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GLOBAL WARMING, SOME FASCINATING DATA PARTS 1-6

I ran across an extremely interesting and fascinating article about global warming, climate change, bio-fuels, etc. that I thought I would pass along to readers of the Silkin Management Group blog sites. This is a fairly long article so I split it up into several sections so they could be read over the following several days.

For ease of reading all parts, with the final conclusion of Part 6 are presented here.

What is written here is likely to be taken as either very controversial, a “conspiracy theory” or hogwash by many. I am not taking sides one way or the other on it, but I thought it was interesting and relevant and well documented enough to present it to our readers to take a look at for themselves. I certainly found it eye opening.

Silkin Management Group is a management consulting company that has delivered management consulting and training to thousands of health care practices and small businesses over the last thirty years. Our blogs tend to be about relevant business issues such as marketing, dealing with staff, hiring and training, etc. But, when we run across them, we also like to present big picture items that effect us all. This is one of them.

For more information about Silkin Management Group and its services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com.

Here is this article, entitled “Anatomy of a Con Job” written by John Truman Wolfe in its entirety.

Larry Silver
President, Silkin Management Group


ANATOMY OF A CON JOB

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.” —George Orwell

PART 1:

If you look with your understanding, the crimes against humanity are written across the rotting visages of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Like a couple of aging prostitutes, these leading architects of twentieth-century evil still sell their wares to those with an insatiable lust for the power of the crown.

THE CLUB OF ROME

Birth Mother of the Environmental Movement

The moldy twosome have something else in common. Both have been active members of an international think tank from the dark side of the force called the Club of Rome. Founded at the Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, in 1968, some of the other fraternity brothers and sisters include Al Gore, David Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

And there is no one better to give you the short version of the Club’s agenda than Gorby himself:

“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”

Who let this guy out of Lubyanka?

Their more precisely stated goal is population control. The solution? Create an environmental catastrophe like, oh, say, “global warming” and blame it on the planet’s most heinous villain—man himself.

But I should let them tell it:

“In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. . . . But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for cause. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changing attitudes and behaviors that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Sounds like a good plan . . . if you’re Darth Vader.

In 1972, the Club took the world stage with the publication of a book they had commissioned to be written by a group of MIT scientists. It was called The Limits to Growth. Examining the planet’s population growth in relation to available resources, the report concluded that the planet would run out of resources sometime in the next 100 years, resulting in a catastrophic decline in population and industrial production.

As one reviewer put it, the authors examine

“. . . the impact of humanity on the world ecology and of steps taken toward remediating the accelerating approach to a train wreck that is mankind’s ill-managed and uncontrolled ‘footprint’ on this planet’s environment.”

Still, these trends and their consequences could be altered, it argued; we had to be less, do less and have less. The brand for this Orwellian path to planetary salvation was sustainable development.

Heavily promoted, the book reached opinion leaders in political, scientific and economic circles as it exploded around the planet like the Harry Potter of environmentalism. It sold 12 million copies in thirty languages despite the fact that the research had all the scientific rigor of a plagiarized term paper for a freshman biology class.

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” —Mohandas Gandhi

Assailed by top scientists, the research was shoddy in the extreme. Population expert and author Professor Julian Simon said, “The Limits to Growth has been blasted as foolishness or fraud by almost every economist who has read it closely or reviewed it in print.”

Yale economist Henry Wallich reviewed the book saying, “. . . the quantitative content of the model comes from the authors’ imagination, although they never reveal the equations that they used.”

But it is a PR world and with the publication of this book, the modern environmental movement was born. Midwifed to life in a blanket of deceit, it was yet hailed as the savior, not of mankind, but of the planet it claimed was being fried to a crisp by humanity’s toxic binge of carbon dioxide.

The scientific fraud is its own malice, but few were able to see the underlying strategy—that the book would serve as the foundation of a global public relations campaign that would mesmerize legislators, educators, and countless organizations of goodwill and would eventually set the stage for the biggest rip-off in human history. But I am getting ahead of myself.

This then was Con #1: The scientific basis of the book that launched the environmental movement calling for “sustainable development” and a reduction of man’s leper-like carbon footprint on the planet was, and is, a scam, a hoax, a falsehood—environmental snake oil.

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Which leads us to the second piece of the puzzle, Con #2. Who’d have thought that . . .

OIL

Is Not a Fossil Fuel

PART 2

The immigration officer at Sheremetyevo took my passport and studied it for some time. He didn’t say anything; he just thumbed through the passport and then looked at a computer screen for a couple of lifetimes before stamping it and grunting me on to customs.

The KGB was still manning the borders the first time I went to Moscow shortly after the fall of Communism. Letting Americans walk freely into Mother Russia without official surveillance was driving the man crazy but he had to keep a lid on it.

In fact, Communism had been officially dead for only a few months when the shock troops of capitalism started storming the gates of opportunity in the former Soviet Union. The ghosts of Marx, Lenin and Stalin stalked the halls of the Politburo in horror as entrepreneurs from the United States, Japan and Western Europe tried to cut deals for every asset in Mother Russia that wasn’t nailed down. Banking, hospitality, timber and precious metals came under assault by peculiar partnerships of western capitalists and thugs from the once mighty KGB. During those early years, when Yeltsin (God love him) and his vodka were in office, it was a free-for-all.

The Oklahoma land rush of the 1890s had nothing on Moscow in 1992.

But even then, the oil industry stayed under control of the state—directly or indirectly. In fact, as recently as 2003, the bare-chested former KGB colonel and current premier—soon to be president of Russia . . . again—Vladimir Putin squashed a buyout deal between Russia’s Yukos and Exxon, the largest company in the world.

To understand the reason for this, we return momentarily to the early days of the Cold War when an isolated Soviet Union tasked their top scientists to identify the actual source of oil. Not a weekend homework assignment. After considerable research, in 1956, Russian scientist Professor Vladimir Porfir’yev announced that “crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial [originating with the earth’s formation] materials which have been erupted from great depths.”

If your eyeballs didn’t fall out when you read that, you might want to read it again.

He said oil doesn’t come from anything biologic, not, as conventional wisdom dictates, from the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and/or ancient plant matter. It comes from very deep in the earth and is created by a biochemical reaction that subjected hydrocarbons (elements having carbon and hydrogen) to extreme heat and intense pressure during the earth’s formation.

Russians referred to this oil (any oil, really) as “abiotic oil” because it is not created from the decomposition of biological life forms, but rather from the chemical process continually occurring inside the earth.

I know, easy for Porfir’yev to say. But it turns out it was more than just a theory.

Because shortly after the Russians discovered this, they started drilling ultra-deep wells and finding oil at 30,000 and 40,000 feet below the earth’s surface. These are staggering depths, and far below the depth at which organic matter can be found, which is 18,000 feet.

Interesting, eh?

The Russians applied their theory of abiotic deep-drilling technology to the Dnieper-Donets Basin, an area understood for the previous half a century to be barren of oil. Of sixty wells drilled there using abiotic technology, thirty-seven became commercially productive—a 62 percent success rate compared with the roughly 10 percent success rate of a U.S. wildcat driller. The oil found in the basin rivaled Alaska’s North Slope.

Let’s say they had a good hair day.

But it doesn’t stop there, not by a long shot. Since their earlier discoveries, the major Russian oil companies have quietly drilled more than 310 ultra-deep wells and put them into production.

Result? Russia recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the planet’s largest oil producer.

Maybe they are onto something.

Though there were papers written on this early on, almost all were in Russian and few made it to the West. And those that did were laughed at.

No more. With Russia’s rejection of the Exxon-Yukos deal (Putin did not want this technology and their abiotic oil experts exported to the West) and the access to information now available on the Internet, the word has begun to spread rapidly to the West. Still, it hasn’t taken hold yet.

Why not? This is huge. Oil is not a fossil fuel! And it’s renewable! Wow!

There are a couple of factors at play here.

Big oil has a vested interest in pushing the idea that oil is scarce, hard to find, and thus costly to produce—all of which, of course, means increased revenues and profits. This is a story in itself, but not the primary focus here.

More relevant to our story is the fact that a cornerstone of the environmental movement is this: oil is a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel that is scarce, and is in limited and ever decreasing supply. Moreover, its production creates carbon dioxide. Therefore its use, for virtually all productive purposes—agricultural production, real estate construction, auto, truck, train and air transportation, utilities, heating, cooling, communication, ad infinitum (all of them)—must be curtailed.

According to the thirty-year update of the book The Limits to Growth,

“A prime example of a nonrenewable resource is fossil fuels, whose limits should be obvious, although many people, including distinguished economists, are in denial over the elementary fact. More than 80 percent of year 2000 commercial energy use comes from nonrenewable fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal. The underground stocks of fossil fuels are going continuously and inexorably down. . . .

“Peak gas production will certainly occur in the next 50 years, the peak for oil production will occur much sooner, probably within the decade.”

Scary stuff. Frightening. But as false as a hooker’s smile.

