Linkaround 12-7-2009

ClimateGate:

via Instapundit: Climate Scientist to Revkin: "we can no longer trust you" to carry water for us. "I sense that you are about to experience the 'Big Cutoff' from those of us who believe we can no longer trust you, me included."
U.K. Mail Online: Arnold Schwarzenegger unveils dramatic climate change map which shows flooded San Francisco of the future 

Good grief!
George Will: Saving Earth requires posturing. "Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be an estimated 420 million in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen."
AP via The Detroit News: Climate summit seeks ways to change planet. These people are mental. Change THE PLANET???
Eric Raymond via Instapundit: “The scientists have been tied up and gagged in the back room”. "The unravelling of the AGW fraud continues to provide an entertaining mix of high drama and low comedy. My favorite recent entry on the CRU mob is a screed from a professor of mathematics in Canada: “All of my colleagues have had to endure these bullies and criminals for a very long time.” Then there’s David Bellamy’s tale of being canned from a very successful science-popularizer gig on the BBC because he dared to speak anti-AGW heresy. That’s a theme in a lot of recent revelations. As long as the lid was on the CRU’s fraud, nobody dared speak up about for fear of being dismissed as a crank."
Ace of Spades: Trust the Scientists on Carbon, Even If They're Not Really Scientists 
American Power: Hopenhagen? "It's not about hope, of course, it's about power."
American Thinker:  Donald Kennedy and the Corruption of Science Magazine
WUWT: Monday Funny

ObamaCare:

Big Government: Was Democrats’ Health Care Strategy Written In Federal Prison?
Gateway Pundit: Obama Again Violates No Abortion Funding Pledge
Detroit Free Press: Ad targets Stupak amendment on abortion restriction
Jill Stanek: Sham NARAL ad targets Stupak

discriminations: Abortion And Health Care, But ...
Gateway Pundit: Dems Cut $43 Billion From Home Health Care
Big Government: ObamaCare: HCAN Proudly Suppressing Dissent

Media matters:

Gateway Pundit: Taxpayer-Funded NPR Tells Correspondent to Stay Off FOX News
Andrew Breitbart: AP Whitewashes My Public Statement on Whitewashed ACORN Investigation
The Other McCain (Smitty): The Quaint Ann Althouse. "Ann Althouse hammers Maureen Dowd for inability to differentiate between private citizens (Tiger "How 'bout them" Woods) and civil servants and Desiree Rogers, the White House social secretary, or does she?"

Miscellaneous:

Doug Ross: The Obama Recovery In Full Effect: Deficits Running 25% Higher Than Highest Estimates

related at Gateway Pundit: Obama Two Month Deficit Is More Than Bush Deficit For Entire 2006 Calendar Year
Detroit News: Police: Suburbanites ride buses to buy drugs in Detroit. What do you expect when cops are confiscating cars without charges?
discriminations: Joseph Califano Solves The Church-State Problem ... Again
John Hawkins:  The Best Quotes From C.S. Lewis' "Miracles". "Men of sensibility look up on the night sky with awe: brutal and stupid men do not."
The Other McCain: Fear and Loathing at Patterico
Izismile: Cool Underground House on a Hill (26 pics)

Just for laughs:

Ace of Spades: Chicks Are Gullible Too Part XII: Making Out With Chimps

Izismile: Awesome Creative Photos (68 pics)

Holy Taco: 25 Dumb Blondes
Manofest: The 20 Funniest Cakes Of All Time

Video of Harry Reid: Passing Government-Run Health Care Is Like Ending Slavery Or Something

More Orwellian NewSpeak from Harry Reid. This, by the way, is the same guy that referred to tea party protesters as 'evil mongers,' thinks our tax system is voluntary, and declared the Iraq Wat lost. When Harry Reid talks, it sounds like a massive case of projection. ObamaCare will not free people, it will shackle them to the state. Par for the course for statists like Obama, Reid and Pelosi. Here's Reid comparing the effort to nationalize healthcare, a system that is proven to decrease quality and kill people, to slavery of all things, something the Democrat Party went to war to defend:

I guess that's consistent with the assertion: Jesse Jackson: 'You can't vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man'.
Keeping blacks down is a form of control that Democrats have become exceedingly efficient at. The same party that defended slavery, fought and died for it, segregated schools, filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964, came up with welfare, good intentions on full display, which has broken the black family and replaced the father with the government. Since that time, the poverty level has not changed on single bit at a cost of trillions of taxpayer dollars. Then the victim mentality was installed by Democrats. Affirmative action separated people by their race. Us against them. Black versus white. Male versus female. Gay versus straight. The party of identity politics divides people and judges them by the color of their skin, not by the content of their character. Democrats have kept blacks down in the plantations of failed urban environments with failed public schools, doomed to continue voting for Democrats to get handouts that they have been convinced they are entitled to. And Democrats continue to to reap many votes from people's misery that they themselves have created.I wonder how Reid feels about this issue: Abortion Is The New Racism: Kills More Black Americans Than the Seven Leading Causes of Death - COMBINED

Previously on Harry Reid:
Video: Reid refers to himself in third person
Video: Harry Reid: We Don't Want Tort Reform Because $54 Billion Saved Is Nothing Compared To ***$2 TRILLION*** COST OF HEALTH CARE BILL!!!
Nancy Pelosi confirms that Harry Reid has the cooties!
Harry Reid: Kennedy's death "going to help us" on health care
Harry Reid Bullies Small Business Owner Constituent: "I Hope You Go Out Of Business!" Gets Called Out By Nevada's Largest Newspaper
Harry Reid: Protesters are ‘evil-mongers’
Video Of Harry Reid: Sotomayor Is Qualified! She Wrote Hundreds Of Opinions And I Haven't Read A Single One!
Harry Reid In PRINT: Bush Is Kind of a "B**ch" Like His Mother
Harry Reid: "the best part of Barack Obama is his heart!" Unborn remain unimpressed
April 20th - Harry Reid's D-I Day
Harry Reid: Tax System Is Voluntary

