Liberty Groups Challenge Federal Authority

In American history, the Continental Congress was the means by which our Founding Fathers formally reacted to the abuses of power they endured under their British sovereigns. Before American independence was declared, it was through Continental Congress that the need was determined.

Two-hundred and thirty-five years later, a coalition of liberty groups is resurrecting this historic forum to challenge the ever-expanding authority of the same federal government their forebears went on to create. In a video proclaiming their intentions, a representative cites the Constitution’s provision for citizens to petition the government for a redress of grievances. The “servant government” is obligated to respond or prove itself in violation of its rightful role. Continental Congress 2009 is scheduled to commence in November with three delegates from each state which were elected through a process concluded October 10th.

There has been only a scattering of local stories regarding the event, no major media coverage. Even alternative news sources known to focus on unconventional stories lack significant coverage of Continental Congress 2009. Regardless of its perceived legitimacy or potential effectiveness, this grassroots initiative is a story worth attention. It represents a degree of activism beyond that typically taken. It is more than a protest. It is more than a rally. It is a direct challenge to federal authority spawning from a liberty movement which has surged in the Year of the Tea Party. Observers will be able to track the event online, as the sessions are scheduled to be broadcast on the web. Fightin Words will offer summaries and commentary.

The idea behind Continental Congress 2009, as explained by its organizers, is to affect a “mass movement” which has the capacity to take effective non-violent action to resist a federal government which seems increasingly brazen and dismissive of the citizens from which it derives its sovereignty. The outlook for success is certainly doubtful, particularly given the ignorance of the public to the existence of Continental Congress 2009. However, the First American Revolution succeeded with only 3% of the population, and there is certainly a tremendous amount of rebellious energy which could be harnessed to impressive effect given the right circumstance. Consider, for instance, the original Continental Congress’s first act to organize an economic boycott of Britain. Imagine the impact of a similar effort exerted by a mere 3% of the current population, 3 million people refusing to pay federal taxes.

The effect of not just this new iteration of Continental Congress, but the entire liberty movement, could be good, bad, or wholly indifferent. Among the definitively bad possibilities is the potential for the liberty movement to unintentionally enable gross revision of the Constitution. Earlier this year, the John Birch Society warned of the damage that could be done if the Tea Party movement embraces the idea of a Bill of Federalism and urges state legislators to call for a Constitutional Convention. A Con-Con almost happened in the early 1980’s, but was avoided once the potential for drastic revision to constitutional limitations was communicated.

For those of you who have not followed the Con-Con battles of the past three decades, the basic problem with Congress calling a constitutional convention at the request of 34 or more states in accordance with Article V of the Constitution is that leading constitutional scholars and judges have pointed out that the agenda of such a constitutional convention could not be specified by the state legislatures who would have started the whole process in motion in the first place. In brief, a constitutional convention could become a “runaway” convention similar to our original Constitution Convention in 1787 and come up with a radically new constitution, not just a few specific amendments. Even Article V’s additional requirement that three-fourths of the states must ratify any amendments emanating from a constitutional convention is not sufficient safeguard against a runaway convention given the biased media and political elites that would be involved in the whole process.

The intention of the progressive radicals currently dominating American politics is quite clear when it comes to the Constitution. The document is maligned for being a charter of negative liberties rather than, as then Illinois State Senator Barrack Obama stated in 2001, “say[ing] what the federal government and the state government must do on your behalf,” namely “redistributive justice.” It should be assumed any opening to revise the Constitution, even if initiated in good faith, would be taken advantage of by the founding document’s declared domestic enemies. For this reason and more, American citizens should keep a close eye on Continental Congress 2009 and its aftermath (if any), and those in the liberty movement should check their enthusiasm to ensure they not become practical examples of Marx’s “useful idiots.”

Enough Talk

What can we do about it?

This is the number one question on the lips of every attendee of every tea party, rally, town hall meeting, or protest I have attended in the past six months. Presented with alarming evidence of gross negligence and even malicious radical intent on the part of officials at all levels of government, people know something must be done, but are at a loss for what. What can we do is precisely the right question to ask. However, the answers typically given are underwhelming. We are told we need to contact our elected officials, write our congressmen, phone our senators, write letters to the editor, talk to our friends and neighbors, and otherwise drum up further talk. But talk, as New York Times columnist David Brooks bluntly informed us earlier this month, is ever so cheap.

Over the years, I have asked many politicians what happens when Limbaugh and his colleagues attack. The story is always the same. Hundreds of calls come in. The receptionists are miserable. But the numbers back home do not move. There is no effect on the favorability rating or the re-election prospects.

Brooks here demeans talk radio. But his point could just as easily be applied to talk, period. Our elected officials do not care what we have to say. They only care about polls. They only care about their re-election prospects. They are not interested in making the best decision informed by the soundest reasoning. They are not interested in learning or teaching, in being seekers or purveyors of truth. They are not interested in representing the interests of their gerrymandered districts. Their only interest is securing their own power. In several well-publicized instances over the summer, many of our elected officials told us flat out how they regard our opinion. We are crazy. We are racists. We are Nazis. We are Astroturf. We are there to listen to them. We’re at their town hall. We’re in their house. We follow their rules.

We baulk at such arrogance as if we should expect anything different. But should we? Haven’t we sat idly by and let things get to this point? Haven’t we sat in the comfort of our homes and watched the news and shaken our heads and thought the world’s goin’ to hell, and done nothing? Haven’t we sat in the comfort of our cars during our commutes and listened to talkers and allowed them to vicariously expresses our discontent, and done nothing? Most recently, haven’t we attended rallies and gone to town halls and maybe shown up to a protest or two, and done nothing? We have a status quo whereby our so-called public servants are so sure of their positions they happily endure (or pay others to endure) our verbal lashing while confident they will skip happily to re-election. They do so with good reason, as Glenn Beck points out in his Common Sense:

How is it possible that a Congress with an overall approval rating of 13 percent saw 95 percent of its incumbent representatives win reelection along with 88 percent of its incumbent senators? Common sense tells us those two things cannot possibly go together – yet it happened.

