XDA

I'm off to Pinedale, WY, where I was a for real cowboy a couple of decades ago and then on to the Yellowstone. Happy Happy Joy Joy.

Back on Sunday.

Labels: Personal History; Road Trip

Southern California was hit with a moderate earthquake today just before noon. It was a 5.8 on the Richter Scale. No one was killed, or even injured and no buildings were damaged severely. However, you wouldn't have know that from the semi-hysterical wall to wall news on the all news all the time channels. Cheesh.

The Richter Scale is a complicated equation from the 1930s which creates a logarithm from the amplitude of the lines on a seismometer along with other information. It is designed to show the amount of energy released in the quake. Because the scale is logarithmic, each whole number increase represents a ten fold increase in amplitude and 32 times the energy in the quake, but even that doesn't capture the increase up the scale. Think of a graph accelerating the rate of change and going, in the end, straight up. A 5.8 earthquake can be felt of course but an 8.8 involves not just 96 times more energy but several orders of magnitude more energy. There is no theoretical upper limit to the scale, but a 12 would nearly have to involve collision with a large asteroid. There has never been recorded a 10 yet.

The story was worth about 30 minutes in my book, so it got all day as if this unnamed, middling earthquake were the ground shaking equivalent of Katrina. Give me a break.

Labels: Earthquakes; Richter Scale

Labels: No one expects the Spanish Armada

Here is a graph of the sea ice in the Northern Ocean published today, at least using information from the federal government (the National Snow and Ice Date Center up the road a bit in Boulder, CO). It says there is just below 8 million square kilometers of ice just now. That's worse than the 'average' between 1979 and 2000 but better than last year (which was alarmingly low).


The next graph is from the University of Illinois and it shows only about 5.3 million square kilometers. Where did more than two and a half million kilometers of sea ice go? Notice too that the government had 14.4 at the beginning of April, while the college showed less than 13.4. Both show about a million square kilometer more ice now than at this time last year. Let's see if the satellite photo composite shows that difference.


Yeah, it looks like there is a lot more ice, especially along the northern coast of Siberia. Two months of ice melting northern warmth to go before the sea ice begins to form again in early Autumn.

Labels: Global Warming; Disputed Metrics

Once you begin trading live terrorists for dead soldiers, what have you done but encouraged your sworn enemies to abduct and murder your soldiers as well as your civilians?

Burt Prelutsky

Labels: Burt Prelutsky quote

A reader from Fredericksburg, VA pointed me to Tim Lambert's so called rebuttal of the David Evans article about the disappearing underpinnings of the Global Warming Climate Change Crisis movement. I wasn't that impressed, but there was one part which was pure bullshit. I thought I'd reproduce it here.

The new ice cores from Vostok in the Antarctic show that over the last 500,000 years the global mean temperature and the concentration of atmospheric CO2 have gone up and gone down as they always do. There is a certain similarity, a synching of their respective graphs but (and it's a Kim Kardassian size, important but) the rise in CO2 followed the rise in temperature. Thus, in the real world of cause in effect, the rise in temperature was not caused by CO2. Rather the rise in CO2 was itself caused by the higher global temperature and the higher temperature was caused by something else (I still nominate the Sun). The rise in CO2 was the effect of warming from another cause.

If I pick up something hot and very shortly thereafter I feel pain, exhibit redness and blisters at the exact point of contact of my skin with the hot object, I say I burned myself, the hot object caused the pain, redness and blisters of a second degree burn. However, if 8 minutes before I pick up the hot object, the pain redness and blisters form, something else caused that (a chemical burn ?) and not the contact with the hot object.

Here's what a Climate Crisis supporter says about the CO2 lagging centuries behind the warming:

He starts with quoting Evans:

4 The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

Lambert then writes:
This is wrong. The temperature rises started on average 800 years before CO2 levels rose, but most of the warming occurred after CO2 levels started rising. Jeff Severinghaus writes:

Does this prove that CO2 doesn't cause global warming? The answer is no.

