The execrable "give back to the community" guilt-trip.

I really hate the guilt-trip phrase “give-back” the way that it is used here and in the post that it links to.

See: https://twitter.com/#!/SeattlePD/status/189419396429643776

And: http://spdblotter.seattle.gov/2012/04/09/spd-officers-give-back-to-the-community/

The term is loaded with the implication that something was wrongly taken and that the taker has “given back” to make amends for their aggression against those that they have victimized.

People need to call bullshit on this crap.

These police officers did not take something wrongly. They did not victimize "the community" by taking something from it by force or by fraud. Neither they nor any of us should allow ourselves to manipulated by the cult of victim-hood that promotes that damnable “give-back” crap. It demeans all of us when it is used.

Vote for Obama and get FREE STUFF!

About that Free Healthcare, . . .

See: BAD WEEK FOR FREEDOM

Only a deceitful government busybody do-gooder would actually argue that forcing insurance companies to cover millions more Americans and cover pre-existing conditions would result in lower costs for the average family. I wonder what will happen in 2014 when 30 million more Americans are guaranteed “free” healthcare under Obamacare. The saddest part of this oncoming train wreck is that millions of willfully ignorant people actually believed the blatant lies and false storyline fed to them by sociopathic politicians who desire to control every aspect of their lives. These people believe they know what is best for you. They believe they are smarter than you. They do not care what means are required to achieve their ends of absolute domination over your life. Personal freedom, individual liberty and a critical thinking populace are the antithesis to the desires of the governing elite.

And about all of that other Free Stuff that you are being promised . . .

See: Can Obama Win Re-Election by Promising Free Stuff

Mr. Obama says he is not waging class warfare against the wealthy in America. He is, of course. His campaign slogan might as well be: ” Vote for Me … I’ll Give You Free Stuff.” This is enticing. Imagine if you pay no federal income taxes and one of the candidates says, “I’ll take money from rich people and give it to you to pay your mortgage – even if you were irresponsible and bought a house you couldn’t afford. Vote for me, I’ll make sure you get unemployment benefits for almost two full years. And, oh yeah, vote for me and I’ll make sure you get birth control pills — free of charge.

The most important, underreported story in America is the one about who we Americans are becoming. As Bill O’Reilly put it: President Obama is “calculating that the American voter has changed into a person who wants free stuff from the government and is willing to sacrifice some freedoms in order to get the free stuff. And you know what? The President might be right.”

Like Bernard Goldberg, I am not convinced that this election is a slam-dunk for the Republicans. I think that when a large enough portion of the voting population is dependent on the government for their material comforts and wants, our mandate to be "a free people" devolves into pleading to be "a people of free stuff."

We are becoming more and more like the serfs of our feudal past.

Borders Versus The Quest For World Peace

See: Memo outlines backdoor 'amnesty' plan

With Congress gridlocked on an immigration bill, the Obama administration is considering using a back door to stop deporting many illegal immigrants - what a draft government memo said could be "a non-legislative version of amnesty."

The memo, addressed to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas and written by four agency staffers, lists tools it says the administration has to "reduce the threat of removal" for many illegal immigrants who have run afoul of immigration authorities.

On the surface, it is about the politics of illegal immigration.

But there is something happening here that is working below the surface. It is a "Big Picture" thing. It is something that is working on an emotional level in the Modern American Left.

It explains much of the way the modern American Left feels about the problem that we have with illegal immigration.

*Primarily, the Modern American left. along with their European counterparts, have a problem with National borders. They see Nationalism as the cause of much of the warfare and strife of the last one hundred years. They believe that a world without borders would necessarily be a more peaceful one. Without countries, they reason, there could be no war, there could only be peace and love.

John Lennon's Imagine is not just a silly pop song. It is their prayer, their hymnal, their anthem. It is a dream that the Modern American Left hopes is our future and the whole worlds future.

(Yoram Hazony's Israel Through European Eyes explains why Israel is hated by much of the European, and by extension, the American Left. The core of his argument is compelling and it has important implications for all of the Western Nations that fought in WWII.)

Oliver Stone - Shaping The Things To Come

Oliver Stone is an influential shaper of public thought.

His movies, which include Natural Born Killers, Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, Nixon, and W will be viewed by hundreds of millions of people, not just in the US, but all over the world. The people who see his movies, see the world through his world-view.

What is his world-view? What does the man think?