This utter lack of accountability is so prevalent, establishment hacks like Brooks point to it as political axiom, as if we are all supposed to know our opinion is worthless and should feel appropriately silly for having expected different. Well, maybe he’s right. Maybe we should feel silly. Maybe we’ve been had.

Upon learning last week that President Barrack Obama is set to sign a treaty which will effectively create a “communist world government,” I sent the following message to my elected representatives in Congress, Representative Erik Paulsen (R-MN-3), and Senators Al Franken (D-MN) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN):

Wednesday night at an event hosted by the Minnesota Free Market Institute at Bethel University, Lord Christopher Monckton, former adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a presentation on climate change. At the end of his presentation, he closed with a warning to the crowd regarding a treaty President Obama is poised to sign at this December’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This treaty will effectively cede US sovereignty to a newly created global government, as overtly stated in the current draft, page 18, item 38; a link to the PDF is provided below.

It is my expectation that you will fulfill your oath to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States by petitioning the president, your fellow members of the Senate, and your colleagues in the House to do everything in their power to keep this country out of that treaty. The Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves if they knew their progeny allowed a foreign power such authority, effectively undoing their every effort in an act of Anti-American Revolution. This is neither hyperbole nor rhetoric. This treaty would leave us accountable to a global governing agency with zero elected representation and zero constitutional protections. It must not be signed!

Thank you. I would appreciate a response indicating your position on the treaty and your intended course of action.

Monckton’s comments:
http://fightinwordsusa.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/obama-poised-to-cede-us-soverignty-claims-british-lord/

Treaty PDF:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/un-fccc-copenhagen-2009.pdf

Sincerely,
Walter Hudson

I received an immediate auto-response only from Paulsen. One week later, I have yet to hear anything from either Franken or Klobuchar. Paulsen’s office sent out this canned non-response, received yesterday:

Dear Walter:

Thank you for sharing your comments and concerns with me.

I deeply appreciate the input of residents of the Third District, which helps me to better represent you in Congress.

You can be sure I will fully review your comments.  As I continue my work in Congress, I will be sure to keep your thoughts in mind.   Please feel free to continue passing along your thoughts, and visit my website for more information about Congress and the work I am doing for the residents and communities of the Third Congressional District.

Thanks again for contacting me, as I appreciate hearing from you.  Please let me know whenever I can be of assistance.

Sincerely,
Erik Paulsen

There was apparently no “surrendering US sovereignty” form letter on hand. So I got this generic “thanks for writing” response instead.

I have seen Erik Paulsen speak and have gauged his manner. He seems to be a decent man who may, in most cases, do the right thing. However, this canned response to an issue of the gravest possible importance is an insult, albeit better then my senators’. Mine was not a letter to be piled neatly in some “for” or “against” stack. It surely did not address a topic which the congressmen was aware of or had commented on. The issue of national sovereignty definitely demands his attention, along with that of all his colleagues. Will it get such attention? I do not know. Nor am I likely to. At the end of the day, it’s kind of like I did nothing.

But maybe that’s how “political participation” is supposed to feel, because maybe that’s what it is – nothing. Maybe we’re supposed to just sit around, go about our lives, stew over the occasional outrage, and once in a while let off steam at a rally. Or maybe we can wait until Election Day to save ourselves, get all riled up, full of manufactured excitement over a candidate we didn’t even want on the ballot, go stand in line, punch our chad, and head home with a button proving we done did our part. Of course, nothing will actually change. Nothing will actually get better. We will get the same bus heading toward the same cliff with a different driver at another speed.

Enough.

It’s time for something different. It’s time to actually do something. But what?

It occurs to me the options fall into two basic categories. We can attempt to operate within the system. Or we can operate outside it, either with the intent to circumvent (which is likely impossible) or the intent to subvert.

I hear a lot of talk among liberty-minded folk which amounts to chest-pounding in preparation for the latter, talk of guns, cold-dead hands, don’t-tread-on-me, blah blah blah. Okay. We get it. You have a gun. Yea for you. How’s that working out for you? What is it doing? Is your gun your plan? Is that how you’re going to get your republic back? Or is it perhaps merely acting as a security blanket barring you from more reasonable and effective (and potentially more frightening) means? It’s easy to talk about shooting, fighting, and dying. It’s easy to pound one’s chest. None of that impresses me. And it certainly doesn’t impress your so-called public servants.

Another rallying call I keep hearing is for third parties or boycotting the 2010 election or otherwise making oneself utterly useless to the political process. I have twice this week been solicited by organizations that are working to divert political will from the two party system in the name of liberty. Again I ask, how’s that working out for you? What is it doing? Is that your plan, to take your ball and go home? Let me be clear; I am not philosophically opposed to third parties. If it were certain that neither of the two major parties could be brought around to serve liberty and constitutional principles, I would be in the market for an alternative political home. But, folks, we haven’t even tried!

Along with the frequent demonstrations of enormous arrogance among many elected officials this summer, we have also seen another commonality, shock and awe. Across the board, at every level of government, from politicians young and old, the sentiment is the same. I have never seen anything like this before in my life. They’re talking about you. They’re talking about the tea parties. They’re talking about the standing room only town halls. They’re talking about the 9-12 march on Washington. They’re talking about a public increasingly willing to take time out of their day, skip a football game, eat on the go, miss a TV show, and make their voice heard. They’ve never seen it before. It’s not supposed to happen. You’re supposed to be asleep. But you’re out walking around, out of your pajamas, no longer content with your Binky. It scares the bejesus out of them, more than anything they can imagine. It scares them only because it has the potential to translate to action, not because it necessarily will.

