Category Archives: Reviews

Climatism!

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climatismThe subtitle of this excellent, well-researched book by Steve Goreham is “Science, Common Sense, and the Twenty First Century’s Hottest Topic.” The book is over 400 pages long including notes and references. It provides both practical and technical details disputing the insistence that “The Science is Settled, Man is Causing Global Warming.” The book presents ample evidence that the science is far from settled and that man has had little impact on climate. However, there is a dire warning that you will be labeled a “Denier” if you question the politically correct positions. Those who have worked diligently to develop the “global-warning-disaster created- by-man-scenario” have invested their reputations in that outcome. They will eagerly attack anyone who has the audacity to ask, “But is it supported by science?” Science at one time was dependant on freedom of thought and criticism that required explanation based on facts. On this subject, questioning the legitimacy of the predictions is equivalent to when people were accused of being witches and treated badly. (This is my comment, and is not in the book.)

The Author’s Note points out that people aren’t shocked when the five day weather forecast isn’t accurate, but are willing to accept that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations knows what the climate will be in 2100. The dominant public assumption is that the IPCC predictions are accurate, but the number of scientists who question the predictions has grown rapidly despite the attacks they know will be leveled at them for being “skeptics” or “deniers.”

The author proposes the title Climatism for the ideology that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate, “…an extreme form of environmentalism that is using the natural climatic changes of Earth to re-define our societies.” Those who advocate that ideology want to limit population growth and replace all hydrocarbon-energy production with solar and wind power. What they don’t mention is that those energy sources cannot provide even a fraction of the energy produced by hydrocarbons, which means that society will have to do without. There has been a slight warming, but evidence is presented that the cause is likely natural and has nothing to do with the activities of man. ”

If global warming is from natural causes, then all efforts to stop the Earth from warming are not only futile, but destructive to our way of life and economic prosperity of the developing nations.”

No book on climate change would be complete without an analysis of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” A judge in London ruled that the film could be used as part of school curriculum, but the teachers must point out there were nine scientific errors or assertions not supported by scientific evidence. The nine corrections did not include mention that the film does not point out that the carbon dioxide increases lag the temperature increases. Therefore, temperature increases are the cause of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere (carbon dioxide is less soluble in warm ocean water). The basis of the climatism ideology that man’s generation of carbon dioxide is the cause of climate change is therefore false from the beginning. That didn’t stop Dr. James Hansen, an outspoken climatist from saying, “CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, those CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

There is a summary of the eight disasters that climatists predict with descriptions of why the predictions are already known to be incorrect. The dominant disaster predictions are rising sea levels (the sea has had a steady rise of 6-7 inches per century), devastating hurricanes (frequency and strength have not increased) and increased famine and death from droughts and floods (droughts and floods have not increased). Of course there is the concern about polar bear drowning, although polar bear populations have doubled since 1950. One of my granddaughters read that increased carbon dioxide will lead to acidification of the oceans and coral bleaching, but the actual data indicates the increase in water temperature and is having a positive effect on coral growth.

It is true that the climate will change just as it has always changed. The Medieval Warm Period occurred from about 900 to 1,300 A.D., and Vikings were able to settle and prosper in Greenland. The climate then moved into the Little Ice Age, and the last written evidence of the settlement was in 1408. The year 1816 is known as the “Year Without a Summer,” and that is the only known instance of a missing oak tree ring.

Chapter 5 presents data that, not surprisingly, solar activity is the main driver of global temperatures. “The scientific results…indicate that the varying activity of the Sun is indeed the largest and most systematic contributor to natural climate variations.” “There is little doubt that solar-wind variability is the primary cause of climate change…Once the IPCC comes to terms with this finding, it will have to concede that solar variability provides a better explanation of…warming than greenhouse gases.” Conversely, solar activity has declined. By April 2009 the sun had hit a 100-year low in sunspot activity and a 50 year low in solar wind pressure.

