The most important issue today in the FCC is the use of the White Space Radio Spectrum. After many discussions, and a nasty FUD campaign by the Major Telco companies, the FCC plans on allowing local, licence-free use of this White Space spectrum, and the possibilities are nearly endless. Most recent findings, those the FCC intend to base decisions on, see this as a Win-Win for consumers.

Imagine free, local android phones calls, or even using your router instead of cables for your television. How about using your cell phone instead of your PC and still have a keyboard and mouse? How about a network of free television channels to broadcast the High School play or football game. How about an integrated Fire, Police, and EMS communication and training network without the outlay of taxpayer money to pay the FCC for those pesky and expensive licence’s. All of these possibilities exist, along with many that have not even been invented. The future is now, and it looks real cool.

The space between the channels on your television is where the future of communication lives. The potential for this white space is limited only by creativity, ingenuity, and the need for clear rules of the road. Wireless broadband is the most promising way to extend affordable, ubiquitous, high-speed Internet connections to all Americans, create mesh networks for emergency first responders, enable new capabilities that bring safety, convenience, and comfort to consumers in their homes, and empower the creators of tomorrow’s innovations.

One of the most important aspects of this technology is that the white space that surrounds your home or school belongs to you. Your radio waves belong to you, not some multimillion dollar money grubbing left-wing media company. There are so many open frequencies that in a community like North Rockland, there would be an endless supply of channels for everyone to use. All you need is a transmitter and a dream. The time is now that we allow free access to this white space, it in turn will allow developers to come up with new and innovative uses for this spectrum in conjunction with device makers, and it should allow those communities with no broadband penetration a good chance to be connected.

I want to thank the Wireless Innovation Alliance who’s members have lobbied to make this spectrum available. You can visit them for more information.

In what to me seems like a crucial backstory this last weekend before the election, exit polls in Israel today report an overwhelming numbers of Americans casting absentee ballots are voting for John McCain.

Published by Keevoon Research Strategy and Communications, the poll gives a landslide victory to the Republicans, with 76 percent of the mostly Jewish respondents living in Israel voting by absentee ballot for McCain. That runs counter to a recent Gallup poll of Jewish American voters in the United States, in which 74 percent of respondents favored Obama. Orthodox Jews accounted for 70 percent of the respondents, who voted overwhelmingly for McCain; the 8 percent of secular voters went largely for Obama.

Why could this make such a difference? Israeli Jewish-American voters generally have somewhat different views from U.S. Jewish voters. The economy is one of them. But in my eye, liberal left-wing American Jews like  Sara Silverman seem always to oppose the conservative views of those like Rabbi Twersky. The fact is that Obama and company are prepared to appease the Arabs at any cost, and the O-man has made numerous statements in his somwhat short carreer to reinforce this message. Although the key issue with many Jews in American voters is the economy, there really is only one real issue for all Jews and thats a nuclear war with Iran.

Although it’s easy to dismiss the results of this poll as marginal, there are over 42,000 Americans living in Israel who are registered voters and around half come from key swing states. Yes, the states these same secular Jews claim as Obama’s. For my part, I just hope all Jews will make a smart choice this election so they still may have a homeland after this most tense time passes.

There are plenty of warning signs about Mr. Obama we ignore at our peril.

America’s economy got into trouble when people didn’t heed warning signs. Three years ago, Mr. McCain called for stricter oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, warning their risky practices threatened our economy and could cost taxpayers billions. He tried to prevent or at least reduce the breadth of the crisis we’re in now. Mr. Obama and congressional Democrats ignored these signs and opposed reform.

When it comes to direct spending, as opposed to handing out “refund” checks through the tax code, Mr. Obama claims he won’t need more revenue because there will be no more spending. He even claims to be proposing to cut more spending ending up with a “net spending cut.” That was Mr. Obama’s most direct answer to Bob Schieffer, the moderator of the last debate, right after Mr. Schieffer said “The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CFARB) ran the numbers” and found otherwise.

Wanting to raise taxes, anyone’s taxes, in a slowdown is a warning sign of a misguided economic philosophy. Mr. Obama’s proposal to redistribute wealth is a warning of indifference or hostility to enterprise. The Joint Tax Committee reports that the bottom 60% of taxpayers with incomes below $50,000 paid less than 1% of the federal income tax in 2006, while the 3.3% with incomes above $200,000 paid more than 58%. Most of Mr. Obama’s tax rebates go to the bottom 60%. They can’t possibly be financed by shifting an even larger share of the tax burden to the top 3.3%.

