To Those in Combat Zones At Christmas

I wish you a peaceful, uneventful Christmas.

I’m not sure “Merry Christmas” is appropriate because I know from experience it’s difficult to feel merry when you are thousands of miles from home and there are people outside the perimeter who would like to kill you. It’s more difficult for many of you than it was for me because many of you are away from your spouses and children as well as being away from your parents and siblings.

I spent Christmas 1969 at Landing Zone English just north of Bong Son, South Vietnam. I hope your Christmas will be comparable to mine.

I worked in the army post office serving the 173rd Airborne Brigade. After weeks of abnormally large amounts of mail we had a day off with no mail coming in. We had had help with the extra mail which included a large number of small artificial Christmas trees. Several lucky men from various infantry units had been given the opportunity to spend their last couple of months in Vietnam sorting mail instead of looking for Charlie.

The weather was sunny but without the heat and humidity of summer. Winter days in that part of Vietnam were often cloudy and sometimes rainy. That night some of the men on guard duty got a little carried away and started popping red and green flares until someone decided to sound the siren for a red alert. The enemy had agreed to a truce, primarily so he could resupply his units.

Of course not all Christmases in Vietnam were pleasant. For some other memories, songs, etc. see the site started by Mary Garvey in 1994.
http://www.vietvet.org/xmastime.htm

I hope your Christmas isn’t anything like my dad’s wartime Christmas. He was a truck driver in Patton’s army. His unit was outside of the area the Germans occupied in the Battle of the Bulge, but he and his brother earned Bronze Stars by disobeying orders and taking some supplies through German lines. When he talked about it later he felt he hadn’t done anything special. He had simply shown the officers that they were wrong about the danger.

American soldiers, sailors and Marines have at times been spending their Christmases in harm’s way since the American Revolution. Members of the Air Force joined them 60 years ago.

The American army’s first major victory came on Christmas, 1776, when General George Washington led his army across the Delaware River to defeat the Hessians at Trenton, N.J.
The next Christmas was rough because of the frigid weather at their encampment at Valley Forge.

Perhaps the most remarkable wartime Christmas occurred in 1914 in World War 1 when English. German and French troops ignored the wishes of higher officers and declared an informal truce and talked and sang with each other before returning to the war.

I wish you could all be home for Christmas, but that isn’t possible. You are participating in a unique conflict. Our previous wars were against other nations including the wars against the Cherokee, etc Even our Civil War was a war involving a group of states acting like another nation.

In the War on Terror your enemy is more like an oversized criminal gang armed with military weapons. Their primary focus is on killing people. They claim to have a religious motive, but they will kill their fellow Muslims just as readily as they will kill us “infidels”. They would like to take over a country, but that isn’t their primary goal.

Many of them want to provoke a war between Muslims and the rest of the world. They want to get others to blame all Muslims for their actions and attack Muslims who aren’t involved in the violence.

Your job is to keep them from getting a country to use as a base of operations. In Vietnam we weren’t always sure which of the Vietnamese were friendly and which were not. As the recent at Ft. Hood indicates, you cannot even be sure of your own comrades.

Eliminating all terrorists probably isn’t possible, but you can minimize their opportunities to conduct mass murders.

Is Western Society Doomed?

It is becoming increasingly clear that in western society the inmates are running the asylum.  The idiot elite that holds power in most western nations  have demonstrated their insanity by accepting the outright lie that the essential atmospheric gas  carbon dioxide is a undesirable pollutant that needs to be regulated.

The scam begun by the crooked Enron corporation in the 1990’s falsely claims that very slight increases in CO2 would substantially raise air temperatures.   Enron, and its successors, hoped to profit from trading  carbon  credits like it had profited from trading credits in  sulfur dioxide, a byproduct of coal combustion.

The scientific fact is air temperatures would rise substantially if atmospheric  CO2  were to decline to a point  insufficient to  support plant life.    Areas of bare ground are significantly hotter than comparably located plant  covered ground because bare ground converts the solar radiation to heat.

CO2 is essential to functioning of the biosphere.  Plants store  solar radiation  by converting atmospheric CO2 to complex carbon molecules instead of converting it to heat.  The energy is stored in the form of the electron bonds that hold the molecules together.  Plants also reflect solar radiation back into space, further reducing solar heating.

Those who talk about global warming have failed to provide any evidence of significant temperature change.  They claim (depending on the source) only about a 0.5 – 0.7 C increase in temperature which is only a 0.23% change [Note: per cent changes are calculated using the Kelvin scale because of the arbitrary zero point of the Celsius scale – the only thing you can have less than nothing of is money.]