Oil is not a fossil fuel.

And it is “renewable.”

While I have never been a fan of Putin the Macho, the Russians have demonstrated the accuracy of their theory in the only place it counts—the oil field. Oil is not only abiotic, it continues to populate fields that were understood to be as dry of petroleum as a desert wind. In fact, some scientists believe it is the centrifugal force of the planet’s rotation that forces abiotic oil toward the planet’s surface on a continuous basis.

“There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” —the late Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post

So Con #2 is that oil is a fossil fuel (which it isn’t), that it is scarce and being depleted (which it isn’t), that it is nonrenewable (which it isn’t), and that, as a result, catastrophe looms (which it doesn’t) unless we drastically curtail our use of petroleum.

Lies one and all, which lead us to the granddaddy of con—Con #3:

END PART 2

GLOBAL WARMING—CLIMATE CHANGE

PART 3

The heart-wrenching icon of a lone polar bear hovering in solitude somewhere in the rapidly disappearing Arctic has become the environmental movement’s most poignant pitchman.

The pitch, however, is bogus. The bears are booming.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “Nearly everyone agrees that there are more polar bears now than when scientists first started counting: Estimates put the population between 20,000 and 25,000, up from several thousand 50 years ago. In Canada, where two-thirds of the world’s bears live, most populations have grown during the past two or three decades. Arctic residents say they are now bumping into bears wherever they turn.”

The polar bear “debate” cuts to the heart of the foundation on which the environmental movement rests: global warming.

While the Club of Rome’s clarion call for “sustainable development” in The Limits to Growth turned out to be more than a little thin on scientific credibility, and the theory that oil is a scarce and rapidly depleting fossil fuel is untrue, the holy grail of the environmental movement is Global Warming or, as they have renamed it due to the last eleven years of embarrassingly cooler temperatures, Climate Change.

It is the creed upon which the movement is built.

The scripture is as follows: The burning of fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide. This and other “greenhouse” gases create global warming, which will destroy the planet.

To wit, the production of these gases must be “capped.”

Legislation to suppress their use is a first step. Population control, a reduction of the planet’s population, is the real answer because man makes these gases. Fewer people mean less greenhouse gas. Less greenhouse gas means less global warming. Less warming means the earth is saved.

Amen.

Greenhouse gases, by the way, are any of the atmospheric gases, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide, that are said to contribute to the greenhouse effect.

The greenhouse effect is a name for the phenomenon outlined above whereby the earth’s atmosphere traps solar radiation and thereby overheats the planet. According to the theory, these gases in the atmosphere allow sunlight to pass through to the earth, but then absorb the heat radiated back from the planet’s surface.

Shazam! Global warming.

Sounds good. Cut CO2 and you save the world.

A clearly identified evil with an action plan to handle it.

Kind of like the Inquisition—fry the heretics, purify the faith.

Today, global warming heretics are burned in the media not at the stake, but the dogma is no less strident, no less authoritarian, and no less despotic.

SCIENCE SETTLED

Al Gore is the Moses of global warming. He, along with the high priests of the movement, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has pronounced that the science regarding man-made global warming is “settled.” There’s nothing further to discuss: global warming is real; man-made CO2 is the cause; carbon production must be capped. Done deal.

Al and the IPCC are simpatico on this—which is cool. Harmony in the ranks.

THE OREGON PETITION

But here’s the deal: 31,486 scientists have signed a document called the Oregon Petition lambasting the shoddy research behind global warming, stating quite simply that “. . . any human contribution to climate change has not been demonstrated.”

This is not a gang of political hacks, or George Soros–funded “activists.” No, the signatories include 3,667 atmospheric, environmental and Earth scientists; 4,796 chemists; 2,924 biologists and agricultural scientists; 903 math and computer scientists; and 9,992 in engineering and general science.

Of these, 9,029 have PhDs.

The petition states that there is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases is causing or will cause global warming.

It goes on to say that there is substantial scientific evidence demonstrating that atmospheric carbon dioxide produces countless beneficial effects on the plant and animal populations of Earth. (In one of Mother Nature’s most spectacular touches of environmental magic, plants convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into oxygen—you know, the stuff we breathe.)

SENATE COMMITTEE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

In March of 2009 the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works posted a report of more than 700 international scientists dissenting on the theory of man-made global warming. Several of those joining in on this report were current or former IPCC members.

Several other groups of scientists have issued statements blasting the lack of credible science behind the theory that man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere contribute to global warming. Examples include the Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming, the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change, and the Heidelberg Appeal.

THE IPCC COOKS THE BOOKS

You will notice, if you read articles about the environment, that “facts” regarding global warming invariably cite the IPCC as their source

In short, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the planet’s opinion leader on the subject of man-made climate change.

Or at least they were.

On November 19, 2009, one of the largest scientific scandals in history exploded across the international media when thousands of internal e-mails were leaked exposing the organization’s blatant manipulation of climate data. The e-mails revealed that the IPCC had skewed bucketloads of climate information to promote the idea that global warming was a result of an increase in man-made carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

This wasn’t a bunch of stoners in a frat house passing the filched answers to the Geology 101 midterm around. These guys were recognized as the world’s leading “authorities” on climate change, caught red-handed in an intentional plot to mislead environmental groups, governments and the public at large about the current and future state of the planet’s temperature.

This brief excerpt from Canada’s National Post rather tells the story.

“The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

“The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

“The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world—Wikipedia—in the wholesale rewriting of this history.”

THE MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD

Like a cheap Las Vegas lounge act, the pernicious cult of climate change ideologues at the IPCC desperately tried to hide the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)—ditch it, make it disappear. This was the warmest period in modern recorded history and is very well known by climatologists.

Trying a page from Houdini’s playbook, the IPCC created a phony graph of historical temperatures that made the MWP—presto!—vanish.

Cute.

You see, during the MWP temperatures were much warmer than they are today. Agriculture flourished and the Norsemen, taking advantage of the ice-free seas, settled Greenland. There is no evidence of a rise in sea level at that time. None. And ice sheets around Greenland were largely absent. Greenland, get it?

Temperatures soared, but where was the man-made carbon dioxide? Oil had yet to be discovered, factories had not been constructed, and the first Model T was centuries into the future.

There followed a mini ice age, and by 1500 the settlements in Greenland were gone and the Thames froze all the way to London.

There was no “man-made” factor in any of this. These ebbs and flows of the earth’s temperatures were all a product of naturally occurring phenomena, which is discussed in detail below.

But as to the IPCC,

“Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful.” —The Oregon Petition

FEARMONGERS

In fact, the same mindset that is now promoting the catastrophic consequences of global warming were using the same arguments, almost word for word, to promote the dire consequences of global cooling just a few decades ago.

In 1975, Reid Bryson wrote in Global Ecology:

“The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population.”

Yeah, baby! CO2 is causing global cooling.

Or consider Kenneth Watt, writing on Earth Day in 1970:

“If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. . . . This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Good call, Ken.

There are more, but you get the idea.

These people, then and now, are fearmongers. They get some kind of perverse joy out of frightening people—in this case, frightening them into acceptance of the greatest con job of all time.

Listen to the climate chaos merchants reviewing a book by a global warming jihadist named James Hansen, who subtitles his book “The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity.”

“Dr. James Hansen is Paul Revere to the foreboding tyranny of climate chaos.” —Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“With urgency and authority, Hansen urges readers to speak out—taking to the streets if necessary—to protect the Earth from calamity for the sake of their children and grandchildren.” —Kirkus Reviews

Calamity, chaos and catastrophe: the cocaine of the global warming media extremists.

STATS

The crisis and catastrophe crowd don’t like to talk about the fact that water vapor (not carbon dioxide) accounts for 95% of all greenhouse gases. This is naturally occurring water vapor—99.99% of “greenhouse gas” water vapor is natural. Only .01% (one-hundredth of one percent) of greenhouse water vapor is man-made.

But carbon dioxide is the anointed villain of the piece. It must really pack a punch, because CO2 only makes up 3.6% of greenhouse gases. And here’s the kicker, only 3% of the carbon dioxide—3% of the 3.6%—is man-made. This means .1% (one-tenth of one percent) is man-made CO2.

This, according to the harbingers of climate doom, is what is driving “climate catastrophe.” International conferences are called, governments allocate billions, and corporate PR departments gush over environmental agendas in a universal tsunami of green.

It’s as if someone had turned a programmed cult of global warming druids lose on the planet to shriek the horrors of carbon dioxide to a populace that doesn’t know or can’t confront the blatant lunacy of what they are saying.

In turn, the lapdog media regurgitates the chaos and calamity to millions. Their sole aspiration is to shovel as much death, destruction, filth and depravity into the public’s mind in the shortest possible time. Except somewhere in their collective soul they know . . . and they are sick with shame.

“We allow the most atrocious lies uttered by political and moral prostitutes to go unchallenged. These lies are endlessly recycled in the commercial media until they become ingrained in the public conscience as truth.” —Charles Sullivan, author and philosopher

Can I get an “Amen”?

