The Solution

Deadeye and I were sitting around last night discussing matters of the world.  She wondered how it all got so crazy.  How is it that people that do all of the right things (work hard, save money, fund their own medical care and retirement, etc.) are penalized by our government in the form of confiscatory taxation and regulation while people who flat-out fail at life, people who don't try to get an education, people who won't work but want to "get paid", and those who spend like drunken sailors Congress and accrue back-breaking debt, are rewarded (via handouts, tax breaks, bailouts, etc.)?

I related to her the wisdom of the Founders.  Originally, the right to vote was NOT universal; it was restricted to land owners only.  The wisdom of this is self-evident.  Those who paid the taxes elected the representation.  A profligate Congress of the type we've had since.......since well before I was born?.......wouldn't last a term if those paying the taxes to support that spending were the only ones voting.

It is almost laughable in hindsight to think that people whose only role in society is to exhaust natural resources and sponge off of the productive are allowed to vote.  Who do you think such people are going to elect?  The guy who promises to reign in government spending and enforce Constitutional government, or the guy who says "Bring on the goodies!"?

The only hope for any sort of sanity in government is to pass a Constitutional amendment limiting the voting franchise to tax paying citizens ONLY.  And that has about the same odds of happening as the odds that I'll one day be President.

My brother is right.  This IS the insane asylum of the universe.

A brilliant campaign strategy

If you're going down - I mean going down hard - and you know it, what do you do?  You could just give up, I suppose.  But if you're Team Donkey, you never say die!  In what may be perhaps the single most brilliant campaign strategy ever, the Donkeys are unveiling a brilliant strategy of threats of what they will do if they lose Congress in the 2010 elections.

That's why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don't want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.

"I've got lots of things I want to do" in a lame duck, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W. Va.) told reporters in mid June. North Dakota's Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, wants a lame-duck session to act on the recommendations of President Obama's deficit commission, which is due to report on Dec. 1. "It could be a huge deal," he told Roll Call last month.
[...]
Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, chair of the Senate committee overseeing labor issues, told the Bill Press radio show in June that "to those who think [card check] is dead, I say think again." He told Mr. Press "we're still trying to maneuver" a way to pass some parts of the bill before the next Congress is sworn in.

Other lame-duck possibilities? Senate ratification of the New Start nuclear treaty, a federally mandated universal voter registration system to override state laws, and a budget resolution to lock in increased agency spending.

Then there is pork. A Senate aide told me that "some of the biggest porkers on both sides of the aisle are leaving office this year, and a lame-duck session would be their last hurrah for spending." Likely suspects include key members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Congress's "favor factory," such as Pennsylvania Democrat Arlen Specter and Utah Republican Bob Bennett.

"SOOOOOOOOOOOO! You think you can just discard us like yesterday's trash!  Try it an we'll unleash hell!"

How brilliant is this strategy?  My first thought after I read the article was, "OMG!  We'd better pray that the Donkeys win in November!"  Then the portion of my brain dedicated to cynicism (that would be 99.9%) kicked in and I realized that the reaction I had is the reaction their strategy is intended to trigger!

Give credit where credit is due.  They're evil geniuses, those Donkeys.  Evil effing geniuses.

Cleared of all wrongdoing [/sarcasm]

The search for truth being a relative thing, we can certainly take it as settled fact when the University of East Anglia proclaims that its investigation of....uh....itself....uncovered no wrongdoing of any kind.

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.

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.

Just like Penn State University in its investigation of....uh....itself....found nothing amiss.

Nothing to see here people.  Move along.

Not all of us are persuaded.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing to see here people.  Move along.

Now let me speak honestly, from the heart.  The source code matters.  Michael Mann's discredited "hockey stick" program would produce the same result whether you fed it temperature data or the price list from Wendy's.  It skewed older numbers to a pattern of a slow, gradual increase, and completely distorted numbers at the tail end of the dataset to sky upward at an exponential rate that is ridiculous on its face and should have caught SOMEONE'S attention from the very beginning.

What's in the source code at East Anglia?  Are we dealing with the same kind of intellectual dishonesty as that shown by Mr. Mann?

Talk of "tricks" and "hide the decline" matter.  When one speaks of "cheating on my spouse" you don't assume it involves a card game.  Someone with a little more intellectual honesty (and no connection to either the University or any government bureaucracy) needs to look into what their little "tricks" were.