Audit: Liberal Utopia Detroit Is Incompetent At Being Incompetent

How bad are things in Detroit? BAD and getting worse. From The Detroit News: Audits unmask Detroit's fiscal crisis. So how bad is it? Here are a few bullet points with more detail contained in the article:

• the city hasn't kept a complete list of city bank accounts (!)
• the city has missed deadlines in filing audit reports for years, thus blind to the problems that were already there
  
• officials repeatedly borrow money to cover day-to-day bills
• officials rarely go after deadbeats. There are $2.2 million in bounced checks
  
• officials sat on at least $3.2 million in property tax overpayments that should have been paid back to residents
• the city hasn't turned over unclaimed property such as uncashed income tax refunds to the state since 2004, totaling $3.4 million, in violation of state law
• the city is owed at least $200 million in unpaid parking tickets, property and income tax, fees and fines that it cannot collect on because of unemployment and the economy
  
• 15 city agencies overspent budgets by a total of $51 million
• the city will have to borrow $269 million to make payroll

Some of the software the city uses is so outdated, it's not compatible with anything today. A single person knows how it works and it is overleaded to the point that it can no longer generate reports, rendering it useless. Here are a few other tidbits from the News piece:

Detroit, which faces a $300 million deficit, remains "one of the weakest (financially) in the nation" and "significant economic conditions continue to cast doubt on the city's future operation," outside auditors wrote last month in a 227-page audit of the 2007-08 finances.

"In a nutshell, the city is insolvent," said Joe Harris, the city's former chief financial office...

At least new mayor Dave Bing isn't taking the grim news lying down:

Bing also is pushing to reduce the city's work force of 13,000, institute a 10 percent pay cut to employees, curb union benefits and ramp up collection of debts. The city is owed at least $200 million in unpaid parking tickets, property and income tax, fees and fines, according to city estimates.

The next audit, which examines the city's finances from June 30, 2008, to July 1, 2009, is due Dec. 31.

That's going to be scary to see. Bing is going to have an uphill battle with the unions that have helped run the city right into the ground. union workers in Detroit work only 35 hours per week but get paid for 40, and have 42 days off each year, are covered for Viagra, in addition to receiving Christmas bonuses. A City Council that until recently was run by a moonbat, and still full of tax cheats after an election to replace a Council full of tax cheats, won't help matters either. Detroit is also ranked the #2 emptiest city in the nation, in the top 4 of the crime index, has resorted to gaming census data to boost funding opportunities, ranked the most dangerous city in the country, the number 1 city in both lack of jobs, homicide rate, and in job sprawl, #2 most toxic metro area in the U.S., the most miserable city in the nation (#6 if sports teams are taken into account), with the worst jobless rate in the state (28.9%) and likely the nation, and dead last among the 50 largest cities for finding jobs.

Oh - did I mention that Democrats have had absolute hegemonic domination of the D for at least the last 50 years? Fact is, Detroit is the most liberal city in the U.S. if one goes by voting record:

2008 General Election results-DEM: 96.93% GOP: 2.65%
2006 General Election results-DEM: 95.05% GOP: 4.33%
2004 General Election results-DEM: 93.61% GOP: 5.93%

In essence, Detroit residents have been voting for their own doom. The Stockholm Syndrome on a massive scale. I have pointed this out manytimes before, but it's worth repeating yet again. One of my all-time favorite movies of all time is The Shawshank Redemption. In it, Morgan Freeman, aka "Red", coined the term when prisoners become dependent on the prison system and can no longer survive without it - institutionalized. One of the older prisoners, Brooks, was willing to kill to stay in the system as he knew nothing else after so many years. Yet they let him out and he promptly hung himself. He was institutionalized. The Democrats have institutionalizing the black population in this country, no different than slave masters did many decades ago. The same party that fought for slavery, not against it, segregated schools and filibustered the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 now has shackled the black population to another form of slavery - slavery to the state. Stripped naked of their dignity, their hope and their self-reliance.

Liberal Reverend leader: Abortion Is a ‘God-Given Right’

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. - Isiah 5:20

Yet that is exactly what the corrupted conscience seeks to do - call that which is good evil, and evil good. These people have a wicked heart that skips a beat when word gets out that clinics are required to show pregnant women ultrasounds, but don't bat an eye that conscious babies are being torn limb from limb while trying to recoil from the vacuum machine, or endure saline solutions injected to burn through their skin and muscle, or are delivered and left in a soiled linen closet to die screaming. That is a conscience seared shut by the evil one. These people have not only bought into the darkness, but have joined with it, perpetuate it, protect it. Such is the case of Rev. Carlton Veazey, president and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. Sure its a religious coalition, but they don't worship the creator of all, but rather the other guy below. From CNS News: Abortion Is a ‘God-Given Right,’ Liberal Leader Declares 

Rev. Carlton Veazey, president and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, told a small crowd of pro-abortion protesters that women have a “God-given right” to abortion and that opposition from pro-life congressmen and religious leaders would never take it away.

Veazey, closing speaker at a “Stop Stupak” rally on Capitol Hill staged by major pro-abortion groups such as Planned Parenthood, NARAL-Pro Choice, and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) told the crowd that not only did they have a constitutional right to abortion, but that they had a God-given one as well.

