Friday, November 25, 2011

Best of comments

From James Cameron at this page-

With the global-warming jolly about to open in Durban, the CRU whistle-blower released a second tranche of Climategate emails just as tawdry and demeaning as the first. Few outside the ranks of professional physicists consider they are able to adjudicate but most people are capable of recognizing when an investigative procedure is flawed.
It is clear the IPCC assessment process has so many serious material defects as to put into grave doubt the soundness and reliability of any of its heavily promoted claims. We know the IPCC report-writing teams are cherry-picked in an opaque process by a secretive bureau in Geneva with no effort to ensure representation of diverse viewpoints. Conflicts of interest abound in the report-writing process and favoured authors review both their own work and that of their critics, inevitably concluding in their own favour. Environmentalist campaign groups are ludicrously overrepresented among the authors who can overrule academic peer review procedures and subsequently rewrite the texts. It is this disreputable behaviour which has been exposed so damagingly by the e-mails and in files subsequently obtained under recent U.K. freedom of information rulings. They show that an IPCC chapter author recruits a contributing author not on the basis of his knowledge or past work but with cloying cronyism which decides if he is 'one of us'. The Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise has recently released her book 'The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert'. It is a classic exposé showing how the IPCC evolved into an activist organization bearing no resemblance to the picture of scientific probity painted by its promoters and its allies. The claim that the IPCC is made up of thousands of the world's top scientists with the most rigorous and exhaustive review processes in the history of science is totally risible. In fact, far from ensuring 'balance, transparency and accountability' the apathetic plenary panel made up from the 195 member governments is the greatest block to reform. Those countries truly seeking objective, balanced and rigorous information about climate science on which to base momentous policy decisions should simply withdraw. Like so much of the UN, the IPCC is irredeemably corrupt and a new assessment body is needed made up scientists rather than green zealots, political placemen and celebrities.
(bolding mine)

Now why can't all those environmental reporters scrambling feverishly like headless chickens put it as simply and precisely as this instead of copy pasting press releases from green groups? 

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Bad day for Phil Joneses

First the Phil Jones of the Climategate infamy is found further vitiating the scientific process in the new release of Climategate emails with mails like this-

Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process

Then Phil Jones, the Manchester United center back, scores an own goal in a crunch match with Benefica that United needed to win. The match was drawn
There is still hope about America-
Anti-Obama sales outpace pro-Obama nearly fourfold at popular online clothier



Climategate strikes again!

With some explosive emails of climate "scientists" (the scare quotes seem quite appropriate) like-


Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.


Wils:
[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably [...]


Wilson:
Although I agree that GHGs are important in the 19th/20th century (especially since the 1970s), if the weighting of solar forcing was stronger in the models,surely this would diminish the significance of GHGs.
[...] it seems to me that by weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from the sun alone.


Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]


Mann:
 I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s doing, but its not helping the cause


Mann:
the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what the site [Real Climate] is about.


Cook:
A growing body of evidence clearly shows [2008] that hydroclimatic variability during the putative MWP (more appropriately and inclusively called the “Medieval Climate Anomaly” or MCA period) was more regionally extreme (mainly in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts) than anything we have seen in the 20th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the MCA period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.


Jones:
[FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.


Jones:
Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.


Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process 


So much for truth and honesty in science.

Government support of science has corrupted it -like everything it touches. We now have tax-payer funded activists whose only 'science' is to find/stretch/twist/make up evidence for their religious  beliefs(hard to call them scientific theories).

There is much, much more here and here.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

The Renewable Scam

Renewable Energy: Bubble, Scam, or Both



When private industry starts looking to Washington as their primary area to make profits, we’ve made a mess of things.
Read it all.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Oxford bends rules for a torturer

What is it with the love affairs among the Western intellectual elites and Third World brutes-

Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani -  the brute Oxford bent over to please




The son of a former Iranian President has been found culpable of torture and has been ordered to pay his victim millions of dollars in compensation while studying for a DPhil at Oxford.

Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani – who was admitted to the University with a “let-off clause” for language skills – had a judgement brought against him by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in August for ordering the torture of a Iranian businessman who refused to surrender control of his oil consultancy to Rafsanjani and pay a demanded $50 million.