The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data. ...

In other words, CO2 does not initiate the warmings, but acts as an amplifier once they are underway. From model estimates, CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases CH4 and N2O) causes about half of the full glacial-to-interglacial warming.

Sorry Jeff, the lagging of the CO2 rise by 8 centuries after the warming does indeed prove the CO2 rise didn't cause the warming, something else caused it to warm and then that warming caused the CO2 to rise. That's how real life cause and effect work.

I'll grant you that the warming period lasted longer than 800 years, but by what mechanism is the original warming nullified by the CO2 rise? What causes the original cause to go away and CO2 to take over? Not explained. The source of the warming is not explained. Lambert and Severinghaus merely assert their belief that more CO2 in the atmosphere must cause warming and so the warming caused by other than increased CO2 must be amplified by the resultant CO2 rise. The reasoning is beginning to circle on them.

If you believe, as I do, that CO2 is merely an innocent bystander to natural warming and cooling, then there is no mystery, no reversal of cause and effect to be explained. Only if you believe that a CO2 increase must cause warming, is there a problem about the cause and, here, a half-assed explanation, which really comes down to 'because we say so.' Its worse because their ilk has programmed the climate models, on which they rely for all the crisis talk, to say increased concentration in CO2 will always cause warming, even though there is plenty of science which tells us the climate is not at all sensitive to CO2 concentration. Oh yeah, one of the scientists saying that was David Evans whom Lambert was trying to debunk.

Sorry, no sale.

UPDATE: The UAH and the RSS numbers for global mean temperature use satellites. Why is the GISS, the outlier in this trio, which is associated with NASA (which at least used to deal with satellites) absolutely satellite data free? Is NASA no longer interested in measurement and observation of the planets from space?

Labels: Global Warming; Debunked Debunkers

Labels: American Civil War

On September 21, 2008, the area of sea ice in the Northern Ocean will be above 4,100,000 square kilometers. Last year at that time, it was just below 3 million.

It will be an important milepost for the 'scientist' who claims all the sea ice will be gone in summer within 5 years, assuming he cares about such mileposts.

Labels: Global Warming; Disputed Prediction

On this day in 1990, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, met with Saddam Hussein, assuring him, "...we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait."
We certainly know how Saddam took that statement and I'm hard pressed to think of any other reason to say it but to give a green light to his invasion of Kuwait, which had been a separate nation from Iraq for 140 years. Still, it's Saddam's bad for taking the action rather than Glaspie's for saying something so unnecessarily dangerous.

It's a bad thing, however, when you're replaced by lyin' Joe Wilson, and he's an improvement.

Labels: Gulf War I pre-history

Judging from the local drive time radio shows, we bitter, religious pistol-packers here in flyover country remembered only two things from Obama's Berlin visit: the phrase 'citizen of the world' and Obama's failure to visit wounded troops at Landstuhl and Ramstein.

Peter Kirsanow

Labels: Peter Kirsanow quote

Support our troops. Enlist.

Ralph Peters

Labels: Ralph Peters quote

First YouTube wouldn't let me post the video on this site. Now YouTube seems to have lost the video. What video, you ask? The one where Obama says this:

In terms of knowing my commitments, you don’t have to just look at my words. You can look at my deeds. Just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.
(Emphasis added).

"...which is my committee..."? Obama is not the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. He's not even on the Banking Committee.

What a liar!

This sort of gaffe/lie would be like death to a Republican running for office. Care to bet if the liberal media will cover this (or provide cover for Obama)?

UPDATE: John Hinderaker at Powerline has the best take on the story so far.

Labels: Barack Obama; Banking Committee

I have to admit that I hope the announced August 1 start date is a head fake and we start right away.