Here, at long last, is what must be done: we must channel this collective energy aroused by the call of liberty and bring it crashing down upon our major parties in precisely the manner they dread. We got where we are by assuming someone else had our back, allowing both the Republicans and the Democrats to become overrun with and led by authoritarian statists with no respect for the Constitution. That those in the Republican party are to some degree less statist than those in the Democratic party is of little consequence. Both parties need to be cleansed. They need to be usurped from within and reclaimed by normal Americans whose differences left and right are of less consequence than their unity on the supremacy of the Constitution and the sanctity of individual liberty. Liberty, like tyranny, knows no party. It can be brought to bear by anyone under any banner. It is our duty to bring it back to the tents of the Republican and Democratic parties.

In a recent email sent out to his supporters, Congressman Ron Paul wrote:

The other day when Lindsey Graham went after me, and accused me of trying to take over the Republican party, I couldn’t help but chuckle. Partisan politics is one thing, and about the only thing politicians understand. But ideas are something else. And our ideas–the ideas of liberty–are capturing the hearts and minds of millions of Americans, and that is what counts.

Dr. Paul is correct. What Graham and other establishment hacks are counting on to save them from a rising tide of libertarian sentiment is fragmentation among the movement. They are counting on us dividing ourselves among third parties, racial lines (really? white nationalists? c’mon now), or letting us neuter ourselves by refusing to participate. We must not oblige them! We must make their fears come true! We must take over their parties and oust them utilizing the means they have kept intentionally esoteric for entirely too long.

In the past month or so, I have spoken to two local Republican party insiders, one of which is a very active official. Both indicated to me that the establishment within the party is scared senseless of normal people like you and me showing up to have a say in internal party politics. They keep their meetings under raps, discourage public forum, and fear open debate. They don’t want to hear from you at the caucuses. They don’t want to hear from you as a delegate. They don’t want your input into who gets on the ballot and what they actually believe. They want you to standby until summoned for a general election, to come out and dutifully pick the candidate with the right letter next to their name.

No more. It’s time to seize control in the only way which matters. There is an entire mechanism for affecting change which has been denied to you by design. The answer is not a third party. The answer is not refusing to participate. The answer which we must at least consider before embracing a likely ineffective alternative is to storm the gates of the two-party system, oust the self-serving autocrats currently hoarding influence, open up the process to real and public debate, and expand our concept of civic duty beyond Election Day to a 24/7/365 obligation as personal and urgent as the feeding, clothing, and sheltering of our children and ourselves. The freedom to provide for those necessities and chart our own course is ultimately at stake.

Projections vs. Data: The Death of Climate Change

by Walter Scott Hudson and Lord Christopher Monckton

Last week, Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave the keynote address at an event held at Bethel University in St. Paul hosted by the Minnesota Free Market Institute regarding climate change. Fightin Words immediately transcribed Monckton’s closing remarks, which included the alarming claim that President Barrack Obama was poised to sign a treaty at a United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen this December which will create a “communist world government.” That post garnered immediate widespread attention which has sustained over the weekend into this week. Lord Monckton was yesterday a guest on Glenn Beck’s radio program and has been scheduled for a television appearance on Beck’s Fox News program later this week.

While the enormity of Monckton’s claim regarding the Copenhagen treaty certainly deserves the consideration it has received, particularly in light of its substantiation via a copy of the treaty available on an official United Nations web site, it is also important to consider how the entire basis upon which the call for global government is justified is without merit. Anthropogenic climate change is insignificant; such was the thesis of Monckton’s presentation at Bethel University. That message has, to some extent, been overshadowed.

Over the weekend, video of Lord Monckton’s presentation (available above) has been released by the Minnesota Free Market Institute. The institute reports the video has been viewed 12,000 times as of October 19th. The institute has also made available Lord Monckton’s fully annotated power point slide show which he referenced throughout his presentation. The purpose of this post is to provide a summary of that presentation for those with limited time or patience. One may find even this summary more lengthy than they have patience for. If so, please consider skipping to the final heading, where the newest and most relevant revelation can be found. Credit for all but a scant intrusion of summary among the following should go entirely to Lord Christopher Monckton, who graciously provided permission for his work to be reproduced and distributed.

Truth Matters

Scientists used to be rather beautifully described as “seekers after truth.” An ancient Middle Eastern mathematician and scientist, whose image today graces an Iraqi banknote, once stated, “The seeker after truth does not put his trust in any old consensus: he questions it, and submits his learning from it to reason and demonstration.” T. H. Huxley stated, “The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.” The scientific method is about checking. One does not accept a claim simply on the basis of popular acceptance. Truth is not discerned by majority vote. Science is not a belief system.

Forty years ago, DDT was banned. DDT was the only effective killer of the malaria mosquito. Before the ban, the inventor of DDT received the Nobel Prize for having crafted an agent which saved countless lives. Malaria, a killer of children in the Third World, had been all but eradicated. There were still 50,000 deaths per year. When DDT was banned, by the very same faction that is now claiming we need to close down 5/6 of the United States economy, the number of malaria deaths shot up to 1,000,000 and stayed there for 40 years. 40 million people, most of them children, died as a direct result of banning DDT for no good reason. When the ban was lifted in 2006, Dr. Arata Kochi of the World Health Organization stated, “Quite often in this field politics comes first and science second. We must take a position based on the science and the data.” In spite of this, the communistic left is once again campaigning for DDT to be banned. Likewise, the initial reaction to HIV by army scientists was to recommend those infected be humanely quarantined. Those recommendations were rejected by policy makers on ideological grounds. The result has been 25,000,000 dead and 40,000,000 infected according to the United Nations. Policy diverting food production to bio-fuels, again for “green” purposes, has resulted in the doubling of food prices. For those of us in the West, this is of little consequence. For those in the Third World, it has been utterly devastating, resulting in food riots and the inability for people to afford the mudpies (made with literal mud) they depend on to stay alive.

This is why it matters to get the science and morality which drives policy right, to not allow conclusions to be affected by anything more than fact. Lives are at stake. The responsibility of policy makers is to serve their constituents by making decisions informed with fact and motivated by truth.