In the judgement made against the 42-year-old, seen exclusively by this newspaper, the judge described how Mr Houshang Bouzari suffered “unspeakably outrageous torture at the hands of the defendant or at his instigation”.




Read it all here and find out what Michael Rubin calls

the murky deals Oxford University appears to have made in order to get its hands on just a small portion of former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s multi-billion dollar nest egg. The price? Apparently, to admit Rafsanjani’s son, waive his language requirement, and ignore the fact that the son was working elsewhere when he was supposed to be studying.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

And speaking of left wing historians-
India's young Chomsky, Pankaj Mishra reviews Niall Ferguson's new book Civilisation: The West and the Rest and shit hits the fan.

Which was inevitable, given the loads of gobar (cow dung) with which Mishra's upper hollow is stuffed.

So England started WW2?

Russia invades Georgia- and lefties blame the victim!



No, Condoleezza Rice Does Not Blame Georgia for the War
Strangely preoccupied with undercutting the pro-Georgia attitudes prevalent in the American national security establishment’s position on the sometimes-violent Russia-Georgia conflict, leftist writers have sought—unconvincingly—to portray Georgia as the aggressor in the two countries’ August 2008 war.

Read it all.
Turning facts upside down is all in a day's work for left wing scholars and historians. Unfortunately, their joke of a 'history' is force fed to children in text books. Child abuse!

BTW, I missed all those anti-imperialist rallies against Russia. It's as if the lefties didn't care about a small, independent country being attacked by a traditionally imperialist power. Either that or I must have been hibernating in a cave.

Monday, November 14, 2011

Top News

Red Green threat






China and bullying ought to be next to each other in the dictionary:

China Threatens Massive Venting of Super Greenhouse Gases in Attempt to Extort Billions as UNFCCC Meeting Approaches

In the run-up to the international climate negotiations in Durban later this month, China has responded to efforts to ban the trading of widely discredited HFC-23 offsets by threatening to release huge amounts of the potent industrial chemical into the atmosphere unless other nations pay what amounts to a climate ransom.



China's threat comes after the European Union and other nations moved to ban HFC-23 credits from internal carbon markets in recognition of the perverse incentives created by these credits under the UN Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The vast amounts paid for HFC-23 offsets have led factories in China and elsewhere to manufacture far more HCFC-22 and its HFC-23 by-product than necessary, just to maximize the amounts paid to destroy HFC-23 through the UN-backed carbon trading scheme.


Green fail continues.

Do read it all.
Welcome to the 21st century!

Mother models lingerie with her 19-year-old daughter


Down with stupid taboos!

The parallel lives of Laura Pollan and Prof. Mushirul Hasan

Laura Pollan was born in 1948 in the pre-Castro Cuba.

Mushirul Hasan came on this planet a year later in a newly independent India.



Laura Pollan - Cuban freedom fighter
Laura Pollan, a simple housewife, a mother and a teacher, died recently of medical complications possibly caused by a long, wrenching struggle against a brutal regime that had imprisoned her husband for being an independent journalist.



 Prof. Mushirul Hasan - influential academic and Castro admirer
image source 

Prof. Mushirul Hasan, a world famous scholar and academic, is a vocal champion of that regime.


Prof. Mushirul Hasan, son of a  noted historian and professor, is a former Vice-Chancellor of Delhi's famous Jamia Millia Islamia University and has written several scholarly books.


 Laura Pollan was a bit like him -
She was ......... a teacher: someone who loved literature and had taught peasants to read in the early years of the revolution.    


Prof. Mushirul Hasan was

the elected President of the Indian History Congress in 2002. In 2007, He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India and the Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Government in 2010. In May 2010, he was appointed the director-general of the National Archives of India.(wikipedia)

Prof. Mushirul Hasan lives in the comfortable and spacious environs that are available as perks to the government-academic elites in India even as the hundreds of millions of Indians who pay for their cozy existence squeeze into their hovels and worry about paying bills.

Prof. Mushirul Hasan at home in the JNU campus
image source



Laura Pollan had been less privileged and much less lucky-

Prior to her husband's arrest in March of 2003 she was an apolitical high school literature teacher who loved cats and plants. That all changed when her husband, Héctor Maseda Gutiérrez, was sentenced to an unjust 20 year prison sentence for his activities as an independent journalist. He had been a nuclear engineer until being demoted in 1992 for ideological errors.


