XDA

I have a ton of things to do and the weather is NOT co-operating. I guess about 16 inches of snow at my house. I could get to work, but what's the point? No one else would have made the effort. Oh well.

Labels: personal history; falling snow

The Democrats have huge majorities in both houses of Congress. There is nothing the Republicans can do to stop any bill, as long as the Democrats stay united. There are, however, plenty of fractures in the Democratic Party, the so called Blue Dog/Yellow Dog being just one of the better known divides. There are plenty of Democrats who hold their office despite the fact their state or district went for Bush in '04 and McCain in '08, so those guys and gals who are looking at auguries for what will happen just over a year from now, might not be so willing to tow the Democratic line regarding unpopular bills if they know that such a vote will hang albatross-like around their necks when they toe the line regarding re-election next November.

And what might these auguries be? Well, the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia (and possibly the special election of a Representative in the 23rd district in New York--although that one might tell a different story). The Virginia election is a done deal. The Republican candidate will win that. The New Jersey election was, for a long while, about the same, with much disliked but rich Gov. Corzine (D) trailing badly; but then the third party guy, Daggett, did well in a recent debate and it all seemed to shift back to the incumbent Corzine. His poll numbers peaked at a plus 3, and his numbers at Intrade Prediction Markets got to about 75, a near lock.

But hold on there, kitty cat. Take a look at these numbers: At Intrade, Corzine is just over 56, having fallen over 16 in a very short time. The newest poll at Real Clear Politics, has the Republican Christie up by 3 and the third party Daggett sliding into insignificance.

The Republican candidate has a fighting chance.

So the Democrats in traditionally Republican seats will have to be very careful about their votes and such internal agita and angst may well doom the rest of President Obama's disastrous legislative agenda.

Quite good news indeed, now that I think of it.

Labels: American Politics; Virginia, New Jersey Gubernatorial Races

I have already tried to show, in an easy to see description, how little anthropogenic CO2 was diffuse in our atmosphere. I had picked between 5% to 26% as the amount of man made CO2 while the overwhelming bulk was naturally occurring (and lately growing in response to the Medieval Warm Period). Here is a recent peer-reviewed paper which uses 5% anthropogenic and 95% natural as the Truth. So AGW is having too little effect to be a culprit and the warming in the 80s and 90s appears to have been perfectly natural and not at all scary. Here is the breakdown of the atmosphere as if it were 100,000 beachballs filling up half a bowl like football stadium:

78,080 of them are nitrogen, not a greenhouse gas
20,850 of them are oxygen, not a greenhouse gas
930 of them are argon, not a greenhouse gas
38 of them are CO2, a greenhouse gas
2 of them represent all the rest of the trace gasses in the atmosphere, some of which are greenhouse gasses.



So 2 of the 100,000 beachballs are anthropogenic CO2, an insignificant number.



Here is a graph of the anti-logarithmic slope of CO2. There is the slope which the Warmie models have chosen and then there is the slope which actual observation has drawn. So, again, even if the CO2 doubles from the the agreed pre-industrial 280 ppm, the amount of possible warming is less than 2 degrees Celsius (assuming there is not a separate positive feedback system--and it appears that there is not, indeed, probably a negative one exists). So we will reap the rewards for increased plant production from higher CO2 in the atmosphere and only pay the negligible price of gentle, slight warming. Hardly the stuff of crisis. Certainly not the stuff to cause economic suicide.


Two more nails in the AGW coffin. The metaphoric air inside will soon begin to grow stale and close. You can see the Warmies sense that and begin to panic and strike out ever more harshly.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Nails in the AGW Coffin

Showtime just premiered a 6 part reality series called Lock 'N Load about the Shootist gunshop/pistol range on Galapago near Santa Fe and Dartmouth in Englewood, just a few miles from where I lived before marriage. I've practiced double taps and anti-armor drills there. So check it out--it could be good. I haven't seen it yet.

Unless the title refers to unloading (which I doubt) the title and phrase is backwards. You first load a gun which fires from either an open or closed bolt or action and then, if it fires closed bolt, you lock in the round. Nobody listens to me but it really should be Load 'N Lock. That doesn't even sound too bad.