Though concern was voiced over the refusal of the scientists to share their "data" (I use the term loosely - fictitious bullshit is the more appropriate term) with independent scientists so they might independently validate their findings, this too matters much more than the sham investigation weighs it.  The fact that in one of the emails a scientist said that he would DESTROY the data before he would share it with an outsider is GARGANTUAN.  This is not something to be brushed under the rug or treated with a slap on the wrist.  You don't hide your data unless you know that it's corrupt, has been falsified, or is total fiction.

The bullying of scientific journals to prevent publication of opposing viewpoints matters.  If science is, as so many of its proponents claim, a search for the truth, then let opposing voices be heard!  These scientists weren't acting as seekers of the truth by throwing their weight around in this way.  They were acting as ideological thugs.

I'm tired of the dishonesty.  I'm tired of this ideology-tainted pseudo-science serving no other purpose than to further political schemes to increase taxation on and control over formerly free peoples.

My brother is right - this planet IS the insane asylum for the entire universe.

Update:

Check out this column for a scathing review of East Anglia's "finding".

Suing for -- what?

If this isn't the damndest thing.  The federal government tries to pry itself into every nook and cranny of our lives, to regulate every single minute facet of of our existence.  Perversely, enforcement of our borders, one of the few powers granted to the Federal government by the Constitution, is the one area where the federal government has no interest in inserting itself.  So when Arizona attempts to do it for them -- they sue. 

The federal lawsuit against Arizona's tough new immigration law focuses heavily on a question that has been in the spotlight repeatedly the past decade and dates back to the Founding Fathers: The right of the government to keep states from enacting laws that usurp federal authority.

The feds have basically stated, in so many words, that not only are they not interested in enforcing our borders, but they'll be damned if they'll let anyone else do it!

And before you "conservatives" start jumping on the "blame Obama" bandwagon, don't forget that your champion, King George the Dim, was worse than Il Duce on border security, and your last candidate for President, "conservative" (ha! in a pig's eye!) John McCommie was the driving force behind Scamnasty.

Our "leaders" don't care to enforce our borders.  Is cheap labor really worth the dangers to which the citizens of borders areas are subjected? 

I. just. don't. get. it.

Another out-of-control Prosecutor

Normally, this would be a story for Toes at Sore Toes and a Bleeding Heart.  She is a tireless advocate for the reform of CPS (Child Protective Services).  But Toes passed it to me because (a) she knows my opinion of Prosecutors, that they are over-ambitious weasels intent on parlaying their position into a future political career without regard to the human wreckage left in their wake, and (b) it happened in my neck of the woods.  In Harford Country, to be exact - just a couple of hours northeast of humble Frederick.

Toes knows me entirely too well. The story got the predictable reaction out of me - I'm PISSED.

I can't do the story justice with a few random quotes. You can find it here in its entirety (major hat tip to Bill Medvecky who, like Toes, is a champion in the fight against out-of-control CPS). This is the money quote.

We want to see how she reacts when we tell her her kid is dead.

Classy. I hope there's a special place in hell where assholes like this can be subjected to horrors beyond imagination.

"Weak economy? We're shocked!"

The people effing up our economy (and the sycophants who obediently shovel their propaganda) simply can't believe that their counter intuitive deliberate efforts to save destroy our economy aren't are working.  The latest news?  Weak numbers (for weak minds).

Fears that the economic recovery is fizzling grew Thursday after the government and private sector issued weak reports on a number of fronts.

Unemployment claims are up, home sales are plunging without government incentives and manufacturing growth is slowing.

Meanwhile, 1.3 million people are without federal jobless benefits now that Congress adjourned for a weeklong Independence Day recess without passing an extension. That number could grow to 3.3 million by the end of the month if lawmakers can't resolve the issue when they return.

All of this worries economists.

NOW you're worried?!?!?!

Anyone who's been paying attention - particularly those who follow Vox Popoli - knows that government bailouts and incentives have only served to prolong the pain and postpone the inevitable crash.  We're in the midst of a profound economic earthquake that has only just begun to rumble.  We would have been a lot better off - a whole lot better off - had King George the Dim simply let the economic chips fall where they may in 2008.  We'd probably be pulling out of the deep, deep recession it would have caused right about now.  Instead, we'll be subject to Great Depression 2.0 in dribs and drabs as our political class tries to salvage their own careers rather than do the right thing.

Now THERE'S a cheery message for a Thursday evening, eh?