THE SOLAR CONNECTION

I’m a California boy. I love the sun. During spring break in college, some friends of mine and I would body surf our way down the west coast of Mexico, turning coffee brown in the process, and return to campus as sun-baked bronze gods. The co-eds would swoon. . . . Okay, maybe not swoon, but getting dates was definitely easier.

It never occurred to me in those halcyon days that the sun might play a leading role in an article I would later write about global warming. But it does.

The fact is that Earth has experienced natural warming and cooling cycles all throughout recorded history—cycles that have driven temperatures much higher than anything we are experiencing today.

And what is the source of these fluctuations in the earth’s temperature? Water vapor? No. Carbon dioxide? Eh . . . sorry. Hair spray? You’re joking.

What causes temperature changes on the earth is . . . the sun.

Scientists have discovered that the sun has regular cycles of sunspot activity. Sunspots are regions on the sun’s surface of intense magnetic activity; the more sunspots, the more “active” the sun is.

Sunspots and solar radiation activity virtually parallel temperature changes on Earth. That’s right; it is the sun that is the source of global warming and cooling cycles—not mankind’s “carbon footprint.”

If greenhouse gases were the cause of global warming, how is it that from 1940 to 1975, when there was a dramatic increase in the production and release of CO2, the earth experienced a significant cooling period?

Warming periods on Earth are a direct result of an increase in solar radiation, which prevents cloud formation. Cloud formation has a cooling effect on the planet. This is further borne out by the fact that other planets in our solar system all appear to heat up at the same time. But they’re not driving Chevys on Pluto or burning coal on Mars.

This, then, is Con #3: Global warming is a vast, strategic PR campaign, nothing more. It is not a planetary temperature phenomenon. Sorry, Al.

“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.” —Bertrand Russell

So, what gives? Why all the misleading information and climate change hysteria?

Let me introduce you to Con #4. . . .

END PART 3

BIOFUELS

PART 4

A friend of mine drives around to restaurants late at night and collects used vegetable oil. He uses it in his diesel Mercedes that will qualify for Medicare next year. He has converted the Mercedes to burn vegetable oil as fuel.

One of the solutions to the “carbon crisis” is biofuels.

Biofuels are essentially fuels produced from plants.

There are two basic types of biofuels. Ethanol, which can be used as petrol and is made from corn, sugar cane, beets, wheat and other grains, and biodiesel which is made from oil seeds, tree nuts or waste oil (à la the Medicare Mercedes above).

Biofuels are supposed to be clean, convenient and carbon neutral. But don’t look too closely because the environmental consequences of their use are something out of a Stephen King novel.

DEFORESTATION

The planet’s tropical rain forests are being obliterated as if some frenzied Jolly Green Giant were running an immense weed wacker through the Amazon.

Biofuels are broadly promoted as a solution to the production of carbon dioxide. But a closer examination reveals that they damage the environment on two fronts: the first is massive planetary deforestation.

Tropical forests are the most powerful carbon reservoirs on the planet. In other words, they sequester and store carbon dioxide more effectively than any other resource.

Cutting forests down not only releases massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it eliminates them as both a carbon reservoir and a generator of oxygen. (Again, for those of you that slept through high school biology, or, like me, never had the guts to take it, plants use carbon dioxide and sunlight to make oxygen.)

But government mandates and corporate greed are pushing the cultivation of biofuels so intently that tropical forests are vanishing from the planet at an appalling rate.

The European Union, for instance, has mandated a 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020. This is to be partly achieved by mandating that 10 percent of vehicles be powered by biofuel. Financial incentives, which we examine in detail below, have driven global investment in biofuels from $5 billion in 1995 to an estimated $100 billion in 2010. Everyone from George Soros to British Petroleum and Shell Oil are players in this market.

As a result, vast amounts of the Amazon rain forest in Brazil have been destroyed for soybean and sugar cane cultivation. Brazil proudly announced last year that deforestation was on track to double that year.

A report by Friends of the Earth revealed that between 1985 and 2000, the development of palm oil plantations in Malaysia was responsible for the deforestation of 87 percent of the country’s forests. Eighty-seven percent! In fact, palm oil is now referred to as “deforestation diesel.”

In Sumatra and Borneo, 4 million hectares of forest were lost to palm oil farms (9.8 million acres—almost twice the size of the state of New Hampshire).

As an added sucker punch to Mother Nature, biofuel-driven deforestation has also led to Holocaust-like species extinction. The forests in Malaysia and Indonesia are home to the orangutan, Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of other species, many of which are under serious threat of extinction from habitat loss.

And then there is this troubling little fact: while biofuels generate less carbon emissions than oil, they are doing so by replacing vegetation and soil that suck up even more carbon. In other words, the carbon absorption lost by razing the wilderness to cultivate biofuels is dramatically more than the gains achieved by using the cleaner- burning fuels.

The “inconvenient truth” is that the biofuel craze is destroying nature, and, incidentally, adding to the carbon dioxide on the planet, not decreasing it.

OCEAN POLLUTION AND DEAD ZONES

If you have ever walked by a body of water and noticed an acrid smell, felt your eyes burning or saw that it was blanketed by a thick red, blue or green plant covering, you’ve probably had an unfortunate run-in with an HAB, Harmful Algal Bloom.

In almost all cases, the production of biofuels is accompanied by the use of nitrogen, phosphorous, herbicides, pesticides, insecticides, etc.

Nitrogen, along with other toxic materials, filters downward to the water table and finds its way to rivers, streams and eventually the ocean. There, the nitrogen and, to a lesser degree, the pesticides generate massive, abnormal and very toxic “algal blooms,” which rapidly decay into huge areas of oxygen-sucking dead algae. This is highly destructive of marine life.

Corn cultivation utilizes the greatest application of fertilizers and pesticides. No surprise, then, that the heaviest concentration of these toxins occurs in the U.S. corn belt. The result? Nitrogen and other toxins in the Mississippi River system have mercilessly poured into the Gulf of Mexico creating a dead zone of 22,000 square kilometers (8,492 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey). It’s not just the Gulf of Mexico. The number of oceanic dead zones has spread around the planet like an environmental cancer.

Since the onset of the biofuel craze in the 1980s, the number of dead zones has increased 450 percent.

But that’s not all.

Species Extinction

There are currently about 405 dead zones on the planet, the largest, 70,000 square kilometers (27,020 square miles—larger than the state of West Virginia), in the Baltic Sea. Species extinction is a direct effect of these zones. In the last ten years, 14,000 dead seals and dolphins have washed up on California’s coast and 650 gray whales have been found beached. In Florida, hundreds of manatees have been killed and 80 percent of the coral reef in the Caribbean has been smothered. Seventy-five percent of California’s fish-rich kelp forest has been ruined and the problem is beginning to affect the availability of seafood for human consumption.

About 1.7 million plant and animal species have been identified on the planet. According to some reports, species extinction is now occurring at the rate of about 20,000 to 30,000 annually. Whatever the number, the endangered species list increased 150 percent last year alone. The single largest reason for this is habitat destruction and pollution, most of which is a result of biofuel production.

Makes you feel warm all over, doesn’t it?

Oxygen Depletion

I don’t know about you, but I’ve grown rather partial to breathing. It brings a certain awareness to life.

So the fact that biofuel production is depleting the planet’s oxygen is more than a little troubling.

Sounds alarmist, doesn’t it? Perhaps even a bit conspiratorial. How could one of the most prolific solutions to global warming be destroying the planet’s supply of oxygen?

The oceans are the planet’s largest carbon sink. (The rain forests are the most effective carbon sinks; oceans are the largest.) It is the algae in the oceans that absorb the bulk of the earth’s CO2. That’s right; the earth’s primary CO2 sponge is the algae in the oceans.

The algae then convert sunlight and the CO2 in the ocean into oxygen.

Seventy to eighty percent (70%–80%) of this planet’s oxygen is produced by the algae in the oceans. Yet the nitrogen, phosphates and other chemicals pouring into the oceans around the world as a result of biofuel production are destroying the very element that produces the bulk of that oxygen—the algae in the oceans.

This is Con #4: Biofuels don’t reduce carbon; they destroy the rain forests and are depleting the very air we breathe. Which begs the question, have these people forgotten to pay their brain bills, are they just plain evil or . . . is there something else at play here?

And that brings us to the last piece of the puzzle and the final con.

END PART 4

PART 5

CARBON CREDITS

I know you are going to be shocked when I tell you that the banksters have their teeth in the climate change agenda like a pit bull on crystal meth.

You have heard the mantra “the planet is a space-borne oven that is melting the polar ice caps, destroying the polar bears and turning Des Moines into beachfront property.”

The solution? Pass laws that “disincentivize” the production of carbon dioxide by taxing its use. Oh, and turn the tax into derivatives so Goldman Sachs and friends can pig out. (See the chapter “The Goldman Connection” in my e-book Crisis by Design at www.behindthewizardscurtain.com.)

