Life, from our perspective, is the result of all the decisions we have made up to that point. Mostly. Sometimes, it is an agreement made between you and another party, perhaps before the world started. We have been making decisions for millions of year; eons. It is not necessarily rewards that we get for making good decisions, but it is most definitely punitive if we choose to make bad or evil decisions.
98% of people alive in the free world today will avoid conflict. We won’t argue openly with our boss. We will take a punch or a slap and refuse to hit back. We will live in a relationship we know we should be free to walk away from, but we stay. Sometimes events happen that break us apart like the other party no longer sees a challenge or received gratification in owning you emotionally, so they kick you out. You cry, but inside you rejoice and remember what it feels like to fly instead of peck for crumbs along the ground, because you feel that is all you deserve. Or perhaps you find solace in the solitude of emotional estrangement and security in the economics of the relationship and the knowledge that somehow you have pleased God or the universe by faithfully submitting your time here on Earth to another.
2% of the people will not avoid conflict. They run headlong into it for various reasons. Mostly, they see that the other 98% of the people will just kneel, put their hands behind their back, bow their heads and wait for the blade of judgment to slice it from their shoulders or to slam a piece of lead or steel into the biological transducer and end your horror on this planet.
Some seek it for other reasons. Some seek conflict out of an inner drive to rescue others from the victimhood to which they are being subjected. We might say that there is hero violence, and there is villain violence. The villain gets satisfaction out of watching others suffer and die at their hand, and the hero gets satisfaction out of dealing justice to the villain.
In my book, Remembering the Future, I discuss the peace, mercy justice, war cycle mankind seems endlessly to repeat. This does not hold true for the individual. Individuals have deep planted memories and scripts from thousands of existences, mortal or immortal, that make us who we are. While we are mortal, and only while we are mortal, we can erase script and write new script for who we are and what we are capable of doing. The trick is to become aware that your are following a script in the first place, and not just aimlessly wandering over a blank sheet of paper each day. Once you figure that out, then a little training on how to develop and write new script can be taught to you. There are countless shamans and teachers out there trying to do this for you, but few there be that actually know what is on the other sides of mortality. If I ever developed a workshop for mortals who want to remember eternity, I think people might benefit from it. Right now, I choose to build electric cars.
We all think we seek peace, so let’s start there in the cycle. Conflict is over. Rebuilding of society begins, and there is usually what seems like an endless amount of work to do for roads, bridges, schools, water, and health care. Oh, that this was actually the case, but actually this work is accomplished in about 50 to 75 years, usually in most societies. Unfortunately, the infrastructure and value we placed upon these things in the beginning create entrenched bureaucracies that internally wish to keep on existing. From top to bottom the internal members of that bureaucracy feel no remorse in burdening the rest of society with the support and continual expansion of a workforce 400% or 4000% larger than is needed. They will, in effect, dig or design their own potholes, just so that the crews have something to do at all times.
We are merciful and give them larger and larger budgets to keep their road and bridge machine going. We tax our people higher and higher so that the bureaucrats’ lobbying for building, or fixing, or tearing down, or redesigning to overcome some traffic prediction that was wrong when it was originally built will be satisfied and they will allow our municipal leaders to keep their jobs. Voters are easily swayed by the negative press about someone who is killed by driving too fast around a curve, or losing control after hitting a pothole.
Then the people discover, one way or the other, that the bureaucrats have been stealing from them for decades. They charged too much for work that wasn’t done, or they built a road to nowhere just to make a politician’s worthless land worth millions. Then the people demand justice. Or perhaps it is a gang, or an activist group, or a foreign power that is envious or wants to control the world, or simply wants their gods worshipped no matter what. Maybe the enemy feels that sitting around the supper table at night with more to eat that some villages have to eat is wrong, or that lying by the pool with your top unstrapped to make sure there is no tan line is evil and punishable by death because it tempts them. Or maybe your belief in Jesus drives them crazy with rage.
At first, it is police that we hire to keep the laws upheld and peace in the society maintained by removing the bad people from our streets. Then we need smarter, better trained police to catch smarter evil that steals on a larger and more nefarious scale. Then we need organized forces to repel invasions or to deter that idea that society is easily invaded and scooped of everything that is good and precious that society has built. And then the day comes that these forces must fight in war to reach victory and to make the enemy disappear or surrender. And the war is fought against every instinct we have inside of us. We kill, when we do not want to. We bomb simply to demoralize. We turn the enemy into animals or numbers in our mind so that we do not have to think about the pain and the death or real humans at our hands. Our bodies are wounded, and our souls are scarred forever.
And then, there is peace again. The smoke clears. The enemies go home and are forgiven. The creeds are reformed so that this never happens again. The bodies are buried and roads and schools are named after the heroes or the victims. The cemeteries are crafted to illicit remorse by all who visit with the inner message that this must never happen again, and how did we ever let it come to this. The planes are parked and the bombs are restacked somewhere deep underground, just in case. The men in uniform go home, mostly. Some stay and show the world that we are strong and that no one better dare to try this again, and to ask society for more money so that better weapons can be designed to make man more lethal and soldiers are renamed warfighters so that the world knows we have the terrible ability and constrained willingness to fight. After all, there is so very much money that can be made during war. Even from a desk in Washington, far from the danger, and the noisy chaos, and the smell. Smell is such a powerful memory, we can dream ourselves into a drenching cold sweat sometimes.