Laura Pollan, instead of sucking up to a barbaric regime like Prof. Mushirul Hasan does, decided against all odds to take it on- 

Within days of the March 2003 show trials and the unjust prison sentences the Ladies in White came into existence and Laura Pollan was one of the founders of the movement. Their demands were simple and direct. The freedom of their loved ones. Their methods were nonviolent, strategic, and well thought out.

and-

Short, blonde and stout, she was not cut out to be hauled into a bus by the police. All she wanted was to see Héctor back, and all the others. Her group would meet each Sunday at the church of Santa Rita in Miramar, Havana’s grandest district, say the rosary, hear mass, and then walk ten blocks in silence along Quinta Avenida on the green verges under the palm trees. The women wore white, symbolising pure intentions, and carried gladioli, a single stem each.


Unlike the cozy environment available to tenured leftist professors in India protected in their group-think, things are tough in Cuba for those of independent minds-

Ms. Pollan, whose resources were limited, ran the protest operation from her Havana home. Branded as a “mercenary,” she lived the dangerous life of a dissident. The government tormented her and other wives by moving the men to prisons far from their homes.

and-
Shock mobs of other women were especially bused in to attack them, beat them and pull their hair. Ms Pollán could fight back with the best: when a man called her “Puta!” once, she threw her gladioli in his face. In one battle in September she was crushed against a wall, which may have set off the breathing troubles that killed her.




 Prof. Mushirul Hasan is such a partisan of the regime that brutalized Laura Pollan that during his time as the Vice-Chancellor he decided to name a university café after his beloved dictator in 2007-

Welcome to Castro cafe at Jamia Milia
--
Vice chancellor of the university Mushirul Hasan said the varsity will be soon naming a cafeteria after Castro. Earlier, he spoke about how Castro had become a symbol of “anti-colonial movement” across the world.
--
Visiting Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque was the chief guest...


Prof. Mushirul Hasan, like so many of his ilk, is in fact a serial admirer of dodgy characters-

 
(In Jamia)There is Noam Chomsky Complex, the big Edward Said Hall, the smaller Yasser Arafat Hall, and the smallest KM Ashraf Hall named after the Marxist historian. Not to forget the coolest spot to hang out — the Castro Café with its award-winning white and black design.  

--
As Jamia’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mushirul Hasan, says, “These names reflect Jamia’s cosmopolitan and secular character reflecting a continuity in its history and a link with future.”

So we have here totalitarian apologists( Noam Chomsky, Edward Said,  KM Ashraf ) and a terrorist (Yasser Arafat). Nice friend list, professor!




Laura Pollan,  unfortunately, could not much enjoy the world built on the ideals of these comfortable Marxist theoreticians-

   ....the (protesting)women were repeatedly assaulted by government-organized “shock brigades,” claiming to represent the ire of the popular masses against “counter-revolutionaries, in the pay if the U.S. empire.”  These thugs also took up intense harassment, occupying the sidewalks outside Pollán’s home on Havana’s Neptuno Street.  During one of the Ladies in White peaceful marches through Havana, video cameras show them being physically attacked before police arrest them, not the attackers, and piling them into a bus to be hauled off to jail.  At one point it became unclear whether the police or the mob did more physical harm to the women.  


Laura Pollan probably never heard of  Mushirul Hasan.


Prof. Mushirul Hasan has most likely heard of Laura Pollan (and if he hasn't, what kind of a historian is he?).



I wonder professor, is there is just an itsy-bitsy chance that you would like to dedicate just a small, lonely chair at the Castro café to this brave freedom fighter?

No need to answer, professor - we all know.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Best of comments

Razlon-

At the tail end of the Vietnam era, I served as an Air Force public affairs NCO. What was striking, even at the time, was the wide gulf between the Ernie Pyle and the David Halbertram generations of civilian journalists.