Labels: Iraq Successes

No one ever seriously thought that President Bush (son) was clever enough to have foreseen that al Qaeda would be drawn into post-Saddam Iraq to be killed in droves by our fine armed forces and our Muslim allies there. The fly-paper effect, as it came to be known, was just an added bonus to our liberation of Iraq through the overthrow of Hitler-lite tyrant Hussein. Looks like this bonus effect is repeating itself in Afghanistan, according to this report.

I can see the thought process: Too hot in Iraq? Move to the cool high mountains of Afghanistan. Meet the eager Marines. (Die in droves).

Money quote:

We have heard reports recently that many of the foreign fighters that were in Iraq have left, either back to their homeland or going to fight in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is now seeming to be more suitable for al-Qaida fighters," said Ambassador Samir Sumaida'ie.

General Petraeus was not quite as sanguine:

They're not going to abandon Iraq. They're not going to write it off. None of that," Petraeus said. "But what they certainly may do is start to provide some of those resources that would have come to Iraq to Pakistan, possibly Afghanistan.

I am nearly giddy with the news. Yes, things could go south under Democratic leadership, but for now, al Qaeda has been nearly defeated in Iraq, what its leaders called the central front, and now some of them are going to die in vain in the strategic cul-de-sac which is Afghanistan. So much for re-establishing the Caliphate.

I never thought we were losing, though for a time I could not say we were winning. Now I know we're winning.

Labels: Iraq Successes, Jihadi War; Afghanistan Front

Net earnings for the despicable, traitorous, totally in the tank for Obama, New York Times fell below the published expectations by about 40%; and in fact earnings fell by 82% from last year at this time. There are certainly chapters left in the lengthy saga of the dowdy old grey lady but it's beginning to look like the story will end in chapter 13.

Nice going, Pinch (or is it Putz? or Paunch? I can't recall). Really well done.

Labels: New York Times Decline

Labels: Jihadi War; Afghanistan Front

There are several downside things to production of Green Energy, energy whose production does not create CO2. The best one, nuclear power, produces long lived radioactive remnants. Hydroelectric requires dams and generally the loss of rivers to the man-made lakes behind the dams (and a block to migrating fish). The more popular ones, wind and solar, have their own problems--bird and bat chopping and heavy metal contamination--but the main thing wrong is that the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine, while our need for power is generally constant. So if you want to rely on wind and solar, you also have to have conventional power plants to take up the slack when the wind dies down and the sun goes down or is occluded. And that 'back up' conventional power plant (or plants) has to have the capacity to provide all of the communities' power needs. If this supposition of mine is mistaken, I would love to hear how I'm getting it wrong.

There is a second problem, however, coming from the nimbleness of the conventional 'back up' power plant, or rather the lack of it. A coal fired plant needs about 12 hours to react to increased demand for electrical power. It's not a lot better for nuke plants. (A watched pot never boils). So if you have coal fired plants as your 'back up', they have to be running at a capacity which would provide all of the communities' electrical power needs pretty much all the time. This sad fact reduces the wind mills and solar arrays backed up by coal fired plants to mere trinkets. They make us feel better about the community and its caring about CO2 production, but they reduce the CO2 output very little, if any.

Power plants using natural gas are more nimble and can pump up the power in response to, say, the wind dying down, in a matter of minutes. So, if you really want to reduce CO2 production (although I think that is an absolutely wasted priority) by building thousands of wind mills (as T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore propose) their 'back up' power plants had better be nukes or fueled by natural gas, or you're just fooling yourself.

Over half of the power plants in America are coal fired. Less than a fifth are natural gas. A full fifth are nukes.

Oh yeah, and the popular green energy production is very, very expensive.

So suck it up, poor people; it's the planet we're saving (supposedly).

Labels: Global Warming; Disputed Solutions

On this day in 1914, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia following the killing of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by a Serb assassin. Things went downhill from there.

Labels: WWI pre history

It's my life and I'll do what I want
It's my mind and I'll think what I want
Show me I'm wrong, hurt me sometime...

