Man-Made Global Climate Change

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

I’ve been hesitant to pick sides on the Global Warming topic. Here is some interesting reading in a recent Scott Adams blog post on the subject:

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/climate_change/?CmtOrder=Rating

I’m curious how many of you simultaneously hold the following two nearly-contradictory opinions:

1.      Climate change is real because scientists say so.

2.      Experts have never accurately predicted anything so complicated.

Even more interesting is some of the comments:
—

I hate the way this debate always gets framed, on both sides of the issue. Yes, it’s true that most scientists agree that the climate is changing due to increased CO2 in the atmosphere. But that question is almost irrelevant. The important questions are:
1) How much of the change is due to CO2 vs other factors?
2) How bad will this really be?
3) If there’s a possibility of this being really bad, what is the cost/benefit of different options of dealing with the problem?

The debate has focused so much on the question of whether climate change exists that on one side you have idiots claiming that it’s a myth, and on the other side you have idiots claiming that because 97% of scientists agree that it exists we must implement policy X to curb carbon emissions, with no consideration of the cost vs benefit of that course of action.

—

Saying most scientists believe in global warming is meaningless, since it ignores the wide range of anticipated changes that might occur. Part of the view of many “skeptics” is not that global warming does not exist, but that many of the dire scenarios are overblown or at least unknowable with current information. Coming to a realistic conclusion about the path of climate change would be more helpful than picking binary sides and sniping.

Rather than striving for a monolithic consensus on any issue, “experts” should be willing, able & indeed eager to challenge their own beliefs again and again to try to get closer (and possibly never) to the truth.

—

see also: http://blog.briangallimore.com/2012/05/technology-economics-psychology/

and http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

 

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How John Stossel Became a Libertarian

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

On Liberals:  “The fall of the Soviet Union ought to have taught them their ideas are moronic and they should stop it”
On Journalism: “I just think there is some left brain / right brain thing and the kind of analytical minds that go into business and science don’t go into law and journalism. The people who go into that are like Bill Clinton: I feel your pain, the emoters, and they are often clueless about analyzing things.”

John Stossel on Journalism, How He Became Libertarian & His New Book “No They Can’t”

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Technology – Economics – Psychology

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

“The circumstances of our lives actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives.” –Rory Sutherland
Ed is right: Do yourself a favor and watch this sometime today. We need more ideas like this in all aspects of our lives.


Rory Sutherland: Perspective is everything

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Lela Pittenger for U.S. Senate

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

www.lelaforsenate.com

  • life-long native Texan
  • 32 years old
  • Christian, Constitutionally Conservative
  • restoring our nation’s legislative, fiscal, and moral integrity


Lela Pittenger at TFRW.mov

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Lela Pittenger: Reaching the Next Generation

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

Here is an excellent presentation of how to connect and understand the younger generation by US Senatorial candidate Lela Pittenger. I’ve been pretty divisive in the area of generational warfare… I’m so mad that we are passing on massive debt and problems to the younger generation. Lela explains a lot of this very well, and her viewpoint is much more productive than mine! I highly recommend everyone watch this video, especially if you are over the age of 40 and want to understand the lives of younger people.


Lela Pittenger_Next Generation_ April 2012.wmv

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Response to “The Story of Broke”

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

Many statist (socialist) are smart and have a good understanding of some of the causes of our problems…  BUT, they seem to miss the fact that doing more of the same is not a solution!  Prager explained this nicely in my last post.  LearnLiberty.org has been publishing some great videos… take a look that their response to the video “The Story of Broke” (which is a really cute video produced by apparent simpleton lefties)


The Story of Broke Response

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Prager’s Top 10 Ways Liberalism Makes America Worse

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

Dennis Prager goes through some interesting comments on the philosophies of liberal and conservative.  By the way, if you haven’t watched all of the 5-minute Prager University videos, go do it!

  • I wasn’t a liberal, but I didn’t know that; therefore, I was a liberal!
  • The great moral diving line is about the size of the state.
  • The bigger the state, the smaller the citizen.
  • The left of this country wishes to be Sweden, the right does not wish to be Sweden.
  • A liberal can not admit that a conservative are utterly decent people.
  • Conservatives measure morality by what happens, Liberals measure morality by what was intended.
  • More people have been killed by governments than anything else in history (including religion) — and this was done in the 20th century alone.
  • The next time someone asks ‘where are all the men?”, tell them the Democrat party and their policies got rid of them
  • It is a very great battle — and the only place still battling it is the United States.  Western Europe gave up.  The left one.  This is the last stand.  The battle is taking place right this moment.
  • There is something immoral about spending more than you take in.