See: Oliver Stone: US should nationalize oil resources

LONDON – The Gulf of Mexico oil spill shows that the United States should follow the example of South American socialists in nationalizing its energy industry, filmmaker Oliver Stone said Tuesday.

The Academy Award-winning director of "Born on the Fourth of July" and "JFK" said that America's country's natural wealth was too important to be left in private hands, telling journalists in central London that oil and other natural resources "belong to the people."

"This BP oil spill is typical" of what happens when private industry is allowed to draw revenue on what should be a public good, Stone said.

"We shouldn't make this kind of profit on oil or on health or on war or on prisons. All these industries should be public industries."

Stone, 63, is in the British capital to promote his documentary, "South of the Border," which tells the story of firebrand Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his left-wing Latin American allies.

This man makes movies. His movies shape people's understanding of reality. What kind of world will his viewers make for our future?

Politics Is Downstream Of Culture

Bill Whittle's Declaration Entertainment Project



Website Link

Yoram Hazony makes a similar argument. Hazony argues that books and schools are the big drivers in the culture. I think that both Whittle and Hazony are correct. Books and Movies are entertainment venues. Schools shape the people who will wright the books and make the movies that America and the world will read and see.

See: Israel Through European Eyes

What can be done? A good start would be to read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—or to read it again if you read it in college. If you’re used to academic books, it’s an easy read. And if not, it’s a bit of an effort, but worth it. No book will give you a clearer insight into what’s happening to Israel today in the international arena, on the campuses, and even, to some extent, in Israel’s universities.

After that, we have to begin talking about what it takes to establish a new paradigm, or to rebuild an old one that has collapsed. There’s much to be said about this, and it’s not for now. But I’ll leave you with just this thought as a start on it: Paradigm shifts aren’t like an election campaign or a struggle over some aspect of policy, much less a short-term media battle like the one over the Turkish flotilla, which can be resolved one way or another in matter of weeks or months, if not days. Paradigm shifts are unusual in the lives of individuals. And when they happen, they often take years to work themselves out. For this reason, clashes between political paradigms tend to play themselves out over a generation or more. By the same token, the relevant media in which these clashes are played out aren’t the newspapers or television or the internet. By the time we’re reading the newspapers or watching CNN, we’ve already got our paradigm in place—just like the reporters we’re watching, who just keep reporting from within their own set paradigm, over and over again. When it comes to shifts of political paradigm, these take place principally through books, which expose people to an idea at length and in depth; and in schools, where such books are studied and discussed, especially universities. If we are interested in the reconstruction of the paradigm that has served as the foundation for Israel’s existence, that’s where the work is going to have to be done.

See: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas S. Kuhn

HT CC

An Economic Collapse in 2011?

Art Laffer discusses the predictable results of raising taxes.

See: Tax Hikes and the 2011 Economic Collapse

On or about Jan. 1, 2011, federal, state and local tax rates are scheduled to rise quite sharply. President George W. Bush's tax cuts expire on that date, meaning that the highest federal personal income tax rate will go 39.6% from 35%, the highest federal dividend tax rate pops up to 39.6% from 15%, the capital gains tax rate to 20% from 15%, and the estate tax rate to 55% from zero. Lots and lots of other changes will also occur as a result of the sunset provision in the Bush tax cuts.

Tax rates have been and will be raised on income earned from off-shore investments. Payroll taxes are already scheduled to rise in 2013 and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will be digging deeper and deeper into middle-income taxpayers. And there's always the celebrated tax increase on Cadillac health care plans. State and local tax rates are also going up in 2011 as they did in 2010. Tax rate increases next year are everywhere.

Now, if people know tax rates will be higher next year than they are this year, what will those people do this year? They will shift production and income out of next year into this year to the extent possible. As a result, income this year has already been inflated above where it otherwise should be and next year, 2011, income will be lower than it otherwise should be.

We are more broke then we know.

Economics is an exercise in dynamic behaviors. People change their spending, investing and working behaviors when the tax code is changed. They will make decisions with the purpose and intent of keeping as much of their money as possible.

Expect people to behave rationally, even if that means working less because they can keep less of what they earn.

Hat tip: LuciusSeptimius @ Correspondence Committee

Enableing Savagery.

The following is a security-cam video of a savage beating that took place in Seattle a few weeks ago.

Warning. This is brutal.



This is what an emasculated culture devolves into.

The thugs become the De Facto rulers of the city.