Roger Atkins and Carl D'Errico

Labels: Roger Atkins and Carl D'Errico quote

There is one thing shared by all the climate models and projections, relied on by the IPCC, Al Gore and all the rabid Warmies for their dire (and demonstrably false) predictions--that the worst of the warming will be in the troposphere about 10 kilometers up over the tropics. Here is the computer generated heat signature. This pattern is not only common to the predictions; it is key to the predictions.

There's only one thing wrong. It ain't there. The scientists have looked for it with satellites; they have run up weather balloons with transmitting thermometers. There is no such signature, or pattern, there to be detected.

Here's the real heat signature:

So there is something totally wrong with the models, projections and predictions. Namely, that there is no appreciable global warming caused by human generated greenhouse gasses, not in the past, not now, not in the future. As we Deniers dared to predict months ago, anthropogenic Global Warming Climate Change is a huge and ultimately perfidious hoax. Within a year, the sad fact of the hoax will be common knowledge and Al Gore will be ridiculed constantly by the likes of Conan O'Brien and Jon Stewart.

Anyone care to bet against me?

Labels: Global Warming Hoax, Missing Signature

Here's the story behind the picture. Why the Israeli leadership (22 out of 25 ministers voted for it) allowed this guy to go free, with others, for two corpses is a disturbing question and a national shame.

(h/t MASB)

Labels: Arab Israeli Conflict, Shameful Exchanges

Labels: WWII history; European theater; Treblinka

Carbon Doxide is an innocent bystander to natural climate change here.

Labels: Global Warming

I'm in the mountains near Aspen. It's like 100 in Denver today. Enough said.

Labels: Colorado Rockies, personal history

Here and here are two stories about the alleged mistreatment of the illegal combatants (Hamden and Omar Khadr) we have captured. One was a tape of a detainee in Gitmo taken secretly through the grating of the air duct. The second was testimony of the alleged bad treatment. And there is no torture---none. NONE. Not even close.

Here is the whole of the 'torture' Omar's mouthpiece describes.

He was deprived of sleep by being removed from his cell and to another cell every three hours on a 24-hour basis for three weeks solid, followed by three weeks of deep solitary confinement," Mr Edney told the BBC.

Oh no, not the deep solitary confinement. Those Nazi thugs!

Here is what he claims about his medical treatment. Doesn't actually add to his credibility.

Mr Khadr says: "No I'm not. You're not here... I lost my eyes. I lost my feet. Everything!" in reference to how his vision and physical health were affected. "No, you still have your eyes and your feet are still at the end of your legs, you know," a man says.

The total lack of anything approaching the routine treatment the Jihadists give those they kidnap doesn't stop the shameless Canadian attorneys from making unethical appeals for release or the seditious lawyers for bin Laden's driver from making groundless and frivolous arguments about compelled testimony. (The well known trick of using a woman to ask the questions. And she gets close to him. And she touched him. Gently.) Can you imagine?

Here is the whole of the reported testimony of the mistreatment in Hamden's hearing:

Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden who is accused in a terrorism conspiracy, told a military court that during questioning in 2002, a female interrogator "came close to me, she came very close, with her whole body towards me. I couldn't do anything. I was afraid of the soldiers."

"Did she touch your thigh?" asked Hamdan's attorney Charles Swift.

"Yes. . . . I said to her, 'What do you want?' " Hamdan said at a pretrial hearing. "She said, 'I want you to answer all of my questions.' "

"Did you answer all of her questions after that?" Swift asked. Hamdan said he did.

Hamdan's attorneys are seeking to persuade a judge to throw out incriminating statements he allegedly made to interrogators at the U.S. military prison here, arguing that they were obtained through coercive tactics.

(Emphasis added, incredulously).

Wait, there's more:

In his testimony, Hamdan said he was repeatedly held in solitary confinement and sometimes deprived of sleep by guards who banged on his cell door every few minutes. He acknowledged, however, that he also took naps of up to three hours on some afternoons.