The saddest bit of evidence offered by the book is the discussion of Dr. Michael Mann’s infamous “Hockey Stick Curve.” The actual record of temperatures from about 900 A.D. is shown along with the modified graph that became known as the “hockey stick” on page 149. The actual graph shows the Medieval warm period and Little Ice Age with a slight upward trend in the late 1900s. The “hockey stick” graph shows basically unchanging temperatures until a sudden spike upward to much higher than anything that had been measured in a thousand years. It is said the Mann data “…contains collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal components, and other quality control defects.” In other words, the graph was and is a fraud.

The climate research community was shaken when an unknown hacker downloaded and posted more than a thousand documents from the University of East Anglia, the “…world’s leading source of global temperature information.” The emails revealed “…a high level of bias toward man-made warming…” One email quoted Dr. Kevin Trenberth of UCAR lamenting a cooling trend didn’t match predictions and referred to it as “…a travesty…”

There are detailed discussions of the flaws with solar, wind, and biofuel energy production. I won’t detail them here to be consistent with my goal of keeping reviews to two pages or less. I will jump ahead to pages 393 -394 where the story of the P-38 “Glacier Girl” is told. A flight of planes being sent from the U.S. to Britain in WWII was forced to land on the ice of Greenland. An expedition set out in 1981 to retrieve the planes from the well-documented location. The planes were eventually found under 270 feet of solid ice.

The End of Money

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Reviewed by Kathy London

end-of-moneyThis book was written by David Wolman, who would like to dispense with physical money. As he puts it in his book “Physical currency is a bulky, germ-smeared, carbon-intensive, expensive medium of exchange. Let’s dump it” in favor of electronic money.

Money has always puzzled me. How can something so important be so abstract? As Wolman tells us, you may not have a god in your life, but you have faith: Faith in the dollar’s value, faith in each other and in our shared government. We are believers. I guess I have mostly dumped cash already. There is no wad of dollars in my mattress. My money mostly exists in accounts I access on the Internet. A lifetime of labor, distilled into 1s and 0s in some server out there. Talk about faith!

Interwoven with interviews and his personal experiment of living without cash for one year, Wolman offers a lot of fascinating information: the history of money, how issuing currency profits governments and establishes their power, how a shortage of currency helped fuel the American colonies’ revolution, why the U.S. keeps minting pennies and nickels at a cost above face value, how many countries have given up their own currency and use U.S. dollars, and why some people think the end of cash would be the beginning of the Apocalypse. Reading about counterfeiting is, alone, worth picking up the book. (North Korea runs on counterfeit U.S. dollars? That’s infuriating.)

The concept of money is world-changing because it allows for commerce beyond barter. Money lets people store and move value, not just within a village, but across the world. Gold makes excellent physical money. Gold is durable, safe to handle, easy to test for authenticity, and won’t decay or catch fire. And it shines – people love bling. But, until recent industrial uses, it’s been worthless in the sense you can’t eat it or heat with it. Gold has only the value we agree to give it. Bizarrely, a small group of men sitting around a table in the U.S. in 1944 decided an ounce of gold would be worth $35. Today gold trades in a free market and worth over $1600 and ounce. But gold is not perfect money. It can fuel inflation and deflation, and won’t stop revolutions and depressions. Wolman thinks gold is just an older and more comfortable abstraction.

Wolman explains the problems with cash. Cash must be printed, guarded, and lugged around. Cash can be stolen or lost or destroyed. Cash is contaminated with germs and traces of cocaine. Cash enables tax-cheats. If you are poor, all these costs and risks hit you the hardest. Without the ability to convert cash into electronic money, you are excluded from banking and denied a safe and reliable way to save.

Cash offers anonymity in transactions and therefore liberty. But because of this, cash is the choice of criminals worldwide. About 60% of the US currency in circulation is $100 bills. How many are in your wallet?

Wolman thinks technology can now cure the problems of cash. Person-to-person transfers via smart phones counter credit card fees. People accumulate more debt when using credit cards than cash, but if you pay with your smart phone, apps could flash vivid images to make the transaction more “real”. Reading how such transactions will work is a view into a future that is standing on our toes.

This was an interesting book and may help readers see the current move away from cash as a good trend. You can’t fight it anyway. Electronic money is taking over the world already, so the only battle left for Wolman is to convince governments to stop issuing cash. As long as that doesn’t bring on the Apocalypse.

