Lorraine Does Not Exist

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com The eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth's orbit vary in several patterns, resulting in 100,000-year ice age cycles. Image: wikimedia (Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– In an analysis of the past 1.2 million years, UC Santa Barbara geologist Lorraine Lisiecki discovered a pattern that connects the regular changes of the Earth’s orbital cycle to changes in the Earth’s climate. The finding is reported in this week’s issue of the scientific journal Nature Geoscience. Besides finding a link between change in the shape of the orbit and the onset of glaciation, Lisiecki found a surprising correlation. She discovered that the largest glacial cycles occurred during the weakest changes in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit –– and vice versa. She found that the stronger changes in the Earth’s orbit correlated to weaker changes in climate. “This may mean that the Earth’s climate has internal instability in addition to sensitivity to changes in the orbit,” said Lisiecki. Lorraine Lisiecki

Move along now...

Strike In Bubble Town

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com

Trust: The Facts

clipped from www.forbes.com In 1943 nearly half of those surveyed, 48%, told interviewers in a poll conducted by the National Opinion Research Center that it was almost impossible for a man to stay honest if he goes into politics. Has anything changed? Well the people's trust in politicians has deteriorated further. More than 50 years later, in a poll taken in 1997 by Fox News and Opinion Dynamics, 55% agreed that people who go into politics cannot remain honest. A 2006 ABC News/Washington Post poll found that a bare majority, 52%, said most members of Congress had about the same amount of honesty as most people, but 44% said they were more dishonest. In 2010 55% told Gallup interviewers that the honesty and ethical standards of members of Congress were low or very low, the only time a majority has given that response since the question was asked first in 1976. Only 9% described them as high.

Enron Lives

clipped from pajamasmedia.com Jefferson County is an example of what happens after the party’s over. Even government jobs proved to be no safe haven. When the bottle’s dry that feeling on the tip of your tongue isn’t the last drop of gin trickling down the neck. It’s the glass itself. Now what? Taibbi writes: As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. “I’d be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning,” she says. “I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I’d go to bed at night, and I’d be in tears.” Well, at least the new sewer system saved the earth. The County probably won’t be hearing from environmentalists for a while. Or maybe not.

Suspicion

clipped from www.telegraph.co.uk The US Federal Reserve has completed its purchase of $1.7 trillion (£1.1bn) of mortgage securities, agency debt and US Treasuries, the conjuring trick of "credit easing" that allowed Ben Bernanke to create stimulus equal to 12pc of GDP. The Fed's money creation has been more or less the size of Washington's borrowing needs for the last year, as Beijing notes with suspicion.

I Want

clipped from ace.mu.nu

Exploding Talking Heads

clipped from yidwithlid.blogspot.com Gallup is reporting that more than half of Tea Party supporters are NOT Republican, but they tend to be much more conservative than the general population.  Also, compared with average Americans, supporters are slightly more male and less likely to be lower-income. Keep in mind, that the $50,000 bracket shown as the highest income bracket below is actually the average US Household income, so it cannot be discerned whether these people are upscale, or around average.

Lockbox

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The Fraud This Time

clipped from hotair.com Clearly written and honestly enforced regulation is not easy to come by, these days. To understand why, imagine that two football teams assemble for a game, under the supervision of a single referee. As the first play begins, one of the players complains that the referee has made illegal movements across the field. The referee laughs and explains he cannot be bound by the same rules that constrain the players, or he wouldn’t be able to do his job properly. He must be able to move up and down the field at will, in ways that would earn penalties for the players. Common sense supports his assertion, and the game continues. The referee begins calling all sorts of penalties, invoking rules he has created on the fly. The players object, saying the rulebook accepted at the beginning of the game should be used without alterations. The referee mocks this notion. More complex rules are needed to ensure a good game! The idea of a large, and yet scrupulously honest State is fraudulent to its core.