Funny, but the very Constitution this man alludes to is predicated on unalienable rights given to us by God, the primary one being LIFE! As in nobody can be deprived of life without due process. Mass murderers and child molesters get their due process. The innocent unborn do not. And how has God made abortion a right? The Bible says quite the opposite, so I am a bit puzzled as to where this "Reverend" derives such moral authority?

The rally was held to inspire abortion rights protesters ahead of a day of lobbying for federal funding of abortion in health care reform legislation. The event also served as an outlet for the activists to vent anger at the amendment offered by Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) to the House health care bill.

Can't you just picture Germans back in the 1930s having similar inspirational gatherings in regards to death camps? The similarities are many as the Nazis did the same thing pro-aborts do: redefine what a person is to justify genocide. If anyone sees any difference, other than the fact that abortion has claimed far more lives than the Nazis ever dreamed of.

“Make no mistake, the Stupak amendment does not reaffirm existing law – it goes way past it,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). “It disallows private insurers who operate in the new exchange from covering abortion services in plans receiving government subsidies.”

Well - yeah! The key is the word "subsidy," no? ie - federal taxpayer money? Hello? One thing I will give to these disciples of Molech though - they're very good at unintentional irony:

Calling the Stupak amendment “a stain,” DeLauro said that pro-abortion activists must make legislators “feel your wrath” if abortion coverage is to be preserved.

If she wants to know what a "stain" is, she should go visit one of the butcher shops she supports. And don't get me going on wrath, something she and her ilk will see first hand when their time comes. It's curious her wording. Stain, wrath. A sign of her stunted conscience trying to speak? These people truly have diseased minds.

²⁸Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. ²⁹They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, ³⁰slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; ³¹they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³²Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. - Romans 1 (NIV)

King Obama To Regulate Oceans And Forests That Produce 99.7% Of Greenhouse Gasses

"If all human activity were to disappear tomorrow, the atmosphere wouldn't even notice..."

Actually no, Obama won't regulate oceans and forrests. Instead, he will try to chop a part of the 3% of CO2 production that is said to be produced by human activity (and absorbed by vegetation by the way). It is a scientific fact that all known greenhouse gases comprise only about 2% of our atmosphere (the majority of our atmosphere is oxygen and nitrogen). Out of all the greenhouse gases, water vapor is more than 90% of that 2%, while CO2 is is only about 3.6% of that. Out of all the CO2, 96% is produced naturally (oceans, forrests, etc), while only 3.4% is man-made. So mankind is responsible for only 3.4% of CO2, which is only 3.6% of greenhouse gases, which are only 3% of our atmosphere. So 3.4% of 3.6% of 2% is... well - not much. (.002% of CO2 and 0.28% overall)

Just so you know what a small percentage of our atmosphere is comprised of CO2, the compound is measured in units of parts per million! So if you gather 1 million people and pick out 385 of them, you have jack squat of the whole, and that jack squat represents the CO2 proportion.

Now keep in mind that detailed CO2 records have only been kept since -- wait for it -- 1999! All of 10 years! Such was admitted even by the state-run Obama AP (AP: The Earth Is Doomed Because CO2 Increased Greenhouse Gasses By 0.02% Or Something). Any small increases thus must be questioned on a much larger temporal scale where no detailed measurements exist and the data must be reconstructed indirectly. The AP in that article was in a tizzy because of an apparent increase of 2 parts per million! As a scientist, my first question would be one of accuracy. For one thing, every measurement has uncertainty. For instance, lets say you weight around 385 pounds and step on ascale that reads 385.2 lbs, then step on another scale. What would you guess the other scale would read. Very likely, it won't be 385.2. It might be 384 or 386.1. Fact is, each scientific measurement has an uncertainty to it. Most scales are accurate to +-2 lbs. So if you step on it and it says 200, you could really weight 202 or 198 or somewhere in between. The AP, of course, doesn't say a darned thing about the uncertainty, even though they claim a significant rise of just 2 out of 385 parts per million! Are such devices that accurate? And is the CO2 concentration uniform over the entire globe. And if not, how many measurements around the planet were taken to get an average? With those considerations, their number means nothing. Yet, they are being used in part to form damaging economic policy.

Be that as it may, Obama is set to unilaterally list CO2 as a danger to public health. Even though human influence is negligible in regards to atmospheric CO2. From teh Washington Post via memeorandum: Obama administration will formally declare danger of carbon emissions

The Obama administration will formally declare Monday that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions pose a danger to the public's health and welfare, a move that lays the groundwork for an economy-wide carbon cap even if Congress fails to enact climate legislation, sources familiar with the process said.

CO2 doesn't pose a danger to the public's health and welfare, it is rather government that does.

The move, which Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson will announce at an afternoon press conference, comes as the largest climate change conference in history gets underway in Copenhagen. It will finalize an initial "endangerment finding" by the government in April.

The endangerment finding stems from a 2007 Supreme Court decision in which the court ordered the EPA to determine whether greenhouse gases qualify as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. It could trigger a series of federal regulations affecting polluters, from vehicles to coal-fired power plants.

And how may I ask will the government regulate nature that is responsible for 98% of greenhouse gasses and almost 97% of CO2???

"An endangerment finding from the EPA could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project," Thomas Donohue, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement. "The devil will be in the details, and we look forward to working with the government to ensure we don't stifle our economic recovery."

"This action poses a threat to every American family and business if it leads to regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. Such regulation would be intrusive, inefficient, and excessively costly," said the American Petroleum Institute president Jack Gerard in a statement. ...

Not to mention that it is based on garbage substituting for science. This whole endeavor is predicated on on a phenomenon, man-made global warming, that DOESN'T EXIST! CRU email leaks? Collusion? Scientific fraud? Hide the decline? Hello???