10 Failures of Progressive Policies on the Character of Society

  1. The bigger the government, the less citizens do for one another.
  2. The welfare state may be well-intended, but it is a ponzi scheme.
  3. Citizens of welfare states become increasingly narcissistic.
  4. The liberal welfare states makes people disdain work.
  5. Nothing guarantees more, the erosion of character, than getting something for nothing.
  6. The bigger the government, the more the corruption.
  7. The welfare state corrupts family life.
  8. The welfare state inhibits the maturation of its young citizens into mature adults
  9. As a result of the lefts sympathetic views of pacifism, and because almost no welfare state can afford a strong military, European countries rely on America to fight the worlds evil, and even to defend them.
  10. The worldview of the left is not to divide the world or see the great battle as between good and evil, but between rich and poor.  Equality therefore trumps morality and other values.

Dennis Prager’s Top 10 Ways Liberalism Makes America Worse

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Joel Salatin Interview w/ Lew Rockwell

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

I listened to a great podcast this morning.  It was Joel Salatin talking about all the things he talks about, which I think I agree with almost 100%.  He goes into a good description about what is happening with the GMO laws also, which I tried to summarize in the video below.  If you are interested in liberty, local food, good food, human rights, the Big Ag Industrial Complex, gardening, and understanding what is wrong with the world we live in today, listen to this podcast! http://www.lewrockwell.com/lewrockwell-show/2012/04/24/272-the-food-police-state/

“What we have right now is a system for example that says it is safe to feed your kids twinkies, coco puffs, and mountain dew but it is not safe to drink raw milk, eat compost-grown tomatoes, and aunt Matilda’s pickles.”

 

The Way GMO Laws Work

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Unqualified Congress Candidates

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

Thursday night at the Allen Area Patriots meeting I witnessed something that made my eyes pop out!  Here is a little background:

  • The two challengers in the US Congress District 3 race (Currently held by Sam Johnson) agreed to participate in a public debate.
  • The US Constitution lists 18 powers, specifically, that are the responsibility of the US Congress.  (These are listed in Art 1, Sec 8, and referred to as the enumerated powers)
  • One of the questions asked during the debate was for each candidate to list off my memory as many of the 18 powers as they could.

Not one of the two candidates could name even one of the powers!  Unbelievable, but wait, it gets better.  They had the opportunity to show they did have a basic understanding of the US Constitution by answering a few other questions.  They didn’t seem to comprehend the language of another question regarding the Constitution.  The climax was when the entire content of Josh’s ending speech was on the theme ‘we need to obey the US Constitution’, complete with reading passages from the preamble of that document!


Candidates Seeking TX CD3 Office Can’t Answer Most Basic Question about US Constitution

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Recording Video with Good Synced Audio from Webcam

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Brian Gallimore

One of the little joys of using Linux is that sometimes you have to play with the switches and wires to make things work right.  For some reason, it takes a small miracle to record decent video via a webcam.  The most popular program is cheese, but I could not make it work right.  The audio and video were way off and laggy.  The program kamoso did work, mostly, but I didn’t have any control over size, speed, etc, and sometimes the video was garbled or wouldn’t save.  I would have really liked to use kdenlive, since I’ve learned to use it and think it is pretty cool.  The problem there is all the new ubuntu (and mint) distros use pulseaudio to handle the audio, and kdenlive has no support for it.

So, here is what I found that works like a charm:

(from http://brightedges.blogspot.com/2008/06/webcam-and-mplayer.html)

  • install the good, bad, and ugly gstreamer-plugins
  • install the non-standard package called GEntrans which “provides a gstreamer element named ‘stamp’ that can apply timestamps to incoming video streams in a way that they can later by perfectly matched to the incoming audio streams to produce perfectly sync’d output”
  • issue the massive command below
gst-launch-0.10  v4l2src queue-size=16 !  stamp sync-margin=1 sync-interval=1     ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=800,height=600,framerate=15/1     ! queue2 max-size-buffers=1000 max-size-bytes=0 max-size-time=0  ! ffmpegcolorspace     ! theoraenc quality=60 name=venc  alsasrc device="hw:2,0"     !  audio/x-raw-int,rate=16000,channels=2,depth=16     !  audioconvert ! queue2 max-size-buffers=1000 max-size-bytes=0 max-size-time=0     !  vorbisenc quality=0.9 name=aenc oggmux name=mux ! filesink location=BrianWebcamVideo.ogg aenc. ! mux. venc. ! mux.
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