The Great Climate Change Caper
Chairman of the House Committee on Space, Science and Technology, has written to Professor Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University, in Virginia, requesting that he release all relevant documents pertaining to his activities as head of a non-profit organization called the Institute of Global Environment And Society.
Congressman Lamar Smith has two main areas of concern.
First, the apparent engagement by the institute in “partisan political activity” – which, as a non-profit, it is forbidden by law from doing.
Second, what precisely has the IGES institute done with the $63 million in taxpayer grants which it has received since 2001 and which appears to have resulted in remarkably little published research?
For example, as Watts Up With That? notes, a $4.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to one of the institute’s offshoots appears to have resulted in just one published paper.
But the amount which has gone into the pockets of Shukla and his cronies runs into the many hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2013 and 2014, for example, Shukla and his wife enjoyed a combined income in excess of $800,000 a year.
Steve McIntyre, the investigator who shattered Michael Mann’s global-warming ‘Hockey Stick’ claim, has done a detailed breakdown of the sums involved. He calls it Shukla’s Gold.
In 2001, the earliest year thus far publicly available, in 2001, in addition to his university salary (not yet available, but presumably about $125,000), Shukla and his wife received a further $214,496 in compensation from IGES (Shukla -$128,796; Anne Shukla – $85,700). Their combined compensation from IGES doubled over the next two years to approximately $400,000 (additional to Shukla’s university salary of say $130,000), for combined compensation of about $530,000 by 2004.
Shukla’s university salary increased dramatically over the decade reaching $250,866 by 2013 and $314,000 by 2014. (In this latter year, Shukla was paid much more than Ed Wegman, a George Mason professor of similar seniority). Meanwhile, despite the apparent transition of IGES to George Mason, the income of the Shuklas from IGES continued to increase, reaching $547,000 by 2013. Combined with Shukla’s university salary, the total compensation of Shukla and his wife exceeded $800,000 in both 2013 and 2014. In addition, as noted above, Shukla’s daughter continued to be employed by IGES in 2014; IGES also distributed $100,000 from its climate grant revenue to support an educational charity in India which Shukla had founded.
The story began last month when, as we reported at Breitbart, twenty alarmist scientists – led by Shukla – wrote a letter to President Obama urging him to use RICO laws to crush climate skeptics.
Shukla’s second big mistake was to send the letter not from his university address but from his non-profit, the IGES.
But his first, far bigger mistake, was his hubris in organizing the letter in the first place. It drew the attention of Shukla’s critics to something which, presumably, he would have preferred to keep secret: that for nearly 14 years, he, his family and his friends have been gorging themselves on taxpayers’ money at IGES; and that this money comes on top of the very generous salary he receives for doing much the same work at George Mason University (GMU).
It’s the latter detail which has led former Virginia State Climatologist Pat Michaels – one of the skeptics who might have been affected by Shukla’s proposed RICO prosecutions – to describe this as “the largest science scandal in US history.”
Under federal law, state employees may not be remunerated for doing work which falls under their state employee remit. As a Professor at GMU, Shukla is definitely an employee of the state. And the work for which he has most lavishly been rewarding himself at IGES appears to be remarkably similar to the work he does at GMU as professor of climate dynamics.
If GMU was aware of these extra-curricular payments, then it was in breach of its own policy on “financial conflicts of interest in federally funded research.”
If it wasn’t aware of them, then, Shukla legally may be required to send half of that $63 million in federal grants to his employer, GMU.
For many readers, though, perhaps the biggest take-home message of this extraordinary story is: Who do these climate alarmists think they are?
Perhaps $63 million in federal grants is just peanuts if you’re gorging on the climate-change smorgasbord, but for most of the rest of us, that constitutes a serious sum of money. Especially when we know it is being taken from us in the form of taxes.
Do they really feel under no obligation to spend it well?
Do they actually feel so sanctified by the rightness of their cause that they deserve to be immune from scrutiny or criticism?
And so what happens when the hammer is fashioned from false data and canonized saints of weather sweep their mighty hand over the map in the name of falling rain? Saturday in the GOP weekly address, Senate Republican Policy Committee chairman
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY)
59%
told the story of Wyoming residents Andy and Katie Johnson who built a state-government approved pond in their front yard that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) then ordered removed.
Barrasso said, “The Johnsons now face fines for more than $37,000 every day until they remove the pond. This is what’s happened to government in America. It’s gotten so aggressive, so inflexible and so unyielding — and seemingly for so little purpose.”
Barrasso estimated that the Obama administration 2,500 new regulations over the last six years will cost the U.S. economy “a staggering $680 billion dollars.”
Barrasso said the Obama administration overreach, “includes things like irrigation ditches, isolated ponds — even low points in the landscape where water might collect after a heavy rain. The consequences of this new federal authority will be severe. Local land-use decisions will now be driven by Washington bureaucrats. And this new water rule is only one of thousands of regulations that Washington is churning out.”
He added, “What the administration won’t tell you is that both Republicans and Democrats in Congress oppose many of these regulations including the new rules on waters in the Untied States. Senators Joe Donnally (D-IN), Heide Heitkamp (D-ND), and Joe Manchin (D-WV) all Democrats joined us to change these water regulations. Yet common sense changes to all this rule making are being been blocked by the President and the liberal Democrat leadership in the Congress. Even the courts have dealt the Obama administration serious setbacks to its regulatory rampage. But by the time the courts finally act the damage is already done Those jobs are going and communities suffer.”