The former were overwhelmingly veterans themselves, never went to J school, had a wide variety of life experiences outside both the classroom and the newsroom, and regarded what they did as a trade learned on the job. The later were virtually all graduates J schools, regarded the military with open contempt,had little to no life experiences outside of journalism, felt they were on a mission to "improve" society, and considered themselves practitioners of a noble profession. Today they are the managing editors and publishers who, without any reflection or self-awareness, decide what the rest of us need to know.

No wonder the profession is dying.

Media - wiping Obama's ass

Media Attempt to Cover up Obama Comments on Israel

--
There are a couple of excellent articles about this, though not much in the mainstream media: one is by Arnold Ahlert in Jewish World Review, in which he writes that “it is hard to decide which part of this story is more revealing: the incident itself, or the subsequent reaction by the Fourth Estaters whose commitment to the standards of journalistic integrity—or perhaps more accurately JournO-listic integrity—seemingly never reach the bottom of an apparently bottomless barrel.” And to the issue of reporters agreeing, after the fact, to keep this quiet, Ahlert writes, “What reporter in his right mind would sign anything that prevents him from reporting on a story made available, not by subterfuge or anything else resembling illegality, but by the carelessness of two world leaders? Since when did a legitimate ‘gotcha’ moment become off limits to the press?”



Read it all. Free press has willingly become King's courtiers. 

Friday, November 11, 2011

All is not for the BEST

Remember that BEST study(non-peer reviewed if I might add, as if that matters to the Warmists) that was supposed to blow up the AGW skeptics' case to outer space?

Turns out that the BEST is not good enough-

The skeptics have now counter-attacked Muller and BEST, in a controversy that could swell to Hockey-Stick dimensions.



On October 30, the UK’s Daily Mail interviewed Judith Curry, Muller's second-named co-author of the four Berkeley study papers. Professor Curry chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

She said that Muller's claim that he had proved warming skeptics wrong was a 'huge mistake' with no scientific basis. She said the Berkeley data showed that there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties. "This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting," she said.  In fact the standstill in warming  was making many non-skeptic scientists take the skeptic arguments more seriously, she said.

Curry was not consulted by Muller before Muller published his results to the media. "I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did," she said.
She said two of the four papers were not publication-ready and a graph given to the press by Muller involved a 'hide the decline' subterfuge. It was also misleading of Muller to claim that the urban heat island issue had been settled.

-- snip --


High-profile anti-BEST scientist, Fred Singer, is an atmospheric and space physicist. He was, among other things, founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service.  He wrote in the Wall Street Journal (November 3)  that  the BEST study merely re-works the same contaminated temperature data used by the Climategate team, covering less than 30% of the earth’s surface. Even so, a third of the BEST data series show cooling, while the absence of warming in the marine atmosphere suggest solar variability, not CO2, is the main climate driver.

Singer says global warming theory and modeling predict atmospheric warming but weather satellites and weather balloon radiosondes (two independent measures), show no atmospheric warming over the 1987-97 period. He concludes:

The Berkeley team's research paper comments: ‘The human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated.’ I commend Mr. Muller and his team for their honesty and skepticism. 


Catch it all here.

LNC Quote Shop " "

Like so many people, in so many countries, who started out to "spread the wealth," Barack Obama has ended up spreading poverty
 -Thomas Sowell

Does this mean Rajendra Pachauri is a liar?

Donna Laframboise who has researched the IPCC and is out with a new book exposing this shoddy -organization -

Rajendra Pachauri- the dodgy Dr.Doom

Yet even though the IPCC evaluates matters in which trillions of dollars are at stake, well into the 21st century it saw no need to even discuss conflict-of-interest. This organization is so arrogant, so used to being praised and admired, that its leaders failed to take the most ordinary of precautions.


Alas, this is only one of many troubling signs. In 2009 Pachauri assured a US Senate committee that his organization mobilizes "the best talent available across the world." On other occasions he has insisted that IPCC authors are at the top of their profession and are chosen for their impressive track records.


But as anyone who does a little math can discover for themselves, the IPCC has been relying on the expert judgment of 20-something graduate students for years.


In one instance, a young man who hadn't even acquired his Masters degree was recruited to be a lead author. In another, a woman 16 years away from completing her doctorate (and three years from the publication of her first academic paper) was one of only 21 people in the entire world selected by the IPCC to write about climate change and human health.