But the environmental left does not care about truth, as our examination shall reveal. They also, as evidenced by their actions, do not care about deaths in the Third World. Rather, they are greatly dismayed by population growth and have, in many cases, openly called for massive population reduction. Regardless of whether population growth is a problem, and there is an argument that it is not, there is a better way to control population than unleashing the malaria mosquito, AIDS, and food shortages. It is called raising the standard of living. If people are wealthy, their populations stabilize. This is something that every demographer knows perfectly well. If the environmental left was really concerned with “saving the planet,” they would not be trying to make everyone poor and divested of responsibility through socialist economic policies; they would do everything in their power to make everyone rich and therefore eager to maintain the beauty and sustainability of their surroundings.

Lies With Intent

“Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” – Sir John Houghton

“We have to offer up scary scenarios.” – Stephen Schneider

“‘Global warming’ can mean colder. It can mean drier. It can mean wetter. That’s what we’re dealing with.” – Stephen Guilbeault, Greenpeace, 2005

“I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is.” – Al Gore

In Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, the infamous “hockey stick” graph, which Gore claims to represent the projected increase in global temperature if nothing is done to halt anthropogenic climate change, contains an obvious flaw. If one looks closely at a freeze frame of the graph in the film, they will see it actually tracks backward at one point near the base of the “hockey stick.” This is a tell tale indication that the line was arbitrarily drawn rather than construed from any actual data.

In October of 2007, a lorry-driver with two school-age children took Her Majesty’s Department of Education to court for proposing to circulate Al Gore’s climate movie to every school in England. He won his case after demonstrating only nine of the several errors in the film. They are as follows: that the sea would go up 20 feet, that the Pacific atolls would need to be evacuated, that the ocean conveyor would stop, that the “snows of Kilimanjaro” were melting due to unnatural processes, that Lake Chad was drying up due to unnatural processes, that Hurricane Katrina was caused by man, that polar bears are drowning due to the melting of polar caps, and that coral reefs are bleaching due to global warming. In the end, the court determined, in order for An Inconvenient Truth to be presented in British classrooms, it would have to be accompanied by 77 pages of corrective documentation. The judge stated, “The Armageddon scenario that [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view. ” In other words, the film is a lie. More than that, there is reason to believe the lie was intentional. In 2005, while Gore was filming the movie in which he suggested that sea level would imminently rise by 20 feet, he bought a $4 million condo in the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf.

“A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said, ‘We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’” – David Deming, 2005

The United Nations has also been caught deliberately lying about climate change. In the UN’s first quinquennial climate assessment report, in 1990, the Medieval Warm Period had been clearly visible, showing it to have been conspicuously warmer than today. However, by the 2001 climate assessment, just 11 years later, the Medieval Warm Period had been ingeniously wiped out. The warm period during the Middle Ages had been artificially eradicated and, for good measure, the warming of the 20th century had been exaggerated by 50% by confining the analysis to the northern hemisphere (for the southern hemisphere has not warmed as fast as the northern hemisphere over the past 100 years). This elimination of the Medieval Warming Period was the result of cherry-picked results from computer models rather than complete hard data.

Furthermore, the UN’s climate panel had concluded in the draft of the 1990 report that there was no evidence of any significant human influence on the world’s temperature. In 1995 the draft quinquennial report, as finalized by the scientists who had authored it, came to precisely the same conclusion. They plainly stated on five separate occasions that no anthropogenic influence could yet be detected. That was the conclusion of the scientists whom the UN’s climate panel had commissioned to write the assessment report. “When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, ‘We do not know.’” That conclusion was not published however. The published version of the UN’s report came to a conclusion precisely the opposite of that which the scientists who had authored and approved the final draft had intended and had repeatedly stated. The new version of the assessment report contained a new statement that “The body of … evidence now points to a discernible human influence on global climate”, and that has been the official line ever since, though there was not, and is not, any scientific basis for it.

Another tactic utilized by the United Nations to perpetrate its claims of anthropogenic climate change is the use of graphs which seem to depict a trend of increasing global temperature. These graphs are examples of endpoint fallacy, by which careful selection of startpoints and endpoints in a randomly-varying dataset are deliberately used to falsely demonstrate a non-existent trend. A headline graph from the 2007 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) purported to show global mean surface temperatures rising faster over the past 100 years than over the past 150 years; faster over the past 50 years than over the past 100 years; and faster over the past 25 years than over the past 50 years. The creators of this fiction were intending to demonstrate that the rate of “global warming” is itself accelerating rapidly and dangerously. It is astonishing that this graph got past what passes for “peer review” in the documents of the UN’s climate panel. The peer review in the scientific journals does not permit authors of scientific papers to override the comments of the reviewers. However, the authors of the UN’s documents are permitted to override the reviewers’ comments, even when the majority of the comments are unfavorable. Therefore, a misleading graph appeared in the IPCC’s official assessment report, and was also cited by the US Environmental Protection Agency as purported justification for its decision to regulate CO2 as though it is a dangerous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who heads the IPCC’s science working group, has also used the discredited graph in his public lectures, and even received an honorary doctorate from an Australian university after displaying it. The graph is a flagrant abuse of statistics. Its publication, and its continued use by the UN and other official bodies, calls into question the honesty and competence of the IPCC and of other scientific institutions who are finding it profitable to pretend that “global warming” is a global crisis. (How can one continue to get government grants for their “research” if there is no problem worth investing funds to solve?) Lord Monckton was able to take the same dataset used by the United Nations and produce graphs which suggested “trends” of temperature increase, decrease, and stability, demonstrating the deceptive nature of the technique.

In fact, the warming rate between 1975 and 1998, when “global warming” ceased, is exactly parallel to – and therefore identical with – the warming rates from 1860-1880 and from 1910-1940. These two earlier periods occurred before humankind’s enterprises and industries and populations were extensive enough to have – even in theory – any appreciable effect on the climate. In short, there is no evidence of any anthropogenic influence whatsoever on global temperatures. That is the truth, and the UN was wrong not to say so. Arguably, its graph attempting to suggest otherwise is an instance of fraud and corruption. This is by no means the only instance of data tampering and generation of false results by the UN.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which incorporates the National Climatic Data Center, has also been tampering with data. Its August 2009 map showing “global warming” at the Earth’s surface was based on removing both the satellite datasets and the ARGO bathythermograph datasets for sea surface temperature – in short, ignoring the two most reliable methods of assessing sea surface temperature. The actual trend in sea surface temperature in the five years spanning 2004-2008, results of extremely sensitive ARGO measurements, are entirely clear: the oceans have been cooling slightly, and have certainly not been warming as the UN’s theory requires.

