11 thoughts on “Open Thread 1: Also, remember to vote!”

1. Perhaps in the UK we should get a partial vote? Ok, we can’t have a full vote obviously but as the effects of finances over in the USA are affecting us over here in the UK can we have a 1/4 vote or perhaps 1/6?

   I was told earlier by someone in Florida that he missed the queues by voting by mail, in fact he said it was so efficient he voted twice. Sadly he accidentally voted once for McCain and once for Obama….

   Regards

   Andy

2. We had early voting in DuPage county. I could have voted at city hall all of last week. However, since lines are never long out here, I always prefer to wait just incase there is late breaking news.

3. Lucia,

   As a UK citizen I have no vote in this election. If I could vote all my instincts basically point me towards Obama.

   Yet at the same time I am seriously worried by his inexperience. He has not held any senior political office and has not even been a Senator for very long.
   A vote for a “breath of fresh air” could well go sour before long ( I hope not).

4. Dave Andrews–
   I’m from the Chicago area, and some of Obama’s Chicago connections are reason for concern. That said, he may turn out fine. I think he’ll win easily today. He’s our senator, and he’ll surely win Illinois. (He probably won’t win DuPage county though. For the benefit of those overseas, I may report on that. This county is very conservative. That goes double or triple for Wheaton, the county seat.)

5. I voted 3rd party for the first time in my life (usually vote Republican). Could not stand McCain’s RINO traits. Think we are better off LOSING, then having more accomodationalists in office. Was happy for a while with Palin nomination, but when McCain was for the bailout (theft by liberal Goldman Sachs New York schmucks), I had to torpedo him. Adding salt in the wound was his flopping and twisting about whether to skip a debate and crap like that.

6. RSS TLT version 3.2 released with October data… Significant differences with 3.1
   Month 3.1 3.2
   2008 1 -0.070 -0.066
   2008 2 -0.002 -0.012
   2008 3 0.079 0.063
   2008 4 0.080 0.067
   2008 5 -0.082 -0.078
   2008 6 0.035 0.063
   2008 7 0.147 0.158
   2008 8 0.146 0.145
   2008 9 0.211 0.194
   2008 10 0.181

7. Fred– Who’d a thunk? Well… welll see what the surface sources say when they come out.

8. Lucia/Fred – just how significant are changes on the order of 1-2 hundredths of a degree? It seems to me that this would be well within the range of measurement/conversion algorithm error and that many in the climate community have much too high a confidence in the accuracy and precision of these numbers.

9. Bob–
   Sure. If you are trying to say whether Oct was definitely warmer or colder than September, maybe. I don’t know what the measurement uncertainty really is.

   But it’s still interesting to see if the recorded temperatures went up or down. In the long runs, the measurement “noise” should averages out.
   (Yes. I know that’s controversial. Some systems may be biased. But… it’s still interesting.)

   So, even if the new temperature is only “down” because Septembers was mistakenly “high” or because Octobers is mistakenly “low” or whatever, I still find it interesting to see as they come out.

   We’ll see what the balance of the other sources says over the next few weeks.

10. Discussion on differences made here:
    http://www.ssmi.com/data/msu/support/Changes%20from%20TLT%20Version%203.1%20to%203.2.pdf

11. If the good Doctor Liljegren will allow me a long comment, I’d like to address in some detail this issue of the vote, because I believe it’s more important now than ever before to stress and re-stress a forgotten fact: namely, the United States is not a democracy, nor was it ever intended to be. (This issue, incidentally, relates directly to the subject of so-called global warming.)

    The United States is, as Benjamin Franklin put it, a Constitutional Republic.

    That is why the word “democracy” does not appear one time in either the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. The Constitutional framers — and the Enlightenment thinkers who most influenced them — had no love whatsoever for democracy, as well they should not have:

    Democracy means majority rule.

    Your life and your property, however, are inalienable and thus never subject to the whims of the majority.

    Your life and your property, in other words, are, in this country, yours absolutely — and that includes your money, which you produce through your labor.

