Romney. *shakes head ruefully*
Yeah, he’s trying to appeal to everybody. He certainly appeals to the Elephant Elitists, who have all but anointed him as The Chosen One. But if you really examine who he is and what he represents, he certainly won’t appeal to YOU.
People keep forgetting that Eisenhower issued two warnings, and the Mil-Industry one was the lessor.That got me thinking. Everyone who knows anything about history is familiar with Eisenhower's admonition about the military-industrial complex. But another warning? I was intrigued. I googled Eisenhower's speech and found this.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.Does that sound familiar to you? It should.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. (emphasis mine)
Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and landslides are some of the additional catastrophes that climate change and its rising sea levels and melting glaciers could bring, a geologist says.Note the weasel word "could". That's so that the "scientist" has plausible deniability when his patently ridiculous premise is dismissed by real scientists.
Scientists are to outline dramatic evidence that global warming threatens the planet in a new and unexpected way – by triggering earthquakes, tsunamis, avalanches and volcanic eruptions.Of course, you have to read on to get to the part where the polar ice caps have to disappear and the glaciers melt away for this to happen...
Reports by international groups of researchers – to be presented at a London conference next week – will show that climate change, caused by rising outputs of carbon dioxide from vehicles, factories and power stations, will not only affect the atmosphere and the sea but will alter the geology of the Earth.
Hours after a massive earthquake rattled Japan, environmental advocates connected the natural disaster to global warming. The president of the European Economic and Social Committee, Staffan Nilsson, issued a statement calling for solidarity in tackling the global warming problem.Are you effing kidding me? Seriously? Do these imbeciles understand that earthquakes are caused by plate tectonics, NOT by the weather? Attributing an earthquake to climate makes about as much sense as attributing an asteroid collision with Earth to climate.
“Some islands affected by climate change have been hit,” said Nilsson. “Has not the time come to demonstrate on solidarity — not least solidarity in combating and adapting to climate change and global warming?”
“Mother Nature has again given us a sign that that is what we need to do,” he added.
Global warming alarmists are to natural disasters what the Westboro Baptist Church is to military funerals.You got THAT right.
President Obama today will name General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt chairman of the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, the White House announced overnight.Why is this any more noteworthy than any other Il Duce appointment? Because General Electric is the #1 looter corporation, and GE Chairman Jeffery Imelt is The King of Looters.
When Democrats said President Obama was “pro-business,” we didn’t know they meant one business in particular.The fact is that no company has more riding on AGW than GE, and no company is more involved in lobbying for crap legislation to lock out its competition than GE. The bill that outlawed incandescent light bulbs? GE was behind that. All the crap legislation making our nation's "energy policy" completely reliant on wind, sun, and unicorn farts? GE was behind that. GE is crony capitalism at its worst.
There are a few companies on the Obama corporate A List – Democratic patrons Google and Goldman Sachs both turn up again and again at White House functions and for special recognition – but no company seems to get the VIP treatment that General Electric receives.
[...]
Whether it is pushing the president’s plan for global warming fees in order to create demand for his “Ecomagination” line of windmills, solar panels, etc., boosting the president’s national health-care law as part of an effort to sell more medical equipment, or enthusing over the Obama strategy of making loans available for industrial exporters, Immelt has been an Obama stalwart all along. Immelt has also consistently argued to shareholders that there is big money to be made in advancing the Democratic agenda.
The New York Times has just reported on a new trend towards what's sometimes known as soap-dodging. Among those who have cut down on daily showers, baths or hair-washing were a woman who swipes a sliced lemon under her armpits instead of deodorant, another who uses baby wipes to freshen up after her lunchtime runs, and a salesman who shampoos only once a month and gave up anti-perspirant for three years.Why in the name of sanity is this happening? It's partly as an extension of the "save the planet" mentality we're badgered with relentlessly by leftards.
