How Government Has Destroyed Science

Perfect:

Art Robinson is a rare man. He’s transcended and laid bare a creeping failure in the infrastructure of science over the past 50 years. He describes how government has usurped control of the quest for knowledge from private industry and individuals.

At the end of the day, what does being a scientist mean if there is nothing more to it than a certificate? Where is the code of conduct? Where are the professional associations standing up and decrying those who breach fundamental principles? What sense of duty and honor is left in science when high-ranking scientists can make dishonest statements, yet keep their jobs and reputations?

I was struck with Art’s description of the true scientist as someone who always speaks the truth as verified, admits the weaknesses in his statement, and treats the pursuit of knowlege as a calling, not as just another 9-to-5 job.

The 10 page paper How Government Corrupts Science is worth reading in full.

Below are some select parts that especially struck a chord with me.

... more at Jo Nova.

Dip - lomat - in - Chief

Great move Obots, insult Canada then ask for help. The Chicago way clearly doesn't involve an finesse:

What a great idea! Let’s convince Canada to have its soldiers die on the Af-Pak theater front by insulting them at their own conference. After all, the troops that Sweden, Finland, and Iceland have in Afghanistan — not to mention those of “indigenous groups” — are so much more important strategically to the US and its mission in Afghanistan. While Canada merely contributes almost 3,000 combat troops, Sweden has 500 non-combat personnel in Af-Pak, while Finland has 95. Iceland has … four.
Canada, not surprisingly, responded by politely telling Hillary Clinton to pound sand. The extension of the mission in Afghanistan is politically untenable anyway, but Barack Obama’s snub of Stephen Harper last December certainly didn’t help matters. Neither does a pointless rebuke at a conference hosted by Ottawa.
So far in this administration, we’ve managed to alienate the UK, Israel, and now Canada, while talking nicely towards Iran and North Korea with no results to show for it. That, apparently, is “smart power.”

... the details.

A New German Beer

Fucking Hell:

The EU's trademarks authority has permitted a German firm to brew beer and produce clothing under the name "Fucking Hell". It may be an expletive in English, but in German it could refer to a light ale -- Hell -- from the Austrian town of Fucking. Whether it will be brewed there is another question.

The European Union trademarks authority has permitted a German firm to register the brand name "Fucking Hell" for a new beer, much to the irritation of the Austrian village of Fucking.

In English, the term "Fucking Hell" is just an expletive used to express irritation or surprise. In German, it could refer to a light ale from Fucking in Upper Austria, because "Hell" is a term for light ale in southern Germany and Austria.

The problem is that Fucking has no brewery, and the town's mayor, Franz Meindl, is not aware of any plans to build one there, Austrian public broadcaster ORF reported on its Web site.

The Trade Marks and Designs Registration Office of the European Union said in a statement that it had rejected a complaint that the trade mark "Fucking Hell" was upsetting, accusatory and derogatory.

"The word combination claimed contains no semantic indication that could refer to a certain person or group of persons. Nor does it incite a particular act. It cannot even be understood as an instruction that the reader should go to hell," the Office said in its statement.

Grade Schoolers Act Out Scarface Murder

Death By Global Warming

There ain't no loon, like a Global Warming loon:

Famed global warming activist James Schneider and a journalist friend were both found frozen to death on Saturday, about 90 miles from South Pole Station, by the pilot of a ski plane practicing emergency evacuation procedures.

"I couldn't believe what I was seeing", recounted the pilot, Jimmy Dolittle. "There were two snowmobiles with cargo sleds, a tent, and a bright orange rope that had been laid out on the ice, forming the words, 'HELP-COLD'".

One friend of Prof. Schneider told ecoEnquirer that he had been planning a trip to an ice sheet to film the devastation brought on by global warming. His wife, Linda, said that she had heard him discussing the trip with his environmental activist friends, but she assumed that he was talking about the Greenland ice sheet, a much smaller ice sheet than Antarctica.

"He kept talking about when they 'get down to chili', and I thought they were talking about the order in which they would consume their food supplies", Mrs. Schneider recounted. "I had no idea they were talking about Chile, the country from which you usually fly or sail in order to reach Antarctica".

Apparently, while all of Prof. Schneider's friends were assuming that the July trek would be to Greenland, during Northern Hemisphere summer, his plans were actually to snowmobile to the South Pole - which, in July, is in the dead of winter.

Mr. Dolittle related how some people do not realize that, even if there has been warming in Antarctica, the average temperature at the South Pole in July still runs about 70 degrees F below zero. "Some people think that July is warm everywhere on Earth."

That Crazy Nuge

Germany Calling the Shots

... there is a lesson to be learned from Germany; He who runs a strong financial house ends up giving orders to those who run a weak financial house:

The message from last week’s European Union summit: there is no more pretence.

If EU nations want to sustain a currency union with Germany, they have to implement economic and budgetary changes that bring their performance into alignment with Germany, according to Marc Ostwald, strategist at Monument Securities.

Ostwald, who is the guest host of “Squawk Box Europe” Monday, said the commitment of support for Greece coming out of Brussels at the tail end of last week shows the illusion of economic uniformity within the union.

... keep reading.

Previous

Why Environmentalists Should Reject Warmism

From EUR:

John Michael Wallace, professor and former chairman of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington, writes of the growing and serious environmental crisis in India.

We have allowed, he says, the IPCC assessment reports to become the dominant vehicle for representing the views of the scientific community on a widening range of environmental issues.

In the IPCC terminology, he adds, "symptoms of environmental degradation, regardless of their cause, are labelled as impacts of climate change, and the societal response to them is framed in terms of mitigating and adapting to climate change."

Thus, while scientists still write papers and speak to the media about environmental concerns outside of the purview of the IPCC, Wallace tells us that, "with so much of the world's attention riveted on climate change there is a lack of institutional infrastructure for calling attention to other issues."

... keep reading.

Iraq's Great Test

With virutally no American support, Iraqis had more or less peaceful elections. The surprise, however, is that secular forces gained hugely over the last election ... so now we'll find out whether Iraqis can cling to peace and fend off the inevitable forces from Iran and Syria who loath democracy in the Middle East. One must also keep in mind the wild card ... Kurdistan.

Long War Journal has more:

It was an upset win: Ayad Allawi’s slate beat out Nouri al Maliki’s by two seats. As recently as a month ago, very few would have predicted such an outcome.

The immediate consequence of such an upset is to deny Maliki the certain opportunity to gain a second term as prime minister. There are many reasons for this upset, some of which will be touched on below. It is clear that prior to the election, Maliki had alienated too many political players—notably the Kurds and his former Shia allies in the United Iraqi Alliance—by his heavy-handed tendencies, which attempted to bring too many powers under his control and that of the Da’awa Party which he heads. His actions had alerted the Iraqi political class that another term would mean a more centralized and entrenched government in which Maliki was prepared to go his own way, without deferring to consensus and deal-making among disparate groups.

Maliki’s best chance at forming a government was to attain the highest number of seats: an outcome that would have given him the legitimacy to demand the right to form a new cabinet based on popular will. By Articles 54, 55, 70, and 74 of Iraq’s constitution, the current president of the republic calls the new parliament into session, which then proceeds to elect a speaker and two deputies, who orchestrate the election of a new president by a two-thirds majority. The new president then has 15 days to task “the largest parliamentary bloc” to form a government. Such a government must then pass a simple majority vote within 30 days of the presidential directive.