In 2002, Wielicki, Wong et al. published a paper inadvertently showing that up to seven times as much long-wave radiation was escaping to outer space than the UN’s computer models had imagined. This result, though accidental, was fatal to the “high-climate-sensitivity” theory, because it implied that very little of the radiation escaping from the Earth’s surface was being trapped within the climatosphere. Accordingly, the data was revised four years later. The pretext for the revision was that the original paper had not taken into account the orbital decay of the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment satellite. Orbital decay is a fact of life for everyone who uses or studies satellite data. It is near-unthinkable that the authors of the 2002 paper had not taken it fully and carefully into account. However, in 2006 they produced a second paper, in which they said that adjustments to their original data to allow for the orbital decay in the satellite had brought the observed outgoing radiation into what looked like uncannily close correspondence with the UN models’ predictions. This certainly has the appearance of blatant revisionism to bring raw data into line with the more extreme predictions of models favored by the UN.

Al Gore and numerous others, including Sir David King in testimony before the House of Commons Environment Committee, have repeatedly said that the science of CO2’s effect on temperature was settled in 1896, when Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish research chemist and Nobel laureate, spent a long Arctic winter performing 10,000 complex calculations by hand to demonstrate that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 5 C (9 F) “global warming”. Sir David King called this result “brilliant”. However, ten years after Arrhenius’ original paper, when he came across the fundamental equation of radiative transfer for the first time, he realized that instead of performing 10,000 separate calculations he could perform just one calculation. So he did his sum, and found that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause warming of just 1.6 C – less than a third of what he had previously imagined. He published his new result, in German, in Vol. 1 No. 2 of the Journal of the Royal Nobel Institute. However, Al Gore, Sir David King, and other drivers of the “global warming” scare find it more congenial to quote Arrhenius’ original, inaccurate paper, and not to make any mention of his subsequent recalculation.

Those who wish to shut down the economies of the West are fond of saying that there is a “consensus” to the effect that, unless we revert to the Stone Age, catastrophe will be inevitable. However, a survey of 539 papers in the peer-reviewed literature published since 2004, and containing the search-phrase “global climate change”, showed that not a single paper offered any evidence whatsoever that any catastrophe would occur. The “consensus”, in other words, is not as the fearmongers say it is – not that science is done by consensus anyway.

Another regularly-repeated but baseless mantra is that “the science is settled”. This is another blatant lie. Even the IPCC does not concur with itself. It has now been compelled to make two downward revisions in the effect of CO2 on temperature, and the author of its 2007 central estimate has recently admitted that this, too, is an exaggeration, and that further reduction will be required when the UN next produces a major assessment report in 2014. However, there has been a spate of papers in the literature suggesting that a doubling of CO2 would produce not the 3.26 C (6 F) warming predicted by the UN in its 2007 assessment report but just 0.5 C (<1 F) warming. If these papers are right, then there is no “global warming” crisis, and no action of any kind need ever be taken to mitigate the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere, for it is harmless.

Established Fact

One way we can determine whether projections of doom are accurate is to examine history. There has been very little correlation between past CO2 concentrations and past global temperatures. Though correlation does not necessarily imply causation, lack of correlation necessarily implies lack of causation. On this evidence, CO2 is at best a bit-part player in the climate. During the Cambrian era, 550 million years ago, CO2 concentration peaked at around 7000 ppmv, about 18 times today’s concentration. Yet the planet did not fry. It was during that era that the calcite corals first evolved: they did not suffer from the “ocean acidification” that is supposed to happen when atmospheric CO2 concentration is high.

During the past four interglacial periods, which occurred at roughly 100,000 to 125,000 year intervals, global temperatures were noticeably warmer than they are in the present day. Indeed, during much of the current interglacial warm period, which began 11,400 years ago, the weather worldwide was warmer than today. We also know the climates of the Bronze Age, the Roman era and the Middle Ages were appreciably warmer than today. Today’s temperatures, therefore, are not exceptional. Detailed analyses by several authors have established that – contrary to what Al Gore imagines – in the past climate it was always the temperature that changed first, and CO2 concentration changed 800-2800 years later.

The oldest temperature record in the world is the Central England Temperature Record. That record reveals that in the 40 years between 1695-1735 global temperature rose by 2.2 C (4 F). Compare this fast and substantial increase with the increase of just 0.6 C in the century from 1906-2006. Not only is the absolute value of today’s temperature unexceptional, but the rate of warming over the past century has also been unexceptional, and well within the natural variability of the climate.

The earth is actually cooling at present. The trend in global mean surface temperatures, compiled as the arithmetic mean of two satellite and one terrestrial datasets, shows rapid and significant global cooling since the millennium on 1 January 2001, compared with the rapid increase in temperature that the UN’s climate panel had predicted.

Contrary to the excitable reports in the media, and the increasingly desperate demands by Al Gore that we should believe the sea ice in the Arctic will disappear by 2013, the extent of Arctic sea ice continues to follow a seasonal sine-wave, much as it has in living memory.

Al Gore, in his mendacious movie, attributes Hurricane Katrina to “global warming”, though the UN has repeatedly pointed out that individual extreme-weather events – which have always occurred and will always occur – cannot be thus attributed. Currently, though Gore is somehow not saying so, worldwide activity of hurricanes, typhoons, and other tropical cyclones – measured as the 12-month running sum of their combined frequency, intensity, and duration – is at a 30-year record low that has gone entirely unreported in the mainstream news media.

