http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/…

Couldn’t the county simply have paid him for the damage to his well?

That’s the question that urges itself upon me as I sift through the rubble of last Spring’s confrontation in rural Wisconsin between Robert Bayliss and … well, at last count, roughly two dozen local, county, and state agencies.

The anti-Bayliss coalition included elements from no fewer than six SWAT teams and the prominent use of three BearCat (Ballistic Engineered Armored Response and Rescue Counter Attack Truck) military assault vehicles.

Surely, Mr. Bayliss must have been a singularly fearsome fugitive in order to trigger such a huge deployment. One would think as much. And one would be wrong.

The post is from late June but I just heard about this story update from Free Talk Live’s August 16th, 2008 show.

This story is particularly disturbing given the situation. Property owned for 30ish years, the township’s tax screwup, the blowing up of his pump and the extreme response to his legitimate defensive actions. The librarian’s description of the man makes what occurred feel all the more horrible.

http://blogs.smh.com.au/…

Roy W Spencer made the announcement when he gave testimony before the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on 22 July 2008. He has a PhD in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has been
involved in global warming research for close to twenty years. He has numerous peer-reviewed scientific articles dealing with the measurement and interpretation of climate variability and climate change. He is Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team Leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Data obtained from Aqua is the basis for much of the following.

Here are excerpts from his full testimony.

“Regarding the currently popular theory that mankind is responsible for global warming, I am very pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research. Our latest research results, which I am about to describe, could have an enormous impact on policy decisions regarding greenhouse gas emissions. … we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

“Another way of saying this is that the real climate system appears to be dominated by “negative feedbacks” — instead of the “positive feedbacks” which are displayed by all twenty computerized climate models utilized by the IPCC. …If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, … it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly
natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end — if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now.”

“The support for my claim of low climate sensitivity (net negative feedback) for our climate system is two-fold. First, we have a new research article in-press in the Journal of Climate which uses a simple climate model to show that previous estimates of the sensitivity of the climate system from satellite data were biased toward the high side by the neglect of natural cloud variability. It turns out that the failure to account for natural, chaotic cloud variability generated internal to the climate system will always lead to the illusion of a climate system which appears more sensitive than it really is. …”

“The second line of evidence in support of an insensitive climate system comes from the satellite data themselves. While our work in-press established the existence of an observational bias in estimates of climate sensitivity, it did not address just how large that bias might be. But in the last several weeks, we have stumbled upon clear and convincing observational evidence of particularly strong negative feedback (low climate sensitivity) from our latest and best satellite instruments. That evidence includes our development of two new methods for extracting the feedback signal from either observational or climate model data, a goal which has been called the “holy grail” of climate research. …”

Not including clouds in the simulations invalidates the result? No shit? Funny… skeptics have been saying that for years. I spent my lunch yesterday explaining that and other reasons to question the “consensus” on global cooling global warming global climate change.

The last episode of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit (S06E06) was on the this topic. I recommend watching it though I warn you that what you witness may cause your brain to hurt.

http://news.yahoo.com/…

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Tuesday allowing the Justice Department to sue OPEC members for limiting oil supplies and working together to set crude prices, but the White House threatened to veto the measure.The bill would subject OPEC oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, to the same antitrust laws that U.S. companies must follow.

The measure passed in a 324-84 vote, a big enough margin to override a presidential veto.

The legislation also creates a Justice Department task force to aggressively investigate gasoline price gouging and energy market manipulation.

“This bill guarantees that oil prices will reflect supply and demand economic rules, instead of wildly speculative and perhaps illegal activities,” said Democratic Rep. Steve Kagen of Wisconsin, who sponsored the legislation.

The lawmaker said Americans “are at the mercy” of OPEC for how much they pay for gasoline, which this week hit a record average of $3.79 a gallon.

The White House opposes the bill, saying that targeting OPEC investment in the United States as a source for damage awards “would likely spur retaliatory action against American interests in those countries and lead to a reduction in oil available to U.S. refiners.”

The administration said less oil going to refineries would limit available gasoline supplies and raise fuel prices.

Foreign investment in U.S. oil infrastructure has declined in the last decade. But the state-owned oil companies of several OPEC nations are owners of U.S. refineries, and those investments could be affected if the legislation becomes law, said Arlington, Virginia-based FBR Capital Markets Corp.

The bill also requires the Government Accountability Office to carryout a study on the effects of prior oil company mergers on energy prices.

The Senate would still have to approve the House measure.

The Senate previously approved similar legislation as part of a broad energy bill. However, the OPEC-suing provision was removed after White House opposition in order to get the underlying energy legislation signed into law.

Speculation is an essential knowledge source for the market. Just like any other source it’s important for the market to function optimally. The speculation is wild because some group of jackasses in Congress and the executive branch of the USA government are waging wars on people who did us no harm. Because they are screwing up the value of the currency and attempting to carve the path for future energy sources. No bill can guarantee prices. They will likely cause shortages like the late 1970’s. As Mises said when the government interferes and screws things up… they know nothing else but to continue to interfere and to screw up.