The Amateur

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the-amateurThe subtitle of this book by Edward Klein is “Barrack Obama in the White House.” The book begins with a detailed discussion of what is supposed to have been a very private discussion between Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton. Bill is pleading with Hillary to run against Mr. Obama in the 2012 primary. Chelsea agrees with Bill, but Hillary refuses and wants to wait until 2016. The quoted conversation ends with Bill declaring that Barrack Obama “…is an amateur.” I wondered about the truth of the conversation, which wouldn’t likely be carried out in front of anyone the Clinton’s could not trust completely.

It is later pointed out that Americans love amateurs who succeed, and Barrack the candidate certainly did thrill his supporters. Unfortunately Barrack the skilled campaigner has been revealed to have few of the talents needed to lead and communicate with the country. Presidential historian Fred I. Greenstein observed, “With all of Obama’s rhetorical brilliance and flash, he went into the phone booth as Superman and came out as Clark Kent.”

There is considerable information about Michelle Obama, Oprah, Caroline Kennedy, and the people who are the key advisors to Mr. Obama. I’m more interested in Mr. Obama, so I don’t intend to say much more about the others.

There are an astonishing 862 reviews on Amazon, and the average rating is four and a half out of five stars. The half results from the one hundred one star reviews. One of those said “It is difficult to know where this author received his information. He does not use any quotes to substantiate his allegations.” However, I will say in defense much of the information in the book is based on public record and agrees with information in news reports.

I found the book easy to read and mostly interesting. Much of the public record about Mr. Obama in his youth continues to be thin. He apparently was nearly invisible in college, displayed no intellectual curiosity, and wrote no scholarly articles as a young law professor. However, he had written his autobiography by the time he was thirty. He was elected to the Illinois Senate and hardly showed up at all. (He voted “present” on most issues.) He demonstrated no interest the legislative process, but he did enjoy giving speeches.

Mr. Obama married Michelle Robinson at the age of thirty, and the most significant adult influence on him during that time and for many years to follow was the controversial Jeremiah Wright whose sermons “…encouraged a victimization mentality among his black parishioners.” When Mr. Obama says “I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody, he is channeling Jeremiah Wright.” The media followed the same approach with the reporting about Wright that they followed with just about any potentially negative story about Mr. Obama. They did not report it. (It has been said the power of the press is not in what they report. It is in what they decide not to report.) The media was swooning over Mr. Obama, and they made little effort to vet him as he campaigned for the Presidency.

There is much information about Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, which begins with the ideas that American exceptionalism is misguided and that American power has done more harm than good. He very much wants the Muslim world to gain respect for at least him if not the country, and he thinks that Israel needs to bend to the Palestinians. He forbids the use of the term “Islamic extremism.” He much prefers to be travelling and speaking to adoring foreign crowds to governing or dealing with Congress in any manner. He was said to have commented that he did not want to waste precious hours talking with “congressmen from Palookaville.” He is described as a thin-skinned, haughty, and exceedingly proud man.

Perhaps the scariest part of the book is the description of a secret meeting with several presidential historians where it appeared the historians were being asked about the most admirable traits of great presidents. One of the attendees observed that Mr. Obama “…seemed to be looking for a presidential identity not his own…endlessly trying on new presidential masks.” The meeting was judged by the author to reveal Mr. Obama “…didn’t have the faintest idea 1) who he was; 2) why he had been elected president; and 3) how to be commander in chief and chief executive of the United States of American.” “In short, he didn’t know what he didn’t know.”

But he did and does have devout fans. Oprah Winfery encouraged his apparent messianic complex by referring to him as “The One,” which is a reference to both Jesus Christ and Neo from The Matrix. Joe Biden, in typical Joe Biden fashion, told a gathering that Barrack Obama had been unable to attend “…because he’s getting busy for Easter. He thinks it’s about him.” It is said his personality most closely matches Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was being asked about appointments, and made it clear that he owed no one anything. He explained “Remember that God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States.”