The marketing folks have branded this scheme “carbon credits.”

Kyoto Protocol

The skyline of Kyoto, Japan, is dotted with many of the country’s oldest Buddhist temples. One of these ancient shrines is built on a lake. The water in the lake is so pristine that the best way to tell the real temple from the reflection is to throw a rock in the water and see which of the images ripples.

This, an introductory allegory, is to make the point that things are not always as they seem, even in the land of many Buddhas.

In 1997, an international agreement was signed in Kyoto seeking to limit greenhouse gas emissions. It was named after the host city and carries a handle better suited for a Robert Ludlum novel: The Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol and a subsequent agreement called the Marrakech Accords set “caps” or quotas on the maximum amount of greenhouse gas a country could emit. In turn, each country was to then assign carbon emission “caps” or quotas to its own businesses and other organizations, which are referred to as operators.

Thus, every business in every country that signed the Kyoto Protocol is supposed to have an allowance of “carbon credits.” Businesses that exceed their allowance must buy some carbon credits. These can be purchased from “green” companies that have not used their allocation of carbon, or they can be bought on a “carbon exchange.”

Let’s take, for example, a furniture factory. The factory is emitting 125 tons of carbon dioxide per year, but its allowance is 100 tons. The factory must now cut its production to bring it into alignment with its 100-ton quota, or buy 25 credits from, say, a biofuel company that is producing “carbon neutral” fuel—an entirely different view of the biofuel craze.

As the population grows, as new companies are created and existing ones expand their productivity, the use of energy (and thus carbon-based fuels and emissions) will increase. The quotas for a country, however, will actually be lowered.

Of course, as carbon quotas (or caps) are lowered, the value of carbon credits increases.

You get the picture: the rules of supply and demand will prevail and the cost of carbon credits has a built-in price increase.

Cap-and-Trade Legislation

Moreover, while the U.S. did not sign the Kyoto Protocol, and Copenhagen turned out to be little more than a cacophonous blizzard of press releases, President Obama has committed to a goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to 17 percent below the 2005 levels this year and reducing emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

This is exactly what the “cap-and-trade” legislation that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in June of last year mandates. That’s right, the same circus act that brought you last year’s $1.5 trillion budget deficit has passed a bill to force you to use less energy—because CO2 is creating global warming.

Except, there is no global warming, temperatures have continued to cool over the last decade, and even if they hadn’t, man-made carbon dioxide has nothing to do with any kind of harmful climate change—nada, zero, zip.

Can you imagine what this kind of legislation would do to American industry and commerce?

To get the full magnitude of where this insanity is going, consider the British. The UK Secretary of State for the Environment has promised legislation there that will set legally binding lower carbon emissions of 60 percent by 2050. He has also conducted a feasibility study to issue carbon “credit cards” to every citizen under a nationwide carbon rationing system.

Under this plan everybody would get an annual allowance of carbon they could spend on products such as food, energy and travel. Individuals would have to swipe their carbon card every time they bought gas, paid a utility bill or booked an airline flight.

Go ahead, read that again. The words won’t change.

The British Parliament, which appears to be a collective mental disorder, has gone so far as to give local bureaucrats the power to enter a person’s home without a warrant to, among other things, check for refrigerators that do not carry eco-friendly energy ratings.

We have here a system literally going mad before our eyes.

Carbon emission limits, and the buying and selling of “credits” to deal with them (called Cap and Trade), are a solution created to deal with a catastrophic—though nonexistent—problem created by what is arguably the most well-orchestrated PR campaign in history.

The solution not only establishes a system of planetary economic control by setting carbon emission limits down to every business (and in the UK down to every citizen) but will make its creators and their allies rich beyond all imaginings.

On a tactical level, Cap and Trade does three things: it suppresses productivity and thus increases unemployment; it drives a biofuel agenda (for carbon credits) that is destroying the earth’s ecosystem, and, if continued, will destroy the very air we breathe; and it creates a massive new international Ponzi scheme that has the international banks orgasmic with delight.

Five “climate exchanges” have already been set up that deal in the buying and selling of carbon credits. The two larger exchanges are the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), which is the only U.S. firm that claims to trade carbon credits, and Europe’s European Climate Exchange (ECX), which is half owned by CCX.

There is the stock market, where stocks and bonds are traded, and a commodities market where things like gold and silver and corn, wheat and soybeans are traded. Now cometh the carbon exchanges where carbon credits in the form of derivatives will be bought and sold.

And derivatives sure did a nice job for us last year, didn’t they?

In short, derivatives are essentially contracts that package up some kind of product into a financial instrument that can be traded—bought and sold. A contract for 100 ounces of gold is a derivative, because the contract isn’t the gold itself.

Banks and other entities will be buying carbon credits, packaging them up, and selling them by the trillions. This is already well in motion in Europe, where carbon offsets have been being traded since 2005.

The carbon market is projected to be in the trillions, and will be turned lose in the U.S. the moment the Senate passes a cap-and-trade bill. That bill will have to be reconciled with the House bill and sent to President Obama, who has made this legislation a key policy initiative second only to health care.

Everyone is set up and ready to go. The big banks have been investing in carbon friendly enterprises—Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup are some of the players. Not to be outdone, the World Bank has joined the CCX and now operates a Carbon Fund for Europe that helps countries meet their Kyoto Protocol requirements.

Isn’t that special?

Major corporations, including the large oil companies, are strong supporters of cap-and-trade legislation and are members of these carbon exchanges as well. Why would an oil company be interested in this game?

As generators of lots of CO2, oil companies will have to buy a lot of carbon credits. If the price of oil skyrockets, they make handsome profits from the oil business. However, as the price of oil rises, so, too, will the price of carbon credits. You see, as oil gets expensive, people turn to less costly coal-fired energy. Coal generates roughly twice the CO2 of oil—which means the demand for carbon credits will increase to offset the coal emissions.

So the oil company scores both ways. Profit on their oil and profit from the increase in value of their carbon credit portfolio.

You see, this is a market that is created only if governments (or international bodies with the authority to do so) mandate emissions standards. By doing so, they instantly create a carbon market because many businesses will have to buy carbon offsets.

If governments impose a limit on carbon emissions, the market will come. If not, it won’t.

The carbon markets in Europe crashed after the Copenhagen conference failed to establish legally binding emission caps for the major industrialized nations.

You see how this works?

And remember, the emission standards do not increase with population growth or increases in the number of plants or factories or their output. They are capped and are then lowered. Therefore carbon credits will continue to rise in price, as the supply will steadily decrease, driving higher demand. Escalating profits are built in if governments mandate the standards.

And standing on deck to become the first carbon billionaire is none other than . . .

END PART 5….Part 6 is next and will wrap this all up.

Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.

It is not hard to imagine Al Gore in a minister’s collar.

After all, he went to Vanderbilt Divinity School when he was a young man—an act of “purification,” his wife would later say.

And he has called greenhouse gases “a moral issue . . . deeply unethical,” which must be why he warns of environmental Armageddon with such a religious zeal:


“. . . unless we act boldly and quickly to deal with the underlying causes of global warming, our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes, including more and stronger storms like Hurricane Katrina. . . .
“Today, we are hearing and seeing dire warnings of the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization: a global climate crisis that is deepening and rapidly becoming more dangerous than anything we have ever faced.”

What do we do, Brother Al? How do we solve “the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization”?

“Cap and trade, my son, cap and trade.”

There’s just one little point that should be known about Brother Al’s sermon: if governments mandate the cap-and-trade legislation he is advocating, Al the Righteous, Al the Moral, Al the Ethical, stands to make billions.

You see, while he is pushing governments around the world to cap carbon emissions, which will force companies to buy carbon offset credits, he is also the chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM), which invests in . . . you guessed it . . . carbon dioxide offsets.
Matt Taibbi’s article in Rolling Stone lays out the structure beautifully.

“The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the `cap’ on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand-new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison’s sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.”

A World Bank Private Sector blog regularly gushes about Brother Al, whose partners in GIM are those priests of Wall Street propriety, the suspender-wearing bankers from Goldman Sachs. Co-founder of the company is David Blood, former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management; other former Goldmanite big shots include Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Assisting with the creation of Al’s ethical investment house was none other than the godfather of the Wall Street derivatives that fueled the global financial crisis and the star of the trillion-dollar bank bailout of 2008, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hammering Hank Paulson.

Goldman has long sought cap-and-trade legislation, having spent $3.5 million lobbying climate issues in 2008. And the bank owns a 10 percent interest in the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), mentioned above. The CCX is the only U.S. firm that claims to trade carbon credits, and, as noted above, also has a 50 percent interest in its sister carbon exchange in Europe, the European Climate Exchange (ECX).

Members of the Chicago Climate Exchange, besides GIM, include Ford Motor Company, Amtrak, DuPont, Dow Corning, International Paper, Motorola and other tier-one carbon emitters. This gives them a “home” from which to buy their offset credits, but also the ability to invest in credits for the purpose of speculation.
If cap-and-trade legislation passes, the CCX’s business and income will soar. Its members will profit gluttonously.