What pansy asses these terrorists are. I'm beginning to think we can beat these fragile flowers.

Labels: Jihadi War, Lawfare

Labels: Global Warming; Disputed Predictions; Quiet Sun

Went with Kit, and Mark and Amy, and Bob and Jane, and Becky and her sister, Sunday to the Botanic Gardens to see Canadian country/alternative band Cowboy Junkies. It was OK. If you googel ennui and alternative music the first entry to come up is this band. Not a lot of fire in the belly. Margo Timmins (her brothers Peter (drums) and Michael (guitar and songwriting) are most of the rest of the band) has a good voice but there is a bit of soporific sameness to the songs. Common Disaster is pretty good; and two I can't remember off the new studio album, At the End of Paths Taken, were pretty good. They can't even get the words to their big hit, Sweet Jane, right.

Standing on a corner, suitcase in my hand....

Still, it was a good night.

Labels: Cowboy Junkies

I think the consensus people [supporting Global Warming caused primarily by humans] have just run off a cliff like Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons and they're in mid-air with their feet spinning madly while they wait for the earth to smash them to the ground far below.

Dennis Avery

Labels: Dennis Avery quote

On this day in 1867, Alfred Nobel demonstrated dynamite. All Nobel did was make nitroglycerine less unstable by absorbing it with diatomaceous earth and a little sodium carbonate. However, dynamite was a huge improvement on black powder and Nobel made a fortune, some of the interest of which is now handed out as prize money for various categories of achievement.

Labels: Alfred Nobel; Dynamite

Former theater critic Frank Rich is so deep into Bush Derangement Syndrome, that he accuses the whole administration of war crimes, namely torture in this prissy, hysterical op ed. He also says that the energetic efforts the administration has taken to defeat Muslim extremists world wide, by taking the fight to them, has actually made us more vulnerable to attack. The logic of that position escapes me, but it is the source of his accusations that we have indeed tortured people which interests me. Here is what he writes regarding the source of that accusation:

Antonio Taguba, the retired major general who investigated detainee abuse for the Army, concluded that “there is no longer any doubt” that “war crimes were committed.” Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

And there are links! Followed, the first one reveal some interesting things: Here is the principal source for the general's findings, a report from Physicians for Human Rights:

The physicians' group said that its experts, who had experience studying torture's effects, spent two days with each former captive and conducted intensive exams and interviews. They administered tests to detect exaggeration. In two of the 11 cases, the group was able to review medical records.

Oh, so the source was a small sample of released detainees, interviewed long after their release, and an even smaller sample of medical records and we can only guess what they contained.

The second link reveals this:

Ms. Mayer acknowledges that Red Cross investigators based their account largely on interviews with the prisoners

Notwithstanding the problems with these sources, we know that what the left considers torture by us is merely the soft foreplay of the real torture the Jihadists actually use (to the silence of the lefty journalists).

We know too that the training manual of al Qaeda (the Manchester document) tells the captured to accuse falsely their captors of torture at ever turn. So the primary and nearly exclusive source of those accusing us of torture are those who are trained to lie.

Has any American 'torturer' confessed? Has any so called torture been captured on film? Is there an unimpeachable source to these 'findings'? Or is it all based on the words of the Jihadists, schooled to lie?

Just as they see torture in the slightest action of our guys while remaining blind to the electric drill work, et al ., of the enemy, the left is eager to believe the lying Jihadists and accuse our guys of lying.

Rich, as usual, is completely full of it. When we actually fight back against those who wage war against us, we defeat them and world wide terrorists activity drops. When we treat it like crime and prosecute the few we catch after their attack on us, the al Qaeda types proliferate.

Labels: false accusations of torture, New York Times Decline

Here is the lengthy editorial last year (July 8, 2007) by the failing, traitorous New York Times declaring defeat in Iraq and calling for swift, complete withdrawal (retreat) damn the consequences. This was (is? who knows?) Obama's position as well. No one in authority listened to them, thank God, and instead we have lower violence levels, functional defeat, but not eradication, yet, of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, functional disbanding of the most violent militias and completion of 15 of the 18 benchmarks (16 if you recognize that the sharing of oil revenue is being accomplished through the budget) set by Congress.