But why stop at students when you can recruit brazen activists, as well? Richard Moss has been involved with the IPCC for nearly two decades. During part of that time he was on the World Wildlife Fund's payroll – as a vice president, no less.


Richard Hare is considered a Greenpeace "legend." He has been one of its spokespeople since 1992 and was its chief climate negotiator in 2007. None of this prevented him from being admitted to the IPCC's inner circle. In 2007, Hare was one of only 40 people on the "core writing team" for the overall, big-picture IPCC summary known as the Synthesis Report.


Chairman Pachauri has further insisted that the IPCC bases its reports solely, only, and exclusively on research that has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals. In testimony before U.S. lawmakers he has said that the IPCC doesn't "settle for anything less." He has further declared that non-peer-reviewed material should be tossed "into the dustbin."


Yet it turns out that one in three sources relied on by the IPCC's landmark 2007 report didn't come within a mile of a peer-reviewed journal. Or, to rephrase that: one third of the sources referenced by the Climate Bible are to material the IPCC's own chairman has said belongs in the trashcan.


How could he have been so mistaken? How could he have repeatedly made the 100% peer-reviewed claim before he'd personally taken steps to ensure it had actually happened that way?


Read  it all.

Otherwise India is a free country

So is our political class okay with this, since it is their policies and illiberal attitudes that cause such State crimes-


Police in India’s Kashmir Valley detained and beat converts from Islam and were expected to arrest Christian workers after Muslim leaders alleged that Muslim youth were being “lured” to Christianity.


Police in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley picked up seven converts who were recently baptized in All Saints Church in Srinagar, a local Christian who spoke to the converts after their release on Nov. 2 told Compass. Srinagar is the summer capital of the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir and the main city of the Kashmir Valley.


The source, who requested anonymity, said police beat the converts and asked if Christians had given them money for their conversion. Most of the converts were from Budgam district, about 18 miles from Srinagar, and pastors there fearful of being arrested were in hiding, he added.


India's Gangster State

Yes, we are a free people - free to be beaten up by the State's goons in uniform following State's laws. Jai Hind!

So Google wants to take over the world?

Reading this one gets that ominous tingly feeling - we have seen too many movies about creepy corporates that, while providing a useful nay indispensable service, really want to take over the world(RoboCop I can think of offhand but I have seen others).




Google may still track your location, even if you prevent Latitude from blabbing to your friends. When you open a map, a little flashing crosshairs appears just to let you know that Google has you in its sights. But the tracking doesn’t stop when you close the map. Google monitors your location continuously, day and night, even if no apps are running.

-- snip --

Good programmers like finding clever ways to nudge users. If you visit Latitude’s Web page on your PC, for example, Google will ask you for permission to share your location. If you click “no,” you get an alert box with only one button — “go back.” (And get asked for permission again.) No is not an option.

Even as I type this post in Google Chrome to be published on a Google Blogger blog, with images found by using Google search and using Gmail as my primary mail, I have to say creepy sounds about right.

Google's motto is - Don't Be Evil.

But it is putting in place an apparatus and a network to potentially do a lot of evil.

Horror care

Readers of this blog know that I am wont to say that there is not much welfare in the welfare state or much compassion in the 'compassionate' policies of  the 'social justice' variety. Whatever be the theories, in practice it always means misery and death.

From John Hinderaker on Britain's NHS, that shining example of government health care-



We noted here that under socialized medicine in the U.K., the death panel process has been delegated to hospital staff who enter “do not resuscitate” orders on patients’ charts without the knowledge of the patient or his or her relatives. Now, another horror story about “The National Hell Service:”

A Mum died gasping for breath in hospital after she was WRONGLY given a “do not resuscitate” tag. The frantic husband of Immacolata Lacovara, 74, watched in horror as nurses stood by refusing to help.

Others involved elderly patients left starving, thirsty and in agony after being denied drug relief.
The case was revealed yesterday in the latest damning report on the hellish neglect suffered by elderly patients on wards across the nation.

The blunder over Mrs Lacovara — who died in North West London — was among 16 shocking cases highlighted by the Patients Association out of thousands of calls to its helpline.


So much callousness in this 'compassionate' system.