And the biggest shareholder of the Chicago Climate Exchange? That’s right, Brother Al’s Generation Investment Management.

Amen, Brother Al. Amen.

People know that it is greed that runs through the veins of Goldman Sachs. They are in a class by themselves, plundering the financial markets like pirates of old. But what about Al the Ethical?
Do you think there’s a conflict of interest in his incessant warnings of the greatest catastrophe in human history if Congress does not legalize carbon restrictions, when his investment company is the largest shareholder in the only U.S. carbon exchange and that same company invests only in carbon offset opportunities?

You think perhaps that Al has taken on the color of his predatory partners?

Another one of Gore’s partners in GIM (this one, silent) is Maurice Strong, a man many credit with being the godfather of the environmental movement. Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange and is known to have—what shall we call them?—extreme environmental views.

Strong once told a reporter the plot to a novel in which the rich countries of the world refused to sign an agreement that reduced their impact on the environment. In order to save the planet, a small group of world leaders decide that the only hope for mankind is for the industrialized civilizations to collapse.
Strong’s allegedly fictional plot is echoed in real life by extremists of the environmental movement. Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies at Stanford, said, “A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”

And Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund, said, “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”

Fortunately, these are not the views of most environmentalists. Most environmentalists are caring people who see our waterways turning toxic with chemical poisons, our rain forests being annihilated, species going extinct by the thousands, and are concerned enough to want to do something about it.

The problem is that they have been fed deceitful and highly misleading information and are seeking to implement solutions to a problem that does not exist, solutions that are making things infinitely worse.
There ARE critical environmental problems on this planet which, if not reversed, can cause devastating consequences. But global warming is not one of them and the solutions being pushed by vested interests are not only bogus, they are causing the very problems real environmentalists are concerned about.

This, then, is a brief summary of the key elements of the con job:

  • The Club of Rome’s theory of global warming and their deceptive call for “sustainable development” is based on junk science.
  • The global anxiety over depletion of the planet’s fossil fuels is based on a lie. Oil scarcity is a myth. Oil is not a fossil fuel and it is a renewable resource.
  • Global warming is an invention. The planet has been cooling for more than a decade, has experienced much warmer temperatures long before industrialization and man-made carbon existed—and carbon dioxide is what plants use to create oxygen.
  • Biofuels are not a solution to the planet’s environmental problems, but rather are highly destructive of life on Earth.
  • Carbon credits are a vicious scam. Financial products made possible only by political mandates, they are based on a nonexistent problem and will destroy the economies of the world while making international bankers and the global elite rich beyond imagining.
    While real environmentalists do not hold the draconian views of Michael Oppenheimer or Paul Ehrlich, if cap-and-trade laws are allowed to pass, their visions of an industrial apocalypse are all too possible.
  • SOLUTIONS

    1. All effort should be made to nullify carbon credits on an immediate basis. This holds true whether on a local, national or international basis. For example, there is a cap-and-trade bill in the U.S. Senate that is high on the administration’s agenda.

    Misinformed environmentalists or “environmentalists” that benefit from the carbon credit agenda are pushing this legislation with a passion born of ignorance or a blatant thirst for power and wealth.

    “This system, which may sound market-friendly, is something only a bureaucrat could dream up. The twist is that the carbon market exists only because the government’s imposition of a cap creates an artificial scarcity in the right to produce energy.” —Deborah Corey Barnes, the PoliReport, Washington, D.C.

    The damaging effect of such a law on the U.S. economy or the economy of any nation that adopts similar legislation is blatantly obvious and it should be derailed, or, if already passed, repealed. California, for example, has already passed legislation that mandates a 25 percent cut in emissions by 2020. No one has been corny enough to brand the legislation the state’s “economic terminator,” so I’ll do it here.

    2. Countries should opt out of the Kyoto Protocol and nullify it, along with any actual agreements that were made in Copenhagen.

    This similarly applies to all underdeveloped countries, though from a different perspective. The simplicity is that carbon credits destroy—economies, environments, and life. But third-world countries hold considerable leverage: if they opt out of the Kyoto Protocol and forbid carbon credits, it does not matter what laws are passed in the U.S. or EU, the carbon credits system will fall flat. It requires developing and underdeveloped countries’ cooperation, as they have the carbon offset resources (rain forests, etc).

    It is important for them to understand that if they join the system and go for the quick buck now, they will make some short-term money selling credits; but as they gradually industrialize, they will have to buy them back—and what will the cost be then? The African Union has the capability to enforce this.

    3. Biofuel production should be legislated against, as it is meaningless as a viable energy resource and because it creates more environmental destruction than all prior conventional causes.

    4. Effective action is needed to actually protect the environment: Reduce the use of harmful fertilizers and gradually replace them with nonharmful products. (Eliminating the production of biofuel would cause the most dramatic and immediate improvement.) This would rapidly improve the condition of our rivers and oceans.

    5. Deescalate deforestation by prohibiting biofuel production, which would also bring about the most immediate environmental improvement and species preservation.

    It doesn’t take a great deal of insight to see the amount of control any governmental body could exert over a planet, a national economy, a business or a household by enforcing a system of carbon emission standards. This is, as one observer noted above, nothing less than complete control of the production of energy.

    When Gorbachev, speaking for the Club of Rome, said, “The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order,” carbon credits are exactly the kind of NWO he meant.

    Because, in the final analysis, global warming is nothing more than a PR campaign for global government.

    We must act quickly and decisively. The Club of Rome has a massive head start and control of much of the media. But neglect of our responsibilities here is not an option. Not if we value the power of choice, the freedom to produce, and economic self-determinism.

    Let’s put this joker back in the box and keep it there. Civilization doesn’t need him.

    © 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.


    For more information about Silkin Management Group and its services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com

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GLOBAL WARMING

SOME FASCINATING DATA

PART 1 & 2
I ran across an extremely interesting and fascinating article about global warming, climate change, bio-fuels, etc. that I thought I would pass along to readers of the Silkin Management Group blog sites. This is a fairly long article so I will split it up into several sections that can be read over the following several days.Part 1 was posted on February 26th at: Global Warming Part 1. For ease of reading, Part 1 is repeated here and Part 2 follows Part 1. The next several sections will come out over the next few days. Part 3 can be found on March 2nd at silkinmanagementgrp.com

What is written here is likely to be taken as either very controversial, a “conspiracy theory” or hogwash by many. I am not taking sides one way or the other on it, but I thought it was interesting and relevant and well documented enough to present it to our readers to take a look at for themselves. I certainly found it eye opening.

Silkin Management Group is a management consulting company that has delivered management consulting and training to thousands of health care practices and small businesses over the last thirty years. Our blogs tend to be about relevant business issues such as marketing, dealing with staff, hiring and training, etc. But, when we run across them, we also like to present big picture items that effect us all. This is one of them.

For more information about Silkin Management Group and its services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com.

Here is PART 1 & 2 of this article, entitled “Anatomy of a Con Job”.

Larry Silver
President, Silkin Management Group

ANATOMY OF A CON JOB

“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.” —George Orwell

PART 1:

If you look with your understanding, the crimes against humanity are written across the rotting visages of Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Like a couple of aging prostitutes, these leading architects of twentieth-century evil still sell their wares to those with an insatiable lust for the power of the crown.

THE CLUB OF ROME

Birth Mother of the Environmental Movement

The moldy twosome have something else in common. Both have been active members of an international think tank from the dark side of the force called the Club of Rome. Founded at the Rockefeller’s estate in Bellagio, Italy, in 1968, some of the other fraternity brothers and sisters include Al Gore, David Rockefeller, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

And there is no one better to give you the short version of the Club’s agenda than Gorby himself:

“The threat of environmental crisis will be the ‘internal disaster key’ that will unlock the New World Order.”

Who let this guy out of Lubyanka?

Their more precisely stated goal is population control. The solution? Create an environmental catastrophe like, oh, say, “global warming” and blame it on the planet’s most heinous villain—man himself.

But I should let them tell it:

“In searching for the new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. . . . But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for cause. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changing attitudes and behaviors that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”

Sounds like a good plan . . . if you’re Darth Vader.

In 1972, the Club took the world stage with the publication of a book they had commissioned to be written by a group of MIT scientists. It was called The Limits to Growth. Examining the planet’s population growth in relation to available resources, the report concluded that the planet would run out of resources sometime in the next 100 years, resulting in a catastrophic decline in population and industrial production.

As one reviewer put it, the authors examine

“. . . the impact of humanity on the world ecology and of steps taken toward remediating the accelerating approach to a train wreck that is mankind’s ill-managed and uncontrolled ‘footprint’ on this planet’s environment.”

Still, these trends and their consequences could be altered, it argued; we had to be less, do less and have less. The brand for this Orwellian path to planetary salvation was sustainable development.