Mr. Obama’s health-care plan is a warning that government will have more, not less, to say about your health care if he has his way. The core of Mr. Obama’s reform is a new government insurance program, open to nearly everyone, including the young and even the affluent. His goal is to have everyone insured by 2012. According to the Lewin Group, independent health-care consultants, the number of Americans with private coverage would drop by nearly 22 million from 157 million starting the first year, as people shifted toward the public option. People with coverage either through Mr. Obama’s plan, Medicaid or the federal-state children’s program (Schip) would increase by about 48 million. Mr. Obama estimates the cost between $50 billion and $65 billion a year when fully phased in, though others say it would be far more. To fund it, he would impose a “pay or play” tax on employers. This would require all but the smallest employers either to provide insurance for their workers, or pay a tax on some portion of their payroll. Mr. Obama hasn’t said what the tax rate would be. If it’s high, government costs would be lower and more employers might offer coverage, paying for it out of wages. If it’s low, many employers would dump their coverage and pay the tax instead, transferring workers to the public option. Mr. Obama has also not elaborated on how the government would reimburse providers under his plan. The rates could be used to undercut private insurers. According to Lewin estimates, these undefined variables could boost the exodus to government to more than 60 million

Mr. Obama’s dismissal of offshore drilling and opposition to nuclear power are warning signs for an economy whose growth depends on affordable energy. Mr. Obama’s commitment to withdraw our troops from Iraq without regard to conditions on the ground is a warning sign that Mr. Obama is dangerously wrong-headed and ideological on national security. The absence of a single significant instance in which Mr. Obama cooperated in a bipartisan manner in the Senate is a warning sign. So is his failure to dirty his hands by working hard on any major legislative challenge since entering Congress.

For many, a vote for Obama is a Hail Mary. The question is, can we catch  it?

A small lesson from our Banking Department

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A very thought-provoking series of statements on the Global Warming Hoax that I believe is being perpetrated to destroy our economy.

CO2  Temperature

MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.

FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas (”heat islands”), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas (”land use effects”).

There has been no catastrophic warming recorded.

MYTH 2: The “hockey stick” graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature decrease for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.

FACT: Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the “average global temperature” has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare.

The “hockey stick”, a poster boy of both the UN’s IPCC and Canada’s Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.

MYTH 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.

FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no proof that CO2 is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth’s oceans expel more CO2 as a result.

MYTH 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas.

FACT: Greenhouse gases form about 3 % of the atmosphere by volume. They consist of varying amounts, (about 97%) of water vapour and clouds, with the remainder being gases like CO2, CH4, Ozone and N2O, of which carbon dioxide is the largest amount. Hence, CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere. While the minor gases are more effective as “greenhouse agents” than water vapour and clouds, the latter are overwhelming the effect by their sheer volume and – in the end – are thought to be responsible for 60% of the “Greenhouse effect”.

Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention this important fact.

MYTH 5: Computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming.

FACT: The computer models assume that CO2 is the primary climate driver, and that the Sun has an insignificant effect on climate. You cannot use the output of a model to verify or prove its initial assumption – that is circular reasoning and is illogical. Computer models can be made to roughly match the 20th century temperature rise by adjusting many input parameters and using strong positive feedbacks. They do not “prove” anything. Also, computer models predicting global warming are incapable of properly including the effects of the sun, cosmic rays and the clouds. The sun is a major cause of temperature variation on the earth surface as its received radiation changes all the time, This happens largely in cyclical fashion. The number and the lengths in time of sunspots can be correlated very closely with average temperatures on earth, e.g. the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Varying intensity of solar heat radiation affects the surface temperature of the oceans and the currents. Warmer ocean water expels gases, some of which are CO2. Solar radiation interferes with the cosmic ray flux, thus influencing the amount ionized nuclei which control cloud cover.

MYTH 6: The UN proved that man–made CO2 causes global warming.

FACT: In a 1996 report by the UN on global warming, two statements were deleted from the final draft. Here they are:
1) “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases.”
2) “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to man–made causes”

To the present day there is still no scientific proof that man-made CO2 causes significant global warming.

MYTH 7: CO2 is a pollutant.

FACT: This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is. CO2 is essential to life on earth. It is necessary for plant growth since increased CO2 intake as a result of increased atmospheric concentration causes many trees and other plants to grow more vigorously. Unfortunately, the Canadian Government has included CO2 with a number of truly toxic and noxious substances listed by the Environmental Protection Act, only as their means to politically control it.

MYTH 8: Global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes.

FACT: There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that supports such claims on a global scale. Regional variations may occur. Growing insurance and infrastructure repair costs, particularly in coastal areas, are sometimes claimed to be the result of increasing frequency and severity of storms, whereas in reality they are a function of increasing population density, escalating development value, and ever more media reporting.

MYTH 9: Receding glaciers and the calving of ice shelves are proof of global warming.

FACT: Glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for hundreds of years. Recent glacier melting is a consequence of coming out of the very cool period of the Little Ice Age. Ice shelves have been breaking off for centuries. Scientists know of at least 33 periods of glaciers growing and then retreating. It’s normal. Besides, glacier’s health is dependent as much on precipitation as on temperature.

MYTH 10: The earth’s poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising.

FACT: The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer, due to unrelated cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling. Ice thicknesses are increasing both on Greenland and in Antarctica.

Sea level monitoring in the Pacific (Tuvalu) and Indian Oceans (Maldives) has shown no sign of any sea level rise.