The guards will not protect you. The bystanders will do nothing, especially if there are guards their doing nothing. Guards in uniform. Guards looking all the world as if they are there to prevent this kind of savagery from taking place. Guards guarding nothing.

The victim of the attack in the video thought that the guards could protect her.

See: Girl, 3 men charged in tunnel attack

The 15-year-old girl who was beaten and robbed in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel as security personnel watched said she had headed straight for the guards because she thought they would help her.

"I went to the security and told them that these kids were trying to jump me," the girl wrote in a statement to King County sheriff's investigators. "I know that I am about to get jumped and I am hanging around the guards to try and get protection. ... I thought the security guards would defend me."

But the girl was wrong.

The guards were following "policy."

According to the Sheriff's Office and King County Metro, the guards followed policy by not intervening in the Jan. 28 attack. Instead, they alerted transit officials, who summoned police.

The attack has prompted Metro to discuss contract changes with Olympic Security Services, whose guards were in the tunnel during the attack. It also has sparked widespread anger at the guard policy and with the suspects accused of the attack and robbery.

It was policy? Policy to not intervene?

What kind of madness puts such a policy in place?

What kind of madness requires adverse publicity from a video like this being released to make a change to that policy?

Do you believe that if this video had not been released that any change would have been made to their "policy."

Madness.

Audi, Eco-Nazis and the Green Police

Audi fucked-up.

You have to wonder what would posses a German corporation to sponsor an ad like this.



The Green Police?

Fucking Eco-Nazis!

Towards A More Productive And Useful Understanding Of North Korea

Christopher Hitchens reviews B.R. Myers' The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.

Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial "minder" whom I'll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world's most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, he mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he'd heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction. Not for Mr. Chae the charm of the ethnic mosaic, but rather a rigid and unpolluted uniformity.

I was struck at the time by how matter-of-factly he said this, as if he took it for granted that I would find it uncontroversial. And I did briefly wonder whether this form of totalitarianism, too (because nothing is more "total" than racist nationalism), was part of the pitch made to its subjects by the North Korean state.

When Christopher Hitchens is good, he is very good. His review of B.R. Myers' book, flavored with his own personal in person observations of North Korea, make it clear that the oft ignored and shunned little crazy kingdom of North Korea may be far too dangerous to just ignore and shun.

I think I will head on over to the bookstore this weekend.

Hat Tip To FinallyFree at Correspondence Committee

An Example Of How Climate Change Hysteria Hurts Everyone

Soil erosion is a very serious problem. As the world's population increases, the importance of good soil conservation practices increases in pace.

The US had an early attention getting experience with why good soil management is essential. The Great Dust Bowl was impossible to ignore. We learned a lot from it. There is still more that we can learn to help us protect and better manage our soils.

However, confusing soil science with the discredited AGW hysteria will do more to hurt the advancement of good soil management practices than it will do to help it.

See: Britain facing food crisis as world's soil 'vanishes in 60 years

Fertile soil is being lost faster than it can be replenished and will eventually lead to the “topsoil bank” becoming empty, an Australian conference heard.

Chronic soil mismanagement and over farming causing erosion, climate change and increasing populations were to blame for the dramatic global decline in suitable farming soil, scientists said.

[Emphasis is Mine]

Due to climate change?

Bullshit.

Bad farming practices yes. Climate change? Give me a fucking break.

This is the kind of bullshit that discredits science. Every kind of environmental calamity that is discussed, some idiot comes along and claims that "climate change" is the cause or part of the cause.

In this case, climate change is not a factor. Deep tilling and the failure to let a field lay fallow after a season can destroy the soil. Rotating crops and protecting the soil from the wind can do a lot to remedy this very serious problem. Fretting over a non-existent climate crises won't help at all and will actually make the problem worse by distracting people and resources away from things that could actually help.

Blaming soil erosion on climate change? When the "scientist" include that drivel in these kinds of reports, they make a mockery of science, or at the very least, make it appear as if they can't really be taken seriously. If they are including climate change in this kind of report without any real or credible evidence, then how can we trust the other claims that they make in their report?

Soil erosion is a very serious issue. It should be discussed and treated by the scientific and political community as a serious issue. Attempting to tie soil erosion to anthropogenic climate change is dangerous and stupid.

The Secular Religion Of Global Warming

Michael Barone has an amusing article in the Boston Herald.