Study: Amino acid recipe could be right for long life (if you starve yourself)

It's funny sometimes reading through articles on nutrition topics that have been well-known in the bodybuilding community for literally decades. Related to the topic of life-extension, calorie restriction has been at the forefront for some time now. The last time I critiqued a study on calorie restriction was back in July: Calorie restriction can make you live a very long miserable life.  That study was interesting because it was performed on monkeys that are physiologically more similar to humans than lab rats. Yet, I had a few problems with study. One of the problems was with the lack of information on macronutrient composition. That is, the monkeys were fed fewer calories, but no percentages were listed for fats/carbs/protein. As a competitive natural bodybuilder, protein is the most important macronutrient when dieting. Seems the calorie restriction crowd is starting to come around to that realization. From Science News via Instapundit: Amino acid recipe could be right for long life.

A new study in fruit flies suggests that the life-extending properties of caloric restriction may be due not only to fewer calories in the diet, but also to just the right mix of protein building blocks, called amino acids. The study, published online December 2 in Nature, may help explain some of the health benefits of restricted-calorie diets.

So don't mind the headline. Calorie restriction is the key still. So you have to be hungry. A lot. 

Coupled with other data, the new study should prompt researchers to reevaluate whether it is calorie count or the nutrient composition of a diet that is most important for regulating lifespan and health, comments Luigi Fontana of Washington University in St. Louis.

Is calorie count or nutrient compostion the most important? My answer: yes! You have to take in fewer calories than you expend, and there has to be a high proportion of protein in such a diet. Every bodybuilder that competes knows this. It's been done for generations now.

Caloric restriction — a diet that contains a minimal amount of calories while maintaining healthy levels of nutrients — has been proven to extend lifespan in fruit flies, worms, mice, dogs, baboons and other organisms. Nutritious, low-cal diets also improve health in people, but scientists don’t yet know whether such diets can extend maximal lifespan in humans.

Here's my big beef with the whole calorie restriction theory. I say this as a person that voluntarily goes on calorie restricted diets from time to time as I compete as a natural bodybuilder. In 2006, I completed about 60 weeks of continuous calorie restriction (that's me on the right after about 49 weeks). There is an upside, as my blood chemistry and physical fitness was top-notch. But there was a downside that no rhesus monkey or rodent or fruit fly study will ever, or can ever, conclude. That is, as fit as I was on a calorie restricted diet, I was miserable from an energy availability perspective. I felt like doing nothing. I was a zombie who had to drag himself to the gym every day. Without even being conscious of the fact, I was sitting around most of the time rather than being active. It just simply came with the territory and I didn't even realize it until months into the diet when it had to be pointed out to me. My temper was shorter. I was more serious and tended to laugh less. I'm usually a cheery guy but was subdued to a large extent. Again, all of this was a gradual decay of my spirits that I was unaware of because of the small increments with which it progressed.

So would a calorie-restricted diet extend human life? No doubt, albeit not as much as lower life forms I suspect. But this is done by slowing your metabolism, and chronically feeling like you don't want to do a thing. Although my thinking was as clear as ever (possibly due to increased sensitivity to hormones like insulin, leptin, etc), I wasn't as motivated to do anything, and it was a lot easier to just sit around and veg. Most people I reckon would choose a happier life rather than a longer unhappy one. There was something else in the article that is well-known in the bodybuilding community:

There is a downside to living longer, though. Many animals on low-calorie diets shut down their reproductive systems. Female fruit flies, for example, don’t lay eggs when fed the calorie-restricted diets...

Happens all the time to female bodybuilders. When their bodyfat levels get low enough, the menstrual cycle shuts down. Of course, fruit flies don't store energy like humans do, so it's easy to see that the researchers attributed stunted fertility to diet, rather than bodyfat level in humans.

The biggest flaw in the study, however, is due to the test subjects being fruit flies. Even studies on lab mice would have yielded far more useful results. That being said, there was this towards the end of the piece:

“The idea that only calories are important is basically falling apart,” Fontana says.

Well - duh! Is that new information? Check out some bodybuilding websites and old magazines and you find out that this has been known for many generations now. In conclusion though, the holy grail to studies such as this one is to bottle the effects of calorie restriction in a drug rather than have people actually exercise and eat correctly. Don't hold your breath out there folks! Instead, 1) go to the gym. Do a combination of resistance exercise with aerobics and 2) don't eat junk! Plenty of protein, healthy fats kept moderate, and carbs on the lower side with periodic refeeds. If you do those 2 things, by the time these scientists come up with a pill that will help you live longer as long as they can replace your liver now and again, you won't need it. The best pill to take is the suck-up variety. Get off your bum and go be active. GO!

Dude - where's my DNA? Study links missing DNA to childhood obesity

Obesity has been blamed on everything from a virus to racism. Personal responsibility tends to be left off the table. But missing DNA? That's a new one. Yet one study makes exactly that assertion. I have several problems with the study on a technical basis, but I'll get to those in a bit. From the AP via The Detroit News: Study: Missing DNA can promote childhood obesity

Some children get severely obese because they lack particular chunks of DNA, which kicks their hunger into overdrive, researchers report.

The British researchers checked the DNA of 300 children who'd become very fat, on the order of 220 pounds by age 10. They looked for deletions or extra copies of DNA segments.

They found evidence that several rare deletions may promote obesity, including one kind they studied further and found in less than 1 percent of about 1,200 severely obese children.

Uh -  1 out of 1,200 isn't significant. Or is it just me? What's up with the other 1,199? No mention in the article of what they're eating either. If their hunger is in overdrive for whatever reason, I doubt they would weigh 220 pounds eating chicken breasts. My guess is they are going high carb in combination with high fats - a sure-fire combination to get anyone fat. I hate these studies that don't release relevant details such as macronutrient delineation.