It is often said that the world’s corals are at risk because of “global warming”. However, as the Great el Nino of 1998 demonstrated, a temporary warming of certain parts of the oceans caused the corals merely to bleach – a natural defense mechanism which enables them to survive, as they have for 550 million years since they first evolved in the Cambrian era, when CO2 concentration was 18 times today’s. Much has also been said about the imagined threat from “global warming” to the world’s largest coral colony – the Great Barrier Reef. However, a simple inquiry has established that throughout the past 17 years there has been no net warming of the oceans surrounding the reef.

The Central Question

The only question that matters in the debate about the climate is this. How much warming will a given proportionate increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide actually cause? The UN’s answer to this question is that a doubling of CO2 concentration – which it expects to occur within the next 100 years – will warm the planet by 3.26 C (6 F). However, as has been revealed, the UN and those who ally themselves with it have been caught repeatedly in a series of ingenious lies; and the climate – whatever the environmental correspondents of the mainstream news media may say – is not responding as expected. So, what is going on? We shall now reveal the truth about just how much – or, rather how little – even a doubling of CO2 concentration is capable of warming the Earth.

“In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise, very-long-range weather forecasting would seem to be non-existent.” – Edward Lorenz, 1963

Let us start with some math: the late Edward Lorenz, one of America’s foremost numerical weather-forecasters, founded the now-thriving branch of mathematics known as chaos theory when he published his landmark paper, Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow, in a climatological journal. In that paper, he demonstrated the curious quality of chaotic objects: that very small changes in their initial conditions could lead to very large changes in their subsequent evolution. These large changes, known as “phase transitions” are departures from the apparently periodic or regular behavior of the object as it evolves. Lorenz’s paper proved that these phase transitions are unpredictable unless the value of all initial parameters is known to a precision that, with the climate, will be forever unattainable.

There are many chaotic equations, some complex, some – like the equation for the Mandelbrot fractal – very simple. That equation has just one parameter or initial variable – the complex number c. Using a computer and this simple equation, we can draw a picture of the Mandelbrot object. However, in order to define exactly what part of the object we are looking at, we need to define the parameter c to 16 decimal places. If we were to change just the last four decimal places, an entirely different picture would appear, because the phase transitions in the chaotic Mandelbrot object would occur in completely different places. How much more disparity is possible in more complex equations? How much more complicated is the climate?

Let us consider the inherent flaw in computer models. They are incapable of answering the one question we need to answer – how much warming will a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration cause? Computers are told the answer at the outset. All of the UN’s models are pre-programmed to assume that climate sensitivity is high, so that is what they find. Garbage in. Garbage out. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, the distinguished scientist who first chased the Aurora Borealis right round the northern Arctic in an aircraft borrowed from NASA so that he could unlock its secrets for the first time, stated in 2008, “No super-computer, however powerful, is able to prove definitively a simplistic hypothesis that says the greenhouse effect is responsible for warming.” The United Nations IPCC itself stated in 2001, “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

Changes in solar radiance striking the ground, not changes in CO2 concentration, fully explain recent global and regional temperature changes. The Sun is the source of just about all the warmth on Earth. Fluctuations in its activity, combined with short-run changes in ocean oscillations and multi-millennial changes in the orbital characteristics of the Earth, are what really determine the Earth’s surface temperature. The International Astronomical Union held a symposium in 2004 that issued a communique saying that solar changes are the major cause of temperature changes on Earth; that the Sun caused the “global warming” of the previous three centuries; that the warming of that period was normal, not unusual; and that the “global warming” that had been continuing for 300 years would soon end. The IAU’s forecast has proven far more successful than those of the IPCC, which have predicted relentless warming. The very small change that we are making in the composition of the atmosphere simply lacks the power to exercise more than a very small, harmless, and generally beneficial influence on global temperature.

The entire atmosphere warms the Earth by only 33 F. Changing the mere one-two-thousandth part of the atmosphere which is CO2 cannot warm it by the 6 F the UN projects. Even if we succeed in doubling the atmospheric concentration of CO2 this century, we shall have altered the composition of less than one-two-thousandth part of the atmosphere. Yet the UN imagines that this minuscule alteration in atmospheric composition will induce a warming that is one-sixth as large as that which is caused by the presence (as opposed to the complete absence) of the entire atmosphere. How likely is that?

The Nail In The “Climate Change” Coffin

The ratio of surface warming to the amount of radiation escaping from the Earth’s surface to space is less than one-sixth of the ratio the UN predicts (Lindzen & Choi, 2009). This is the clincher that establishes the definitive answer to the vital question of how much warming is likely to be caused by a given proportionate increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. This answer is derived, not by complex and error-prone computer modeling, but by the novel concept of direct measurement.

Looking at 11 distinct UN computer models, as temperature rises, outgoing radiation from the Earth is predicted to diminish, ostensibly because greenhouse gases will get in its way and prevent it from escaping to space as easily as before. But the truth has now been revealed, measured by the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment Satellite, and correlated with changes in sea surface temperatures. As the sea surface warms, outgoing radiation escaping to space increases. It is not, after all, trapped down here as the 11 UN models project. The paper in which this discrepancy between model predictions and observed reality was presented represents the undoing of the official “high-climate-sensitivity” theory. Six or seven times as much outgoing radiation is escaping to space per unit change in sea surface temperature as the UN’s models predicted. This is a discrepancy of astonishing magnitude. But perhaps the most astonishing thing about this analysis is that no one had thought of performing it before it was carried out by Professor Richard Lindzen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen’s results are as close to a direct measurement of climate sensitivity as it is possible to get. Measurement is a brilliantly simple method, unquestionably superior to projection based on assumption. In any rational world, the only remaining question would be whether Professor Lindzen’s results can be replicated by others. If these results are indeed confirmed, that is the end of the climate debate. Instead of a 3.3 K (6 F) warming in response to a CO2 doubling, we shall see just 0.5 K (less than 1 F). And that is all.