Mr. Obama has been so inept at so many aspects of being President that The Onion News Network broadcast a fake “…story that the real Barrack Obama had been kidnapped just hours after the election and replaced by an imposter.” The book asks whether the centrist, pragmatic, post-partisan leader vanished, or, “Did he ever exists? Was he a figment of his own imagination, or of our imagination—or both?”

Chapter 7 is titled “Bungler in Chief,” and lists many of Mr. Obama’s failures. He loves signing ceremonies, but has little interest in what is being signed. Perhaps his most embarrassing failure was his decision to go to Copenhagen to convince the Olympic committee to select Chicago as a site for future games. He had many friends in Chicago who would have had handsome profits if the city was chosen. He gave his speech, and Chicago came in fourth out of four. Of course that isn’t the only embarrassing failure, and the Solyndra fiasco immediately comes to mind.

There are interesting observations about the current presidential campaign. First, it is written that the Republican (who we now know to be Mitt Romney) will have to run against not only the Democratic campaign but the full force of the liberal media. They are already gearing up a campaign that Barrack has made mistakes, but he has learned so much he deserves a second term. Axelrod “…has ripped a page out of Harry Truman’s 1948 playbook …he demonizes his opponent and runs against a ‘Do-Nothing’ Republican Congress and its wealthy supporters.” The last pages of the book list all the things Mr. Obama does not want America to remember on Election Day.

George F. Will recently wrote about Barrack Obama, “…people who like the idea of him, but not the results of him.”

Crazy Horse and Custer

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crazy-horseThe subtitle of this book by Stephen E. Ambrose is “The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors,” and it provides a wealth of information about the two main characters and details their similarities and differences. Crazy Horse lived a simple life and strived to do what was best for his people. Custer behaved outlandishly to attract attention and surrounded himself with an entourage that catered to him while his troopers lived a hard life with poor food. Custer’s actions were always designed to improve his reputation and status. Custer’s only military strategy was to attack regardless of the risk to the men under his command. His eventual defeat resulted from the fact Crazy Horse was a better strategist and had vastly superior forces that were well organized for one of the few times in the decades the Native Americans warred against the whites. (Note that Ambrose called them “Indians,” and I have a problem with that name because it derived from Columbus seeing natives in what he thought was Indies and that name has survived since that error was made. However, I will use the term the author uses in the remainder of this review.)

I began reading this book on the recommendation of a friend and with a warning from the librarian who declared the book was said by her husband, an Ambrose fan, to be his worst. More important to me is a negative review on Amazon by a Sioux that “What Mr. Ambrose states in his book is mostly fabrication about the Sioux Nation.” I found the descriptions of the Indians and Crazy Horse to be fascinating. It actually makes me sad that a member of the Sioux Nation was moved to give the book a one star ranking, because I had increased my admiration of that tribe from the reading of this book. The most remarkable observation Ambrose makes is that whites were amazed that the Indians could consume as much as ten pounds of meat in one meal.

Crazy Horse began life as “Curly” and Custer began as “Autie.” Crazy Horse was raised in the tradition that led him to want to be a Sioux warrior, and Custer became known as “a born soldier” as a little boy. Crazy Horse and his people had no use for the concept of private property while the whites believed that the concept of private property was the key to economic freedom. Autie learned early that currying favor with the politically powerful gained advantage, and that is how he made it into West Point. Crazy Horse learned that bravery of actions and outcome was all that was important to a warrior.

Custer finished last in his West Point class, and seemed to be able to curtail his lack of discipline in both actions and dress just in time to prevent expulsion. He loved attention and was an expert at getting it. He went from long flowing hair to shaving his head and wearing a toupee. As his hair grew back he acquired the nickname of “Curly,” which was the name first given to Crazy Horse.