... keep reading.

Please Stay

Afghans plead with the Dutch:

We Elders, Maleks and Commanders of tribes from the districts Tarin Kowt, Chora, Dehra Wood and Gizab in Uruzgan with firm faith in God Almighty and believing in the sacred religion of Islam appeal on behalf of the people of Uruzgan to the representatives of the Dutch people.

Cause of our appeal is the discussion of the Netherlands for extending the military contribution to ISAF Mission in Afghanistan.

We fear that a withdrawal of Dutch soldiers from Uruzgan lasting significant negative consequences for until now the very successful process of social and economic development of the Province of Uruzgan.

Roads, bridges, schools, health centre and administration building have been built and restored. Programs for drinking water supply, irrigation, water reservoirs and electricity supply were realized. Many development programs for farmers and for improving family income have been implemented. 70% of families in Uruzgan have directly benefited from the Dutch economic aid to developing Uruzgan. Visible consequence of agricultural support is for example the significant decline in poppy cultivation in Uruzgan.

The economic and social progress would not have been achieved without military protection of the environment by the Dutch PRT. Afghan security forces are not yet capable for ensuring security and stability in Uruzgan alone by themselves. Therefore the civilian targets in Uruzgan cannot be accomplished in the next years without military security provided by the coalition of Netherlands, USA, Australians, ANA and ANP. However, without attaining civilian targets, there will be no security in Uruzgan. In the security network of Uruzgan the Netherlands are essential for Uruzgan because the Dutch ISAF Contingent have developed a strong relation of trust to the population of Uruzgan and without such a relation creating sustain security is not possible in Afghanistan.

... keep reading.

Meanwhile in Canada ... click.

Dancing in the Light

image: The dance was entirely spontaneous…

It's the Light that Saves Us

... not the dark:

Earth Hour starts tonight at 8:30 p.m. EST. The event, which began in 2007, calls for everyone in the world to turn off their electric lights until 9:30 p.m., to raise awareness of climate change.

The Earth Hour website claims that last year, “Hundreds of millions of people in more than 4,000 cities and towns across 88 countries switched off their lights for one hour, creating a visual mandate for action on climate change.” The website also offers this frightening warning: “New economic modelling indicates the world has just five years to initiate a low carbon industrial revolution before runaway climate change becomes almost inevitable.”

But Earth Hour is not designed to be scientific, rational, or even constructive. It is designed to inspire fear and assuage guilt.

Feel-good activities such as Earth Hour primarily appeal to three constituencies: the young, the idealistic and those who would prey on their ignorance. The latter category includes politicians, climate change activists and people with other agendas, specifically anti-capitalist, anti-growth and anti-prosperity.

... keep reading the National Post.

Human Achievement Hour

image: North and South Korea at night ... where North Korea is every green loon's wet dream, with humanity cowering in the cold and the dark.

A reminder to all realists, that tonight is Human Achievement Hour ... or as we like to call it at Celestial Junk ... WWF Hour, where we honour our favourite green exploitive, money grubbing, dishonest, greed-filled, capitalist organization ... the WWF.

At our home, it'll be lights on for liberty and life.

There Ain't No Phony

... like a Progressive spewing high dudgeon and preening in full strut:

I’m still on semi-vacation, but the Left never takes a break from falsely accusing the Right of fomenting hatred and violence through political speech. The MSM never takes a break from whitewashing leftist intolerance, death threats, and extremism — and engaging in selective reporting (or rather, non-reporting) of the long history of leftists’ manufacturing of hatred for political gain. My syndicated column fills in the missing context. In related developments, Glenn Reynolds takes a look at a new dubious report of rock-throwing. Erick Erickson shreds Josh Marshall’s specious incitement accusations. Patterico reports on the latest Twitter death threats against the Palin family. (Here’s a reminder about the one a Toronto Star columnist posted about me, which was laughed off by her editor and ignored by her colleagues). Here’s Mary Katharine Ham’s reminder that 7 of the 10 violent incidents during the summer town hall protests were brought to you by Obama-bots and union thugs. And in case you need a quick refresher on the routine liberal ugliness that will never be decried by the civility police, see here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here here. For starters. See also: Unhinged.

... much more and the discussion @ SDA.

WWF Hour

At Celestial Junk, we will be turning on the lights, driving around town, and enjoying modern technology ... and we'll be doing all to honour our favorite capitalists:

The WWF

Job - Creator - in - Chief

Creating jobs, one tax at a time:

AT&T said Friday it will take a non-cash charge of about $1 billion for the current quarter in anticipation of costs resulting from the health care reform measure signed into law this week by President Obama.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the telecommunications provider said the charge is related to a part of the law that eliminates tax deductions for Medicare prescription drug subsidies.

When the Medicare prescription drug program was passed in 2003, it included a provision granting employers a subsidy of 28%, or up to $1,330, per retiree for prescription drug costs.

Even though the federal subsidies were already tax free, employers could still write them off on their income taxes, in addition to writing off their own contribution. The new law, signed by Obama on Tuesday, maintains the subsidy as a tax-free incentive to employers, but prohibits them from taking it as a deduction.

Of course it's all part of the master plan ... make the system so dysfunctional it collapses into chaos, then offer the grand fix-all ... total government control.

There Ain't No Loon

... like a leftist Loon:

A group of professors in Saskatchewan are criticizing a scholarship that's being offered to the children of fallen Canadian soldiers, calling it a "glorification of Canadian imperialism in Afghanistan."

Sixteen University of Regina professors have drafted an open letter to school president Vianne Timmons, stating their concerns.

"It's about associating heroism with the military intervention of Afghanistan," said Jeffrey Webber, a political-science professor at the school.

"We think it's aligning a public university — without any consultation with its students or staff, or the broader community — with support for this war."

The program, called Project Hero, provides financial aid for children of Canadian Forces personnel who die while serving in an active mission.

Individual universities establish the terms and conditions for the scholarship, including value, duration and application process.

More @ NTR

Go West Young Man

Some clearly are:

Saskatchewan grew by 15,760 people last year, with more than half of that number coming to the province from outside Canada, Statistics Canada says.

This is the fastest growth rate in the province since the boom years just before the Great Depression.

According to the latest population report released by the federal agency on Thursday, there were a record 1,038,018 people living in Saskatchewan on January 1, 2010.

The Saskatchewan government said the increase over the past two years, 30,511, was the fastest rate of growth for any two-year period since 1929 to 1931.

Saskatchewan's 2009 population boost included 8,571 from net international migration. There were also 4,509 more births than deaths and a net interprovincial migration of 2,680.

Eighty per cent of new arrivals from other provinces came from Ontario.

Saskatchewan's growth rate was 0.29 per cent last year, higher than any other province except B.C., which grew by 0.32 per cent last year.

Galloway Versus Coulter

From Glavin:

As followers of these creepy circus-midway acts will know by now, the University of Ottawa has canceled [or not] a performance by the freakish Yankee harridan Ann Coulter on the dubious ground that some sort of security threat [or not] had arisen from the presence of a herd of people who clearly spend too much time watching Fox News without their smelling salts close at hand.

Insufficiently noticed in the ruckus was the grandstanding opportunity to which Olivia Chow (NDP Toronto-Spadina) rushed in the House of Commons, only to make a bigger fool of herself for free and by accident than Coulter likes to make of herself on purpose and for money.