Trouble

clipped from legalinsurrection.blogspot.com I haven't spoken to my friend in many months, probably since the fall or summer. So I was pleased when his name showed up as an incoming call on my cell phone, although I wondered how we would dance around the subject of Him. The first sentence out of his mouth was, "Let's get it out of the way, you were right about Obama." Not being satisfied with mere contrition, I asked him whether he was bs-ing me, and he said no, he meant it. My friend spends half the year in Florida along with his similarly ancient friends. He's predicting a "Republican sweep" in November, although his dissatisfaction with Obama is not the result of a conversion to conservatism. He feels that Obama broke so many promises, and "he's just another politician." If Obama has lost my friend, the Frank Rich-loving, Sarah Palin-hating greedy Democratic geezer that he is, the Democrats are in deep electoral trouble.

And More Adams

clipped from www.brainyquote.com A government of laws, and not of men. John Adams Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society. John Adams All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation. John Adams Arms in the hands of citizens may be used at individual discretion... in private self-defense. John Adams Because power corrupts, society's demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases. John Adams Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence. John Adams Fear is the foundation of most governments. John Adams I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

More Adams

clipped from www.brainyquote.com Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people. John Adams Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. John Adams Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak. John Adams Power always thinks... that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws. John Adams Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty. John Adams Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. John Adams The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea. John Adams There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty. John Adams

Forgiveness Lost

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Politico begins its story about the rough reception two New Hampshire Democrats who voted for Obamacare have received from their constituents this way: If the experience of this state's two Democratic House members is any indication, the raw emotion and mistrust emanating from last summer's congressional town halls never really went away. I'm not sure why anyone thought it might have. All that has changed since last summer's town hall is (1) the Democrats enacted legislation disfavored by a clear majority of Americans and (2) they did so with the help of a series of unsavory back room deals. Under these circumstances, one would expect that, if anything, voters would be more angry and mistrustful now.

Three Or More Is A Congress

clipped from www.quotationspage.com In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress. John Adams US diplomat & politician (1735 - 1826)

And a Happy Easter to John Adams!

Modern Belief

clipped from pajamasmedia.com The history of secularization can be understood not as a replacement of belief by reason, but an exchange of one belief for another. The traditional monotheisms were hustled out of the way so that they could sell Lenin in the place left vacant by Jesus. Perhaps no other century has seen more god-men than the 20th. Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Nicolae Ceauşescu, Saparmurat Niyazov, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-Sung, Ayatollah Khomeini, Sukarno, and Kim Jong-Il promoted a cult of personality.  And there’s a reason for that. The dictators could only sell the box of matches with their likeness on the cover if they could darken the sun of faith. “During the peak of their regimes, these leaders were presented as god-like and infallible. Their portraits were hung in homes and public buildings Maybe Chesterton was right when he predicted that “the first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything.”

Irony

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Isn't it kind of ironic that the political party that hangs Che Guevara posters in its campaign offices is whining about how their opposition is supposedly a violent political movement?

Big Bird And Big Green

clipped from wattsupwiththat.com

Congress Capsized

clipped from hotair.com

Prison-Homing

clipped from blog.heritage.org “According to a report released Monday by the U.S. Department of Education, an increasing number of American parents are choosing to have their children raised at school rather than at home,” The Onion “reports” today. “School-homing,” as the satirical source dubs the fictional trend, would be a witty April Fool’s fib if it didn’t sound so much like the liberal education ideas we’ve heard in the last few decades. As Virginia Walden Ford, who’s organized thousands of parents in the District of Columbia on behalf of school choice, will attest, the difference that decision-making authority can make is powerful. She’s seen adults’ and families’ lives transformed as a result. On the other hand, if policies encourage “school-homing,” they’ll reap what they sow, sadly. As The Onion sardonically concludes, “increasingly overburdened public schools have recently led to a steady upswing in the number of students being prison-homed.”

