The Terrorists Read Alinsky

clipped from wizbangblog.com The mere fact that we've reached this point is symbolic of how far this once great country has already fallen... but if these brave men are punished for bringing a terrorist to justice, then it's over... it's done... America's preeminence is finished... and Obama's worldview, one focused on what America does wrong rather than on what she's done right, prevails. clipped from wizbangblog.com The video quotes the Al-Quaida manual to use the system against itself. It seems that even terrorists read Alinsky. 3. Posted by DaveD | December 5, 2009 11:18 AM | Score: 10 (10 votes cast)

Breathtaking

clipped from article.nationalreview.com In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.” Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. ones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust.

Hijacking Hubert

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com As the questionable actions of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia are being revealed, we are witnessing how the life work of Hubert H. Lamb was tarnished by the very organizations he helped create. A pioneer in the scientific study of climate change, H.H. Lamb was the founder and first director of the CRU. After he retired, Lamb wrote the classic, Climate, History and the Modern World, (Routledge, 1982 & 1995). Lamb synthesized the physical evidence demonstrating that since the last ice age ended, the earth has been both warmer and cooler than today. For over 3,000 years, 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, it was 2-3 degrees C warmer than today. The evidence for the Northern Hemisphere is extensive. Throughout North America and Eurasia trees grew 200 to 400 km closer to the North Pole than they grow today and in the mountains grew at higher elevations than they do today. The Sahara Desert was wetter.

COTD: Sanger Stats

clipped from hotair.com Here are the statistics which show the percentage of each ethnic type that has been exterminated through abortion since 1967. White 10.3% Hispanic 16.9% Black 28.1% Asian and Pacific Islander 16.0% Native American and Alaskan Native 16.0% Total Minority 21.7% 1/5 of the minorities have been exterminated. Now with the Obamacare legal extermination plan, the government (the eugenticists, Cass Sustenien and Holder being a part of them) will be able to selectively exterminate the “human weeds” they don’t want. Read up on Margaret Sanger, a 20th century progressive, who was founder of Planned Parenthood. Hillary, “I would define myself as a 20th century progessive”, was presented the “Maggie Award” this year. We are fighting the eugenicists, who have people in powerful positions. ms on December 5, 2009 at 7:51 PM

Devastating

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I haven't had a whole lot of respect for Carly Fiorina. But this has definitely bumped it up a number of notches.

It's Got Lots Of E's and And At Least One Z In There Somewhere

clipped from pajamasmedia.com FOCUS GROUP: Congress Is Like Satan. Best bit: “One telling moment came after Hart asked each voter to write the name that comes to mind when they think of Congress. Bill, a 62-year-old retired automobile-industry executive and independent who backed Obama, wrote ‘Satan.’ When Hart asked why, Bill answered, ‘Because I wasn’t sure of the correct spelling of ‘Beelzebub.’ Now that’s intensity.”

The Knowledge Problem

clipped from pajamasmedia.com VIRGINIA POSTREL ON GIFT-GIVING AND THE KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM: “The problem of buying good presents for other people, even people you supposedly know well, illustrates that old familiar Hayekian concept, the knowledge problem. If you can’t even give your loved ones the right presents, how likely is it that a central authority could make the right decisions for everyone?”

In The Original French

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com Charles Krauthammer bashes Obama's call to arms, or to reflection, or whatever it was: Obama's surge speech wasn't that of a commander in chief but of a politician, perfectly splitting the difference. Two messages for two audiences. Placate the right -- you get the troops; placate the left -- we are on our way out. I'm sure the speech sounded better in the original French.

Let's retraite tout de suite. Mais faire croire que nous ne sommes pas.

Saudis First Out Of The Blocks

clipped from www.smalldeadanimals.com The Australian; SAUDI Arabia has seized on a series of stolen British university emails to become the first country to cast doubt on the consensus about man-made climate change ahead of next week's Copenhagen summit. [...] [C]hief Copenhagen negotiator, Mohammad al-Sabban, suggested in an interview with the BBC yesterday that there was now no longer any point in seeking an agreement to reduce emissions. "It appears from the details . . . that there is no relationship whatsoever between human activities and climate change," he said. "Climate is changing . . . but for natural and not human-induced reasons. So whatever the international community does to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have no effect on the climate's natural variability." His government might be prepared to take "no cost" measures to control emissions but more drastic and painful action would be out of the question until there was "new evidence" about what was causing climate change, he said.

Du'O.

