. In other words, the federal government will put this money directly into existing funding formulas and programs such as Medicaid. But there is an additional $700 million that I as governor have influence over, and it is the disposition of this money that has drawn the national spotlight to South Carolina.

Here’s the background: Before the stimulus bill passed, I asked for states not to be bailed out. After it was signed into law, I said that a state bailout would create more problems than it solved, and that we shouldn’t spend money we don’t have. That debate was lost, so I looked for a reasonable middle ground. I asked the president for his support in using the $700 million to pay down state debt.

If we’re going to spend money we don’t have at the federal level, it becomes all the more important that our state balance sheet is in good order — particularly if this is a protracted downturn. But many people do not realize that the stimulus money runs out in 24 months — at which point South Carolina will be forced to find a new source of funding to sustain the new level of spending, or to make sharp cuts. Sure, I could kick the can down the road; in two years, I’ll be safely out of office. But it would be irresponsible. . . .

When you’re in a hole, the first order of business is stop digging. South Carolina is in a hole, and it’s not a shallow one. Spending stimulus money on ongoing programs would mean 10% of our entire state budget would be paid for with one-time federal funds — the largest recorded level in state history.” (Read more from campaignforliberty.com)