By Evelyn Pyburn

With all the wrangling we encounter about words—what’s appropriate, what’s not, what a word means, and even if we dare speak words – if you think that is just an accidental manifestation in our society – think again.

To attack our language, to make communication difficult if not impossible. To create confusion and to intimidate, is a front line tactic of collectivists —socialists, communists, etc. To undermine society and the strength of the individual, really can be just a matter of words.

“The confusion and vagueness of terms always found in collectivist theories is not accidental; it is a reversion to the mental and verbal limitations of the primitive society it advocates, the inability to think in abstract terms,” writes Isabell Paterson, in God of the Machine, a 1968 book that explains why the Constitution works.

While most people use words to communicate, collectivists use words to create confusion. They want human beings to be cogs in a machine where no language is necessary, says Paterson.

Crippling our ability to communicate clearly or to articulate ideas is but one part of changing the words we use and the terms of their use, it is also used to subtly convey a concept — to infiltrate society with unchallenged perceptions.  A good example is the change of the word employee to “team member.” It is almost anathema to be called an employee any more  – you are a “team member.” The change underscores the collective as being more important than an individual. It diminishes individual achievement, automatically forcing the sharing of it with less productive members of a group. It also diminishes the role of the employer and what they must achieve in order to be an employer.

Paterson also underscores how the suspension of the real meaning of words allows people to speak utter nonsense without challenge, and advance concepts that make no sense. The example she gives is the claim that “All property is theft.” The definition of property is something that is owned. If it is not owned it is just something in nature. Theft presupposes rightful ownership – the forcible taking of something that is the property – ie. owned – by someone else.

Those who make such nonsensical utterances pay no attention to the meaning of words… they assign their own meanings. They would probably attempt to claim that the collective owns it – that it belongs to everyone — again, paying no heed to the insanity of such a concept, to the fact that words mean something. In practicality when everyone owns it, no one owns it. When no one owns it the government has total control. Aha, might that not be what they really advocate?

And we all have become aware of how words can suddenly change in their meaning and in unexpected ways. For example “woke” was self-adopted by those who wanted to claim they identify with a group but didn’t want to exactly say they were “politically correct,” which held its own negative connotations. But while “woke” was meant to be a positive change for obedient followers, it kind of boomeranged into a negative. Its meaning was far too well understood by many people, and now those who coined the term are begging that it no longer be used.

Of course, there is the most glaring way in which words are changed, to suddenly mean negative things about race so those caught unaware can be accused of racism. It is done as a political tactic even when those being “protected” object – such as the political agenda that forced the changing of the name of the Washington Redskins to Commanders because Washington Redskins was perceived as being a racist slur – apparently by those who were not Native American, because there is now an effort by Native Americans – by the “Redskins” — to try to undo the name change.

Of course language is always changing most often as a consequence of things that change our lives – other than collectivists. Your great grandparents would undoubtedly have no idea what you mean to hear you say you are going to “google” someone.

The term “I figure” or “I calculate” emerged in the early days of American life, as more everyday people entered business and used math as their means of earning a living – they really were “figuring” and “calculating” in this Capitalistic society.

So if in this new age world you don’t know what to say to some people, just grunt.

— “they only block the sun.”

by Evelyn Pyburn

Just because it’s not likely to get nearly the public recognition that opposition views routinely get, this editorial is to emphasize two news reports about how much we should be concerned about global warming.

Not so much, it seems. Certainly, not so much that we should give up heat, food and life as we know it. And, most certainly, not enough to give up our freedom to choose how we want to live.

The Epoch Times reports focus on the fact that global warming is not the “settled science” that we are frequently told. There are in fact a lot of very smart people who have other points of view… they just don’t get much of a platform to say so.

We have all witnessed it– the media and politicians call them “climate deniers” and ridicule them to a degree that most people with doubts or questions learn to say nothing, which is exactly the purpose.

Following the end of the recent court case of children suing the state for denying them a clean environment, there were articles in which advocates gloated that so successful has the terrorization been, that the state’s attorneys never once even suggested that there might be doubt about the veracity of global warming claims.

One of those “deniers” is a 2022 Nobel Prize Laureate, John Clauser, who has pointed out that the hysteria about supposed climate warming is at the very least hugely overstated, if not outright deceitful. Clauser is not only a Nobel Prize recipient for his contributions to quantum mechanics, he holds degrees from Caltech and Columbia University, and served in roles at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, he was honored with a portion of the Wolf Prize in Physics.