There are, of course, environmental benefits. In a bid to reduce his carbon footprint to the absolute minimum, environmentalist Donnachadh McCarthy, 51, limits his showers to about twice a week.Apparently it's not enough for leftards to offend us with their demands on our wealth and freedoms. Now we have to put up with BO in the name of Save the Earth.
You're living in Atlas Shrugged, which was the vision of a lunatic who has as much insight into living human beings as Dustin Hoffman's "Rain Man". To be a consistent Randian you need to have as much contempt for Christianity as for Socialism. Of course it was all that "Good Samaritan" and "Golden Rule" crap that she particularly hated. Is that part of your Christianity?Don't put words in my mouth. I was neither preaching, nor espousing the incoherent, contradictory, and, frankly, sophomoric epistemology of Ayn Rand. When I said that we are "living in Atlas Shrugged", I meant the world portrayed by Rand in the novel. In the book, the government and industry were run by looters -- looters who raped the productive by pushing legislation in the interest of "fairness", etc.
If you can back up your claims with anything besides wordplay and overuse of the word "literally", that might hold some interest . As it is, you remind me of the "merry pranksters" of the 60s/70s with their "radical" "underground newspapers" with everyone they opposed dressed up as Nazis. I like you in many ways -- primarily when you talk to me directly; not so much when you're preaching, but I gotta speak the truth as I see it.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.Who's that saying those heretical things about Mother Gaia and the blessed religion of AGW? Some clown in the employ of Big Oil? Some flat-earth-know-nothing?
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it.
In the 60s/early 70s, when some idiots went around calling police "pigs" and that sort of thing, there was the saying "OK, when you get mugged, call a hippie". By the same token, since you don't seem to believe there is a real pursuit of truth in scientific institutions, if you get cancer, call a blogger.But I haven't criticized medical science...or physical science...or any other branch of science. The practitioners of those branches of science actually practice the scientific method - results are falsified, tested, and retested, until the findings are a certain as can be possible in this imperfect world. No one shouts down scientists who deny that coffee is health food. No one prevents the publishing of contradictory articles claiming that coffee is good for you or bad for you. No one tries to deny funding to studies of pain management. Or those trying to falsify the results of those studying it. Yet those techniques are employed and applauded by AGW true believers! If that doesn't make one suspicious, then I have no further argument that might possibly convince them.
There is nothing magically virtuous or magically demonic about government, and you can't just trust a government with the power to redistribute all wealth, and expect good things to happen. The government is simply the Res Public, (ironically the party that took its name from that now goes around mouthing the belief that you can't trust anything to a Res Public, except the ability to wage war and seize people by force and put them in jail -- don't trust them with health care or you'll inevitably get a totalitarian society).If by any stretch Hal thinks that I'm one of those "except the ability to wage war and seize people by force and put them in jail" people, I want to categorically disabuse him of that notion - right now. A true small-"L" libertarian wants neither government health care NOR a government running amok among the nations inflicting Democracy at bayonet point. A libertarian wants the ridiculous laws that unnecessarily put people in jail for what are truly victimless crimes revoked. Drug laws? Not a Federal issue. Prostitution? I don't like it...but I don't want people in jail for it, either. I, like other libertarians, simply want to be left alone to live our lives without the uncertainty of government sticking its nose into our lives.
We've gotten way too used to engaging pictures, whether of unicorns, polar bears on ice flows, as a substitute for thinking. I'm sure a lot of climate scientists by now wish Al Gore had never been born.I appreciate the OC's comments, as always. He and I can be described as being polar opposites politically. Yet we are able to engage in meaningful discussion without rancor. Would that all such discussions could be handled so amicably.
Yes, it's true, the IAC has critiqued the IPCC on some counts.