Mr. Speaker, once again the government is showing its hypocrisy. A year after banning anti-war MP George Galloway from entering Canada, the minister of censorship has no problem with letting a pro-war Conservative come and preach hate.

George Galloway is not an "anti-war" MP, and he was not banned from entering Canada. Back in the days before such terms became too indelicate and blush-making for the sort of people who constitute Olivia Chow's activist base, we would have called Galloway a fascist thug, or perhaps a Mosleyite demagogue. "Anti-war" is not the compound adjective that would have come immediately to mind, at any rate.

... keep reading.

The Greatest Terrorist

Go Sarah

I can think of no finer a way for SP to make a fortune ...not bad for a so-called bubble-head:

No, Palin was not about to create a reality show that would have endorsed every potshot her critics aimed at her through her family in 2008 and afterward. In fact, this is only a “reality” show in the sense that documentaries are “reality movies,” Michael Moore’s entries notwithstanding. Travelogues have a long and worthy history on television, and Discovery has some of the best, although the National Geographic channel has more claim to the market.

Will the Palin travelogue of Alaska be worth the reported asking price of $1 million per episode, assuming the show gets that price? Probably. Discovery will gain some attention for the sheer novelty of having a former national candidate conduct a tour of her home state. Most Americans are unfamiliar with Alaska, and such a show would tend to close a cultural gap as well as a geographic one. I’d bet that Discovery is eyeing the potential DVD sales, too.

Steering Markets

... or setting them free?

Freedom to Speak is a Progressive Concept

... or so they say:

Think of Ezra's and my appearance in the House of Commons, and then imagine the scene when Miss Coulter testifies. So the threat is an empty one and M Houle seems to be being - oh, what's the "respectful and civil" way of putting it? - a posturing wanker.

This is the pitiful state one of the oldest free societies on the planet has been reduced to, and this is why our free speech campaign matters - because those who preside over what should be arenas of honest debate and open inquiry instead wish to imprison public discourse within ever narrower bounds - and in this case aren't above threatening legal action against those who dissent from the orthodoxies. Lots of Americans loathe Ann Coulter but it takes a Canadian like François Houle to criminalize her. The strictures he attempts to place around her, despite his appeal to "Canadian law", are at odds with the eight centuries of Canada's legal inheritance. Canadians should point that out to him politely, and explain that, although he lives high off the hog courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer, he does not speak for them.

... and more:

My own perspective on the events of the evening is fairly simple. While Ann Coulter says stupid things in a stupid way – in a way that plays to the worst and most canting instincts of our modern discourse – she still has a right to say ‘em. If she’s been invited to speak, and the university is fine with giving her a room in which to do it, that’s all there is to it. Those protesting are also well within their rights, though, so long as they protest before, after, or outside. Attempting to disrupt her speech is stupid; actually shouting it down, blocking the entrances, or pulling fire alarms is insane.

The freedom of speech we enjoy means that Coulter gets to say her piece, and we get to respond – to respond, mind you, not pre-empt – in whatever necessary manner. That this was utterly prevented from happening is what enrages me the most. I – and hundreds of other people there – would have been happy to confront or challenge her in the Q&A session that was to follow, but now that will never happen.

Nobody was obliged to listen to her speech; it was held in the evening, in a small venue, in a substantially out-of-the-way building on campus. You had to voluntarily go there. I do not think that the accusation that she appreciably incites violence is strong enough to warrant pre-emptively banning her, and – what’s more – I entirely resent that a bunch of protesters got to decide whether or not I’m allowed to hear what she had to say.

I’ll note in closing, though, that there was one thing that both impressed and intrigued me – mostly because of its actual nature, but also because of how unusual it was. In the case of Seamus Wolfe, and the people arguing with the burly Coulter supporter, and indeed in other disputes I saw, there was a whole-hearted willingness on the part of the anti-Coulter folks to declare that the mere fact of speech does not necessarily validate its content. What matters is what’s being said, not that it’s being said at all; there is value, and that value inheres in the substance rather than the form. This is so utterly at odds with the general relativism to which I’ve become used among my contemporaries that I’m sort of at a loss to account for it. I hope the people who have said such things will follow this way of thinking to even more glorious conclusions. It could happen.

In Honour of the Obamacare Battle

The best worst fight scene ever ... ha ... ahhhh ... yaaa !




Bert, in the comments, counters with this:

What a Difference a Day Makes

... or, Slip Sliding Away:

Sometimes you do live to see it. In my book America Alone, I point out that, to a five-year-old boy waving his flag as Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession marched down the Mall in 1897, it would have been inconceivable that by the time of his 80th birthday the greatest empire the world had ever known would have shriveled to an economically moribund strike-bound socialist slough of despond, one in which (stop me if this sounds familiar) the government ran the hospitals, the automobile industry, and much of the housing stock, and, partly as a consequence thereof, had permanent high unemployment and confiscatory tax rates that drove its best talents to seek refuge abroad.

A number of readers, disputing the relevance of this comparison, sent me mocking letters pointing out, for example, Britain’s balance of payments and other deteriorating economic indicators from the early 20th century on. True. Great powers do not decline for identical reasons and one would not expect Britain’s imperial overstretch to lead to the same consequences as America’s imperial understretch. Nonetheless, my correspondents are perhaps too sophisticated and nuanced to grasp the somewhat more basic point I was making. Perched on his uncle’s shoulders that day was a young lad who grew up to become the historian Arnold Toynbee. He recalled the mood of Her Majesty’s jubilee as follows: “There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.” The end of history, 1897 version.

[...]

Is America set for decline? It’s been a grand run. The country’s been the leading economic power since it overtook Britain in the 1880s. That’s impressive. Nevertheless, over the course of that century and a quarter, Detroit went from the world’s industrial powerhouse to an urban wasteland, and the once-golden state of California atrophied into a land of government run by the government for the government. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and sclerosis to California become the basis for the nation at large? Strictly on the numbers, the United States is in the express lane to Declinistan: unsustainable entitlements, the remorseless governmentalization of the economy and individual liberty, and a centralization of power that will cripple a nation of this size. Decline is the way to bet. But what will ensure it is if the American people accept decline as a price worth paying for European social democracy.

Real Scientists Mocking Climate Scientists

Here's a delicious rant by Czech physicist Lubos. Be sure to read the comments as well. The whole thing is about the standards in hard science, compared to the standards in climate soft science ... and there's tons of hyperbole to give the read colour :)

You know, it's very unlikely for the evidence to "naturally" give you a 2-3 sigma evidence for an effect. Why? The "signal to noise ratio" is a priori distributed over several orders of magnitude - imagine the base-10 logarithm of the ratio is uniformly distributed between -3 and +3 - and for the ratio to be between 2 and 3 sigma, the logarithm has to be between 0.30 and 0.48. The width is just 0.18. If the a priori total span of the ratio were 6 orders of magnitude, the probability that the ratio leads to a 2-3 sigma evidence is just 0.18/6 = 3%. But papers claiming such 2-3 sigma findings are omnipresent - most of them must be wrong. It's much more likely for the evidence to show more than 5-sigma evidence than to be stuck between 2 and 3 sigmas. Also, we know why there are so many papers with wrong 2-3 sigma statements: people just cheat to get evidence for claims that they like (and that are mostly wrong, which is why they're so exciting).