But more than that, he has read climate change research, which brought him to conclude that those living in fear of becoming crispy critters are “misguided” because researchers  have ignored a key variable, an oversight he calls “sloppy science.”

There is no “climate emergency,” says Clauser, as do another 1600 educated professionals who signed the World Climate Declaration organized by Climate Intelligence, which says “climate change science is not conclusive, and that the earth’s history over thousands of years shows a consistently changing climate.”

After studying the research of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), National Academy of Sciences, and the Royal Society, Clauser says the scientists “miss the mark on the critical role of clouds in the climate system.” He says, “cloud cover has a profound effect on the earth’s heat input… clouds are reflecting a massive amount of light back out into space.”

Clouds! What could be more obvious about weather? It’s hard to believe they could be overlooked.

Clauser stated, “As a physicist, I’d worked at some excellent institutions— Caltech, Columbia, Cal Berkeley—where very careful science needed to be done. And reading these reports, I was appalled at how sloppy the work was. And in particular, it was very obvious, even in the earliest reports, and all carried on through to the present, that clouds were not at all understood. … It’s just simply bad science.” 

Clauser referenced a book by Obama’s science advisor, Steve Koonin, in which Koonin noted the inconsistency of the IPCC’s 40 computer models, emphasizing their inability to explain the past century’s climate and suggesting that these models lack a crucial piece of physics.

Clauser said that Al Gore in his film, “The Inconvenient Truth”— “insists on talking about a cloud-free earth. . . That’s a totally artificial Earth.” Clauser said that satellite images show that clouds can cover “five to 95 percent of the Earth’s surface.. . The cloud cover fraction fluctuates quite dramatically on daily -weekly timescales.”

Clouds regulate the Earth’s temperature, serving as a “cloud-sunlight-reflectivity thermostat” that “controls the climate, controls the temperature of the earth, and stabilizes it very powerfully and very dramatically,” asserts Clauser. With two-thirds of the Earth being oceanic, the ocean becomes instrumental in cloud formation.

The article reports: Minimal clouds result in heightened sunlight exposure to the ocean, triggering increased evaporation and subsequent cloud formation, resulting in more clouds. .. abundant clouds reduce this sunlight, thus curbing evaporation rates and cloud formation, resulting in fewer clouds …This balance acts like a natural thermostat for the earth’s temperature…and has a vastly greater influence on Earth’s temperature than the effect of CO2 or methane… “this cloud-reflectivity mechanism might overshadow CO2’s influence by more than 100 or even 200 times.”

Koonin’s book reads that just a 5 percent rise in cloud cover can largely counterbalance the temperature effect of doubling atmospheric CO2. 

Clauser stated that this oversight, “is a rather egregious breach of honesty by the U.S. government by NOAA, . . . This worry about CO2, the worry about methane, the worry about global warming, is all a total fabrication by shocked journalists and or dishonest politicians.”

Clauser is not alone in his views.

The Global Climate Intelligence Group’s “World Climate Declaration” has been signed by 1,609 scientists and informed professionals, who say far more blatantly that “the ‘climate emergency’ is a farce.” When asked why they signed the statement “they all stated a variation of ‘because it’s true,’” reported Epoch Times.

The declaration’s signatories include Nobel laureates, theoretical physicists, meteorologists, professors, and environmental scientists worldwide.

“I signed the declaration because I believe the climate is no longer studied scientifically. Rather, it has become an item of faith,” Haym Benaroya, a distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Rutgers University.

Ralph Alexander, a retired physicist and author  of “Science Under Attack”, said, “The earth has warmed about 2 degrees F since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, but that hardly constitutes an emergency—or even a crisis—since the planet has been warmer yet over the last few millennia.”

Edwin Berry, a theoretical physicist and certified consulting meteorologist, said “public perception of carbon dioxide is that it goes into the atmosphere and stays there. They think it just accumulates. But it doesn’t.” He said carbon dioxide molecules stay in the atmosphere for about 3 1/2 years. And, while we are led to believe that human activity contributes about one-third of the total, it is only 5 to 7 percent. In explanation, IPCC claims that the CO2 humans emit is different from that which nature emits and the human CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

But, a human carbon dioxide molecule is exactly identical to a natural carbon dioxide molecule.

“The belief that human CO2 drives the CO2 increase may be the biggest public delusion and most costly fraud in history,” Berry said. He said the deception is all about money and control.

“All climate model predictions have been wrong,” claims Benaroya. He said that the “push” to declare a climate emergency is about “”power and money, but also larger political forces.”