That deletion, on chromosome 16, apparently causes trouble because it removes a gene that the brain needs to respond to the appetite-controlling hormone leptin, said Dr. Sadaf Farooqi of Cambridge University.

In her study, children with a chromosome 16 DNA deletion "have a very strong drive to eat," said Farooqi, who co-led the research. "They're very, very hungry, they always want to eat."

Even if fed chicken breasts and little else? Sorry - not buying it. Here's a fatal flaw in the science though. Leptin is a relatively new hormone discovered within the last decade. Upon discovery, it was touted as a way to get the obese thin. BUT... obese people were later found to have huge leptin levels already, meaning that 1) introducing more leptin will do something between jack and squat, and 2) obese people are leptin resistant. Thus, the resistance may not be a genetic certainty, but rather a genetic preference that can be overcome with a proper diet and exercise, much like insulin resistance can. Finally I will comment on this:

The work, reported online Sunday by the journal Nature, has already produced a real-world payoff. Farooqi said four children with the chromosome 16 deletion had drawn the attention of British child welfare authorities, who blamed the parents for overfeeding them.

The researchers got them off the hook, but it's a sad commentary on the totalitarianism gripping the U.K, something I've written about before (see prior posts below). The other comment is about the journal Nature, which has come into notoriety as the journal hijacked by the CRU global warming alarmists to publish their junk science to form a consensus by collusion. Thus, forgive me for taking anything from such a journal with a grain of salt.

Previously: 
Nanny statism: Newborn baby and SIX siblings taken into care 'over obesity fears'
Moonbattery in the U.K.: 4-year olds to be interned in fat farms to combat obesity
Uberliberal Bonnie Erbe on obesity health care war: "why the heck are fat people on tv?"
Doctor: Take Fat Kids Away From Parents
Research: We're Not Fat Because We're Lazy, We're Fat Because We're Greedy!
Scientists: OBESITY BUG YOU CAN CATCH!!!
Cause Of Obesity Among Black Women Found - RACISM!
Skinny ideas on overweight kids

December 7th, 1941: A date which will live in infamy. Pearl Harbor 68 years ago today

A day that will always live in infamy, remembered by everyone except Google:

68 years ago the Japanese attacked us while most slept, declaring war on the U.S. after the attack (which was antithesis to the samurai code of honor). America hasn't been attacked in such a horrific manner until 9/11. With the attack, the Japanese Empire sealed its fate on that morning. It was the beginning of their end. Here are some Pearl Harbor videos I dug up on YouTube:

You wonder if a Pearl Harbor were to happen on this day if the 'progressives' would have the stomach for going what needs to be done.

Govt effectiveness: Finding an outside CEO for GM could be hindered by company's salary cap

If you mess with the bull, you will get the horns. Back in June, the story came out regarding the shock of top executives when Obama forced out CEO Rick Wagoner (The Madness Of King Obama: Kicking Wagoner out caused outrage and shock at GM). In that decision, as well as the imposed salary cap on execs, there was a common mantra coming from the White house: "the Obama administration has 'no desire to run an auto company on a day-to-day basis.'" That last part was always worrisome to me as it implied that they will set mandates while leaving the small stuff to their minions. The claim itself and what it was supposed to project was about as believable as stimulus job numbers. The consequences of some of those mandates are starting to rear some ugly heads. Case-in-point today is the salary cap. From MLive: Chances of finding an outside CEO for GM could be hindered by company's salary caps

General Motors Co. has a relatively low pay scale for top executives that could make it difficult to find someone from outside of the company to lead the troubled automaker, according to a report from Reuters.

GM is searching for a new CEO after Fritz Henderson stepped down on Tuesday after eight months as the company's top executive. Chairman Ed Whitacre Jr. is serving as GM's interim CEO until a new executive can be found.

Reuters said the federal government limits salaries for most of GM's top 25 executives to $500,000 in cash, with any exceeding pay limited to long-term company stock options, since GM accepted a federal bailout last year. By comparison, Reuters said Ford Motor Co. -- which did not take a bailout -- will pay CEO Alan Mulally $1.4 million in cash for 2009.

Experts told Reuters that the pay discrepancy will make it difficult to attract executives from outside of the company for the CEO position.

Some analysts say that the new CEO needs to be from outside Michigan for the company to succeed long-term. I don't know that that's true, but it's hard to imagine the most competent CEO possible coming to GM to get a paycut while big government is hanging over his (or her) head, dictating what kind of cars to build, and the company is UAW-owned. Yuck!

Linkaround 12-6-2009

ClimateGate:

WUWT: The Smoking Code, part 2 
Climate Skeptic: Example of Climate Work That Needs to be Checked and Replicated. 

"Let’s say you had two compasses to help you find north, but the compasses are reading incorrectly. After some investigation, you find that one of the compasses is located next to a strong magnet, which you have good reason to believe is strongly biasing that compass’s readings. In response, would you

1. Average the results of the two compasses and use this mean to guide you, or
2. Ignore the output of the poorly sited compass and rely solely on the other unbiased compass?

Most of us would quite rationally choose #2. However, Steve McIntyre shows us a situation involving two temperature stations in the USHCN network in which government researchers apparently have gone with solution #1. Here is the situation: ..."