See a nice reaction by Calabi, a physicist who got to Tamino's blog and defended 3-sigma and ideally 5-sigma results. Although Calabi, whoever (s)he actually is (Eugenio Calabi is 87, and a mathematician), may disagree with me in other contexts, be sure that there can't be any disagreement here. So Tamino is understandably as insulted by Calabi's comments as he is insulted by mine. ;-) So we may learn that the scientific standards as presented by Calabi are arrogant, parochial, and idiocy. :-)

... as an aside, I wonder if Lubos is part of the climate jihad nexus of evil.

It's a Nexus of Sceptic Evil

“A fascinating new study commissioned by Oxfam and produced by digital mapping agency Profero has shed new insights into the way climate sceptics’ networks operate. The study’s conclusions, as yet unpublished but seen by Left Foot Forward, were presented to a closed meeting of campaigners on Wednesday night.

Profero’s study analysed online coverage of the “Climategate” debacle that broke last November, tracking its progress from fringe blogs to mainstream media outlets over the ensuing weeks and months.”

[...]

Stuart Conway, the study’s co-author, declared simply that “there are no progressive networks” – just hubs of activity here and there, lacking interconnection.

Oh My !

The Squishy Conservative

Geraghty:

I get the feeling that I’m a little more tolerant of those often derided as “RINOs” than your average guy on the right, but a lot of my easygoing acceptance is directly proportional to the political character of the district or state that they represent. For example, I’m just not convinced that Maine will elect a Republican more consistently conservative than Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins. I knew Scott Brown was going to leave some of us disappointed from time to time. I know Mike Castle’s going to frustrate me if he becomes a senator, but he’s probably as good as it’s going to get out of Delaware.

But in the end, even the squishiest Republican candidate chooses to be a Republican, with all of its attendant inherent hostility from much of the mainstream press, demonization by Hollywood, reflexive accusations of racism, etc. That suggests at least a little spine, or at least a certain willingness to espouse a view because of some deeply held principle independent of public opinion.

I'm not sure I agree ... especially since most squishy conservatives tend to be pathetic communicators and couldn't convince a starving man to take food ... but the point is well taken that some regions would never elect a strong conservative voice, no matter the communicating skills and political machine that conservative may have; or would they?

Trading National Security for Waiting Lists

Steyn:

Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it's hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be "insurers" in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that's clear we'll be on the fast track to Obama's desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.

If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It's a huge transformative event in Americans' view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Their bet is that it can't be undone, and that over time, as I've been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there's plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.

More prosaically, it's also unaffordable. That's why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it's less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we'll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America's enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.

Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side . . .

That's why every single "progressive" initiative does one or more of the following:

1. Expands government bureaucracy
2. Expands NGOs
3. Expands unionization
4. Expands the number of citizens dependent on government largesse

With each "expansion" comes a little more loss of freedom, through regulation. With each expansion, comes ever more transfer of funds from the productive to the parasite. With each expansion comes more power for the bureaucrat, and less for "the people". With each expansion, comes a flood of progressive-voting tapeworms.

Previous Steyn.

Deniers on a Rampage

... Celestial Junk; A Rampage Blog

The Real Cost of Obamacare

The Real Afghanistan Scandal

What a pathetic small minded country we have become ... or rather; has there ever been a more conniving, impotent, "small", bunch of politicians ruling over us ... from the phony in-name-only conservatives to the endlessly whining left, it would be much better were our national animals the weasel and the tapeworm:

As you might imagine by its name, the House of Commons Special Committee on Afghanistan is supposed to provide advice to the House of Commons on Canada's role in Afghanistan. But there is a problem. The MPs who dominate the committee say the committee's job is actually not to provide advice to the House of Commons on the pressing matter of Canada's role in Afghanistan.

I am not trying to be funny.

The committee has 12 members drawn equally from government and opposition benches, which is one reason why it's gotten nowhere since it was established in March 2008. The committee was handed a specific mandate to travel to Afghanistan and to neighbouring countries and to issue frequent recommendations on how Canada is doing and what Canada could do better.

The committee has done none of these things.

... keep reading Glavin.

Behind Every Green NGO

... is a billion dollar cash-cow:

The WWF and other green campaign groups talking up the destruction of the Amazon rainforests are among those who stand to make billions of dollars from the scare. This "green gold-rush" involves taking control of huge tracts of rainforest supposedly to stop them being chopped down, and selling carbon credits gained from carbon dioxide emissions they claim will be "saved".

Backed by a $30 million grant from the World Bank, the WWF has already partnered in a pilot scheme to manage 20 million acres in Brazil. If their plans get the go-ahead in Mexico at the end of the year, the forests will be worth over $60 billion in "carbon credits", paid for by consumers in "rich" countries through their electricity bills and in increased prices for goods and services.

The prospect of a billion-dollar windfall explains the sharp reaction to the "Amazongate" scandal, in which the IPCC falsely claimed that up to 40 percent of the rainforest could be at risk from even a slight drop in rainfall.

Here, the IPCC was caught out again making unsubstantiated claims based on a WWF report. But unlike the "Glaciergate" affair where its claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was conceded to be an "error", the IPCC stood firm on its Amazon claim, stating that the assertion was "correct". What makes the difference is that there is no serious money locked into melting glaciers. Amazonian trees, however, are potentially worth billions.

In standing its ground, the IPCC was strongly supported by the WWF, and by Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist from the US Woods Hole Research Centre. Relying on an assiduously fostered reputation as a leading expert on the effects of climate change in the Amazon rainforests, Nepstad – who works closely with the WWF - posted on the Centre's website a personal statement endorsing "the correctness of the IPCC's statement". Bizarrely, his own research failed in any way to substantiate the claim.

Be sure to read the whole thing; and while you do, remember that the WWF is the driving force behind Make a Greenie Rich Earth Hour.

SocialistProgressive Code Words

... have fun with the code book:

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou implicitly criticised Germany on Saturday for opposing efforts to help his country out of its fiscal crisis, warning they risked destabilising the EU.

"We have struggled for years to build a strong Europe, economically stable and with social solidarity," Papandreou said at a meeting of the national council of his socialist PASOK party.

But "many forces forget the political importance of the euro, and are withdrawing the substance of the political vision of the European project, which is a joint effort to develop our economy in a calm and stable climate," he added.

Deemocracy ...

... the progressive wet dream:

One can make arguments for permitting porn and for banning porn, but there isn’t a lot to be said for the bureaucratization of porn. Hard to believe there will be dull, bespoke California bureaucrats looking forward to early retirement on gold-plated pensions who’ll be getting home, sinking into the La-Z-Boy and complaining to the missus about a tough day at the office working on the permits for Debbie Does the Fresno OSHA Office.

[...]

Meanwhile, Obamacare will result in the creation of at least 16,500 new jobs. Doctors? Nurses? Ha! Dream on, suckers. That’s 16,500 new IRS agents, who’ll be needed to check whether you — yes, you, Mr. and Mrs. Hopendope of 27 Hopeychangey Gardens — are in compliance with the 15 tax increases and dozens of new federal mandates the Deemocrats are about to “deem” into existence. This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II — and that’s change you can believe in. This is what “health” “care” “reform” boils down to: fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. And, when you walk into the Health Care Enforcement Division of the IRS, the staffing levels will make Madelyne Hernandez’s group-sex scene look like an Equity-minimum one-man play off-off-off Broadway.

[...]

Obama is government, and government is Obama. That’s all he knows and all he’s ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who’s never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who’ve demonized (deemonized?) such grubby activities.