Custer attracted attention of superiors in the Civil War because he was the opposite of cautious. Custer ordered and led charges while others held back. He often lost large numbers of soldiers killed, but seemed impervious to injury himself. He led a headlong charge into Jeb Stuart’s Confederate cavalry at Gettysburg and might have changed history. Stuart was to hit the Union lines from the rear to coincide with Picket’s charge from the front. Custer’s undermanned charge sent horses and men crashing into the Confederate calvary, and disrupted what probably would have been devastating to the Union soldiers lined up to repel Picket to the front. Custer lost 481 men killed, wounded, or captured of his 1,700 man force, but he was promoted to Major General and Jeb Stuart was mortally wounded. Custer lost more than a third of his men at the Wilderness. His aggressive “tactics” stopped Lee’s flight and was a key in forcing the Confederate surrender at Appomattox despite the loss of 377 men. His successes in battle were always brutal and bloody. Custer’s younger brother Tom was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions in the battles that led to Appomattox. His brother would follow him and die with all the other selected staff members at the hands of the Sioux.

On a personal family note, one of Custer’s competitors for senior military attention was Judson Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick, or “Little Kil,” was the commanding general of the “mounted calvary” unit in Sherman’s army that included Elijah Tilton, my Great Uncle by marriage to my Great Aunt Rachael Brooke, and two of their sons. The two sons survived, but Elijah did not.

Custer led the Grand Review in Washington to celebrate the defeat of the Confederacy. The end of the Civil War left only the Indian wars for Custer to gain the military recognition he craved, and there was little positive recognition due for the U.S. army and calvary in those wars. The book observes that, “…no campaign the Army ever undertook matched the Hancock campaign of 1867 for sheer stupidity.” The soldiers spent years chasing the Indians, and many of them never saw a hostile Indian in the field except in the rare instances that the Indians believed they had a strategic advantage. Custer and his troops unsuccessfully pursued Indians in the central U.S. while the Indians “…had a fine time…” striking mail stations, wagon trains, and railroad workers. The whites defeated Indians not by direct conflict but by killing the buffalo herds that provided the Indians food.

There is detailed information about Libbie (Elizabeth) Custer and her relationship with Custer. Custer did everything to be in her company, and once was even court martialed for abandoning his post to reach her. Libbie was completely loyal to him, and used her beauty and charming personality to advance his career. She accepted the fact that Custer ordered that she be killed if threatened to become an Indian hostage. She dedicated her life to advocating that he was a hero who died in the service of the country.

There is an interesting comment by Sitting Bull who became part of the Wild Bill Cody show and was later shot in the back and killed by an Indian policeman that “…the white man knows how to make everything, but he does not know how to distribute it.” Annie Oakley observed that the money Sitting Bull made “…went into the pocket of small, ragged boys.” Sitting Bull was eventually shot in the back and killed by an Indian policeman.

There are details about Custer positioning himself in politics. There are implications that he pushed his soldiers and their mounts to exhaustion and ordered the fatal attack on a Crazy Horse’s massively superior force because he hoped to have a major combat victory would earn himself a nomination in the Democratic convention. He was said to have laughed just before his death, and one has to wonder whether his brother, the hand-picked staff, and the others in his command thought it was all that funny.

Crazy Horse eventually agreed to come in to a reservation, but tried to resist when he realized he was going to be locked in a small cage with no toilet. He was stabbed with bayonets, and died within a few days. Not a great story in our historical legacy, but a worthwhile book to consider.

Angry Pigs Organized Against Gerbils: The Farmer Island War

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apoagThis review is about what may turn out to be my favorite book of all time. The reason is that I am the author and our four grandchildren are the Creative Staff and illustrators. The grandchildren are, in order of age, Andrew, Davis, Clayain, and Campbell. The intriguingly creative Angry Pigs book is the product of sharing ideas with those grandchildren and is, according to one reviewer, “An entertaining and well-illustrated book.”

Why in the world did pigs organize against gerbils, and why were they angry? The gerbils that had been farm pets did not prepare for the future when the Old Farmer, the only remaining human caretaker of the isolated farm, died. The pigs recognized that the animals had to grow food to survive, but the gerbils resorted to declaring war after the pigs refused to surrender their supplies of corn. The pigs became angry when the gerbils began using lethal weapons.

The pigs form a military organization and develop weapons to respond to the threat. They gain allies from other animals, including secret spies. The pigs also gain honor and respect as they bravely face danger together, and learn compassion is more rewarding than anger.