    Your life and your property — money, one must never forget, is property, and in the U.S.A. you are allowed to grow as filthy rich as you can, and no one is legally entitled to your wealth — are not in any way, or at any time, ever subject to vote.

    The Constitutional framers did not believe in unlimited majority rule on any fundamental issue, because they did not believe that the rights of even a single individual could or should be at the mercy of the majority.

    Indeed, democracy is known also as “the tyranny of the majority.”

    As James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers:

    “[Under democracy] there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.”

    And John Adams accurately recognized that democracies “merely grant revocable rights to citizens depending on the whims of the masses, while a republic exists to secure and protect pre-existing rights.”

    Democracy was intended to have only a minor role in our government:

    What some have called the “selection of personnel,” which refers to electing officials whose job is to implement the Constitutional principles; but those principles –- specifically, the principle of individual rights –- are fixed into place and not ever subject to vote.

    Nor was the selection of personnel ever meant to be a primary issue, as it’s become today, as we’ve just so dramatically witnessed.

    The fact that it has become so — when, for example, it is decided by vote if you may open your liquor store on Sunday, or when it is decided by vote if you can allow people to smoke in your place of business, or when certain politicians assume they can decide by vote how much of your money they expropriate and redistribute, or when it is decided by vote (and lobby groups galore) if you can open a coal-fired power plant, or drill for oil on your property — it tells you how little our politicians understand the nature of inalienable rights, and how far we’ve come from the original concept.

    More frighteningly: it tells you how thoroughly the public does not understand it.

    The public has now officially demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that their minds can be easily controlled by empty rhetoric.

    “Inalienable” literally means “that which cannot be taken away or transferred” — not by vote, not by force, not by anyone.

    Right are inalienable in this sense:

    Persons unaccustomed to attach exact meanings to words will say that the fact that a man may be unjustly executed or imprisoned negates this proposition [of inalienable rights]. It does not. The right is with the victim nonetheless; and very literally it cannot be alienated, for alienated means passing into the possession of another. One man cannot enjoy either the life or liberty of another. If he kills ten men he will not thereby live ten lives or ten times as long; nor is he more free if he puts another man in prison. Rights are by definition inalienable: only privileges can be transferred. Even the right to own property cannot be alienated or transferred, though a given item of property can be. If one man’s rights are infringed, no other man obtains them; on the contrary, all men are thereby threatened with a similar injury (Isabel Paterson, God of the Machine, 1943).

    Incontrovertibly, the biggest threat facing this country now, as it has been for some time, is the overwhelming political-economic ignorance not only of our politicians but of the people who vote them in. The vote has now become a weapon of destruction — specifically, the destruction of your and my inalienable right to our own life and property.

    If you have any doubts about this, observe how it’s become commonly accepted among U.S. citizens that government bureaucrats do have legal entitlement to your money and your other property — the only question is how much.

    Observe how the term “individual rights” — which is the cornerstone of this country — has all but vanished from political discourse.

    Observe how Barack Obama explicitly rejects individual rights — “Just because you have an individual right does not mean that state or local government can’t constrain the exercise of that right” (Barack Obama, 2008, Philidelphia primary debate) — in favor of so-called positive rights, which are in fact a complete negation of rights, by definition, since your rights, my rights, everyone’s rights stop where another’s begin. There is no such thing as a positive right. It is a literal contradiction in terms.

    Observe the sheer number of voters — millions upon millions — who do not have even the most rudimentary grasp of the most fundamental political-economic principles at issue here: things such as “freedom,” “redistribution of wealth,” “rights,” “capitalism,” “democratic-socialism,” “welfare-statism,” “free markets,” and so on.

    These are terms that 98 percent of surveyed voters admittedly had no conception of whatsoever — which, however, did not prevent them from shouting upon the street corners and going door-to-door telling us who we must vote for.

    Please reread that paragraph.

    Now observe the political ideologies of the candidates that these same voters voted in.

    If you are not horrified by this, I promise that you should be.

    America has officially fallen victim to the tyranny of the masses.

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