Ouch! Steve McIntyre is a hero to true science!
Big Government: ClimateGate: Scientists Behaving Badly
WUWT: Improved dendroclimatology techniques may help end climatic speculation related to tree ring analysis
American Power: Global Warming Fraud an Attack on Humanity
Gateway Pundit: Copenhagen Global Warming Summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and Caviar Wedges
Legal Insurrection: 56 Newspapers to Sing As One About Copenhagen
The Other McCain: Dear 'experts': Don't bother auditioning for 'Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?'
A Conservative Teacher: Senator Stabenow Out of Touch With Majority of Americans on Global Warming Issue
Carp Diem:  Climate Change Propogandistic Lockstep, Delusions of Intellectural Adequacy, and Messiah Complexes
Hall of Records: The Climate Elephant In The Room
WUWT: CBS finally reports on Climategate: Dr. Trenberth interviewed

ObamaCare:

Ace of Spades: Death Panel in California Ends Mammogram Subsidies for Women Between 40 and 50. "The California Health and Human Services Agency is ending mammogram subsidies for low-income women under age 50. Under the old rules, women unable to pay could get a subsidy for annual breast-cancer screening starting at 40."
Big Government: Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against ObamaCare

BaucusGate:

Doug Ross: It's who you know: a touching, romantic photo essay spotlighting the pristine ethical and moral standards of Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT)

Media matters:

Doug Ross: A Government-Media Complex Without Conscience

Miscellaneous:

Gateway Pundit: Fistgate: Barack Obama’s Safe Schools Czar’s 2000 Conference Promoted “Fisting” to 14 Year-Olds (audio-video)
Big Government: ACORN’s Fingerprints on Mortgage Crisis Appeared 20 Years Ago
Americsan Thinker: Professor slain by Saudi grad student. Anyone see this reported in the MSM?
Jill Stanek: Daena and Jill attend President Bush's employee Christmas party 

American Power: Sixth Tiger Woods Floozy Alleged! If they're floozies, what's Tiger? As Michelle Malkin put it: "Tiger is an idiot. That is all"
Doug Ross: 'Recognize That Our Most Vital Institutions Are Under Attack'
No Sheeples Here!: Gator Demotivators
Riehl World View: Is "Rube" Sarah Palin Redefining E-Campaigning?
motorcitytimes: Sarah Palin At Gridiron Club: “The View Is So Much Better From Inside The Bus Than Under It”  

Just for laughs:

Legal Insurrection: Sunday Morning Dance Party

Izismile: Amusing Pictures from Weddings. Part 2 (93 pics)
Izismile: The Most Dangerous Bodybuilder in the World (5 pics)

The heck?
Izismile:The Best Crew of Bartenders. Just Awesome! (4.6 Mb) But is it real?

More on ClimateGate, hiding the decline, and 'the most influential tree in the world'

When the ClimateGate emails and program code was leaked to the public via a whistleblower, it started a cascade similar to a house of cards falling down. There are two primary heroes that have blown the lid off of global warming alarmism and exposed the fraud for what it was. Primary is the whistleblower that has remained silent. Yes there was plenty of speculation from the alarmist camp that it was a hacker, but 1) that is becoming more and more unlikely due to the type of data that was accessed, and 2) it was public data that the alarmists have illegally kept to themselves in the face of FOI requests. A close second to the whistleblower would be Steve McIntyre, proprietor of Climate Audit, who has been absolutely badgering the alarmists for years for the data they were hiding against the most basic scientific value - transparency - and conclusively proving the fraud through the scientific method.

The scientific fraud came on 2 fronts, and I will list them in order of severity in my opinion:

1. Selective and biased data manipulation, deletion of raw data making only 'adjusted' data available
2. The hijacking of the peer-review process and collusion such that only alarmist papers are published, while skeptic papers are not, leading to a desired consensus via artificial information cascade throughout the archival literature
   

I was up in the air a while as to which was worse. They're both pretty close to equal in the ultimate result - scientific fraud in a huge scale. I posted many times on both aspects of the scandal, such as the posts listed at the bottom of this one. Two recent articles of interest that delve into some detail regarding the most damning aspects of the fraud piqued my interest today. First, from the U.K. Telegraph via memeorandum: Climategate reveals 'the most influential tree in the world. I've mentioned the famous 'hockey stick' graph several times on this blog, most recently in September when it was discovered that the data was cherry-picked to show something that wasn't there (Confirmed! Global warming "hockey stick" graph a fraud - data cherry-picked to show effect that wasn't there!, CRU emails prove global warming fraud: 'Hockey stick' authors hiding/manipulating data). Not that there was any doubt in my mind as to its fraudulent nature, especially when comparing it to European data that totally contradicted it:

From the current article:

...Right at the heart of the sound and fury of "Climategate" – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see.

To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists. Professor Philip Jones of the CRU, his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, the US computer modeller Dr Michael Mann, of "hockey stick" fame, and several more make up a tightly-knit group who have been right at the centre of the last two reports of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). On their account, as we shall see at this week's Copenhagen conference, the world faces by far the largest bill proposed by any group of politicians in history, amounting to many trillions of dollars.

...The supreme prize that they have been working for so long has been to establish that the world is warmer today than ever before in recorded history. To do this it has been necessary to eliminate a wealth of evidence that the world 1,000 years ago was, for entirely natural reasons, warmer than today (the so-called Medieval Warm Period).

You can clearly see the MWP in the graphic that I posted above and in many other blog posts. From a seperate but equally relevant article by Marc Sheppard at American Thinker points out (also via memeorandum):

In fact, the 1990 First Assessment Report used this schematic IPCC 1990 Figure 7c (courtesy of Climate Audit) to represent last millennium’s dramatic temperature swings. 

But this image of a fluid climate system subject to abrupt and natural up-and-downturns made unprecedented 20^th century warming about as marketable as Florida swampland.  And opportunists who depended on the aberrance of post-industrial revolution warming in order to condemn and control mankind’s CO2 emissions soon recognized that perhaps the LIA but most certainly the MWP simply had to go.

And as many of these hucksters were closely connected to the IPCC – both sender and recipient names on those illuminating CRU emails include many of its editors, lead authors and contributors -- that task was far less daunting than one might imagine. 