It is perhaps no surprise to many that our Earth has built into it the apparent ability to respond to increases in surface temperature with nearly proportionate increases in outgoing radiation escaping to space. Anthropogenic climate change has always been, first and foremost, a conceit inflating the influence of man upon his environment. Now that we have new evidence, derived from hard data, which contradicts the alarmist projections upon which that conceit is based, it is time to reject all proposed public policy informed by false alarm. There is no scientific justification for any cap and trade bureaucratic monstrosity, and certainly no justification for a communist world government which will plunge the world into darkness both literal and moral.

Obama Poised to Cede US Sovereignty, Claims British Lord

by Walter Scott Hudson

The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a scathing and lengthy presentation, complete with detailed charts, graphs, facts, and figures which culminated in the utter decimation of both the pop culture concept of global warming and the credible threat of any significant anthropomorphic climate change.

A detailed summary of Monckton’s presentation will be available here once compiled. However, a segment of his remarks justify immediate publication. If credible, the concern Monckton speaks to may well prove the single most important issue facing the American nation, bigger than health care, bigger than cap and trade, and worth every citizen’s focused attention.

Here were Monckton’s closing remarks, as dictated from my audio recording:

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

[laughter]

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties – And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your prosparity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.

But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire – it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it.

So I end by saying to you the words that Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow:

Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

Lord Monckton received a standing ovation and took a series of questions from members of the audience. Among those questions were these relevent to the forthcoming Copenhagen treaty:

Question: The current administration and the Democratic majority in Congress has shown little regard for the will of the people. They’re trying to pass a serious government agenda, and serious taxation and burdens on future generations. And there seems to be little to stop them. How do you propose we stop Obama from doing this, because I see no way to stop him from signing anything in Copenhagen. I believe that’s his agenda and he’ll do it.

I don’t minimize the difficulty. But on this subject – I don’t really do politics, because it’s not right. In the end, your politics is for you. The correct procedure is for you to get onto your representatives, both in the US Senate where the bill has yet to go through (you can try and stop that) and in [the House], and get them to demand their right of audience (which they all have) with the president and tell him about this treaty. There are many very powerful people in this room, wealthy people, influential people. Get onto the media, tell them about this treaty. If they go to www.wattsupwiththat.com, they will find (if they look carefully enough) a copy of that treaty, because I arranged for it to be posted there not so long ago. Let them read it, and let the press tell the people that their democracy is about to be taken away for no good purpose, at least [with] no scientific basis [in reference to climate change]. Tell the press to say this. Tell the press to say that, even if there is a problem [with climate change], you don’t want your democracy taken away. It really is as simple as that.

Question: Is it really irrevocable if that treaty is signed? Suppose it’s signed by someone who does not have the authority, as I – I have some, a high degree of skepticism that we do have a valid president there because I -

I know at least one judge who shares your opinion, sir, yes.

I don’t believe it until I see it. … Would [Obama's potential illegitimacy as president] give us a reasonable cause to nullify whatever treaty that he does sign as president?

I would be very careful not to rely on things like that. Although there is a certain amount of doubt whether or not he was born in Hawaii, my fear is it would be very difficult to prove he wasn’t born in Hawaii and therefore we might not be able to get anywhere with that. Besides, once he’s signed that treaty, whether or not he signed it validly, once he’s signed it and ratified it – your Senate ratifies it – you’re bound by it. But I will say one thing; they know, in the White House, that they won’t be able to get the 67 votes in the Senate, the two-thirds majority that your Constitution has stipulated must be achieved in order to ratify a treaty of this kind. However, what they’ve worked out is this – and they actually let it slip during the election campaign, which is how I know about it. They plan to enact that Copenhagen treaty into legislation by a simple majority of both houses. That they can do. But the virtue of that – and here you have a point – is that is, thank God, reversible. So I want you to pray tonight, and pray hard for your Senate that they utterly refuse to ratify the [new] Treaty of Copenhagen, because if they refuse to ratify it and [Obama] has to push it through as domestic legislation, you can repeal it.

Regardless of whether global warming is taking place or caused to any degree by human activity, we do not want a global government empowered to tax Americans without elected representation or anything analogous to constitutional protections. The Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves if they knew their progeny allowed a foreign power such authority, effectively undoing their every effort in an act of Anti-American Revolution. If that is our imminent course, we need to put all else on hold and focus on stopping it. If American sovereignty is ceded, all other debate is irrelevant.

Edited to add @ 8:31 am:

Skimming through the treaty, I came across verification of Monckton’s assessment of the new entity’s purpose:

38. The scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention will be based on three basic pillars: government; facilitative mechanism; and financial mechanism, and the basic organization of which will include the following:

World Government (heading added)
(a) The government will be ruled by the COP with the support of a new subsidiary body on adaptation, and of an Executive Board responsible for the management of the new funds and the related facilitative processes and bodies. The current Convention secretariat will operate as such, as appropriate.

To Redistribute Wealth (heading added)
b) The Convention’s financial mechanism will include a multilateral climate change fund including five windows: (a) an Adaptation window, (b) a Compensation window, to address loss and damage from climate change impacts [read: the "climate debt" Monckton refers to], including insurance, rehabilitation and compensatory components, © a Technology window; (d) a Mitigation window; and (e) a REDD window, to support a multi-phases process for positive forest incentives relating to REDD actions.

With Enforcement Authority (heading added)
© The Convention’s facilitative mechanism will include: (a) work programmes for adaptation and mitigation; (b) a long-term REDD process; © a short-term technology action plan; (d) an expert group on adaptation established by the subsidiary body on adaptation, and expert groups on mitigation, technologies and on monitoring, reporting and verification; and (e) an international registry for the monitoring, reporting and verification of compliance of emission reduction commitments, and the transfer of technical and financial resources from developed countries to developing countries. The secretariat will provide technical and administrative support, including a new centre for information exchange [read; enforcement].

Edited to add @ 1:24am on October 18, 2009

Brought to my attention via an e-mail from Minnesota Majority, this clip of Monckton’s closing remarks taken by a higher quality mic than my own. The transcript above hardly does justice to his delivery.