Such a small change could easily be the result of changes in equipment or the characteristics of measuring sites.

The claim about CO2 causing warming by trapping IR ignores the fact that physicist  R. W. Wood demonstrated in a 1909 experiment that trapping IR did not heat greenhouses as many in the 19th Century had believed and thus the process could not heat the atmosphere either.

Those who talk of magical greenhouse gases have no understanding of the complexity of earth’s energy system.

Earth gets virtually all of its heat from the sun and changes in heating are most likely caused by variations in solar output than human activity.  If human activity is affecting temperature the most likely mechanism would be the heat generated by human activity or changes in the thermal characteristics of the landscape.

Except in tropical areas the human body is hotter than the air most of the time.   Human activities such as cooking and operation of mechanical devices generates additional heat.   Pavement produces more heat than plant covered areas.

Any Western leaders who think they can benefit from the adverse economic consequences  of  restrictions on CO2 emissions should be taken to the Happy Home by those nice young men in their clean white coats.

Western leaders who think an economic calamity can benefit them are living in the wrong century.  Any economic collapse in the West   would speed up the process of shifting the economic center of gravity from the West to Asia.  China is already benefiting from the West’s economic mistakes and is moving toward controlling the American economy by buying American assets and becoming the creditor for its government.

climategate, western society, insanity, CO2, magic, Enron, scam, biosphere,  idiot elite,  global warming,  greenhouse gases, R.W. Wood

http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1625289-CO2-Is-Essential-to-Biosphere

The CO2 cycle is the basis of carbon based biological life. Plants are carbon structures and CO2 provides the carbon they need.   Carbon is the second most common element in the human body.  Humans and other animals get their energy from the complex carbon compounds plants produce.  For example, each molecule of table sugar contains  12 carbon atoms as well as the equivalent of 11 water molecules.

Plants are the original  solar energy collectors. The ability of plants to grow depends upon the available sunlight and the amount of CO2 in the air.

The global warming crowd claims that the atmosphere has too much CO2, but fast growing young plants benefit from higher concentrations .  Some greenhouses use twice the concentration of CO2 to encourage faster, sturdier growth, in young plants.

Plants use CO2 to produce food for animals which return part of the CO2 to the atmosphere for plants to reuse.  Unfortunately, humans don’t return all plant carbon to the environment.  Humans use  plant carbon for building materials, clothing and long lasting paper products such as books.  Humans also put carbon containing food materials along with other carbon materials into landfills where it is unavailable for plants.

If it weren’t for the combustion of carbon containing fossil fuels we might already be facing a shortage of atmospheric CO2 that could significantly reduce food production.

Production of biofuels depends upon ample supplies of CO2.  The most productive biofuel plants would  benefit from  higher concentrations of CO2 because more carbon would be available for conversion to fuel.

CO2 provides the best way to return carbon to the environment for plants to reuse. Animals exhale CO2 as their bodies use carbon molecules  for energy.   The wind moves it from where it is produced to where plants are growing.

The CO2 molecule is one of the simplest carbon molecules and is easy for plants to take apart for construction of complex molecules.  The cell is a microscopic factory.  Its genes are programmed to process CO2 into other molecules.   Taking carbon from the air is more efficient for plants because the carbon is available where it is needed.

Contrary to the lies of Gore and others,  increasing  the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere cannot increase temperatures.  Niels Bohr disproved the claim that the atmosphere was heated by absorbing infrared radiation (IR) with research that indicated the process of absorbing specific wavelengths of light changed the energy state of the electrons in gas molecules instead of increasing their temperature.  Physicist R. W. Wood demonstrated in a 1909 experiment that trapping IR did not heat greenhouses as many in the 19th Century had believed and thus the process could not heat the atmosphere either.

It would be easier to make a case that increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would reduce temperatures.  Plants use CO2 to store solar energy in the form of chemical fonds of carbon molecules rather than converting it into heat.   Plant covered areas do not become as hot as nearby  areas that lack plant cover.  Bare ground converts solar radiation to heat.

Reducing CO2 would reduce the amount of radiation  stored as  chemical bonds allowing more of the  radiation to be converted to heat.

Increasing the availability of CO2 means that plants can store more solar energy than is possible with current levels of  CO2.  Storing  more solar energy would reduce the amount of solar energy converted to heat.