Another report of theirs, which can be accessed at www.interacademies.net/?id=9075 which makes, among other conclusions:
·At current emission rates models suggest that all coral reefs and polar ecosystems will be severely affected by 2050 or potentially even earlier;
·Marine food supplies are likely to be reduced with significant implications for food production and security in regions dependent on fish protein, and human health and well being;
·Ocean acidification is irreversible on time scales of at least tens of thousands of years;
·Even with stabilisation of atmospheric CO2 at 450ppm, ocean acidification will have profound impacts on many marine systems. Large and rapid reductions of global CO2 emissions are needed globally by at least 50% by 2050.
Counting on your fairmindednes, as I've gotten accustomed to doing.
Never mind that ALL of the scientists working for alternate energy companies, for the government, or on projects that are government-funded are part of the 'consensus'.ALL of the money going into grants to study warming comes from those with much to gain from that warming being "true". All of it. There is NO government or Quango (Quasi-governmental organization) money going into ANY study to try to falsify the findings of those claiming AGW is true. Falsification - proving something is correct by first trying to prove that it isn't - is the bedrock of science and the scientific method. Funding only studies that seek to PROVE warming and to identify its "effects" gives the impression that the science isn't serious. It's the scientific equivalent of a Soviet show trial (Verdict first, then trial!).
Never mind? Let me take that back. It DOES matter that the 'consensus' emanates from those sources. Why? Like they say in all of the detective shows: follow the money.
A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming.Reporter #2 looks upon the upcoming Cancun AGW summit and declares it humanity's last chance.
It also said the panel had emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.
The review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) was launched after the IPCC’s hugely embarrassing 2007 benchmark climate change report, which contained exaggerated and false claims that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035.
Cancun, or "COP 16" as it is officially known, will again see ministers and officials from nearly 200 nations grapple with the politics of global warming, but no one thinks they will be able to close a widening breach in the world's defences against dangerously rising temperatures – the "gigatonne gap".Remember this the next time someone tries to feed you that BS about news sources being "objective".
A gigatonne is a billion tonnes of carbon, and the emissions cuts currently promised by the nations of the world in the Copenhagen Accord – the last-minute agreement patched together by leaders after the conference in the Danish capital all but collapsed – will mean that, by 2020, when global emissions should be on a firmly downward trend, they will be several gigatonnes too high to limit the warming to C above the pre-industrial level. This is widely considered the most that human society can stand without serious consequences.
Emails stolen from one of the world's leading climate change research centers contained no evidence to undermine the case for manmade global warming, a report found on Wednesday.Just like Penn State University in its investigation of....uh....itself....found nothing amiss.
An investigation into the British research unit cleared its scientists of serious wrongdoing, but criticized their lack of openness and said some of their data was misleading.
The University of East Anglia, eastern England, launched the inquiry after 1,000 emails hacked from its climate research unit were put on the Internet and held up as evidence scientists had exaggerated or lied about man's role in global warming.
Russell was appointed by the institution to investigate an archive of source code and emails that leaked onto the internet last November. The source code is not addressed at all. His report suggests that the problems were of the academics' own making, stating that they were "united in defence against criticism". Yet the enquiry found that despite emails promising to "redefine" the peer review publication process, and put pressure on journal editors, staff were not guilty of subverting the IPCC process, and their "rigour" and "honesty" were beyond question.Let me summarize. Because the results produced in the time frame under investigation matched the results of earlier work produced by....uh....the people under investigation....nothing untoward has occurred.
Leading academics were called for written and oral evidence before the Russell enquiry, and in many cases the report accepts their account of events. The subjects of their criticism were not invited, not were climate scientists critical of their behaviour. For example, in their capacity as IPCC gatekeepers, the academics are cleared of excluding critical evidence, and yet bending the rules to include supporting studies. To reach this particular conclusion, for example, the report finds a criterion: a "consistence of view" with earlier work. The earlier work here was in fact produced [by] the academics under scrutiny. So, having compared the CRU academics' work against their previous work, and found it to be consistent, they are cleared of malpractice.