Editor’s note: Corrected transcript above upon receipt of this higher quality audio. The word “prosperity” had been incorrectly transcribed as “humanity.”

Edited to add @ 2:30am October 18, 2009:

Commenter “Ralph” provides another link to a copy of the New Copenhagen Treaty which Monckton referenced and wattsupwiththat.com posted. This time it comes from an official United Nations website. There is no doubt now. This document is authentic.

As Opposed to Love Crime?

A recent Washington Post article reports that the US Senate is likely to pass another hate crimes bill this week. The bill was recently passed in the House after spending several months in deliberation. One of our first podcasts covered the legislation back in May, relying heavily on the commentary of Focus on the Family, which is cited by the Post among a handful of Christian activist organizations opposed to the bill.

One of the claims made by the panel of contributors in the Focus on the Family podcast we excerpted was that this bill would result in de facto criminalization of religious teachings against homosexuality. This would occur, it was claimed, by enabling criminal charges to be filed against anyone who could be argued to have motivated an attack on a homosexual. An April article from the Post summaried the debate thus:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, predicts a “wave of federal prosecution.” In a fund-raising e-mail sent to supporters …, he warned that offended gays could accuse a religious broadcaster, a pastor or a Sunday school teacher who expresses the viewpoint that homosexual behavior is morally wrong and unhealthy.

That’s “just a scare tactic to mobilize the grass roots,” counters Becky Bansky, federal legislative director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. “When they have to resort to lying, they’re telling you they have no legitimate argument against the legislation.”

Not so, says Jason Lorence, senior attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal firm. “I don’t think it’s preposterous to propose that in the future, hate crimes can be used against pastors.”

The more recent Post article argues such concern is without merit:

Do they have a point? Not really. As we saw and heard during the last election cycle (think Jeremiah Wright and John Hagee), existing hate-crime laws for acts “committed on the basis of the victim’s race, color, religion or national origin” haven’t kept pastors or anyone else from expressing their biblical views. Why would that change when “sexual orientation” is added to the list?

This argument by author David Waters sidesteps two key points. Unlike race, color, or national origin, homosexuality is specifically and harshly condemned within theology, scripture, and religious teaching. So the likelihood of a “hate crime” against a homosexual being linked in some way to a sermon is far more than any other variety of “hate crime.” More pressing than that, however, is the fact the entire concept of “hate crime” is a criminalization of thought, making this and existing hate crime laws unconstitutional. The freedoms of speech, religion, and press, preserved in the First Amendment, may rightly be considered together as the Freedom of Thought. Speech is the expression of thought. Motivation too is thought. To criminalize a motivation is therefore to criminalize thought. If it is legally acceptable to use a racial slur before assaulting someone, how does it become illegal afterward? We use motive in criminal prosecutions to help determine whether a crime was committed; it has up until the advent of hate crime laws never been a crime in and of itself. The reason is plain sense; motivation is thought; and we may not rightly criminalize thought.

Some may argue it is a crime to incite a riot or yell “fire” in a crowed theater, etc. There is a distinction, however, between inciting or conspiring to commit a crime and holding or expressing a view which motivates a crime. If you find a pastor who says, “Bash gays! Bash ‘em good!” that is inciting violence. Stating that homosexuality is sin is not.

Waters seems to recognize the validity of that argument:

There might be valid legal or even constitutional arguments against laws that penalize people for committing crimes because of their discriminatory views. But shouldn’t people of faith oppose hate in all its forms, whether spoken or acted upon?

No, they shouldn’t. At least not if they are Christian or Jewish. A cursory search of scripture reveals the following declarations of hatred:

Select capable men from all the people—men who fear God, trustworthy men who hate dishonest gain—and appoint them as officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens.
Exodus 18:20-22

You must not worship the LORD your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the LORD hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.
Deuteronomy 12:30-32

And do not erect a sacred stone, for these the LORD your God hates. Deuteronomy 16:21-22

You love righteousness and hate wickedness; therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy.
Psalm 45:6-8

Hate evil, love good; maintain justice in the courts…
Amos 5:14-16

“I hate divorce,” says the LORD God of Israel…
Malachi 2:15-17

You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness; therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy.”
Hebrews 1:8-10

It seems pretty clear the Judeo-Christian tradition calls for judicious and appropriately directed hate. Of course this does not justify, in my view or through any application of mainstream Christian or Jewish theology, violence against homosexuals. The point is hate (like sex) is not an evil in and off itself. Its misapplication is.

That’s theology. Then there’s law. In the United States of America, ours starts with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which are pretty clear on the issue of speech. Still, Waters argues this new hate speech law makes exception for constitutional protected speech.

…the House version clearly states that “Nothing in this Act, or the amendments made by this Act, shall be construed to prohibit any expressive conduct protected from legal prohibition by, or any activities protected by, the Constitution.”

…the Senate version includes two even more specific speech protections:

(3) CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to prohibit any constitutionally protected speech, expressive conduct or activities (regardless of whether compelled by, or central to, a system of religious belief), including the exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment and peaceful picketing or demonstration. The Constitution does not protect speech, conduct or activities consisting of planning for, conspiring to commit, or committing an act of violence.

(4) FREE EXPRESSION- Nothing in this Act shall be construed to allow prosecution based solely upon an individual’s expression of racial, religious, political, or other beliefs or solely upon an individual’s membership in a group advocating or espousing such beliefs.

While this is certainly heartening, it does not fully discredit concern that religious speech might be linked to a crime after the fact.

.,..the hate crimes bill clearly doesn’t allow prosecution to begin until an actual crime — a violent act — has been committed. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that bias or discrimination can only be considered when directly connected to a criminal act.

This is meant to quail fears, but actually validates them. If “bias or discrimination can be considered when directly connected to a criminal act,” does that not place the previously protected speech into a prosecutable category? We don’t know. It all depends on how the law is interpreted. But we know how it should be interpreted. If speech is protected independent of violence, by what principle is it suddenly not protected after violence? By what principle may we constitutionally prosecute thought regardless of act?