Actually, the US Government has done just that when FDR seized, not 40% but 100% of the money, money in the form of perfectly legitimate gold coins in the 1930's. Astoundingly, a descendent of bankers, and son of a robber baron, had become convinced gold coinage was the root of economic evil, following WWI and the Roaring 20's where the US had amassed a large amount of the world's gold inventories, a disproportionate share even. WIth it's peak, FDR for some reason didn't want gold flows diluting his political power to fundamentally change capitalism to quasi-socialism. Gold would have quickly told the tale of the tape regarding the New Deal, and an honest economic poll is the last thing FDR wanted. He, like O', seems to prefer talking.

That's untrue, Bayesian statistics are different but that doesn't permit them to violate statistical methodology. Perhaps, actually, it's more stringent with regard to statistical methodology

Another item is that statistical means are to be representative of something, an underlying distribution. To so represent the earth the sites must meet very tight standards not just scattered around the earth for weather forecasting at some population center and for bureaucratic whim. Plus they must be accurate, an absence of flawed data. Plus what's the distribution mean. A mean for everything form the poles to the equator isn't one distribution, it's just the sum of a bunch of scattered nos. Perhaps the greatest mistake regarding climate change (global warming) is the abuse of data both in methodology and in interpretation.

Actually his old man, after being tossed out of Congress by the voters, spent years on the board of an energy company, a nat'l gas pipeline no less. Happened to have come across that years ago, so when i see Al raving about energy use and climate change, I laugh.

Actually an average of high and low, statistically speaking, is an statistical measure of the mean, but a much more inexact one. Did that problem once in a stat class, and the variance is huge, the sqare root of two versus the square root of say 24. That's what 16 times bigger. But that's only half the issue. What's the higher order stats--skewness, kurtosis. Plus who knows much about the underlying distribution. Here, in Iowa, noteworthy for changeable weather, we can get a morning very warm, and an afternoon from another distribution, a front goes through. So the high can be from Mars; the low from Venus lets say. Doesn't even make sense to average them then. And tree rings don't even show high or low, and not the winter.

Actually there is a certain logic to it. If you're an academic "researcher," and want glory and grant money, you put the tag line, climate change, onto your study. For example, Climate change raises foot fungus disease, sells a lot better than "Hot smelly feet have athletes feet." Plus you get swooned over by colleagues and feeble minded college administrator, foundation hustlers, and do-gooder groups on campus. Do otherwise, and you get trampled by the screaming mob.

Silly. Lincoln had the great misfortune of being assassinated at the end of the Civil War is the only reason he was no longer alive when officially slaves were free. Nice word game being played. We've had truly two great Presidents, Washington and Lincoln. All the rest have been second tier and below. The three worst presidents have been Franklin Pierce, John Tyler, and Barrick Obama. Jefferson, F. Roosevelt the most overrated in the popular mind. The most egotistical, W. Wilson, and probably deserves fourth from the bottom for the great harm his mischief began.