Some decades hence, I suspect, people will look back and wonder why so many elites were taken in to the point that they advocated devoting trillions of dollars to a cause that was based on flagrant dishonesty.

The secular religion of global warming has all the elements of a religious faith: original sin (we pollute), ritual (must recycle), redemption (renounce economic growth) and the sale of indulgences (carbon offsets).

People in the grip of such a religious frenzy evidently feel justified in lying, concealing good evidence and plucking bad evidence from any flimsy source.

The Global Warmist are on a quest to save the world. Anything that stands in the way of their quest to save the world threatens the world, even it is just data that does not conform to their preconceived notions. For the Global Warmist, the stakes are so high, there is so much at risk, they cannot permit the inconvenient truth to stand in their way.

They believe with a powerful belief. Their Crusade is not yet over. For them, these recent setbacks are minor. They also have many willing allies in the government and in the media that have profited in both power and money from the global warming hysteria of the last three decades. They will give each other succor and rejoin the fray with even more bitterness and hatred for "the evil" that has set them back.

It is incumbent upon us, the enemies of the anti-human luddites of the environmental movements, to heed the ancient old ways of battle. When you have shattered your enemies ranks and knocked your enemy to the ground, when you have winded him, shriven his shield, broken his sword, and splintered his lance, you keep hitting him. Do not stop till he is dead. You can show your enemies mercy only after they have fully and completely surrendered, not before, and even then, you must not be too eager to let the hurts they have caused you to be forgotten.

Fun times.

Hat tip: Kosh'sShadow at Correspondence Committee

Fox News Wins In Trustworthyness.

Reported at Politico: Poll: Fox is most trusted name in news

Fox is the most trusted television news network in the country, according to a new poll out Tuesday.

A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.

Ouch.

That has to sting.

Worse yet, Public Policy Polling (PPP) is a Democrat affiliated polling company.

I have some concerns about the survey because it was a robot-poll, which typically excludes cell phone only households. Cell phone only households are a large and growing minority of eligible respondents. Excluding cell phone only households from a poll of this type can result in some misleading numbers.

PPP is a Democrat affiliated polling company known for its extreme partisanship. These are the same yucks that thought it would be fun to ask "Do you think that George Bush is the Antichrist?" and "Do you think that Barak Obama is the Antichrist?" and then report results that were almost identical as a slam against Republicans. In a survey that acknowledges a +/-3.9% margin of error, a 2 point difference is no difference at all. These are the kind of snotty hacks that give polling a bad name.

Bogus Claims Were Included In The IPCC Report To Advance Political Agendas

More proof that politics trumped science in the UN's IPCC report.

From MailOnline: Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

This is just the tip of the iceberg glacier.

The IPCC report and every other outrageous environmental claim will begin to be rightly challenged. Good science will stand. Politicized science will fail.

The New York Times Exposes A Blogger Suffering From A Self-Inflicted Flame-War

Many of us knew that the New York Times would be publishing a feature article about a certain blogger this month. That his melodramatic flouncing away from “the right” would attract the attention of the New York Times was no surprise. What was surprising was how thorough the New York Times article was. It wasn't the "puff piece" that we had expected that blogger to get.

Johnathon Dee of the New York Times gets much right about how the fracas spun out of control.

It was a kind of orgy of delinking, an intentionally set brush fire meant to clear the psychic area around Johnson and ensure that no one would connect him to anyone else, period, unless he first said it was O.K. No one would define Johnson’s allegiances but Johnson. Of course, much of this was accomplished by the very methods he felt so threatened by: a kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon approach to political rectitude, in which the existence of even a search-engine-generated connection between two people anywhere in the world implied a mutual back-scratching, an ideological partnership. It was unfair and simplistic and petulant, but it also seems to have achieved its goal. Very few people on the right want to be linked with Charles Johnson anymore.

I sure don't. I won't link to him. I don't even like having his or his blog's name mentioned here in these quotes.

The following paragraph is essential to understanding how that place devolved into what it has become. I am very surprised that Johnathon Dee included it. I am grateful that he did.