As for the United Nations’ push for net-zero CO2 by 2050, Alexander said: “It’s a complete waste of time and resources and may well impoverish many Western economies. China and India are not playing along in any case, which makes the whole effort meaningless.”

Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology and the Alfred P. Sloan professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stated that the issue was never one of science but of politics. He says, “The only purpose of the policies is to make the society poorer. And if you’re poorer, you’re less resilient. So if you believe CO2 is an existential threat and your policies are doing nothing to prevent it but are making you less resilient, one would have to ask, are you a pathological sadist?”

The article quotes dozens of noted scientists, all of whom express doubts about global warming predictions – and be assured you have probably never seen any of their names in any media, especially not to the degree of Al Gore, who is no scientist at all.

Said one scientist, “the claim that 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming isn’t truthful.”

When asked what concerns him most about the current narrative, Larry Bell, an architect known for designing and crafting inhabitable buildings for space, and an endowed professor at the University of Houston, said “I care about how climate hysteria, and how misinformation, drives policy. And these policies are driving our foundational bedrock policies that determine our economic well-being. They determine our national defense mastery—we won’t run a Navy on ethanol. We’re not going to run an Air Force on extension cords. It’s just absolutely insane. People think of climate as science. No, it’s not. It’s the big lever of government. It’s big globalism. And it ain’t favoring the U.S.”

Even if there is a “climate emergency” we as individual citizens need our freedom to deal with it – unless you trust your life to our political leadership, because that is where we are headed.

By Evelyn Pyburn

Save us from those who want to protect us.

The 12-year-old girl from Red Lodge who is passing a petition to allow people to become lawyers in Montana without going to law school or without sanctions of the Supreme Court, is so spot-on in so many ways. Why shouldn’t the legal profession be as accountable to the consuming public as a retail store or a hot dog stand???

The only problem with this young person’s petition is that it involves only lawyers. Why shouldn’t every profession be accountable to the people they serve more so than all-knowing overlords – who, as we have come to see, are not as all-knowing?

In fact, if never before, surely the past few years has demonstrated for all of us, how the overlords are not necessarily the benevolent caretakers and unbiased evaluators, as they would like to pretend. Almost every regulatory body has demonstrated that they can most easily be corrupted to gain political power and unearned wealth – whether they be attorneys, doctors, researchers, real estate agents, educators, engineers, or financiers.

In the end, we as consumers must always use our own good judgement about who we depend upon for expertise. Just because there is a piece of paper that gives someone sanction from some august body is no guarantee as to their expertise, honesty and true professionalism. Education can be a factor to consider but it should be the citizen’s right to do the considering. The transaction between a citizen and an attorney should be no different than in deciding what lawn mower to buy or what grocery store to patronize. In the end it should be a combination of attributes that commends the professional – not least of which is reputation, just as it would in any other FREE MARKET TRANSACTION.

Why shouldn’t a prospective client make the judgement call as to who they want to represent them legally? After all a citizen retains the right to represent themselves if they so choose; why shouldn’t they be FREE to choose who they want to advise them? The truth is this is as much as a protection racket as any other scheme.

And the fact of the matter is, in establishing a regulatory body to make such decisions, even should they start out as a fair and ethical group, just the existence of such a position becomes a shrieking invitation to corruption, which means it is just a matter of time before they are the corrupted, unjust and destructive bodies, as most have become.

We have surely come to recognize that even in the medical profession and with the overlords sanctioning medical treatments and medicines, our lives can be at risk if we are to make decisions based exclusively on official approvals coming from government. Big Brother is not necessarily our friend, and every citizen is responsible for their own decisions, every bit as much as if there were no licensing and permitting regimes. So why establish the pretense that there is some all-knowing, all-caring, honest and knowledgeable decision-makers who can relieve us of the responsibility of having to make such decisions ourselves? All that the existence of such “expertise” does is dupe a lot of trusting citizens, who have otherwise been brainwashed into trusting to “officials.” Not having such governmental advisors would make more clear to all citizens that they are still the final decision makers.

And more than that — over and over again in the history of our country we have seen that brilliance can emerge from anywhere – it does not always come from the hallowed halls of academia – and in fact sometimes it emerges because it was not blunted by the staid philosophies of “experts”. In those cases, quite frequently a brilliant new idea has been forestalled by regulating boards, either because their members weren’t as brilliant, or they were protecting their friends and political alliances. In all cases – lives hung in the balance. It is in allowing people to protect their lives that they must have the freedom to choose in the market place – most especially when it comes to choosing what “professionals” they want to rely upon.