Labels: Showtime: Lock 'N Load

Our friends from near New Orleans and Kit on the Circle Line boat on the Hudson and up the East River to about Sutton Place.












The Statue of Liberty up close. Son Andrew and I went up in the crown a few years ago (which requires a lot of work early in the morning and a slow long climb up the stairs in the center of the statue). Still almost worth it, if only for the view.















Here are two out of focus, moving photos of the skyline which I will pretend are arty. Something like arty.





















This is actually an OK photo of south end of Manhattan. I miss the Twin Towers, even though they were ugly compared to the Empire State or Chrysler Buildings. And I think the plans for redevelopment are a sham and a shame. I like Johan Goldberg's idea--build back the towers just as they were, but one story higher,for the anti-aircraft guns. No one in New York City listens to us conservatives.

Labels: New York City

Here is the short version of a translated German report out of the think tank Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (RWI). Money quote from the short version:

• Green jobs created by government actions disappear as soon as government support is terminated, a lesson the German government and the green companies it supports are beginning to learn.
• Government aid for wind power is now three times the cost of conventional electricity.

It was the same in Denmark and Spain.

Intermittent energy sources are worse than useless.

So, of course we're spending billions of dollars to support wind and solar in this state and throughout the nation as part of the No Energy Economy.

Labels: No Energy Ecomony; Green Jobs Hoax

The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.

Freeman Dyson

Labels: Freeman Dyson quote

Inglourious Basterds has been presented to the world through the ministrations of the producer Harvey Weinstein. The success at this year’s Academy Awards of his 2008 release The Reader—a meta–Stanley Kramerish erotico-solemn tract, false in every particular (no illiterate Kate Winslet could possibly have “joined” the S.S.)—must have proved to Weinstein und Company that there is no business like Shoah business.
[...]
Inglourious Basterds has to be great because, if the boffo box-office figures are true, people love it. It’s therefore undemocratic to go calling it the antihuman dirty dream of a pretentious, vacuous clown primed with Hollywood gelt to do the Jews a favor by showing that they too, given the chance, coulda/woulda behaved like mindless monsters. What does it matter, after all this time, if the world gets sold the idea that what Shoshanna and the Basterds did to the Nazis was exactly what the Jews would have done to the Germans if Harvey had been around to greenlight the project?

Frederic Raphael

Labels: frederic Raphael quote

Although I haven't watched the show in years, and it is set actually in Evergreen in the Front Range west of Denver, here are a few shots of South Park in the evening sun. There is a North Park too, but I wasn't driving through there recently.

Labels: South Park

It has been four years since I saw a live elk on a mountainside in Colorado, while I had a rifle in my hand. I'm forgetting what they look like. We went to our scouted spot, got the van stuck in snow and almost over a cliff when brother in law Gary was towing me out, and it was remarkably elk free. There was no sign of anything recent in the snow and we had no idea where they went. The days were absolutely silent. Our elk hunting guru, the stock boy at the local grocery store, had no idea where to go and all the hunters we talked to were baffled, frustrated and ready to go home. So we did.

I listened to the Bronco victory on the radio, as soon as I got to Poncha Springs. That was fun, but staying up late to see the Rockies lose was not as much fun.

Labels: Personal History: Failing to Shoot Elk

I'll first say congratulations but then I'll have to ask for what? He joins a long list of questionable choices including:

Le Duc Tho (for signing a peace treaty his country never intended to honor and which it broke within 2 years)

Mikhail Gorbachev (for allowing the Soviet Union to fall on the ash heap of history without nuking nations at random)

The UN (God knows why)

Truth challenged Rigoberta Menchu Tum (for a rousing good yarn of an autobiography)

Kofi Annan (for presiding over the complete corruption of the useless UN)

UN Peace-Keeping Forces (for stopping the genocides in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Congo and the Sudan and protecting the children everywhere from sexual assault. No wait...)

Yassar Arafat (for refusing to make peace with Israel and found a Palestinian state)

Al Gore and the IPCC (for spreading the lie that anthropogenic CO2 effects global temperature in any measurable way)

International Atomic Energy Agency (for failing to stop a single technologically advanced country that wanted to get nuclear weapons from getting them)

Jimmy Carter (for his continual criticism of George Bush)

Heady company indeed.