Incredibly telling is this tidbit.

Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse.

Keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse?

As predictions go, it is difficult to imagine one more wrong.

Labels: New York Times Decline

I liked the Talking Heads song, Life During Wartime, a lot when it came out. I was in law school at the time. We used to sing a few lines of it with modest changes. Original--"Why stay in college? Why go to night school? Gonna be different this time?" We'd sing:

Why stay in college? Why go to law school? etc.

Such was the mad cap, non-stop wackiness that made up my life at the time. But here's the weird part--what I remember of some other lines in the song.

Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?
You ought to know not to stand by the window,
Somebody blow you away.

See how that scans and rhymes? 'PA' and 'away'? Excellent.

Here are the real lyrics:

Heard about Houston? Heard about Detroit?
Heard about Pittsburgh PA?
You ought to know not to stand by the window,
Somebody might see you up there.

Now it doesn't scan; and do 'PA' and 'there' rhyme? Do they even make a sight rhyme. NO. They don't. Neither one. Nearly all the rest of the verses rhyme (some are merely close). Why not this one?

And why do I have a different memory than the recording? It's either a world wide conspiracy or I have a faulty memory (albeit a better rhyming, cutting edge one). Neither alternative is that satisfying to me.

Just thought I'd get that off my chest.

This ain't no party; this ain't no disco; this ain't no fooling around. This ain't no mudd club, or C. B. G. B. I ain't got time for that now.

Life during wartime indeed.

Labels: Life During Wartime

Labels: Global Warming; Disputed False Color Images

Labels: Iran; Missile Testing; Sabre Rattling; Fauxtography

Labels: Tony Snow

Labels: History of Anti-Semitism

Labels: Personal History; San Carlos de la Rapita, Spain

Labels: Global Warming; Debunked Predictions, Sunspots

The publicly traded stock of the traitorous, despicable New York Times hit a 10 year low and is expected to go even lower in the next year or so. Must be some kind of right wing plot.

The stock sank 7 percent, or $1.05, to $14.01 yesterday, near its lowest point in 10 years and 77 percent off its 52-week high of $24.76.

The drubbing came after Lehman Brothers analyst Craig Huber slammed the Times' shares for being too expensive, compared with Gannett and McClatchy.

Huber also ratcheted down his previous price target to $8 a share from $12 a share, due to the industry having deteriorated faster than he earlier predicted, adding, "We think the shares have significant further downside risk over the next year as the stock is the most expensive in the [newspaper] group, plus Street estimates remain way too high in our opinion."

He urges the company, which is run by CEO Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., to cut its dividend, claiming it should utilize the money to pare down the company's $1.05 billion debt.

Schadenfreude is over-rated, but then again Karma is a black hearted one.

Labels: New York Times Decline

Labels: Invasion of Sicily, WWII history; European theater

ubi jus incertum ubi jus nullum

Where the law is uncertain, there is no law.

Labels: Roman Aphorism

On this day in 1934 (one year into the Hitler dictatorship) Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler was given the duty to administer the concentration camp system which would become one of the infamous hallmarks of the 12 year NAZI regime.

Labels: WWII pre history; European Theater

quid nos dura refugimus aetas quid intactum nefasti liquimus

Horace

What have we, a hard generation, shirked? What have we, wickedly, left inviolate?

Labels: Horace quote

Labels: Global Warming; Disputed Predictions; Glaciers

Remember just a few months ago, when the United States forces were kicking ass in the first part of the surge change in tactics in Iraq, and it became harder and harder to deny that reality, so the Democrats switched from denial to "well, we always said our armed forces would do well (lie), but the surge has failed because the government of Iraq has failed to meet the bulk of the 18 benchmarks?" It was in all the papers. Obama said it. Need I cite more?