Indeed. Besides that data, there is a mountain of anecdotal evidence in history that vineyards in England grew varieties of grapes that to this day cannot be grown due to cooler weather, that Greenland was actually green, etc. It is irrefutable, yet these 'scientists' have colluded to hide that very warm period because it conclusively dismantles their fear-mongering of an unprecedented climactic cataclysm.  Further from the Telegraph piece:

The most celebrated attempt to demonstrate this was the "hockey stick" graph produced by Dr Mann in 1999, which instantly became the chief icon of the IPCC and the global warming lobby all over the world. But in 2003 a Canadian statistician, Steve McIntyre, with his colleague Professor Ross McKitrick, showed how the graph had been fabricated by a computer model that produced "hockey stick" graphs whatever random data were fed into it. A wholly unrepresentative sample of tree rings from bristlecone pines in the western USA had been made to stand as "proxies" to show that there was no Medieval Warm Period, and that late 20th-century temperatures had soared to unprecedented levels.

You would think that McIntyre's work alone would have given even alarmist scientists pause. Not so! They went on to brush that aside because of all the peer-reviewed journal publication that they wrote and colluded to keep the publications 'pure' by not allowing papers published that made the opposite case.

Although McIntyre's exposure of the "hockey stick" was upheld in 2006 by two expert panels commissioned by the US Congress, the small group of scientists at the top of the IPCC brushed this aside by pointing at a hugely influential series of graphs originating from the CRU, from Jones and Briffa. These appeared to confirm the rewriting of climate history in the "hockey stick", by using quite different tree ring data from Siberia. Briffa was put in charge of the key chapter of the IPCC's fourth report, in 2007, which dismissed all McIntyre's criticisms.

Thus #2 above in my list of frauds - the hijacking of the peer review process and artificial construction of an information cascade in the archival literature, as well as the IPCC report that the alarmists had carte blanch control over. Marc Sheppard comments further on the suppression of teh MWP:

In a June 2003 email to Jones and company, Mann discussed the notion of expanding CRU charts to 2 millennia, in an effort to ‘try to "contain" the putative "MWP."’  No deception in that, I suppose. Of course, an honest 2000 year reconstruction, such as this one from CO2Science.org, adapted from a 2005 Moberg et al.  temperature history derived from tree-rings and lake and ocean sediments, would actually emphasize rather than “contain” the MWP:

Any questions why Mann and friends work so diligently to “contain” (hide) the MWP?

As you can see, the post-LIA warming that began around 1850 is neither unprecedented nor spectacular.  And certainly not worth rewiring the economic circuitry of the planet over.

And the CRU/IPCC reconstructions have been counterfeited for the express purpose of hiding that very fact.

In addition, the data that was the basis of those graphs remained hidden. Back to the Telegraph article:

At the forefront of those who found suspicious the graphs based on tree rings from the Yamal peninsula in Siberia was McIntyre himself, not least because for years the CRU refused to disclose the data used to construct them. This breached a basic rule of scientific procedure. But last summer the Royal Society insisted on the rule being obeyed, and two months ago Briffa accordingly published on his website some of the data McIntyre had been after.

This was startling enough, as McIntyre demonstrated in an explosive series of posts on his Climate Audit blog, because it showed that the CRU studies were based on cherry-picking hundreds of Siberian samples only to leave those that showed the picture that was wanted. Other studies based on similar data had clearly shown the Medieval Warm Period as hotter than today. Indeed only the evidence from one tree, YADO61, seemed to show a "hockey stick" pattern, and it was this, in light of the extraordinary reverence given to the CRU's studies, which led McIntyre to dub it "the most influential tree in the world".

One. Single. Tree. 

But more dramatic still has been the new evidence from the CRU's leaked documents, showing just how the evidence was finally rigged. The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used "Mike [Mann]'s Nature trick of adding in the real temps" to "Keith's" graph, in order to "hide the decline". Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann's procedure for the "hockey stick" (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.

A further devastating blow has now been dealt to the CRU graphs by an expert contributor to McIntyre's Climate Audit, known only as "Lucy Skywalker". She has cross-checked with the actual temperature records for that part of Siberia, showing that in the past 50 years temperatures have not risen at all. (For further details see the science blog Watts Up With That.)

Fraud, fraud and more fraud. The scale of this is beyond comical. It is so blatant that these people should not only be excommunicated from the scientific community on any level whatsoever, but criminal charges ought to be pending.

Previously on the CRU scandal:
Video: The global warming programmming code that is a fraud
Silicon Graffiti Video: Hide The Decline!
Kill the messenger! Boxer wants criminal probe for 'hackers' over ClimateGate
Video: Jon Stewart Talks Climategate
Fraud discovered in ClimateGate computer code - part 2
Fraud discovered in ClimateGate computer code, CRU head Phil Jones steps down
ClimatGate scandal gets worse: Original raw climate change data discarded by the alarmists! Only their manipulated data remains!
ClimateGate Hack Scientists Michael Mann To Be Reviewed By Penn State University
Audio: Frank Beckmann Interviews Climate Depot's Marc Morano Regarding ClimateGate Scandal
BBC had CRU emails in October proving global warming is a fraud, spiked the story
ClimateGate 2: New Zealand Climate Data Doctored To Show Warming That Wasn't There - No Warming At All In Last 156 Years!
Hypocrisy with a side of bias: NYT linked to hacked Palin's emails, refuse to publich CRU emails proving global warming is a lie
Lord Monckton comments on the CRU Emails that prove global warming is a fraud: “They Are Criminals”
Leaked CRU computer program proves global warming scientific fraud
New York Times (!) Refuses To Pubish "Illegally Obtained" Emails Proving Global Warming Is A Fraud
Video: Climate Historian Dr. Tim Ball on the CRU email scandal
Searchable database of hacked CRU emails proving global warming fraud by scientists
CRU emails prove global warming fraud: GW scientists do "science"
CRU emails prove global warming fraud: GW scientists collude to manipulate data
GW scientists colluded to circumvent FOI requests of data
GW scientists discuss how to destroy journals that publish skeptics
GW scientists can't find actual global warming
GW scientists colluding to delete data 
'Hockey stick' authors hiding/manipulating data
CRU emails prove global warming fraud: GW scientists fantasize about physical violence against skeptics