Transparent Unicorns

clipped from ace.mu.nu

Death By Inertia

clipped from ace.mu.nu What happens when vehicles we all drive are legislated out of existence? Americans behind the wheel die. According to a 2003 NHTSA study, when a vehicle is reduced by 100 pounds the estimated fatality rate increases as much as 5.63 percent for light cars weighing less than 2,950 pounds, 4.70 percent for heavier cars weighing over 2,950 pounds and 3.06 percent for light trucks. Between model years 1996 and 1999, these rates translated into additional traffic fatalities of 13,608 for light cars, 10,884 for heavier cars and 14,705 for light trucks.12 * A 2001 National Academy of Sciences panel found that constraining automobile manufacturers to produce smaller, lighter vehicles in the 1970s and early 1980s "probably resulted in an additional 1,300 to 2,600 traffic fatalities in 1993."13 Every. Goddamned initiative. Kills people. They are killing us with their rules. The rules we thought, when they initiated them, were intended to save lives. No more. And they do not care. At all.

Falling Bricks

clipped from www.qando.net Another brick falls from the crumbling facade of “climate science” in support of AGW: E-mail messages obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that NASA concluded that its own climate findings were inferior to those maintained by both the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — the scandalized source of the leaked Climate-gate e-mails — and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. The e-mails from 2007 reveal that when a USA Today reporter asked if NASA’s data “was more accurate” than other climate-change data sets, NASA’s Dr. Reto A. Ruedy replied with an unequivocal no. He said “the National Climatic Data Center’s procedure of only using the best stations is more accurate,” admitting that some of his own procedures led to less accurate readings.

Did I Forget To Mention The Mansourian Candidate?

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com I spent some time with the highest tenured faculty member at Chicago Law a few months back, and he did not have many nice things to say about “Barry.” Obama applied for a position as an adjunct and wasn’t even considered. A few weeks later the law school got a phone call from the Board of Trustees telling them to find him an office, put him on the payroll, and give him a class to teach. The other professors hated him because he was lazy, unqualified, never attended any of the faculty meetings, and it was clear that the position was nothing more than a political stepping stool. According to my professor friend, he had the lowest intellectual capacity in the building. He also doubted whether he was legitimately an editor on the Harvard Law Review, because if he was, he would be the first and only editor of an Ivy League law review to never be published while in school (publication is or was a requirement).

At Least One President Too Late

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com Evan has now produced a timely new video splicing together footage that he calls "A trip down memory lane." He describes it as four minutes of nonstop examples of violent imagery and extremist rhetoric employed by left-wing anti-Bush protesters. He writes: "For some reason, despite it being well documented at the time by me and many others, the media chose to ignore it." Indeed. In his "memory lane" post, Evan observes a transformation in the attitude of the Democrat/media axis to political protest. He even identifies the precise date of the transformation: "[I]t seems that publicly airing your grievances stopped being patriotic right around noon on January 20th, 2009." How so? "Once President Obama was sworn in, protesting became incitement to violence." Evan adds: "One thing's for sure: If there is such a thing as dangerous rhetoric, then the media is at least one president too late in reporting the story."

Orwell Spinning In His Oil-Free Grave

clipped from www.powerlineblog.com The Institute for Energy Research doesn't think so: This is a huge step backward for America's energy security. Prior to today's announcement, the vast majority of OCS areas were open for business. No longer. Today, while President Obama may have stated his support for increased energy development in the Eastern Gulf (which requires congressional action) and the Southern Atlantic (which he'll study over the next year), he also announced that he would delay the development of the energy resources off Virginia's coast and lock up vast resources off the Alaskan coast. Additionally, those who cheer the President's newfound support for domestic energy resources should remember that the very same President's FY 2011 budget proposal includes upwards of $36 billion in new oil and natural gas taxes Obama's announcement added up to: * Cancelled five lease sales off the Alaska coast that were planned over the next 2 years. One of the areas is estimated to hold up to 77 billion barrels of oil

The (Dis)United State Of America

clipped from blogs.usatoday.com With this legislation, Congress has effectively defined an uninsured 18-year-old man in Richmond as an interstate problem like a polluting factory. It is an assertion of federal power that is inherently at odds with the original vision of the Framers. If a citizen who fails to get health insurance is an interstate problem, it is difficult to see the limiting principle as Congress seeks to impose other requirements on citizens. The ultimate question may not be how Congress can prevail, but how much of states' rights would be left if it prevailed. The guarantee of federalism was essential to ratifying the Constitution and embodied in the 10th Amendment guaranteeing that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." Historically, however, federalism is a constitutional rule honored largely in the breach by Congress.