Steyn has it right; behind every single progressive scheme (without exception) there is an expanded bureaucracy, expanded unionism, and expanded NGOs. Progressives never ... I repeat never ... go on a diet.

A Global Warming Hot Spot

Well, not quite ... but hot spot nevertheless:

The Mother of All Bubbles

How smart is the Canadian deficit going to look if THIS bubble bursts?

Just asking?

China is in the midst of “the greatest bubble in history,” said James Rickards, former general counsel of hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management LP.

The Chinese central bank’s balance sheet resembles that of a hedge fund buying dollars and short-selling the yuan, said Rickards, now the senior managing director for market intelligence at McLean, Virginia-based consulting firm Omnis Inc.

“As I see it, it is the greatest bubble in history with the most massive misallocation of wealth,” Rickards said at the Asset Allocation Summit Asia 2010 organized by Terrapinn Pte in Hong Kong yesterday. China “is a bubble waiting to burst.”

[...]

The World Bank indicated today that China should raise interest rates to help contain the risk of a property bubble and allow a stronger yuan to help damp inflation expectations. The nation’s “massive monetary stimulus” risks triggering large asset-price increases, a housing bubble, and bad debts from the financing of local-government projects, Washington-based World Bank said in a quarterly report on China released in Beijing.

Keep in mind that China is a significant consumer of Canadian resources, keeping Canadian resource companies flush with cash. Also, keep in mind that nearly 40% of all NYSE companies do signifant business in Asia.

Double dip anyone?

Constitutional Law Professor-in-Chief

" We shouldn't, he added, concern ourselves with "the procedural issues."

... unbelievable when coming from the lips of a constitutional law professor. There's more guano to this man than anyone dare imagine.

The discussion.

Play Obamacare: Short the Market

Video: When Reagan and Lenin agree, you know there might be something to the hyperbole ... click.

Reagan
Lenin

My Favorite Historian: An Interview

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

The Russians are Coming

By the time Obama is done, his name will be the most hated in America:

The Obama administration is poised to ban offshore oil drilling on the outer continental shelf until 2012 or beyond. Meanwhile, Russia is making a bold strategic leap to begin drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. While the United States attempts to shift gears to alternative fuels to battle the purported evils of carbon emissions, Russia will erect oil derricks off the Cuban coast.

Offshore oil production makes economic sense. It creates jobs and helps fulfill America's vast energy needs. It contributes to the gross domestic product and does not increase the trade deficit. Higher oil supply helps keep a lid on rising prices, and greater American production gives the United States more influence over the global market.

... more on the Russians.

The Dinosaur Powered Electric Car

The Leaf:

You can tell that civilisation as we know it is coming to an end when they call a car "The Leaf", the new Nissan electric fantasy which is going to cost the British taxpayer £20.7 million in grants, topped up with a soft loan from the European Investment Bank of £197.3 million.

We are told that this thing will have an average range of 100 miles and a top speed of 90mph, although the egregious hacks writing this stuff forget to tell us that it is one or the other – not both. They don't tell either that you need a calendar rather than a speedometer to gauge the acceleration.

Nor, of course, do they tell you that, in terms of net efficiency, the electric car performs far less well than a petrol-driven motor, by the time you have taken into account the power station and transmission losses, to say nothing of the conversion losses in charging the batteries.

And then, since about 40 percent of our electricity comes from coal, and will do so until it is replaced by gas generation, the odds are that this wonderful "green" car will be driven by fossil fuels, only very inefficiently at one stage removed.

Shocking: Climate Change Disrupting US Government

In a stunning release, the US government confirms that climate change is now reducing its ability to be effective:

Climate change is already having “pervasive, wide-ranging” effects on “nearly every aspect of our society,” a task force representing more than 20 federal agencies reported Tuesday.

“These impacts will influence how and where we live and work as well as our cultures, health and environment,” the report states. “It is therefore imperative to take action now to adapt to a changing climate.”

Indeed, climate change has begun to affect the ability of government agencies to fulfill their missions, reports the White House Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.

The group is led by the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It is made up of representatives from more than 20 federal agencies, departments and offices, including the Department of Commerce, the National Intelligence Council, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Pentagon. That’s diverse – and it’s definitive.

As in all things progressive, the only remedy to the horrors described will likely be an increase in funding.

How Cooling is Warming

The Deeper we delve into the chicanery of climate science, the more guano seems to float to the surface. In recent days serious questions are being asked about the significant global cooling that took place in the 1970 ... the significant cooling that was so severe the northern hemisphere actually warmed.

First, there is the old record:

Human emissions of carbon dioxide began a sharp rise from 1945. But, temperatures, it seems, may have plummeted over half the globe during the next few decades. Just how large or how insignificant was that decline?

Frank Lansner has found an historical graph of northern hemisphere temperatures from the mid 70’s, and it shows a serious decline in temperatures from 1940 to 1975. It’s a decline so large that it wipes out the gains made in the first half of the century, and brings temperatures right back to what they were circa 1910. The graph was not peer reviewed, but presumably it was based on the best information available at the time. In any case, if all the global records are not available to check, it’s impossible to know how accurate or not this graph is. The decline apparently recorded was a whopping 0.5°C.

But, three decades later, by the time Brohan and the CRU graphed temperatures in 2006 from the same old time period, the data had been adjusted (surprise), so that what was a fall of 0.5°C had become just a drop of 0.15°C. Seventy percent of the cooling was gone.

It's interesting, that once one stirs the pot, more lumps pop to the surface:

Frank Lansner has done some excellent follow-up on the missing “decline” in temperatures from 1940 to 1975, and things get even more interesting. Recall that the original “hide the decline” statement comes from the ClimateGate emails and refers to “hiding” the tree ring data that shows a decline in temperatures after 1960. It’s known as the “divergence problem” because tree rings diverge from the measured temperatures. But Frank shows that the peer reviewed data supports the original graphs and that measured temperature did decline from 1960 onwards, sharply. But in the GISS version of that time-period, temperatures from the cold 1970’s period were repeatedly “adjusted” years after the event, and progressively got warmer.

The most mysterious period is from 1958 to 1978, when a steep 0.3C decline that was initially recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. Years later that was reduced so far it became a mild warming, against the detailed corroborating evidence from rabocore data.

Raobcore measurements are balloon measures. They started in 1958, twenty years before satellites. But when satellites began, the two different methods tie together very neatly–telling us that both of them are accurate, reliable tools.

... so far it's all just questions ... but as we learned with the CRU and NASA, where there's smoke, there's guano.

Update: More Details

O - K

ht

Spurious Warming

What if a large part of "global warming" turns out to be UHI?

Taken together, I believe these results provide powerful and direct evidence that the GHCN data still has a substantial spurious warming component, at least for the period (since 1973) and region (U.S.) addressed here.

There is a clear need for new, independent analyses of the global temperature data…the raw data, that is. As I have mentioned before, we need independent groups doing new and independent global temperature analyses — not international committees of Nobel laureates passing down opinions on tablets of stone.

But, as always, the analysis presented above is meant more for stimulating thought and discussion, and does not equal a peer-reviewed paper. Caveat emptor.

Another Brick in the Wall

... falls out:

Oops! There go another two bricks, tumbling out of the IPCC wall of deceit on man-made global warming – there is not a lot left now; even the Berlin Wall (to which the AGW construct is ideologically allied) has survived better. Unhappily for Al, Phil, Michael, George and the rest of the scare-mongers, these two discredited components are among the most totemic in the AGW religion.