No one ever said L.G.F., or any blog, had to be about the free exchange of ideas. “It’s his sandbox,” Pamela Geller says simply. “He can do whatever he wants.” Still, if you read L.G.F. today, you will find it hard to miss the paradox that a site whose origins, and whose greatest crisis, were rooted in opposition to totalitarianism now reads at times like a blog version of “Animal Farm.” Johnson seems obsessed with what others think of him, posting much more often than he used to about references to himself elsewhere on the Internet and breaking into comment threads (a recent one was about the relative merits of top- versus front-loaded washing machines) to call commenters’ attention to yet another attack on him that was posted at some other site. On the home page, you can click to see the Top 10 comments of the day, as voted on by registered users; typically, half of those comments will be from Johnson himself. Even longtime commenters have been disappeared for one wrong remark, or one too many, and when it comes to wondering where they went or why, a kind of fearful self-censorship obtains. He has banned readers because he has seen them commenting on other sites of which he does not approve. He is, as he reminds them, always watching. L.G.F. still has more than 34,000 registered users, but the comment threads are dominated by the same two dozen or so names. And a handful of those have been empowered by Johnson sub rosa to watch as well — to delete critical comments and, if necessary, to recommend the offenders for banishment. It is a cult of personality — not that there’s any compelling reason, really, that it or any blog should be presumed to be anything else.

That place got freaky weird.

Cults and abusive spouses threaten their victims with being cast-out. They will tell their victims, and it will be echoed by their enablers, that they would be nothing without their leader/spouse. They are also slowly but then thoroughly isolated from friends and relatives outside the group/family. Even speaking to or associating with casual acquaintances or strangers on the outside is discouraged and sometimes even forbidden.

These are powerful tools of control. As you can see from what Johnathon Dee describes, those tools were evident in their use, even if their named intent was for something else. When these methods start out small and grow in their utilization over time, the victim may not even recognize that they are being manipulated in this way. They become like the frogs sitting in a pan of cool water with the heat set on low.

But . . .

This is the internet . . .

I would never have thought such relationships could be made on the web.

Now I am certain that they can.

I used to think that internet cults were an impossibility.

Now I believe that they are possible and even real.

Tuesday, Massachusetts will elect a new Senator.

So far, Scott Brown, the Republican, looks likely to win in a landslide. A big landslide.

Elected Democrats are predictably freaking out. Well that they should. This race may be a bellwether for the next ten years.

If the establishment Democrat, Martha Coakley, loses big to a Republican in Massachusetts, then no Democrat will feel that their seat is “safe” anywhere. If a Democrat can lose “Ted Kennedy's seat,” then all bets are off on every Democrat “safe” seat.

If Coakley loses, and loses big, watch for a rebellion among elected Democrats who will realize that they could lose their cushy sinecures by being associated too closely with Nancy Pelosi's and Harry Reid's flavor of politics.

The polls are all over the place. There are many reasons for this. The whole polling industry is struggling with some huge changes that they must come to grips with.

The primary problem is cellphones and cellphone only households.

If you would like a first hand anecdotal feel for how big of a problem cellphones present to the polling industry, ask the following question in the next large group that you are in. “How many of you no longer have a land-line phone and only have cellphones in your household?” If your group is made up largely of people under forty years of age, odds are that half to over half of them will be cellphone only households. This is very significant. It is a game changer in the polling business. It is also a number that is very likely to increase over the next ten years. In twenty years, land-line phones may be as anachronistic as Telegraph machines.

There are rules for calling cellphone sample that make it very expensive to work with. Mainly, you cannot use any kind of automated dialing method. If you are knowingly dialing on cellphone sample, you must hand dial the phone numbers.

Robo polls will miss cellphone only respondents. The results of a robo poll are ever more doubtful due to the fact that the robot dialed poll cannot account for the opinions of respondents that live in cellphone only households. (Texting may be a way around this problem. So far as I know, there are no rules against using automated systems to send out text messages to cellphones.[Where there is a will, there is a way - especially if there is money involved.])

When it comes down to the wire in regards to elections, I find that I am much more trustful of the punters then I am of the pollsters.

The punters ask a different question. They do not ask “Who will you vote for?” they ask “Who are you willing to bet good money, your money, on to win?” Its a question of knowledge, not of opinion. Which makes its a very different question. The results can be significantly different and potentially far more accurate.

Predicting elections was once something that the odds-makers dominated. Scientific telephone polling changed the game and allowed telephone pollsters to take that role away from the bookies. Now the game may be changing again, giving the advantage in predicting election outcomes back to the gamblers.

Take a look at Intrade and watch the election numbers as they come in Tuesday. Election Markets may be the way of things to come. Time will tell.

And these are very exciting and interesting times indeed.