Heavily promoted, the book reached opinion leaders in political, scientific and economic circles as it exploded around the planet like the Harry Potter of environmentalism. It sold 12 million copies in thirty languages despite the fact that the research had all the scientific rigor of a plagiarized term paper for a freshman biology class.

“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.” —Mohandas Gandhi

Assailed by top scientists, the research was shoddy in the extreme. Population expert and author Professor Julian Simon said, “The Limits to Growth has been blasted as foolishness or fraud by almost every economist who has read it closely or reviewed it in print.”

Yale economist Henry Wallich reviewed the book saying, “. . . the quantitative content of the model comes from the authors’ imagination, although they never reveal the equations that they used.”

But it is a PR world and with the publication of this book, the modern environmental movement was born. Midwifed to life in a blanket of deceit, it was yet hailed as the savior, not of mankind, but of the planet it claimed was being fried to a crisp by humanity’s toxic binge of carbon dioxide.

The scientific fraud is its own malice, but few were able to see the underlying strategy—that the book would serve as the foundation of a global public relations campaign that would mesmerize legislators, educators, and countless organizations of goodwill and would eventually set the stage for the biggest rip-off in human history. But I am getting ahead of myself.

This then was Con #1: The scientific basis of the book that launched the environmental movement calling for “sustainable development” and a reduction of man’s leper-like carbon footprint on the planet was, and is, a scam, a hoax, a falsehood—environmental snake oil.

“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Which leads us to the second piece of the puzzle, Con #2. Who’d have thought that . . .

OIL

Is Not a Fossil Fuel

PART 2

The immigration officer at Sheremetyevo took my passport and studied it for some time. He didn’t say anything; he just thumbed through the passport and then looked at a computer screen for a couple of lifetimes before stamping it and grunting me on to customs.

The KGB was still manning the borders the first time I went to Moscow shortly after the fall of Communism. Letting Americans walk freely into Mother Russia without official surveillance was driving the man crazy but he had to keep a lid on it.

In fact, Communism had been officially dead for only a few months when the shock troops of capitalism started storming the gates of opportunity in the former Soviet Union. The ghosts of Marx, Lenin and Stalin stalked the halls of the Politburo in horror as entrepreneurs from the United States, Japan and Western Europe tried to cut deals for every asset in Mother Russia that wasn’t nailed down. Banking, hospitality, timber and precious metals came under assault by peculiar partnerships of western capitalists and thugs from the once mighty KGB. During those early years, when Yeltsin (God love him) and his vodka were in office, it was a free-for-all.

The Oklahoma land rush of the 1890s had nothing on Moscow in 1992.

But even then, the oil industry stayed under control of the state—directly or indirectly. In fact, as recently as 2003, the bare-chested former KGB colonel and current premier—soon to be president of Russia . . . again—Vladimir Putin squashed a buyout deal between Russia’s Yukos and Exxon, the largest company in the world.

To understand the reason for this, we return momentarily to the early days of the Cold War when an isolated Soviet Union tasked their top scientists to identify the actual source of oil. Not a weekend homework assignment. After considerable research, in 1956, Russian scientist Professor Vladimir Porfir’yev announced that “crude oil and natural petroleum gas have no intrinsic connection with biological matter originating near the surface of the earth. They are primordial [originating with the earth’s formation] materials which have been erupted from great depths.”

If your eyeballs didn’t fall out when you read that, you might want to read it again.

He said oil doesn’t come from anything biologic, not, as conventional wisdom dictates, from the fossilized remains of dinosaurs and/or ancient plant matter. It comes from very deep in the earth and is created by a biochemical reaction that subjected hydrocarbons (elements having carbon and hydrogen) to extreme heat and intense pressure during the earth’s formation.

Russians referred to this oil (any oil, really) as “abiotic oil” because it is not created from the decomposition of biological life forms, but rather from the chemical process continually occurring inside the earth.

I know, easy for Porfir’yev to say. But it turns out it was more than just a theory.

Because shortly after the Russians discovered this, they started drilling ultra-deep wells and finding oil at 30,000 and 40,000 feet below the earth’s surface. These are staggering depths, and far below the depth at which organic matter can be found, which is 18,000 feet.

Interesting, eh?

The Russians applied their theory of abiotic deep-drilling technology to the Dnieper-Donets Basin, an area understood for the previous half a century to be barren of oil. Of sixty wells drilled there using abiotic technology, thirty-seven became commercially productive—a 62 percent success rate compared with the roughly 10 percent success rate of a U.S. wildcat driller. The oil found in the basin rivaled Alaska’s North Slope.

Let’s say they had a good hair day.

But it doesn’t stop there, not by a long shot. Since their earlier discoveries, the major Russian oil companies have quietly drilled more than 310 ultra-deep wells and put them into production.

Result? Russia recently overtook Saudi Arabia as the planet’s largest oil producer.

Maybe they are onto something.

Though there were papers written on this early on, almost all were in Russian and few made it to the West. And those that did were laughed at.

No more. With Russia’s rejection of the Exxon-Yukos deal (Putin did not want this technology and their abiotic oil experts exported to the West) and the access to information now available on the Internet, the word has begun to spread rapidly to the West. Still, it hasn’t taken hold yet.

Why not? This is huge. Oil is not a fossil fuel! And it’s renewable! Wow!

There are a couple of factors at play here.

Big oil has a vested interest in pushing the idea that oil is scarce, hard to find, and thus costly to produce—all of which, of course, means increased revenues and profits. This is a story in itself, but not the primary focus here.

More relevant to our story is the fact that a cornerstone of the environmental movement is this: oil is a fossil fuel, a fossil fuel that is scarce, and is in limited and ever decreasing supply. Moreover, its production creates carbon dioxide. Therefore its use, for virtually all productive purposes—agricultural production, real estate construction, auto, truck, train and air transportation, utilities, heating, cooling, communication, ad infinitum (all of them)—must be curtailed.

According to the thirty-year update of the book The Limits to Growth,

“A prime example of a nonrenewable resource is fossil fuels, whose limits should be obvious, although many people, including distinguished economists, are in denial over the elementary fact. More than 80 percent of year 2000 commercial energy use comes from nonrenewable fossil fuels—oil, natural gas, and coal. The underground stocks of fossil fuels are going continuously and inexorably down. . .

Peak gas production will certainly occur in the next 50 years, the peak for oil production will occur much sooner, probably within the decade.”

Scary stuff. Frightening. But as false as a hooker’s smile.

Oil is not a fossil fuel.

And it is “renewable.”

While I have never been a fan of Putin the Macho, the Russians have demonstrated the accuracy of their theory in the only place it counts—the oil field. Oil is not only abiotic, it continues to populate fields that were understood to be as dry of petroleum as a desert wind. In fact, some scientists believe it is the centrifugal force of the planet’s rotation that forces abiotic oil toward the planet’s surface on a continuous basis.

“There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” —the late Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post

So Con #2 is that oil is a fossil fuel (which it isn’t), that it is scarce and being depleted (which it isn’t), that it is nonrenewable (which it isn’t), and that, as a result, catastrophe looms (which it doesn’t) unless we drastically curtail our use of petroleum.

Lies one and all, which lead us to the granddaddy of con—Con #3:

END PART 2

© 2010 by John Truman Wolfe. All rights reserved.

For more information about Silkin Management Group and its services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or contact us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com.

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DID YOU SEE THOSE SUPER BOWL ADS?

MORE MARKETING INFORMATION ON POSITIONING

In a blog a few weeks back, I presented an article by Bruce Wisemen, the President and CEO of On Target Research, a surveying and marketing company out of the Los Angeles area. Silkin Management Group has used his company successfully in several marketing areas and have always found their work to be top notch. We have also referred some Silkin Management Group clients to this company with excellent success.

Therefore, whenever I get on of Bruce’s pieces of writing on marketing, I always try to pass his wisdom along to Silkin clients and readers of the various Silkin Management Group blog sites. Here is the latest I received. I hope you enjoy it and find it as educational as I did.

Larry Silver
President, Silkin Management Group

You can find out more about Silkin Management Group and it’s programs by visiting our website at silkinmanagementgroup.com and/or obtain information by writing to: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com

At first I thought it was an act of corporate suicide.

I’m talking about the Doritos’ commercials on the Super Bowl last Sunday. Pepsi’s Frito-Lay division (owner of the Doritos brand) ran a series of Super Bowl ads that cost them some serious coin.

CBS charged $2.6 million for a 30 second Super Bowl spot this year (up just a bit from the $42,500 for Super Bowl I). If Frito-Lay paid the sticker price were talking $10.4 million for a couple of minutes of air time. But with 106.5 million viewers– the largest in television history – they had an historic opportunity to sell some chips.

So with about $10 million invested and 106 million prospects to talk to, they communicated a message of great clarity: Eating Doritos will bring you physical pain.

I kid you not.

One of the ads takes place in the exercise room of a gym. One guy – headband, sweat pants – offers his buddy – tank top, gym shorts – some Doritos, which he takes.