Harried

clipped from www.smalldeadanimals.com Jim Prentice - call your office; The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by leaked e-mails. The new analysis of the data will take three years, meaning that the Met Office will not be able to state with absolute confidence the extent of the warming trend until the end of 2012. The Met Office database is one of three main sources of temperature data analysis on which the UN’s main climate change science body relies for its assessment that global warming is a serious danger to the world. This assessment is the basis for next week’s climate change talks in Copenhagen aimed at cutting CO2 emissions. Poor Harry.

Taking No Chances

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Lately my day job has been a day-and-night job. I just got home from Oklahoma City, where I spent the week. There was virtually no time to follow the news; all I know is that President Obama gave a speech and Tiger Woods got into some kind of trouble. (In the outside world, a lot more attention was paid to the latter than the former.) I did, however, notice this story, which has gotten some attention but not enough: A doctor who witnessed the torture of opposition detainees in Iran died after eating a drug-laced salad, Tehran's public prosecutor said yesterday. The announcement raises the number of official explanations of Ramin Pourandarjani's death to at least four. ... After Dr Pourandarjani's death on November 10, officials claimed that he had been in a car accident, died of a heart attack and committed suicide. They're taking no chances, I guess.

Conceit II

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com On the White House invoking “separation of powers” to prevent social secretary Desiree Rogers from testifying on Capitol Hill: I love this story.   Of course, every time you are in power, you invoke executive power if you don't want to be embarrassed. And the opposition declares itself shocked and outraged at the hiding of information and obstruction of justice.   What is comical about this is it's being invoked for a social secretary in a circumstance where, in the original Supreme Court rulings, it was intended for high officials with important state secrets. What was the state secret here — the nature of the flower arrangements at the head table? You know, it is as if somebody is invoking the Fifth Amendment in a dispute over a parking ticket. Mark Sullivan said that the level of threat against President Obama is the same as against Bush and Clinton, which I think is heartening. It refutes a lot of the rumors and the insinuations that we heard this summer

Conceit

clipped from corner.nationalreview.com On the White House jobs summit: Well, it is obviously a PR maneuver. Unemployment is high. People showed [concern] on Election Day in November that the administration and Congress are spending all their time on health care, which is not a high priority. High priority is the economy.   It is the conceit of liberals in power to imagine that the government not only should but can create jobs. Outside of world wars, it doesn't. Generally it gets in the way.

Palin's In

clipped from www.americanthinker.com Via her favorite forum for chiming in on the national conversation, Facebook, she has issued the following statement: The president's decision to attend the international climate conference in Copenhagen needs to be reconsidered in light of the unfolding Climategate scandal. The leaked e-mails involved in Climategate expose the unscientific behavior of leading climate scientists who deliberately destroyed records to block information requests, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and conspired to silence the critics of man-made global warming. I support Senator James Inhofe's call for a full investigation into this scandal. Because it involves many of the same personalities and entities behind the Copenhagen conference, Climategate calls into question many of the proposals being pushed there, including anything that would lead to a cap and tax plan.

Far Out, Man

clipped from www.minyanville.com In her daily missive, she wrote to clients this morning that, after perusing the latest data, there were a couple niggling items that she felt curious enough to noodle on. First of all, she wrote, the labor force dropped by 98,000 bodies which is helpful in reeling in the unemployment rate. “Did they hit Power Ball or did they just walk off into the sunset, pack of Luckies and a couple o’ Bud nips tied up in the bindle?” McCullough scribbled. “Take the visual.” The strategist added, “Hours came off the record low to 33.2. And wages added a penny an hour. Big whoop. The seasonally-adjusted labor force participation rate dropped 0.1 to 65. This is another recession low and nothing to crow about.” Finally, McCullough, like us, was a little weirded out by the revisions. “The next thing that is odd is the SIZE of the October and September revisions, i.e., they added a combined 159,000 more bodies,” she said. “That is far out, man, far out. As in: Are they for real?”

And He Doesn't Even Get Into The Code...

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... which makes the emails look like Mary Poppins.

Going Galt

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Fraudulent

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com The usual armwaving denial that we should not trust our own lying eyes was delivered by a Harvard Professor in the Boston Globe: James McCarthy, a respected Harvard professor who was a former Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author, sent a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) today stressing that e-mails stolen from climate scientists do not undermine the evidenc[e] for manmade global warming. McCarthy is board chair of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). In the words of Frank Drebin: “Nothing to see here, move along!” And then comes this response I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that “human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming” is NOT overwhelming. But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures

RTWT. Print this one out and study it for a good summary of the situation. As a computer scientist myself, I can confirm the fraudulence of the code. And he is correct about how utterly devastating that is.