I’m not sure how the hell they can enforce anything like this, I’ve not read the bill yet, but this sounds to me to be a declaration or war or at least an aggressive act.

If the government wants prices to drop stop the intervention. Leave the market alone. Leave the people and governments of the oil producing nations alone. Leave domestic energy production alone. Let them build refineries, let them drill for new oil sources, let them build nuke plants. Then will the costs normalize.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,347751,00.html

Enacting city smoking bans appears to increase drunken driving, according to a new national study of arrests by Wisconsin researchers.

Fatal accidents involving alcohol increased after communities banned public smoking, the study to be released by the Journal of Public Economics found. The authors attributed the increase to people driving farther to drink, either to a place with an outdoor smoking area or a city without a ban.

“The increased miles driven by drivers who wish to smoke and drink offsets any reduction in driving from smokers choosing to stay home after a ban, resulting in increased alcohol-related accidents,” the study says.

The researchers, Scott Adams, of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Chad Cotti, now at the University of South Carolina, said they were surprised by the results.

“We thought we would see a reduction,” Adams said. “Our first thought was, ‘Throw it away, it must be wrong.’”

But it wasn’t, he said.

Be sure to read the title in your best Strong Bad voice. Add a “HAHA” before and/or after. What is so hard to believe an action can have unforeseen consequences? Something is going to change when you forcibly alter peoples behavior. Not smoking means more time to drink. It may mean driving further to drink. It may even cause a drop in hook ups from the loss in “Do you have a light?” pickup lines.

Any researcher whose first reaction is “Throw it away, it must be wrong.” has no credibility in my opinion. I’ll need to make a note of questioning anything out of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

From the Associated Press:

WAUSAU, Wis — Cars lining the street. A house full of young people. A keg and drinking games inside. Police thought they had an underage boozing party on their hands.

But though they made dozens of teens take breath tests, none tested positive for alcohol. That’s because the keg contained root beer.

… Nearly 90 breath tests were done, and officers even searched locked rooms for hiding teens…

You never which terrorists might be at these root beer keggers, right?  Reno 911 writers take note.  I’m surprised that the kids weren’t charged with some kind of frivolous charge for not actually breaking the law.

http://www.cnn.com/…

Amir Khan says he becomes frustrated and humiliated every time he enters the United States and federal agents search his computers. Khan, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen, says it has happened five times since 2003.

He says agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection have even forced him to give them access to password-protected, confidential information from his company and his banking records.

An IT consultant who travels to Europe, Turkey and Pakistan, Khan says he has cooperated with the questions and searches but feels by now border agents should know he doesn’t pose a threat.

Situations for travelers such as Khan are at issue in a lawsuit filed last week by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Asian Law Caucus in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The suit accuses customs agents of “lengthy questioning and intrusive searches” and seeks clarification on the law that allows such searches.

I’d really like to know which law overrides the 4th Amendment. Oh wait… none of them. So which part of the Constitution overrides the 4th Amendment? They don’t have the authority to regulate immigration. That’s a state issue. We however have allowed the general government to take on that authority and in doing so the Supreme Court in 1977 in US v. Ramsey ruled that Customs may search people without probable cause. I find the dissenting view far more convincing.

In 1971 the Department of the Treasury and the Post Office Department first asserted that Congress had granted such authority in an awkwardly drafted statute enacted in 1866. [431 U.S. 606, 626] Under the earlier practice, which had been consistently followed for 105 years, customs officials were not allowed to open foreign mail except in the presence, and with the consent, of the addressees, 1 unless of course a warrant supported by probable cause had been first obtained. There are five reasons why I am convinced that Congress did not authorize the kind of secret searches of private mail that the Executive here conducted.First, throughout our history Congress has respected the individual’s interest in private communication. The notion that private letters could be opened and inspected without notice to the sender or the addressee is abhorrent to the tradition of privacy and freedom to communicate protected by the Bill of Rights. I cannot believe that any member of the Congress would grant such authority without considering its constitutional implications.

Second, the legislative history of the 1866 statute unambiguously discloses that this very concern was voiced during debate by Senator Howe, and that he was assured by the sponsor of the legislation that the bill would not authorize the examination of the United States mails. This colloquy is too plain to be misunderstood:

“Mr. HOWE. The second and third sections of this bill speak of the seizure, search, and examination of all trunks, packages, and envelopes. It seems to me that language is broad enough to cover the United States mails. I suppose it is not the purpose of the bill to authorize the examination of the United States mails.

“Mr. MORRILL [sponsor of the bill]. Of course not.

“Mr. HOWE. I propose to offer an amendment to prevent such a construction.

“Mr. EDMUNDS. There is no danger of such a construction being placed upon this language. It is the language usually employed in these bills.

“Mr. HOWE. If gentlemen are perfectly confident that it will bear no such construction, and will receive no such construction, I do not care to press it.

“The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Wisconsin withdraws his amendment.”