Firstly, a new study, funded by Nasa (which may be feeling the need to rehabilitate itself post-Climategate) has revealed that the ridiculous claim in the notorious IPCC 2007 report that up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could be drastically affected by even a small reduction in rainfall caused by climate change, so that the trees would be replaced by tropical grassland, is utter nonsense. That assertion has already been exposed as derived from a single report by the environmentalist lobby group WWF.

Couldn't Resist ...

EU: Pulling Each our Load by Doing Less

I recall a Saskatchewan event a number of years ago which involved a canoe race. The teams in the race decided to all finish the race together ... so the fastest canoe held up to let all the rest catch up, and they finished the race all in first place.

... or was it all in last place?

Such is the mentality of the new Europe:

Germany's trade surpluses built on holding down labor costs may be unsustainable for the other countries in the eurozone, France's finance minister said in an unusually blunt warning to Berlin.

Christine Lagarde said Berlin should consider boosting domestic demand to help deficit countries regain competitiveness and sort out their public finances.

Her comments break a long-standing taboo between the French and German governments about macroeconomic imbalances inside the 16-country bloc which have been dramatically exposed by the Greek debt crisis.

"[Could] those with surpluses do a little something? It takes two to tango," she said in an interview with the Financial Times. "It cannot just be about enforcing deficit principles."

"Clearly Germany has done an awfully good job in the last 10 years or so, improving competitiveness, putting very high pressure on its labor costs. When you look at unit labor costs to Germany, they have done a tremendous job in that respect. I'm not sure it is a sustainable model for the long term and for the whole of the group. Clearly we need better convergence."

Klavan on Culture: Hollywood

Global Warming is All About Science

... political science:

Since the e-mail scandal broke, the British Information Commissioner's Office has stated that the scientists violated the United Kingdom's Freedom of Information Act. The British Parliament is holding hearings. The British Meteorological Office has announced a multiyear review of its temperature data. And the Dutch government is investigating how the IPCC could have been so hapless that it incorrectly doubled the country's sub-sea level territory. Bipartisan groups of lawmakers in Washington are equally troubled and have filed legislation that would strip the EPA of its ability to regulate carbon dioxide.

Do these errors mean the globe is not warming? No, but they demonstrate that the rigorous, objective scientific process has been abandoned in favor of political science. They also mandate that the EPA conduct a scientifically valid process before making a decision that could cost Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of jobs. Because the EPA failed to do its own independent scientific review, I am asking a court to order the EPA to do it.

Abbott is the 50th attorney general of Texas

The Back Draft Begins

Consider the UK one of the "greenest" places on the planet ... yet even there, a return to logic and reality seems to be taking hold:

TWO government advertisements that use nursery rhymes to warn people of the dangers of climate change have been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for exaggerating the potential harm.

The adverts, commissioned by Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, used the rhymes to suggest that Britain faces an inevitable increase in storms, floods and heat waves unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control.

The ASA has ruled that the claims made in the newspaper adverts were not supported by solid science and has told the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) that they should not be published again.

It has also referred a television commercial to the broadcast regulator, Ofcom, for potentially breaching a prohibition on political advertising.

Bruce Willis; Step Aside

It's a TKO

Stephen Harper is a Conservative ... Right?

At what point do the Stephen Harper apologists face up to the fact that their man has only one thing in mind ... power. How he gets it doesn't matter because he is like the former LPC ... completely bereft of any core political values except one ... beat the other tribe.

For me, the last straw is that Harper, while greatly increasing spending, actually CUT military spending from a military budget that is already one of the most paltry in all of NATO. It's amazing what a man will do to grovel for Quebec and GTA votes; while taking his base utterly and totally for granted.

Previous

Climate Ninnies May be Wearing Orange Coveralls

Tricking any entity to spend billions of dollars based on false information is fraud ... the trick will be tying individual scientists and bureaucrats to specific amounts; not just the general fact that governments have sunk hundreds of billions into the climate scam, from grants to outright confiscations based on carbon taxing:

The once-respected science journal Nature recently published a whining editorial to the effect that climate scientists are not criminals, really; that attacks on them by increasingly-skeptical news media are soooo unfair; and that the fundamental science showing that the planet is doomed unless the economies of the West are shut down at once is unchallengeable.

No doubt most climate scientists are not criminals. However, some are. Many of the two dozen Climategate emailers, who have for years driven the IPCC process, tampered with peer review in the learned journals, and fabricated, altered, concealed, or destroyed scientific data are criminals. Whether they or Nature like it or not, they will eventually stand trial, and deservedly so.

After all, the biofuel scam that is one of many disfiguring spin-offs from the “global warming” scare — driven by the poisonous clique of mad scientists whom Nature so uncritically defends — has taken millions of acres of farmland away from growing food for people who need it and towards growing biofuels for clunkers that don’t. Result: a doubling of world food prices, mass starvation, and death, leading to food riots in a dozen major regions of the globe.

... keep reading.

A Taste of the Climate Mob

For a taste of how dirty the climate cabal can be, have a read of Benny Peiser's detailed piece:

On Aug. 31, Tom Wigley (a former CRU director) emailed Jones to notify him that he believed Keenan’s paper raised a valid issue: “Seems to me that Keenan has a valid point. The statements in the papers that he quotes seem to be incorrect statements, and that someone (WCW at the very least) must have known at the time that they were incorrect. Whether or not this makes a difference is not the issue here.” Jones was now in possession of authoritative information that undermined his claims about the integrity of CRU data products for which he is responsible. Confronted with the evidence from Keenan, and, most importantly, Wigley’s advice that Keenan appeared to have a point, Jones should have been insistent on getting the data and facts out rather than keeping them secret.

Previous @ SDA

The Great Data Robbery

Take your pick; hubris, Chicanery, or Incompetence ... either way, it's a mess:

Perhaps we need to go back to first principles?

Rule # 1:

In Science, the raw data is sacrosanct.

Rule # 2:

Corrections to raw data to compensate for known anomalies are always kept in a separate data set or adjustment algorithms

Rule # 3

The corrected data produced from applying Rule 2 is also sacrosanct.

Rule # 4

You never throw anything away.

How hard can it be for the climate “science” crowd to understand this?

It is beyond being funny any more.

Luckily, team-climate has lots of pristine data sets ... right?

Green Economics

... a one way ticket to poverty:

Turning to employment, while projections in the renewable sector convey seemingly impressive prospects for gross job growth, they typically obscure the broader implications for economic welfare by omitting any account of off-setting impacts.

These impacts include, but are not limited to, job losses from crowding out of cheaper forms of conventional energy generation, indirect impacts on upstream industries, additional job losses from the drain on economic activity precipitated by higher electricity prices, private consumers' overall loss of purchasing power due to higher electricity prices, and diverting funds from other, possibly more beneficial investment.

Proponents of renewable energies often regard the requirement for more workers to produce a given amount of energy as a benefit, failing to recognize that this lowers the output potential of the economy and is hence counterproductive to net job creation. Significant research shows that initial employment benefits from renewable policies soon turn negative as additional costs are incurred. Trade and other assumptions in those studies claiming positive employment turn out to be unsupportable.

... read the whole thing.