Shoot The Horse

clipped from meganmcardle.theatlantic.com Every time a prominent businessman or politician resigns to "spend more time with his family", I think of the economist colleague who pithily completed that sentence: I want to spend more time with my family complaining about getting fired. This Facebook note on Fritz Henderson's abrupt resignation, allegedly by Henderson's daughter, really drives it home: HE F*****G GOT ASKED TO STEP DOWN ALL OF YOU F*****G IDIOTS. I'M FRITZ'S F*****G DAUGHTER, AND HE DID NOT F*****G RESIGN. WHITACRE IS A SELFISH PIECE OF SHIFT [sic], WHO CARES ABOUT HIMSELF AND NOT THE F*****G COMPANY. HAVE FUN WITH GM, I HOPE TO NEVER BUY FROM THIS GOD FORESAKEN [sic] COMPANY EVERY [sic] AGAIN. F**K ALL OF YOU." On the other hand, GM's management strategy right now looks uncomfortably like the policy outlined by one character in Robert Heinlein's Friday: If the horse can't make the jump, shoot the horse.  Continue until one of the horses makes it, or you run out of horses.

Not Bearly Any Left

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Over And Over

clipped from www.financialpost.com The expert reports upheld all of our criticisms of the Mann Hockey Stick, both of the mathematics and of its reliance on flawed bristlecone pine data. One of the panels, however, argued that while the Mann Hockey Stick itself was flawed, a series of other studies published since 1998 had similar shapes, thus providing support for the view that the late 20th century is unusually warm. The IPCC also made this argument in its 2007 report. But the second expert panel, led by statistician Edward Wegman, pointed out that the other studies are not independent. They are written by the same small circle of authors, only the names are in different orders, and they reuse the same few data climate proxy series over and over.

Flying Unicorns

clipped from www.qando.net David Freddoso catches Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) in an unscripted moment of truth: “Health care reform, whether you use a ten-year number or when you start in 2010 or start in 2014, wherever you start at, so it is still either $1 trillion or it’s $2.5 Trillion, depending on where you start…” Of course, regardless of where you start, it won’t cost just the 894 billion that has been claimed. Again, for those who’ve missed it the numerous times I’ve mentioned it, CBO can only score a 10 year window. So, knowing that Democrats used a bit of trickery to make the bill in the Senate seem to cost less than it really does. They front-loaded the taxes (they begin immediately upon passage) and they delayed the major programs (they begin in 2014 – those are the two dates Baucus cites) so that the cost is spread over 10 years (although they only take place in 6) as is the revenue. You figure it out – 10 years of revenue and 6 years of spending – would that drive the supposed 10 year cost down?

COTD: Full Panic Mode

clipped from www.washingtonexaminer.com I used to think the Dems were just being cynical when the complained about the money 'lost' to tax cuts despite the tax revenues going up each time. Now it appears they actually believed those economic turnarounds were just going to happen. So in control this time they wrote a stimulus plan that would reward their special interests and waited for good news. Now they are in full panic mode.

Urgency

clipped from www.washingtonexaminer.com There’s a reason Barack Obama squeezed a hastily-arranged "Jobs Summit" into a White House schedule dominated by national health care and Afghanistan.  You can find it on every page of "The Economy and Politics of 2010," a new survey of voter attitudes circulating among Democrats that, despite its dry title, betrays a sense of dread and horror among party strategists hoping to avoid defeat in next year's mid-term elections. The pollsters found a lot of residual blame for George W. Bush.  But they also found that Obama is gradually coming to own the economy. And for the first time since 2002, Carville and Greenberg found that more voters, 45 percent to 42 percent, say Republicans would do a better job handling the economy than Democrats.  Just last May, Democrats held a 16-point lead. Urgency -- that's the key word, and the reason for Obama's "Jobs Summit."  But voters know Democratic leaders haven't shown that urgency about jobs

COTD: Math Language

clipped from www.americanthinker.com Americans are very bad at math. An extremely small number are good at it. It is easy to manipulate a population when they can't even make change for a dollar without the cash register or calculator. Math is another language, the language of critical thinking and logic. I've always thought that the humans were terribly conceited to believe that they could alter the long term earth climate. If we really could, why not make it a bit more temperate, especially here in the midwest. Singular events like a large volcanic eruption or a decent size meteor could plunge the world into a cool or dark spell for many years. A single year of worldwide crop failure would cause absolute chaos and famine. People underestimate the fragility of modern civilization. The monies should be spent not on guessing what the climate will be in 100 years, but preparations and planning for random events causing global crop failure or other more immediate disasters threatening the human race.