Robertson, who apparently can't let any disaster pass without providing aid and comfort to the anti-Christianity community, had this to say about the Haiti earthquake.
"They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, okay it's a deal."Uh huh. I guess if the devil said it, Pat Robertson, false prophet, would know.
We have to mount a much larger effort in the US. It's going to be a defining moment for this administration. Other countries in the region, they are Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba, and other countries have already stepped to the plate. What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this. And we need to find -- we did what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen. This is the response. This is what happens, you know what I'm saying? But we have to act now.That Danny Glover! What a hoot!
The final WotW for 2009 are the people who showed up for this.
A downtown protest of the climate change talks in Copenhagen became a victim of Wednesday's snowstorm.Classic. Absolutely classic.
"Not many people showed up because of the blizzard conditions," said organizer Clea Major, an international studies student at the University of Utah.
As I write this there is a blizzard pounding the East Coast. A big one. A real, live Nor'easter. Unofficially, Frederick has received 22" of the white stuff, with the snow projected to last through tomorrow afternoon. The wind has been gusting, so there are drifts over 4' tall alongside the house. The steps out the back door are completely covered.
But this storm is a big, fat nothing compared to two other storms brewing on the horizon. On Friday Il Duce reached an agreement with other nations complicit in the the fraud that is the Hopenhagen debacle. Oh, sure, you say, it doesn't really have any teeth to it; there's nothing to worry about. Ah, but that's where you're wrong. When the details of this little agreement finally trickle out -- from European and Internet sources, NOT Big Media (the BM for short)- you will find that our "leaders" are using this invented "crisis" to sell off our sovereignty.
The other brewing storm is much more worrisome. The last domino has fallen in Der Staat's longstanding quest to take ownership of our very persons via the fraudulently-sold universal health care.
Senate Democrats appear within reach of the 60 votes necessary to pass President Barack Obama's health care legislation after a long year of struggle and a final burst of deadline bargaining with holdout Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska.There it is. Just like that troll Mary Landrieu from Louisiana, Nelson has sold his soul for over $300 billion in Federal goodies.
When I named the WotW two weeks ago, I left a "Bonus Wiener" tease link to what is a classic example of intentionally misleading journalism. That link deserves more attention, especially in light of yet another intentionally deceptive story.
First, the older story. The premise of that story was that global warming was forcing women in some islands of the Philippines to work in hard-labor occupations or even as prostitutes. Global warming.
By the third paragraph "have driven" has softened to "could" and "possibly". And in paragraph eight the truth finally outs: the catastrophe forcing women to work hard-labor jobs or as prostitutes is overfishing. Overfishing. Not warming. In other words, the first half of the article was nothing but a lie, an intentional deception to pimp for the cause of AGW.
This story caught my eye personally, because, as one who suffers from asthma, I am keenly aware of how air quality affects my breathing.
Cutting global warming pollution would not only make the planet healthier, it would make people healthier too, newly released studies say.So we are led to believe that reducing carbon emissions will help prevent heart and lung diseases. Starting at paragraph three, the theme starts to implode.
Slashing carbon dioxide emissions could save millions of lives, mostly by reducing preventable deaths from heart and lung diseases, the studies show.
Cutting carbon dioxide emissions would also reduce other types of air pollution, especially tiny particles that lodge in the lungs and cause direct health damage, doctors said. Other benefits could come from encouraging more exercise and less meat consumption, to improve heart health, researchers said.So, the entire benefit of reducing carbon to improve health is not the carbon. No, it's the reduction of REAL pollutants. And, of course, exercise and meat reduction are also required in order to realize the reduced carbon health benefits. In other words, avoiding pollution, getting regular exercise, and reducing consumption of red meats - things already recognized by the medical profession as promoting good health - NOT a reduction of carbon, as posited in the first paragraphs, are the things that will result in improved health.
Big Media (the BM for short) has continued to stonewall or downplay ClimateGate.