This is the last for a while, I'm off to hunt giant deer and then see The Jersey Boys in NYC. Bit of a cultural whiplash there.

Labels: President Obama; Nobel Peace Prize

This is not a posting on the IMAO humor site's ubiquitous motto, but a real story. Tomorrow, we bomb the moon. Some people in the media, who have watched a little too much Star Trek, worry that we'll start a conflict with non-existent lunar denizens.

Given President Obama's apparent preparedness to surrender in Afghanistan, the real central front, the good war, the necessary war, according to Candidate Obama, the smart money, if a conflict erupts, is on the moon.

Labels: Moon bomb

Here is a top ten firearms list I agree, generally, with. Not sure why the STG 44 is not in it and the .303 Lee-Enfield is. I would have listed the 1898 Mauser rather than the 1893 version. And I would have replaced the Glock with the M-14. But other than that, really good and right on the money.

Labels: Top Ten Firearms

Labels: Space Station

And that's the main reason I am grateful for this controversy [regarding Roman Polanksi]. It is a dye marker, "lighting up" a whole archipelago of morally wretched people. With their time, their money and their craft, these very people routinely lecture America about what is right and wrong. It's good to know that at the most fundamental level, they have no idea what they're talking about.

Jonah Goldberg

Labels: Jonah Goldberg quote

Dendrophrenology

Warmie scientist Keith Briffa published a hockey stick graph in 2000 based on Russian scientists' work with tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia. The underlying raw data was not disclosed for 9 years and finally, when it was, Steve McIntyre took a hard look and discovered that there are hundreds of tree rings to use and the Warmie Briffa only used about a dozen, one of which is an outlier hockey stick (not literally). McIntyre use of another subset revealed a graph the opposite of a hockey stick.

Trees are bad proxies for temperature anyway. It could be any one of several dozen things that causes their growth rings to be fat or thin. Temperature is just one. Water is the factor that predominates. There is absolutely no way to isolate the growth caused by temperature alone from at least the really old trees.

The Warmie scientist replied but he sidesteps the major questions. The Warmie true believers at Real Climate went absolutely nuts and responded, but the reply seems to me another sidestep with way too big a helping of ad hominem. The lady doth protest too much, methinks. But back to the thread.

The Warmie scientists said this in his response:

My colleagues and I are working to develop methods that are capable of expressing robust evidence of climate changes using tree-ring data.

That statement caused a commenter to translate it into:

We are developing methods to make trees talk. (…and they’ll say what we want them to, and nothing else? That’s called dendrophrenology.)

Tickled me.

Now you see how important is the reported loss of the Hadley Climate Research Unit's raw data for its world temperature record. It appears Warmie scientists cook the data to support their theories, or at least they interrogate the data, using enhanced methods, until it confesses.

UPDATE: Dr. Briffa said this in his response:

I note that McIntyre qualifies the presentation of his version(s) of the chronology by reference to a number of valid points that require further investigation.

A hit, a palpable hit.

UPDATE 2: Here is a much better semi-fisking of the response of the Warmie site, Real Climate. And here is a take down of the lie/strawman that begins the response.

When you're taking flak (and not reasoned counter-arguments) you must be over the target.

I recall when basketball great Oscar Robertson, after he retired, gave a try to broadcasting as the color man. His best comments were along the lines of "Oh Man, did you see that play?" He didn't have a long career in broadcasting.

I read through Gavin Schmidt's responses to some of the better questions in his site's comment section. He's the big O of scientific response. He asks if a reader's very pertinent question is a joke (that was the entirety of his response); he calls another clueless and when the question is presented again, admits he knows nothing about the subject. All with a very ominous vibe. Not the stuff to inspire confidence in Schmidt's scientific chops. Indeed, just the opposite.

UPDATE 3: Here is a very sober and well reasoned look at the bigger picture of climate research, riffing off the hockey stick problem. Who could be against scientific method and transparency? Not us Deniers.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax; Disputed Metrics; Biffra; McIntyre