Then headband tells gym shorts that he got the Doritos “out of Tim’s locker.” This comment strikes such fear in the heart of gym shorts that he spits a mouthful of partially eaten Doritos onto the floor and says, “This is bad. Tim loves Doritos.”

Gym shorts no sooner gets utters these fateful words when he is struck in the side of the neck by a Dorito in the incarnation of a steel, ninja throwing dart, and falls over.

Cut to Tim: a psycho, covered in Doritos like the creature from the Black Lagoon with orange splotches, who attacks headband screaming.

Fade to black.

Makes you hungry, doesn’t it?

There was another commercial in the series that has the young son of an attractive black woman sharply slapping his mother’s suitor for checking out his mom as she walks into the kitchen and then taking a Dorito from a bowl on the coffee table. Junior is peeved and the sound effects of the slaps are loud and vicious.

Yet another shows a man sitting on a bench eating Doritos. A dog approaches and looks at the man longingly. The man won’t give the dog a chip unless he barks for it. The dog, unknown to the guy on the bench, is wearing a bark suppressing collar. The clever canine somehow gets behind the bench, removes the electronic device, and straps it around the man’s throat, who falls to the ground spasming from a series of agonizing electric shocks to his larynx.

See, here’s the deal: ads are supposed to sell something; they are supposed to create a want for the product in the mind of the viewer.

I know these commercials are supposed to be funny. And maybe some people were amused by Fido’s electric revenge or the attack of the Dorito-maniac. Maybe.

But the question is, did they increase the desire for a bag of Doritos? Sorry. No sale.

I later found out that these particular ads were the winners of a contest created by Frito-Lay for consumers to shoot home based commercials for Doritos to be played at Super Bowl commercial breaks.

Clever marketing idea on Frito-Lay’s part, and well done to the budding filmmakers for winning the contest. But the marketing executives that approved the multi-million dollar ad buy should be ordered to read Positioning The Battle for your Mind by Al Reis and Jack Trout on pain of having their corporate Blackberry accounts cancelled – because they sure as hell don’t have a clue what positioning is.

Newsflash: associating your product in the minds of your prospects with slaps, electric shocks, and steel darts might be better suited to promoting a psychiatric hospital than a snack food.

Google’s Super Bowl ad, on the other hand, was piece of marketing simplicity and effectiveness. It’s called Parisian Love. It starts with a picture of the Google search box. You don’t see the person, but he types in “study abroad paris france.” And it rolls from there. The viewer watches a love affair develop between the searcher and a woman in Paris all played out in the sequence of terms rapidly typed into the Google search box.

When the commercial finishes, the viewer knows that he or she can find anything on Google from cafes near the Louvre to how to assemble a crib.

The ad works – just like Google.

Frito-Lay didn’t ask for this assessment of their Super Bowl commercials. Neither did Google. And while the pluses and minuses of these advertisements may seem all too obvious, some of the nuances of many marketing strategies are not so glaring.

This is why corporations large and small have us conduct reviews of their marketing materials. They get a professional viewpoint regarding the impact and communication potential of their websites, brochures, direct mail pieces and public relations messages.

The service is fast and inexpensive and provides them with an external perspective as to how they are communicating to their customers and prospects.

If you think this service might be of assistance to you in some way, please contact us at 818-397-1401. Or via our website at ontargetresearch.com

Best,

Bruce Wiseman

President & CEO

On Target Research

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Posted in Marketing.

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HANDLING A DIFFICULT STAFF MEMBER

Through our on-line magazine, The Practice Solution (http://magazine.thepracticesolution.net/), we survey hundreds of doctors every week. The number one issue that normally comes up by survey that doctors have the most difficulty with is dealing with staff. This includes a wide array of issues from everything involved with finding and hiring the right staff, properly training them and then dealing with them once they are on the job. New clients to Silkin Management Group normally request the most help with this area as well. Previous articles on Silkin Management Group’s various blog sites have discussed different aspects of this management situation.

Today and tomorrow let’s go over some information on difficult staff members.

Today I’ll present an example – one that might sound familiar to you. Take a look and see if anything like this ever happened to you. In a follow up article tomorrow on our blog site silkinmanagementgrp.com I’ll discuss what you do with an example such as this, as well as look at the management systems to have in place so that examples such as this don’t happen in the future. These are the types of things we train our Silkin Management Group clients on.

Here’s the example:
You round the corner and overhear Jessica, your front office employee, saying to Julie, your assistant, Gossip in the workplace“Omigod! You just have to see Brian! He’s sooooo totally hot! I gotta show you his Facebook page!” Then they walk across the office to nearest open computer. You think they are gonna be entering transactions on that screen? Or calling up the recall/reminder list?

Ummm, think again.

If it wasn’t before, it should now be fully in your “management awareness” that you have some staff management issues to handle. It looks like you have a bad apple. Or maybe two. One thing you know is that you pay your staff well, and those paychecks are coming out of your bank account. Another thing you know is that if feels like your blood pressure rises and you get stressed too often during the workday, especially when you see something like this.

What do you do now?

Have you run into anything like this before in your office? If so, take a look at a) how you handled it and more importantly, b) what occurred in the management of your office that allowed such a situation to exist. There are definite management systems that, once put in place, prevent and detect these situations from occurring.

We’ll discuss these more tomorrow in our next blog which you can access here on Feb 11. silkinmanagementgrp.com.

For more information about what we do at Silkin Management Group, how we help clients with staff and other practice management issues, visit our website at: silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can also contact us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com or call 800-695-0257.

Lyn Ribisi
Silkin Management Group
Appointment Coordinator

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DO THE FINANCIAL PLANNERS HAVE A CLUE?

After reading the blog written yesterday by my Silkin Management Group fellow consultant Bill Hickey, called IS THIS A CLASSIC EXAMPLE OF “THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE”?, I began thinking more about some of the government policies being touted for small businesses to help the economic recovery. Yesterday’s Silkin blog pointed out how one of the latest proposals by the Obama Administration was to offer tax credits to small businesses as an incentive to hire new employees and discussed how that could be pointless if the business didn’t need or couldn’t afford new employees.

Today, I ran across three articles that I thought were very relevant to share with anyone reading this blog, whether a client of Silkin Management Group or not.

The first article, from Business Week entitled Obama Tax Credit May Not Cover IRA Cost, Business Group Says points out that another of the proposals by the Administration was to provide a $1000 tax credit for small businesses, but at the same time requires them to set up a mandatory retirement savings plan. The article points out how the cost of setting up such a plan is likely not even offset by the tax credit (assuming the business is even eligible for a tax credit).

The second article from the New York Times, entitled For Some A.R.C. Loan Borrowers, an Expensive Surprise Caps the Long Wait discusses how some small business are getting loans approved but it is taking literally months and months and months to receive the funds as the SBA administrative lines are so slow. So the financial help that the small businesses so sorely need is ridiculously slow in coming. Might this have something to do with slow business recovery?

The last article I ran across in Small Business Trends called A Million Startups that Offer Lasting Good Jobs was very interesting to read. Its premise had to do with a recent New York Times opinion article written by Tom Friedman, a writer I personally enjoy. Friedman’s article had to do with recommending to the President that he should make the centerpiece of his presidency mobilizing a million new start up companies that would provide long lasting jobs in areas that would help put America on the “cutting edge”. The author of the article in Small Business Trends, Scott Shane – a professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western University and author of 9 books – quickly went through the math of how many new companies it would take to end up with one million long lasting companies that provided good jobs. I won’t spoil the “surprise ending” for you, but suffice it to say that he walks through the logic of how and why it would take many many millions of start up companies to begin right away to end up with a million long lasting companies. Read the article, I think you’ll enjoy it.

All of this makes me wonder…do the people coming up with these ideas have any idea how the real world of small business works?

Dave McKevitt
Silkin Management Group Consultant

For more information about Silkin Management Group and/or Silkin Management Group’s services, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or email us at; info@silkinmanagementgroup.com

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More on Appointment Scheduling

I read an article yesterday by Bill Hickey on one of Silkin Management Group’s blog site about patient scheduling. You can read that article at www.practicemanagementblog.com. I thought I’d offer some more information about patient scheduling for those interested.

As mentioned in the above referenced blog, our clients at Silkin Management Group are taught some key fundamentals about patient scheduling. Here is another tip that you might find useful in this area:

Never say “We have an open slot at…” or “When would you like to come in?” or “If there’s a cancellation we could fit you in earlier…” This is weak appointing and allows the patient to dictate how your day will be filled.

Offer the patient two options: “Doctor can see you at 10 a.m. on Thursday or 2 p.m. on Monday. Which would you prefer?” Give two specific times that you want to see filled. The great majority of patients, about 80%, will take one of the two options you’ve given them.

People respond well to good control – as examples: standing in a line at the theatre instead of bunched up at the ticket counter; following the “Please wait to be seated” sign at the restaurant; and waiting between the barriers at an amusement park. Offering two specific time slots is a way to run good control and you will find that patient/clients respond to this procedure as well.