Video: 100 Years Of Climate Change Headlines

As I have said many times, the global warming alarmists make diametrically-opposing arguments to support their fraud. On the one hand, they dismiss the cooling that's been going on since 1998 saying that the time scale is too short, but point to the warming from the late 70's to the late 90s as proof of man-made (Mann-made) global warming. They can't have it both ways. Either a scale of the order of a decade is sufficient or it isn't.  I'd say it isn't, and that the scale should be on the order of a century at least. That, of course, would negate the alarmists' arguments in totality. With such a short times scale, though, it would be like me tracking the daily temperature outside my house and going into a panic as I see the temperature rise from December to March to June to August and being convinced that the world's oceans will boil by next November.

In that respect, the media has been as guilty as anyone in perpetrating fear-mongering, globbing onto whatever alarmist hypothesis comes down the pike. Case in point is this video mantage of soem of the prior headlines in th epress warning, amongst other things, of a global cooling catastrophe that was going to plunge us into another ice age - back in 1974:

And don't forget that this either: Flashback Video (1970s): In Search Of... THE COMING ICE AGE!

Granholm Thought GateCrasher Michaele Salahi Was Entertainment Dancer, SNL Goofs On Scandal

Granholm was at the Presidential state dinner along with the first lady Mulhern where Tareq and Michaele Salahi crashed the party getting their pics taken with Biden along with access to Obama. Turns out that Granholm saw the couple, and thought for some reason that Michaele Salahiwas a dancer for the party. From The Detroit Free Press: Dinner crasher could have been dancer, for all Granholm knew

Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who attended the dinner, said she didn't meet Tareq and Michaele Salahi, but she saw them get out of a limo next to her chauffeur-driven car at the first White House security checkpoint.

"We went around their limo, and I said to Dan, my husband, 'Gee, I wonder if that's a dancer, one of the entertainers.' Little did I know she'd be entertaining in a different way."

Now, why would Granholm think that? Profiling? What would the press say if a male governor had said such a thing? And how did the Salahis get through that very checkpoint? A stunt to get Obama's friends tv exposure? Whatever it is, SNL didn't spare any time goofing on the scanda; (via Jill Stanek):

Video: The global warming programming code that is a fraud

The smoking gun in the CRU information that was leaked was in small part the email, but the vast majority of eth fraud is contained in the code. It's a mess that has fudge factors (the programmer even calls it such!) and routines do actually hide the decline. Garbage in, garbage out as it were. I posted several times regarding the code itself:

• Fraud discovered in ClimateGate computer code - part 2 
• Fraud discovered in ClimateGate computer code, CRU head Phil Jones steps down
• Leaked CRU computer program proves global warming scientific fraud 

In addition, a Fortran programmer wrote extensively on the fraud in the code, with expletives:

• The Harry_Read_Me.txt file

In any case, Steve over at motorcitytimes found this great video that at least sheds a little bit of light on soem of the issues in the code: Video: The Planet Is Globally Warming And Climatically Changing Based On Bogus Computer Code

Ouch. No wonder Obama wants to quickly go to Copenhagen to try to ram through CO2 regulation by hook or crook (the latter if you ask me). When the public were to finally get the info (the MSM is still not covering the story), global warming would go south in the polls like a duck in winter, even in relation to where it is now.

Previously on the CRU scandal:
Silicon Graffiti Video: Hide The Decline!
Kill the messenger! Boxer wants criminal probe for 'hackers' over ClimateGate
Video: Jon Stewart Talks Climategate
Fraud discovered in ClimateGate computer code - part 2
Fraud discovered in ClimateGate computer code, CRU head Phil Jones steps down
ClimatGate scandal gets worse: Original raw climate change data discarded by the alarmists! Only their manipulated data remains!
ClimateGate Hack Scientists Michael Mann To Be Reviewed By Penn State University
Audio: Frank Beckmann Interviews Climate Depot's Marc Morano Regarding ClimateGate Scandal
BBC had CRU emails in October proving global warming is a fraud, spiked the story
ClimateGate 2: New Zealand Climate Data Doctored To Show Warming That Wasn't There - No Warming At All In Last 156 Years!
Hypocrisy with a side of bias: NYT linked to hacked Palin's emails, refuse to publich CRU emails proving global warming is a lie
Lord Monckton comments on the CRU Emails that prove global warming is a fraud: “They Are Criminals”
Leaked CRU computer program proves global warming scientific fraud
New York Times (!) Refuses To Pubish "Illegally Obtained" Emails Proving Global Warming Is A Fraud
Video: Climate Historian Dr. Tim Ball on the CRU email scandal
Searchable database of hacked CRU emails proving global warming fraud by scientists
CRU emails prove global warming fraud: GW scientists do "science"
CRU emails prove global warming fraud: GW scientists collude to manipulate data
GW scientists colluded to circumvent FOI requests of data
GW scientists discuss how to destroy journals that publish skeptics
GW scientists can't find actual global warming
GW scientists colluding to delete data 
'Hockey stick' authors hiding/manipulating data
CRU emails prove global warming fraud: GW scientists fantasize about physical violence against skeptics