Yumpin Yimini

clipped from www.youtube.com

We Are Not Here -- But We Understand

clipped from pajamasmedia.com ‘But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals–mammoths and mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever heard of.’ ‘Have you ever seen those bones, Winston? Of course not. Nineteenth-century biologists invented them. Before man there was nothing. After man, if he could come to an end, there would be nothing. Outside man there is nothing.’ Power means the power to delete. Power means the power to form the narrative. He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future. We of the Belmont Club are not here. But we understand.

RTWT.

Rhetorical

clipped from www.qando.net He then moves on to note that employers may respond in a rather unexpected fashion as well: Take a medium-sized firm that employs a hundred people earning $40,000 each—a private security firm based in Atlanta, say—and currently offers them health-care insurance worth $10,000 a year, of which the employees pay $2,500. This employer’s annual health-care costs are $750,000 (a hundred times $7,500). In a situation like this, the firm has a strong financial incentive to junk its group coverage and dump its workers onto the taxpayer-subsidized plan. Under the new law, firms with more than fifty workers that don’t offer coverage would have to pay an annual fine of $2,000 for every worker they employ, excepting the first thirty. In this case, the security firm would incur a fine of $140,000 (seventy times two), but it would save $610,000 a year on health-care costs. If you owned this firm, what would you do? I assume that final question is rhetorical.

Lies Without End

clipped from newsbusters.org "The United States of America does not quit once it starts on something.  You don't quit, the American armed services does not quit.  We keep at it.  We persevere." -- Pres. Obama to US troops in Afghanistan, March 28, 2010 "Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is calling for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. combat brigades from Iraq, with the pullout being completed by the end of next year. 'Let me be clear: There is no military solution in Iraq and there never was,' Obama said." -- Obama calls for immediate withdrawal from Iraq, AP, Sep. 12, 2007 [emphasis added] There are lies, damned lies, and then the kind of brazen rewriting of what a man stands for that Barack Obama engaged in yesterday.

Still Crazy After All These Years

I'm reading Sowell's book also. It's excellent as usual.

clipped from neoneocon.com Leaving London for a vacation in South Africa in 1935, Shaw declared, “It is nice to go for a holiday and know that Hitler has settled everything so well in Europe.” While Hitler’s anti-Jewish actions eventually alienated Shaw, the famous playwright remained partial to the Soviet dictatorship. In 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet pact, Shaw said: “Herr Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming. And every one except myself is frightened out of his or her wits!” A week later, the Second World War began, with Hitler invading Poland from the west, followed by Stalin invading from the east. It goes on, but I think you get the idea. The stupidity of supposedly smart men (and women!) can be simply stunning. And that stupidity is not random; it tends to almost always go in the same direction, that of failing to understand the workings of the totalitarian and tyrannical mindset.

Enlist!

clipped from www.moonbattery.com

History Lesson

clipped from www.nps.gov I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife.

In Charge And Incoherent

clipped from www.moonbattery.com Another loony look at the Democrats on ObamaCare -- just so we don't forget who's "in charge" of this abomination.

At Least Dozens

clipped from gatewaypundit.firstthings.com Just in case you still trusted the state-run media… CNN on size of Saturday’s rally: “At least dozens of people.” This is dozens? This photo was taken at 1:35 p.m. More than an hour and a half after the rally started people were lining the highway trying to get in.

Practitioners

clipped from en.wikipedia.org The practice of negative racial aspects of eugenics, after World War II, fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[9] The modern field and term were first formulated by Sir Francis Galton in 1883,[10] drawing on the recent work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin.[citation needed] At its peak of popularity eugenics was supported by prominent people, including Margaret Sanger,[11][12] Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling[13] and Sidney Webb.[14][15][16] Its most infamous proponent and practitioner was however Adolf Hitler who praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf, and emulated Eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States.[17]