(Not Quite) Gone Again

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com Senior Advisor to Google, Inc. Gore is also Visiting Professor at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.” It seems he has done some “advising” of Google’s search quality in the past. Here’s a story from the New Yorker via Newsbusters about that very subject. There is some history there that has some bearing on the current situation. In the case of “Climategate”, Mr. Gore’s ability to continue his current speaking engagements might be hampered. Thus, there could well be a motive for him doing some “advising” in this case. A phone call might be all it took. Word from some others doing investigations say Google senior staff has told them the removal of “Climategate” from the autosuggest in web searches is algorithm based. But the Google trends data suggest otherwise, particularly since it was restored and operating in Googles autosuggest feature back on November 28th, as documented here on WUWT. Now it is gone again.

RTWT. "climate gate scandal" is now up to the 4th auto suggest for "clim". So some evidence of algorithms not currently being overridden for now.

Made Up Horsesh*t

clipped from ace.mu.nu Amusingly, Wegman showed that replacing Mann's principle components estimates with repeated samples of random white noise continued to produce the same hockey stick shape. Now, if you've been following this, Mann's entire temperature reconstruction method rests on knowing (observing) recent periodic global temperatures, y. Quibbling about principle components aside, that's the dependent variable in the backcasts. But as is now becoming increasingly plain, y was constructed from an undocumented process that took raw ground station data and ran it through a black box that included smoothing, filtering, inference, manipulation, baling wire, glue and the juice of one whole lemon. This is what the CRU people are calling "valued added homogenized data." Or what normal people call "made up horseshit." It's also the temperature data that dozens, if not hundreds of AGW studies are based on.

Vietnamization

clipped from ace.mu.nu Among his "Big Ideas" is Vietnamization. Which Nixon did with Vietnam-- making the Vietnam War more dependent on the Vietnamese. Which makes sense, except for the minor fact 1, they weren't ready and knew they would lose, so 2, they had no reason to fight and awfully big reasons to ingratiate themselves to the soon-to-be-victors by selling information and such to the North. Basically, when you tell your ally you're bugging out in a couple of years, and they know when you do bug out they lose, you have incentivized them to begin defecting to the enemy early.

Most Excellent: Aussie Branch Carbonians Collapse

clipped from ace.mu.nu What looked like a sure thing a few weeks ago just got voted down in the Australian Senate. There has been a bunch of drama over this bill, including the ousting of the main opposition leader after he started to go along with PM Rudd's plans to send the Australian economy back to the Stone Age. Now it looks like Rudd and both houses of parliament are in for an early shake-up: Opponents of the cap-and-trade scheme used their numbers in the Senate after a climate change skeptics took control of the opposition leadership on Tuesday. The scheme would have been the biggest outside Europe, covering 75 percent of Australian emissions and starting in July 2011. It would have effectively forced polluters to pay for their emissions, requiring them to purchase emission permits from a carbon market. Senior opposition lawmaker and frontbencher Christopher Pyne said he expected a dissolution of both houses of parliament and an election early in the new year, ahead of polls due around late November.

Achingly phOny

clipped from justoneminute.typepad.com How did you love the speech?  I liked the George Bush passages on American exceptionalism the best; yes, Obama was achingly phony, but I figure he was even more annoying to lefties. As to the eighteen month round-trip surge, great idea!  Of course, one might think that after thirty years of civil war the Taliban can do another eighteen months standing on their heads, but it carries Obama past the midterm elections.

Wave Of The Future

clipped from www.forbes.com Victory in Afghanistan is crucial. Those who say occupation sparks insurgency misunderstand what is at stake. Afghans dislike occupation, but they place a higher priority on security. Security brings tolerance of the U.S. presence, and stability and a responsive government enables withdrawal. To cede the Taliban a safe haven, either now or post-surge, is unacceptable. Absent a stable government and a more capable Afghan National Army, the Taliban will fill the vacuum as they did from 1994 to 2001. The Taliban and their al-Qaida allies remain ideologically committed to the destruction of Western society. Not only will failure in Afghanistan mean a renewed threat to Americans across the globe, but it will also enable Islamists to convince more and more people that, having defeated two superpowers, they are the wave of the future. Unless Obama convinces the Taliban that his commitment to victory is unwavering, prepare for a dozen new Afghanistans.