Well, now the Iraqi government has met 15 of the 18 benchmarks (and the oil revenue sharing is actually being met by the budget rather than by separate legislation). Porcine, serial military defamer Rep. Jack Murtha (D-PA) still thinks its only 4 or 5 out of 17. What a buffoon. Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-N.C.) doubts the report (a Progress Denier).

We're not hearing a lot about the surge's failure due to lack of benchmarks met now, are we? Not hearing much about the gigantic success in Iraq lately, come to think of it. Was the press silent about our victories on Iwo Jima and, ultimately, in the Bulge? Silent in the months before VE and VJ day?

Hmmm? Wonder what's up with that?

Labels: Democratic Defeatism, Iraq Successes

Rush Limbaugh just resigned with his bosses for the Sun the Moon and all the Stars ($400,000,000 through 2016) and he was talking today about what he could do with the money. He noted that he could purchase his beloved Pittsburg Steelers, for about a bil.


Sorry, Rush, my old friend and roomie senior year, Stanley Druckenmiller ($3.5 bil) is the likely buyer. He can pay cash for the team.

Labels: Rush Limbaugh; Stanley Druckenmiller

Here is the AP story on the subject. Of course it was unused stuff at the Tuwaitha nuclear site, but a lot of it. Here are some pertinent questions.

And why was it unused? Because the Israelis, bless 'em, had the foresight and moxie to bomb the reactor before it was up and running.

Well if there were 550 metric tons of it in Iraq since 1982, why would Iraq have needed to purchase more from Niger? Because Saddam wanted yellowcake that was not discovered and catalogued with which to be able to ramp up his nuclear program clandestinely.

I'll let the next question be asked by others.

Labels: Iraq, Yellowcake

On this day in 371 B.C., at the Battle of Leuctra the soldiers of Thebes defeated the soldiers of Sparta. The Spartans had won but been weakened by the Peloponessian War which had ended in 404 B.C. Called the Lacedaemonians in Greece, this loss consigned them to the inevitable ash heap of history. Sic transit...

Labels: Post Peloponessian War History

quieta movere magna merces videbantur

Sallust

To stir things up seemed a great its own reward.

Labels: Sallust quote

Labels: Climate Report

Labels: Marco Polo Bridge Incident, WWII history; Pacific theater

regibus boni quam mali usupectiores sunt semperque his aliena virtus formidolosa est

Sallust

The good are more suspected by kings than the bad and virtue in others is to them always a source of worry.

Labels: Sallust quote

The one thing about lefty journalists (sorry for the redundancy), including Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes, is that they're not afraid to repeat lies even when the lies they are repeating have been shown to be lies. It really is amazing. In this belligerent, belittling interview with good guy Douglas Feith, Kroft says:

One of the reasons people were told we were going to war in Iraq was because of the imminent attack with weapons of mass destruction was about to happen.

Feith says no one said that [an attack from Iraq was imminent] and Kroft quotes three people, Rumsfeld, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney and no one uses the word "imminent." Rumsfeld says that of all the nations harboring terrorist, the threat from Iraq is the greatest and "more immediate" but that's a comparison with others, not a straight statement that Iraq is about to attack us.

So, with all the researchers and film at their fingertips, and the set up of Kroft lying about what the administration said, and Feith denying it--here was the opportunity to make Feith look the fool and point out that the administration indeed said an attack from Iraq on America or Americans was imminent.

And they produce no such clip.

That's because there is no such clip.

There is this rather famous bit from the 2003 State of the Union address:

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

Kroft didn't play that.

The next time some Democrat/socialist/moderate/anarcho-syndicalist says that the administration lied to say that an attack by Saddam was imminent (or that they used some sort of Jedi mind trick to fool some into thinking that) call them a liar, because they are.