Amazing Temperature Reconstruction

... using clams:

Most measures of palaeoclimate provide data on only average annual temperatures, says William Patterson, an isotope chemist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and lead author of the study1. But molluscs grow continually, and the levels of different oxygen isotopes in their shells vary with the temperature of the water in which they live. The colder the water, the higher the proportion of the heavy oxygen isotope, oxygen-18.

The study used 26 shells obtained from sediment cores taken from an Icelandic bay. Because clams typically live from two to nine years, isotope ratios in each of these shells provided a two-to-nine-year window onto the environmental conditions in which they lived.

Patterson’s team used a robotic sampling device to shave thin slices from each layer of the shells’ growth bands. These were then fed into a mass spectrometer, which measured the isotopes in each layer. From those, the scientists could calculate the conditions under which each layer formed.

“What we’re getting to here is palaeoweather,” Patterson says. “We can reconstruct temperatures on a sub-weekly resolution, using these techniques. For larger clams we could do daily.”

... and wouldn't you know it ... no hockey stick.

Climate Chacanary

Unbelievable:

Email messages obtained by the Competitive Enterprise Institute via a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that the climate dataset of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) was considered — by the top climate scientists within NASA itself — to be inferior to the data maintained by the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU).

The NASA scientists also felt that NASA GISS data was inferior to the National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN) database.

These emails, obtained by Christopher Horner, also show that the NASA GISS dataset was not independent of CRU data.

Further, all of this information regarding the accuracy and independence of NASA GISS data was directly communicated to a reporter from USA Today in August 2007.

The reporter never published it.

Of Whores and Teats

... perfect:

The central thesis of George’s Grand Remonstrance, however, is that the battle to persuade the world of the reality of global warming is lost. “No level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy codded up by boffins and governments to tax and control us.” By George, he’s got it! Reality has dawned. The penny has dropped. The world knows AGW is a crock and nothing is going to change that reality. And the problem all along, George, was the very “evidence” to which you refer. The wider distrust of scientists was provoked by the thousands of white-coated whores who trousered the IPCC’s cash, chased the grants and plaudits, and clamped their gobs firmly around the UN and EU teats.

... read about Poor George.

Climate Lies

First we have this:

This morning, there was lot of noise in the Dutch media (unfortunately in Dutch only) about new research that was claiming a dramatic warming of 4 degrees in 2050. The news report quoted Dutch econometricians from the University of Tilburg. They had done a statistical analysis of temperature data and the influence of CO2 and solar radiation and concluded that aerosols masked much more of the warming of greenhouse gases than previously thought. This also means there is more warming in the pipeline for the future if the trend of global brightening, that has been detected by researcher Martin Wild of ETH in Zürich, will continue in the coming decades. They also draw policy conclusions from their research stating that in order to avoid more than 2 degree warming more drastic measures are to be taken. This news was copied by many Dutch news outlets.

... and then we have the rest of the story.

Australian Broadcasting Corporation Shakedown

A warning shot that had to smart:

THE chairman of the ABC, Maurice Newman, has told about 250 leading journalists, program-makers and managers at the ABC that the media had displayed "group-think" on the issue of climate change in a speech that led to a feisty exchange with senior journalists and forced managing director Mark Scott to try to smooth the waters.
Describing himself as an agnostic on climate change, Mr Newman said climate change was an example "of group-think where contrary views have not been tolerated, and where those who express them have been labelled and mocked".

He warned ABC staffers that he would not tolerate anyone suppressing information, citing the fact that a BBC science correspondent knew for a month before the scandal broke of damaging emails at the University of East Anglia in Britain highlighting the politicised nature of climate science but did not report them.

... tremors before the quake?

Dr. Doom

The Harper government has been subtly urging Canadian businesses to seek markets outside the USA; especially true for businesses in Ontario and Quebec where the balance of trade flows south.

Dr. Doom suggests why that may be:

At best, the US economy is headed for a U-shaped recovery this year, Roubini said. That has been his prediction in recent months.

The US faces challenges in the second half, especially as fiscal stimulus measures fade, and "appears far too close to the tipping point of a double-dip recession," he said.

The euro zone is also facing an increased risk of a double-dip fall, because of its ongoing debt crisis, he wrote.

Even if the euro zone does not suffer a double dip, growth in demand will be even more limited and this will hurt the United States' potential for export growth ...

... it's a good thing Ontario and Quebec voted for Obama.

Magic Science

If Plants Could Speak

... they'd be cheering madly with each puff of your SUV's exhaust:

Plant growth shuts down at 150 ppm, so the Earth was within 30 ppm of disaster. Terrestrial life came close to being wiped out by a lack of CO2 in the atmosphere. If plants were doing climate science instead of us humans, they would have a different opinion about what is a dangerous carbon dioxide level.

Update:

... looks like they may have found a spokesman ... a real genuine magnificant bastard.

It's Not About Healthcare Stupid

... it's about power:

So there was President Obama giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.

Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”). The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

[...]

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

[...]

Makes perfect sense. Except that Canada already has a Conservative government under a Conservative prime minister, and the very head of the “human rights” commission investigating me was herself the Conservative appointee of a Conservative minister of justice. Makes no difference. Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists — sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect “conservatives,” as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the Left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha’penny or some such would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place.

Help Needed from Global Warmists

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the fact that so many greenies have mocked sceptics for producing non-peer reviewed work ... we've been told so many times it makes the head ache ... that the gold standard of climate research is peer review ... full stop ...

*** ***

Those Huge Health Insurance Company Profits

Not:

2008 Industry Rank as % of Revenues

1 Network and Other Communications Equipment 20.4
2 Internet Services and Retailing 19.4
3 Pharmaceuticals 19.3
4 Medical Products and Equipment 16.3
5 Railroads 12.6
6 Financial Data Services 11.7
7 Mining, Crude-Oil production 11.5
8 Securities 10.7
9 Oil and Gas Equipment, Services 10.2
10 Scientific, Photographic, and Control Equipment 9.9
11 Household and Personal Products 8.7
12 Utilities: Gas and Electric 8.7
13 Aerospace and Defense 7.6
14 Food Services 7.1
15 Industrial Machinery 6.9
16 Food Consumer Products 6.7
17 Electronics, Electrical Equipment 6.5
18 Commercial Banks 5.2
19 Telecommunications 5.1
20 Chemicals 5.0
21 Construction and Farm Machinery 5.0
22 Insurance: Life, Health (stock) 4.6
23 Information Technology Services 4.5
24 Computers, Office Equipment 4.3
25 Metals 3.9
26 Wholesalers: Diversified 3.5
27 Insurance: Property and Casualty (stock) 3.3
28 Specialty Retailers 3.2
29 General Merchandisers 3.2
30 Health Care: Pharmacy and Other Services 3.0
31 Packaging, Containers 3.0
32 Beverages 2.9
33 Engineering, Construction 2.7
34 Health Care: Medical Facilities 2.4
35 Health Care: Insurance and Managed Care 2.2
36 Petroleum Refining 2.1
37 Food and Drug Stores 1.5
38 Pipelines 1.5
39 Wholesalers: Health Care 1.3
40 Semiconductors and Other Electronic Components 1.0
41 Energy 0.9
42 Home Equipment, Furnishings 0.7
43 Food Production 0.6
44 Wholesalers: Electronics and Office Equipment -0.3
45 Diversified Financials -0.6
46 Motor Vehicles and Parts -0.7
47 Insurance: Life, Health (mutual) -3.0
48 Hotels, Casinos, Resorts -4.5
49 Automotive Retailing, Services -7.9
50 Forest and Paper Products -9.6
51 Entertainment -10.0
52 Real Estate -13.4
53 Airlines -13.5

Winning Votes the CPC Way

Sure we suck ... but not as much as the other guys:

Shorter version? "Conservatives have starved the Canadian Forces less than Liberals starved the Canadian Forces, so everyone should be grateful that we suck less than the other guys did."