Requirements Unmentioned

clipped from www.slate.com But Obama said nothing in the speech that put actual pressure on the government. The surge can succeed militarily but won't be worth anything if Hamid Karzai doesn't change his behavior and the Afghan army doesn't improve. Obama knows the government in Kabul is corrupt or, more benignly, that Karzai's goals don't match America's. President Obama wants to pressure Kabul but can't be seen to be doing so too openly, or it will undermine Karzai with his own people. So President Obama announced no verifiable set of benchmarks or penalties for Afghanistan—the very requirements that Sen. Obama said were necessary for for Bush's Iraq troop surge in 2007. The president's strategy, according to administration officials, is to circumvent the Karzai government, inspiring regional agencies through financial incentives and basically avoiding the Kabul government altogether.

John Coleman: Doesn't Sound So Stupid Now, Eh?

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Your Children Are Belong To Us Redux

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community." Adolf Hitler

The Branch Carbonian Cult: Truths Denied

clipped from www.americanthinker.com (f)  the fact that ever more scientists assert convincingly that atmospheric CO2 is a lagging consequence, rather than a triggering cause, of alleged global warming, (g)  the fact that all earlier glacial and inter-glacial periods were clearly caused not by man but by solar, ocean and volcanic cycles and "natural" fluctuations, (h)  the fact that di-hydrogen oxide (H2O) molecules -- water vapor -- and methane molecules are 20-30 times more heat-retentive than CO2 molecules are, (i)  the fact that termites worldwide expel about as much "greenhouse gasses" into the atmosphere as does all the burning of fossil fuels by human beings, (j)  the fact that even if all Kyoto-type limits on CO2 were obeyed by all nations, the estimated net impact by 2050 would be less than half a degree F -- with a ruinous cost-to-benefit ratio of thousands to one, when the standard requirement is no more than one to one.

The Branch Carbonian Cult: Thou Shalt

clipped from www.americanthinker.com With this half of the AGW Cult's self-definition now clearly established, here is the other half -- its Ten Commandments of "Thou-Shalt" and "Thou-Shalt-Not" absolutes -- designed for keeping its devoted cultists in lockstep support and its intimidated detractors in retreat: o Thou shalt have but one Mother Earth (Gaia) Goddess before you o Thou shalt not worship false Prophets -- especially sun cycles, ocean cycles, volcanic influences and  "Objective Science" in general o Thou shalt never doubt catastrophic depletion of the so-called "Ozone Layer" o Thou shalt not doubt man-made "Greenhouse Gasses" as the primary cause of GW o Thou shalt condemn such doubters as "Extremists" and "Criminals Against Humanity" o Thou shalt minimize, ignore and deny any and all environmental good news  o Thou shalt avoid benefit-cost evaluations of AGW solutions and never admit error or falsehood about anything o Thou shalt continue opposing all Nuclear and new Hydro power, despite their non-GW attributes

The Branch Carbonian Cult

clipped from www.americanthinker.com Here, therefore, in far more detail than any routine allegation of "cultism" conveys, are no fewer than ten of this AGW ideology's very specific characteristics 1. Leadership by a self-glorifying, manipulative New Age Prophet -- in this case, former Vice-President Al Gore, though he is rapidly being supplanted by President Barack Obama. 2. Assertion of an apocalyptic threat to all mankind. 3. An absolutist definition of both the threat and the proposed solution(s). 4. Promise of a salvation from this pending apocalypse. 5. Devotion to an inspired text which (arguendo) embodies all the answers -- in this case, Prophet Gore's pseudo-scientific book "Earth in the Balance" and his more recent "An Inconvenient Truth" documentary. 6. A specific list of "truths" (see the Ten Commandments listed below) which must be embraced and proselytized by all Cult members.. 7. An absolute intolerance of any deviation from any of these truths by any Cult member.

COTD: A Bunch Of Crap That Should Be Abandoned

clipped from www.americanthinker.com A lot of American youth are abandoning science and mathmatics. Perhaps they are right. It appears that it is a bunch of crap that should be abandoned.

COTD: The Branch Carbonian Cult

clipped from www.americanthinker.com I have a proposition. This Branch Carbonian Cult operated within the safe confines of the university system. Protected by tenure and cloaked in the peer-review process, these men launched their assaults on freedom and liberty via scare-mongering the public and politicians into believing their “global warming” then “climate change” hypotheses. These university guilds protected and housed those that try to do conservatives harm. Universities are forcing us to buy the rope that they would love to see us hang with. They do it from behind a curtain of protection that has them now exposed as a result of the ClimateGate scandal. All freedom loving people should consider how to mount a successful assault into this system as a means of restoring freedom and liberty to the institutions that we pay for against our will.