Try it and I think you’ll find it will work in the great majority of cases. It will also help fill the empty appointment slots that you want filled. Clients at Silkin Management Group find it to be a very workable method of making appointments.

Eric Korb
Director Consultant

For more information about Silkin Management Group and its practice management program, visit our website at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com or email us at: info@silkinmanagementgroup.com

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Posted in Getting New Patients, Marketing.

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SOME IDEAS ON WHAT TO DO WITH A PROBLEMATIC STAFF MEMBER (Part 1)

We recently received an inquiry to our Silkin Management Group website silkinmanagmanagementgroup.com wherein a doctor was asking for advice about how to handle a problem staff member. On our website we have a function called “Ask a Consultant”, in which one can request help from one of our consultants about any practice management problem they may be experiencing. In this case the doctor relayed that she didn’t know what to do with an employee who was disturbing and distracting other staff with her problems. I thought I would relay my response to her as it might be helpful and informative to other Silkin clients or anyone reading this blog. I have broken my response into two parts – the first part is below and the second part will be in a blog published on December 14 which can be accessed at: silkinmanagmentgrp.com.

“Thank you for contacting Silkin Group. I can sense your frustration with this situation. There are several things that can help you in this current situation and help prevent this from happening in the future. This is a bit of a lengthy reply due to the nature of your problem. Please take the time to read through this as I believe it will give you some insight into the problem and how to handle it.

The first, and probably the most important thing that should be in place, is that you have very detailed job descriptions and office policies existing in your office. As part of or one of these policies there needs to be something clearly written about what is acceptable and unacceptable employee behavior.

When new employees are hired, they should be given a copy of this policy manual to read and, once read, they are to sign off as being read and understood. This lets them know what type of behavior is and isn’t permitted in your office. By signing off that they have read and understood the policies they have thereby agreed to follow the policy which gives you recourse for disciplinary action and/or termination for non-compliance. Of course one would generally not proceed to termination for initial offenses, but rather instigate the handling with a gradient approach (i.e. first offense a warning, second offense suspension for a day, etc.).

As new policies are written, copies would be handed out to all employees for them to read and sign off on. These signed agreements should then be added to their personnel files. These can then be referenced in regular employee evaluations, job reviews, disciplinary actions and if needed, termination situations.

If, however, you only deliver your “policies” verbally, you leave these expectations open to interpretation and lower your ability to be able to effectively and safely (from a legal point of view) handle employees. It is imperative to have everything in writing so that there is no room for interpretation.”

As a note to anyone reading this: At Silkin Management Group we work very closely with our clients on the implementation of office policies and job descriptions. We have a 400 plus page Office Policy and Job Description Manual, easily adapted to any office, that covers everything I’ve written about above plus much more.

More to come in our December 14th blog.

For more information about Silkin Management Group, please visit our website at silkinmanagementgroup.com. You can access our “Ask A Consultant” feature there or email us at info@silkinmanagementgroup.com.

Ken DeRouchie
Silkin Management Group’s “Ask a Consultant”

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Posted in Health Care, Staff Management.

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I HAVEN’T SEEN MANY NEW JOBS, HAVE YOU?

Maybe this is why

As part of our continuing research to help our clients at Silkin Management Group, I found a really stunning article from the Cascade Policy Institute concerning the supposed “job creation” from the economic stimulus package. It caught my eye as I recalled reading an article in the last few weeks that discussed phantom congressional districts that were beneficiaries of new or saved jobs.

You can access the article from Cascade at at the URL below, but since it is a short article, I thought I’d reproduce it here as part of this blog. The URL is: http://bit.ly/6xPtwH.

“The White House recently claimed that about 640,000 jobs have been saved or created as a result of the $787 billion stimulus package. Many have questioned the accuracy of this number, and for good reason. Faulty reporting appears to be pervasive in the data used to make the claim. Jim Scarantino, of newmexico.watchdog.org first broke the story that the transparency site for the stimulus package www.recovery.gov was reporting congressional districts that did not exist in his home state. These phantom congressional districts were prominently displayed in the state summary of districts that had saved or created the most jobs.

Cascade Policy Institute’s investigation showed that Recovery.gov reported Oregon to have nine phantom congressional districts. These Oregon phantom districts created or saved 15 jobs, at a cost to taxpayers of almost $5 million.

A quick look at reported jobs created in Oregon by the $787 billion stimulus package turned up more inaccuracies. $397,761 spent to save 205 jobs at the Mid-Willamette Valley Community Action Agencywas actually spent to give pay raises to staff. 200 jobs supposedly created by a taxiway construction project for the Coos County Airport District was really only 20 jobs.

Further review of reported jobs created or saved likely will have similar results. There is no benefit in having transparency when the data isn’t worth the paper it is reported on.”

Fascinating, isn’t it? I’d sure love to have one of these phantom districts near my house and get some of these astounding benefits. Our tax dollars, hard at work again. It’s no wonder politicians are held in lower esteem than lawyers. This is the kind of information we keep our clients at Silkin Management Group up to date on since they are all owners and managers of small businesses. Many of our blogs have discussed key management principles that we teach our clients, as well as pointing out matters, such as this one, that we consider important for our clients and business owners in general, to be aware of.

You can find out more about Silkin Management Group and it’s programs by visiting our website at silkinmanagementgroup.com and/or obtain information by writing to:info@silkinmanagementgroup.com

Larry Silver
President Silkin Management Group

Also, visit our other blog site at: silkinmanagementgrp.com

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Posted in Economy, Leadership.

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HERE’S MORE IDEAS ON MEASURING PRODUCTIVITY

After reading my colleague’s blogs of November 19 How do you measure the productivity of all areas in an office? and November 23rd More on measuring Productivity on Silkin Management Group’s other blog sites, I thought I’d add my knowledge of ways to measure productivity in a health care office.

The November 23rd article discussed that, in order to come up with a good statistic to measure production, you first have to figure out the product produced by that area or position. Then, once the product is worked out, you can figure out what metric best measures the production of that product. This article used a receptionist in a health care office as an example, since most of Silkin Management Group’s clients are health care professionals.

Here’s another example that anyone reading this might find useful in the management of their practice. What might be the product and statistic of a doctor in terms of his/her job of examining a patient and presenting the proper treatment plan? You might try the idea below as we’ve seen it work very well for Silkin clients:

  • Product: A patient/client who is fully briefed on their, or their animal’s health condition including any non-optimum conditions that might exist, with remedies to the non-optimum condition/s presented in a clear and understandable way so that they are fully understood and agreed to.
  • Statistic: Percentage of treatment plans accepted.
  • This is an easy way for any doctor to see how well his/her treatment plans are presented and understood. A low percentage would indicate that the doctor needs to learn the proper way to deliver treatment plans so that the great, great majority get accepted and begun. There are very specific techniques that we, at Silkin Management Group, teach our clients that routinely result in a high acceptance rate of treatment plans.

    If you would like to know more about this or any aspect of managing your practice, visit us on the web at:

    www.silkinmanagementgroup

    silkinmanagmentgrp.com

    Email us at:
    info@silkinmanagementgroup.com

    All the best,
    Bill Hickey
    Consultant
    Silkin Management Group

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Posted in Health Care, Staff Management.

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HEALTH CARE LEGISLATION IS MOVING FORWARD

If you’ve been following the progress of the various versions of the health care legislation that are moving through the Senate, as well as the one that passed in the House, you know that the next step is that the Senate is voting this weekend whether or not to proceed to the debate stage on their bill.

Many of us at Silkin Management Group have been following these various forms of the legislation as it will affect our clients at Silkin as well as the management of their practices and business. We’ve posted a variety of articles and references on the various Silkin blog sites. I ran across several today that I thought I’d comment on and reference for anyone reading this site.

This article from Reuters gives a very good overview of what is presently happening with the Senate bill and its ramifications.

As noted in previous Silkin Management Group blogs, although the Senate version seems better for small businesses, it still is not small business friendly as determined by the NFIB, the primary voice of small business in this country. I also found this article by the Heritage Foundation “think tank” which summarized the problems the bill has for small business.

Take a look at those articles and I think you’ll get caught up, as of today, on what is going on with the bill and its ramification for small business.

One thing I thought was very interesting and, if it wasn’t so absurd, humorous. Apparently the Senate bill is touted as cheaper than the House bill over the next ten years. But a further look shows that possibly the main reason it is cheaper is that many of its provisions would not kick in until 2014, a year later than in the House bill. If true, this is just another typical “slight of hand” performed by our trustworthy politicians. And they wonder why they are among the least trusted group of people in the country.

I invite your viewpoint and comments about this vitally important national debate. Those of us at Silkin Management Group involved in following this always want to hear what people think about this legislation.

You can post comments on this blog site by clicking on the word “comments” or write us at www.silkinmanagementgroup.com, and silkinmanagementgrp.com

Dave McKevitt
Consultant
Silkin Management Group

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Posted in Economy, Money & Finances.

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