Can the New York Times Be Marketed Like Porn?

The New York Times will soon try a strategy that will reduce its readership and relevance, further accelerating its decline.

How?

They will try to charge you to read their articles.

This model does work for online porn. (It is pretty amazing that it does since so much Internet porn is available completely free of charge.)

The New York Times must think that their content will sell as well as porn. I think that they should keep their pants on.

News, for the most part, is not porn.

Most people will just begin to skip links to the NYT and to any other news organization that attempts this online subscription (Porn) model.

Display ads can still be seen in the off the rack "paper" newspapers. When people used to regularly read news printed on paper, display ads were profitable.

Then the Internet happened and print readership plummeted. Click-through ads were then touted and became the de facto norm for online advertising.

Click-through ads are stupid. Think about the long ago days of yore when you actually read a "paper" newspaper. There were ads all over the execrable thing were there not? Did you drop everything when you came across an advertisement about a product or service that interested you, pick up the phone and call or hop in your car to run out and buy it? No? No shit.

What on earth would make anyone think that such a model would then work for news-sites on the Internet?

Display ads in the paper and even the ads on television and radio worked on the concept of impressions. The idea was to use the ads to put the product brand or service brand in your mind for when you were actually ready to buy that type of product or service. The impression concept focused on shaping your opinion of which brand you would buy when you were ready to buy. There was no expectancy of an immediate customer response while you were reading through the newspaper.

While the Internet changed the way the news was delivered to the reader, it did not change the way the reader responded to display advertisements.

Display ads can be profitable online. Keep them simple. Sell them by the old impression model. Human psychology has not changed even if the news delivery medium has.

Leave the click-through ads for the adult content websites.

Another AGW Hysteria Fraud Exposed.

More indications that you have to view Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) claims with a certain amount of skepticism.

From an article titled World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown at Times Online

Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report.

It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

It turns out that it was all just gum-flapping bullshit.

The old peer review process must be revised. No more secret data. No more secret programing. If they “can't” share their data and their sources, they should not be given the time of day.

HT: squatch at Correspondence Committee (See Post #20)

Are we all Refusniks now?

Using soviet era political language to describe those that have refused to “go along” with the “stimulus” plan, the framing continues.

From an MSNBC article

Some refuseniks use terms like “Obama’s filthy, stinking stimulus,” and some have ambitions for higher office, but they insist their actions to reject the money are motivated by a sense of fiscal responsibility, not partisan politics.

. . . and the loudspeakers blare "Oceania has always been at war with EastAsia."

A Glossary Of Environmentalist Newspeak

The BBC has very helpfully provided a short glossary of Environmental Newspeak.

Here are three for your amusement.

Carbon footprint The amount of carbon emitted by an individual or organisation in a given period of time, or the amount of carbon emitted during the manufacture of a product.

Carbon intensity A unit of measure. The amount of carbon emitted by a country per unit of Gross Domestic Product.

Carbon leakage A term used to refer to the problem whereby industry relocates to countries where emission regimes are weaker, or non-existent.

Its kind of like Pirate Jargon - a code language of thieves and scum.

The American Public “Getting Reamed.”

The Politico has a short piece about the 1,990 + page monstrosity that house Democrats are going to try to cram down our throats.

They cite a section as a caution to those that will clammer for it to be read before it is voted on.

“(a) Outpatient Hospitals – (1) In General – Section 1833(t)(3)(C)(iv) of the Social Security Act (42 U.S.C. 1395(t)(3)(C)(iv)) is amended – (A) in the first sentence – (i) by inserting “(which is subject to the productivity adjustment described in subclause (II) of such section)” after “1886(b)(3)(B)(iii); and (ii) by inserting “(but not below 0)” after “reduced”; and (B) in the second sentence, by inserting “and which is subject, beginning with 2010 to the productivity adjustment described in section 1886(b)(3)(B)(iii)(II)”.

Um . . .

Yah. . .

I got that.

A sane person, in the everyday life that you and I live in, would look at that pile of gobblygook and rightfully conclude that the person spewing it was trying to get one over on us.

For the Democrats in Washington D.C., it is how they hide what they are going to do to us.

At the end of the article, the Politico closes with the following paragraph.

But Republican Rep. Joe Barton, who is Texan, said the bill is “about four reams of paper” that add up to the American public “getting reamed.”

Thats Democrats just doing what they do best Joe.

Rationed Health Care is going to be just to die for.