Losing Afghanistan

A political failure at home:

Vance says the mission was underfunded and under-resourced for most of the time Canadians have been deployed to the country, but at the same time the military was under pressure to fix what is essentially an at-risk community thousands of kilometres away, and to fix it before “our attention-deficit disorder society” gets impatient.

Vance also said the military can’t blame the media for the lack of public support for the mission because the military didn’t effectively communicate the mission.

“We have utterly failed to protect our centre of gravity [i.e. the home front],” he said.

Why the CPC Will Never Get a Majority

Barring a complete meltdown of the LPC, the Stephen Harper conservatives will never get their coveted majority. Why? Because the CPC leader, Stephen Harper, CAN'T communicate plainly, clearly, and with passion. Mr. Harper is, to be blunt, a limp dish-rag when it comes to public communication. The only thing sustaining him in office is a string of Liberal Party of Canada leaders who are hapless failures.

There is no reason ... none, other than distrust or dislike of the LPC, that would cause non-conservatives to take a chance on Stephen Harper.

My criticism has nothing to do with Mr. Harper's intelligence (he is incredibly bright) ... nothing to do with his how nice a man he is ( clearly a wonderful father and husband ) ... or how good he is at political chess (which he is a master at); it has rather to do with the fact that Mr. Harper is not capable of inspiring non-conservatives to vote CPC. He is incapable of reaching out and beyond the media filter in order to draw Canadians to the conservative cause.

Failing that, the CPC is left with what it has been doing ever since it gained a minority government, which is to use the politics of personal destruction against the LPC (Ignatieff Me), use the politics of obfuscation (detainee abuse), use the politics of fuzzy policies (AGW), and politics of blatant vote buying (Quebec).

I present to you an example of a plain spoken conservative ... a conservative who has an incredibly difficult task ahead ... a task that makes any challenge faced by the CPC seem like child's play ... but a conservative who can communicate in plain, concrete, and inspiring ways. A conservative who can, and has, shattered the media filter in order to speak directly to the people and who has won a great following in the heart of progressia.

* A note to those who will complain that a speech like the one below would find the CPC in the gutter ... the "content" is not the point ... nor the substance (for now) ... it's the ability to communicate that I draw your attention to.

Baiting Greens has Become Great Sport

The whole global warming canard (green movement in general) is so full of guano it's becoming too easy to satire, lampoon, or simply mock the self-righteous finger-waggers.

For instance, recall all the times that greens go on about "big oil" funding sceptic view points ... recall, then chuckle:

Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the "deniers", the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times have changed.

Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil's supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking.

The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it's chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are unwittingly helping giant finance houses.

... keep reading ABC.

The Great Peer Review Canard

Recall all the finger-wagging about "peer review".

Well, peer review THIS:

Despite protests from expert reviewers, 42% of the documents cited in one chapter of the climate bible are grey literature rather than peer-reviewed.

[...]

Tol further notes that on another page, devoted to the rather important question of what effect reducing emissions might have on employment (in the US climate change policies are currently being sold to be public as job creation plans), a total of six "studies are cited to support the notion that emission reduction creates jobs. Only one of the six is peer-reviewed."

If this seems rather sloppy, Tol says it gets worse. The academic literature in this area, he says, suggests that the relationship between emissions reduction and job creation is a weak one, and that job growth only occurs in certain circumstances – namely when government policies are "smart and well-designed." If "emission permits are given away for free – as is common," he points out, "no positive impact on employment" is achieved. The IPCC report mentions none of this, however.

In other words ... "Do as I say ... "

The Climate Trough

Oink oink!

One of the more sinister aspects of the "climate change" miasma is the insistence of campaigners and governments that saving the planet requires personal sacrifice and significant changes in personal lifestyles. However, while we may be dimly aware of government exhortations along those lines, few people realise quite how much of our money is being spent on trying to make us change our ways.

A significant amount of that money is spent by one government department, DEFRA, on "behavioural research", and a record of its recent expenditure provides a chilling testament to the Orwellian world of climate advocacy, where every aspect of our lives is coming under official scrutiny.

The record, which starts in 2005, has the University of Surrey doing a project called "Choice Matters", exploring how to make sustainability "an automatic and primary part of producer and consumer choice, rather than a self-satisfying added extra." This cost a relatively modest £21,775.

For £63,017 meanwhile, the University of Westminster carried out an analysis of existing research relating to "pro-environmental behavioural change", aiming to contribute towards a better practical understanding of how DEFRA could influence behaviours.

Cranfield University, on the other hand, took on: "Sustainable development as a "collective choice" problem: theoretical and practical implications". The aim if this research was to explore thoroughly the potential of a highly promising and unique body of research, known as "collective-action theory", for achieving DEFRA's goal of finding new ways of motivating people to produce and consume in a sustainable manner. This cost a mere £23,333.

... keep reading about the climate-hogs.

And, even more tracking of climate-cash ... bigger than the Manhattan Project by 5 times.

The next time some dizzy green launches into a tirade about Big Oil funding sceptics, stick the above two pieces in their face ... it'll be fun to watch their peanut brains spin in circles as they reach for some lame excuse to reject the hard fact that the money, virtually all of it, is in the warmist camp.

Gaddafi the Truth Teller

Even one of the world's greatest scum-bags, a one Mr. Gaddafi, manages to tell the truth on occasion:

Ladies and gentlemen, I don't have a problem and my party does not have a problem with Muslims as such. There are many moderate Muslims. The majority of Muslims are law-abiding citizens and want to live a peaceful life as you and I do. I know that. That is why I always make a clear distinction between the people, the Muslims, and the ideology, between Islam and Muslims. There are many moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as a moderate Islam.

Islam strives for world domination. The Quran commands Muslims to exercise jihad. The Quran commands Muslims to establish shariah law. The Quran commands Muslims to impose Islam on the entire world.

As former Turkish Prime Minister Erbakan said: "The whole of Europe will become Islamic. We will conquer Rome". End of quote.

Libyan dictator Gaddafi said: "There are tens of millions of Muslims in the European continent today and their number is on the increase. This is the clear indication that the European continent will be converted into Islam. Europe will one day soon be a Muslim continent". End of quote. Indeed, for once in his life, Gaddafi was telling the truth. Because, remember: mass immigration and demographics is destiny!

Islam is merely not a religion, it is mainly a totalitarian ideology. Islam wants to dominate all aspects of life, from the cradle to the grave. Shariah law is a law that controls every detail of life in a Islamic society. From civic- and family law to criminal law. It determines how one should eat, dress and even use the toilet. Oppression of women is good, drinking alcohol is bad.

[...]

What will be broadcasted forty years from now? Will it still be "This is London"? Or will it be "This is Londonistan"? Will it bring us hope? Or will it signal the values of Mecca and Medina? Will Britain offer submission or perseverance? Freedom or slavery? The choice is yours. And in the Netherlands the choice is ours.

... keep reading the whole thing.

... and commentary.

ht

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... and then there is Wafa:

... and then, we have America's new Sharia-Finance-in-Chief.