We are confident that you will enjoy this entertaining story and encourage you to order the book here. We also encourage tell your family and friends about the book, forward them the link to the book, and write a “customer review” on Amazon.com. We don’t think you will be able to resist ordering the book when you see the intriguing cover art that was developed by Keith Motyl, our publisher.

You also might also be interested that we have begun a web site to highlight the book and to post information about pigs and gerbils and describe the upcoming and continuing adventures of the animals on Farmer Island.

Better Angels of Our Natures, Why Violence has Declined

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Guest Review by Kathy London

better -angelsI keep running into references to Steven Pinker’s book, so, even though it came out in 2011, I think it was worth a look today.

Pinker sets out to demonstrate that violence has decreased over history and continues to decrease today. Pinker views the decline of violence as one of the most significant and least appreciated developments in history. But he knows most people will refuse to believe it.

Because of preconceptions about violence in the past and today, Pinker must present lots of data – and the evidence is extensive. So this is a long (812 pages of text) and leisurely (84 pages of notes, plus references and index) book.

The book is full of stories as well as studies and statistics. Pinker says “if narratives without statistics are blind, statistics without narratives are empty”. Using sources from Shakespeare to the Bible to Saturday Night Live to word searches across 5 million digitized Google Books, Pinker shows how integrated into everyday life violence was in the past – slavery, rape, murder, feuds, wars, and torture. Europe in the Middle Ages seems especially horrific; enough to ruin any romantic vision of medieval knights.

Pinker is writing about a trend that spans millennia, starting well before written history. Can we learn anything about our pre-human ancestors from the behavior of apes today? Maybe. Lethal raiding among chimps is shockingly brutal.

Are human beings basically good or bad? Pinker presents extensive psychological evidence. This doesn’t seem, strictly speaking, necessary to prove his point on decreasing violence. Pinker feels probability and statistics are counter-intuitive, so you need to see this evidence in detail. He tells me more about power-law distributions than I really wanted to know. There are a lot of words on crime, deterrence, and how to test for reality – and Pinker admits the data present a rat’s nest of implications.

There was no idyllic past. Evidence piles up that hunter-gather societies, once considered peaceful, murdered a substantial percentage of their populations through raids, ambushes, and terrorism (including cannibalism).

With the rise of agriculture and states, a government monopoly on force to protect citizens replaced feuds and personal vengeance. While this was a significant step in reducing overall violence, governments committed mass violence against their citizens: torture, prison, execution, starvation, and slavery.

The Age of Reason and the Enlightenment brought many violent state institutions to an end, though tyranny and war between major states continued.

The Twentieth Century has often been labeled “the most violent century”. The first half was certainly a cascade of world and civil wars: a “hemoclysm”. But the second half of the century avoided war between major powers and led to the astonishing fizzling out of the Cold War. So what does the hemoclysm tell us about long-term trends? Nothing. 

To convince you, Pinker presents data from earlier wars and atrocities that killed more people than Twentieth Century wars. Of the 21 worst things people have ever done to each other, 15 were before World War I. If you rate atrocities by the percentage of the population killed, only one Twentieth Century war even makes the list: quite a surprise. (By the way, the Tang Dynasty rebellion is rated as the worst atrocity: in eight years the rebellion resulted in the loss of two thirds of China’s population – a sixth of the total world population at the time.)

Pinker concludes that five cultural developments decrease violence over time:

1 – State monopoly on force to protect citizens replaces feuds and personal vengeance.

2 – Gentle commerce makes it better to tolerate others than kill them.

3 – “Feminization” of society, or the moving away from “manly honor”. (Think of the famous duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr for manly honor.)

4 – Expanding sympathy for others from kin to tribe and beyond.

5 – Reason, with a broad trend towards self-control and orientation to the future.

Pinker doesn’t claim today’s violence is acceptable or even that the historical trend will continue. This offers little comfort to today’s victims of violence. But it offers perspective and hope. Pinker’s book is well worth the time it takes to read.

PS: Pinker continues to find hopeful trends. For data since WWII and mostly since 1970, see his article here.