James Delingpole of The Telegraph (yeah, you have to go to UK sources to read ANYTHING about ClimateGate) wrote an opinion piece that provides a breakdown of the BM's non-coverage of the issue. In the course of detailing this journalistic malpractice, he makes the following assertion.
But in the case of “Climate Change”, the MSM has been caught with its trousers down. The reason it has been so ill-equipped to report on this scandal is because almost all of its Environmental Correspondents and Environmental Editors are parti pris members of the Climate-Fear Promotion lobby. Most of their contacts (and information sources) work for biased lobby groups like Greenpeace and the WWF, or conspicuously pro-AGW government departments and Quangos such as the Carbon Trust. How can they bring themselves to report on skulduggery at Hadley Centre when the scientists involved are the very ones whose work they have done most to champion and whose pro-AGW views they share?The sad thing is - he's absolutely right. Environmental reporters are as wedded to AGW as the corrupted "scientists" who are studying it falsifying data to keep the myth alive.
From The Urban Dictionary.
The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eyeOh, THAT'S rich! The assholes who brought us the Pentagon Papers, who published (against the wishes of the Bush administration) details of the methods utilized to track terrorists, and who published excerpts from Sarah Palin's hacked emails, now suddenly have a conscience!
There are WotW's, and there are WotW's. This moron reflects the latter, in what may be the airhead ridiculous stupid comment of the year.
Yet in an interview with the Detroit News Monday, Senator Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.) - recently appointed to the Senate Energy Committee - made clear that fighting the climate crisis is her top priority.I feel it when I'm flying? Are you kidding? This intellectually-challenged bimbo feels the effects of global warming when she's flying?!?!?
"Climate change is very real," she confessed as she embraced cap and trade's massive tax increase on Michigan industry - at the same time claiming, against all the evidence, that it would not lead to an increase in manufacturing costs or energy prices. "Global warming creates volatility. I feel it when I'm flying. The storms are more volatile. We are paying the price in more hurricanes and tornadoes."
Gaia worshipers and Stateists of all stripes are trying to use mythical anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as a cudgel with which to flay the scourge of Mother Earth, that virus known as humankind. These followers of the official religion of the coming One-World Socialist Utopia are bound and determined to ensure that humans - particularly those in the wealthy West - are made to suffer for their sins against nature.
The penance of choice has been to levy onerous taxes on Western Nations in the form of carbon credits. Our suffering is manifested in the predicable results of this ridiculous and unnecessary drain on Western economies: jobs lost, and economic opportunity squandered.
This is a small price to pay compared to that suffered by the developing Third World. Policies employed (read: dictated) by Western "leaders" are causing real death and disaster, particularly in Africa.
Life in Africa is often nasty, impoverished and short. AIDS kills 2.2 million Africans every year according to WHO (World Health Organization) reports. Lung infections cause 1.4 million deaths, malaria 1 million more, intestinal diseases 700,000. Diseases that could be prevented with simple vaccines kill an additional 600,000 annually, while war, malnutrition and life in filthy slums send countless more parents and children to early graves.There's more - much more - that I'd love to share from this extraordinarily well-written commentary. The only problem is that, short of quoting the entire article, I wouldn't know what to leave out.
And yet, day after day, Africans are told the biggest threat we face is – global warming.
[...]
However, the real problem isn’t questionable or fake science, hysterical claims and worthless computer models that predict global warming disasters. It’s that they’re being used to justify telling Africans that we shouldn’t build coal or natural gas electrical power plants. It’s the almost total absence of electricity keeping us from creating jobs and becoming modern societies. It’s that these policies KILL.
[...]Not having electricity also means disease and death. It means millions die from lung infections, because they have to cook and heat with open fires; from intestinal diseases caused by spoiled food and unsafe drinking water; from malaria, TB, cholera, measles and other diseases that we could prevent or treat if we had proper medical facilities.
Hypothetical global warming a hundred years from now is worse than this?