Oh, and about the "wide" debunking of the Czech report that leader of the 9/11 attack, Mohamed Atta, met just before the attack with Iraqi officials in Prague, who debunked it widely, the CIA? The FBI? No way they could ever be wrong about anything. No freakin' way. That's crazy talk.

When you're as wrong as Kroft is on the facts, it really doesn't suit you to be smug as well.

Labels: 60 Minutes; Douglas Feith

Nevertheless, the speed of Al-Qaeda’s decline in Iraq – not only in the north but throughout the country – has taken many military strategists and observers by surprise.

Labels: Iraq Successes, Yellowcake

Just got back from Hancock which was not at all crowded (that's not so good) and I have to give this warning:

THIS MOVIE CAN MAKE YOU PHYSICALLY ILL.

It's not that bad a movie, but the director, Peter Berg, (whom I quite like as an actor) dispensed with the steadicam and filmed a jerky, nausea inducing flick. Not good.

Will Smith was really quite adequate to the role, not at all like the Fresh Prince all grown up (which, face it, he has been from time to time in his work of the recent past).

And for a while it was quite enjoyable, until the big unmentionable plot twist came and the movie went right to hell. Express. Or maybe that was when the nausea kicked in. Either way, it couldn't have ended too quickly for me. I guess I wait for the Hellboy sequel now. The new Batman movie might be OK.

Labels: Hancock

The news is interesting rather than good. A total of 56 American servicemen died in Iraq and Afghanistan last month, according to Department of Defense news releases. For the first time ever, more died in Afghanistan (31) than in Iraq (25). The Iraq numbers were up slightly over May, but were still half of that in the months this year before May. The numbers are up in Afghanistan because we're taking the fight to the Taliban and the Taliban has switched to the effective, but not actually brave, tactic of the IED. Here's the further breakdowns.

In Iraq, 11 servicemen died from IEDs. That's low but not low enough. Four were killed by small arms and two in combat operations. That doesn't indicate a lot of stand up combat. Five died from non combat or non hostile causes. Two were killed in a bomb blast (no other information given) and one died but there was no further information given.

In Afghanistan, 11 also were killed by IEDs and 12 were killed in combat operations. Two were killed in a rocket attack, one was killed by a land mine and five were killed by vehicle accidents. No one with a female Christian name died. However, it was a tough month for officers with 7 killed, mainly in action. The officers lost were: Major Dwayne M. Kelley, 48, from Willingboro, NJ; Captain Eric Daniel Terhune, 34, from Lexington, KY; Major Scott Hagerty, 41, from Stillwater, OK; Lt. Col. James Watson, 41, from Rockville, MD; Captain Gregory T. Dalessio, 30, Cherry Hill. NJ; Lt. Col. Max A. Galeai, 42, Pango Pango, Samoa; and, Captain Philip J. Dykeman, 38 of Brockport, NY.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to all our brave warriors and their families.

Labels: American War Dead in Iraq and Afghanistan

Labels: Christopher Hitchens; Waterboarding

Labels: American Civil War; Battle of Gettysburg

quo teneam vultus mutantem Protea nodo?

Horace

By what knot will I hold this shape shifting Proteus?

Labels: Horace quote

Here is a pdf version of the speech Dr. Hansen gave 20 years ago, which speech is credited with jump starting the anthropogenic CO2 caused Global Warming Climate Change crisis. If you go there, scroll down to the final page (10) and look at the chart he presented to predict the next 30 years. Now, compare that to the RSS for the past 28. Not even close.



Hansen's prediction is closer to the GISS record , but as Anthony Watt and others have been showing, someone is cooking the books at GISS and it is not reliable.


Now, when someone tells you that his knowledge and study causes him to believe a certain thing will happen in the future and then when the future becomes the now, what the person said would happen, didn't, in fact, well, happen; do you continue to blindly believe that person or do you begin to take what he says cum grano salis? The question answers itself except for those who have adopted Climate Change (from anthropogenic CO2) as a personal religion. There certainly are plenty of them.

Labels: Global Warming; Debunked Predictions