We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
I just read about the circular firing squads at the IPCC, with calls for the firing of the CPU and even for the disbanding of the entire IPCC (why not the rest of the UN at the same time?). Plus other good details at Climate Depot and also in the Political Climate column of Icecap.
Addendum #3: The more I think about it, the more I think that Climategate might be the biggest expose of the year. And yet the MSM will barely mention it because it DOES NOT FIT THE SOCIALIST NARRATIVE. Unbelievable, for people who supposedly want viewers and to sell newspapers - but they did the same thing with the ACORN stories. Thus for real news we must rely on amateurs, semi-pros, and bloggers. This from Clive Crook via Blair:
In my previous post on Climategate
I blithely said that nothing in the climate science email dump
surprised me much. Having waded more deeply over the weekend I take
that back.
The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their
willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is
surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering. And, as Christopher Booker argues,
this scandal is not at the margins of the politicised IPCC process. It
is not tangential to the policy prescriptions emanating from what David
Henderson called the environmental policy milieu. It goes to the core of that process ...
Here are three cool vids of three very cool remote-controlled airplanes.
First, introducing the Hydroboat-plane-car-helicopter-lawnmower-skateboard:
Pretty nifty, eh? And some review I read mentioned "sand and snow", so I guess we can add "dune buggy" and "snowmobile" to the list.
Aerodynamically, what's amazing is how maneuverable it is with what little wing surface it has. But it certainly seems like it's under fairly tight control.
And one big plus point is that they don't cost very much, compared to jumping into the field of normal R/C planes and expensive control boxes. So when you pile the rascal up, it won't be a wallet-killer to replace it, and it also gives us the luxury to try a different brand if we're not happy with the first one. Try Stormlauncher, Graupner and HydroFlyer, and Toys 'R' Us has a pretty good selection of flying toys.
Now, if you want a more conventional plane, but one that can still pull off some simple, basic maneuvers, try this little honey:
That's a pretty cool moment when he stands it on its nose. Don't try it at home!
On the other hand, if the above planes are too mechanical-looking...
Whether you call it global warming or climate change or greenie hysteria or a religion or Lefty politics, the fact is that it's an industry, and one which has become increasing lucrative over recent years.
Goldman Sachs, never a company to pass up on chances to make lots of money, has done extensive planning to capitalize on carbon credit markets - as has Al Gore. But don't forget Big Academia: Surber
"If you follow online analysis from obscure websites on the fringes of the map, you'll know what's going on. If you go to the convenience store and buy today's newspaper, you won't."
Two of Canada's greatest and most undersung recent heroes are environmental economist Ross McKitrick and statistical minerologist Steven McIntyre, who by their tireless research in the teeth of the entire ecological establishment, proved the former IPCC claim of drastically accelerated global warming was a fraud. These men have been prominently mentioned in the hacked emails that have just revealed the outrageous lengths the scientific propagators of the Great Green Fraud have gone to to suppress the facts.
At a recent town hall meeting, President Obama said, "Now,
the only thing that I have said is that having a public option in that
menu would provide competition for insurance companies to keep them
honest."
But it is government that is responsible for the dearth
of competition in the insurance business. That's because Congress
enacted the McCarran-Ferguson Act in 1945, which allows the states to
limit the number of players in their insurance markets, and explains
why "in 64 percent of all metropolitan areas, a single health insurer
commands a market share of at least 50 percent".
Government
created the insurance monopolies in the states, thus destroying
competition. Government is therefore responsible for the "dishonesty"
that Obama decries.
We're late to the party with this chart, but it sure is revealing, isn't it?
Cheers on St. Andrew's Day to our Scots friends and readers!
Now we must move south of the border to take a good summary look at Climategate and its meaning, as far as we now know: Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation: "Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get
away with the Climategate whitewash, says Christopher Booker."
Andrei, you've lost another submarine?....Most fascinating to me: they got rid of, or "lost," all of their raw data. That means the raw data from which the IPCC reports have been produced - after the data was played with. In science, "losing" data is a felony, and discredits everything you have ever done. Why?
Because it makes it impossible to either corroborate or refute the conclusions.
Col. Douglas Mortimer:
“You know, when you consider that ‘We’re Saving The Planet’ is the
biggest power/money grabbing scam since ‘We’re Saving Your Souls,’
whoever leaked/released those e-mails and such is kind of like the
modern scientific equivalent of Martin Luther. This person/persons may
well have broken the backs of the Global Warming Priests who did
everything in their power to make sure that the common man, and those
who would oppose them, had no direct access to the Spoken Word of God.”
I think what's interesting about Obama is he is going to be at the U.N. [conference in Copenhagen] to announce the [new] policy about climate change on the basis of — nothing. He is going to be proposing what the House has passed — that he knows is not going to pass in the Senate. And we are actually a constitutional democracy where the president can't announce a policy unilaterally. It actually has to pass the two houses of the Congress, and our allies abroad know that, and they’re going to look at this announcement he is going to make and think it … extremely strange.
Photo: Christmas trees along the median of Park Avenue, NYC. Not yet lit.
One insight distinguished Barack Obama from the other presidential candidates last year. While he lacked experience or a special grasp of issues, Mr. Obama said he uniquely understood what ails Washington, and what was causing the endless squabbling and bitter stalemate on important issues. If elected, he said he would change the way business is done in Washington, end the partisan deadlock and the ideological polarization.
So the battle over health care is not just about health care. It's about whether government will permanently gobble up more of the private-sector economy -- and slow it down in the process.
I think that's right. I don't believe that Democrats in Congress actually disagree with the majority of voters who expect a government takeover of medicine to result in worse health care at a higher cost. Rather, the Democrats believe that degraded health care is an acceptable price to pay for what they are really after--government domination over the life of every citizen. Whether the American people understand how profound is the Democrats' assault on their liberties, and will be willing to do what it takes to throw the greedy rascals out of power, remains to be seen.
‘AGW is in fact now an industry (as well as a religion) and your insistence upon peer-reviewed papers makes me smile because there seems to be a preponderance of reviewers from within the AGW industry. Why do I think of the expression “Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”?"
Money managers do this sort of thing all the time for marketing purposes. To make their performance look good, they pick their start point and their end point based on what the chart looks like. Then they decide whether to include or exclude new money or new accounts from the data, depending on what looks best. Etc.
Tinkering with data is easy. Pols and activists do it every day to manipulate. See How to Lie with Charts and Graphs, one of my favorite data books - after the classic How to Lie with Statistics. Nether require advanced math to understand.
It's a shame journalists aren't required to read those two books.
I give thanks to God today (and every day) for being a free American - and for being free to read, write, and report whatever I want to here on Maggie's Farm. I am grateful to our Founding Fathers, for our Constitution, for all of the past and present men at arms who defend our freedoms.
I have a shoot today, then family dinner this evening in MA. A grouse and woodcock hunt on Friday in the lowlands, swamps and marshes. Image via Mr. Free Market:
Another good link for Thanksgiving: Malthusians wrong since the year 200. Fewer people would be better for my hunting, though. The good hunting habitat in the Northeast is being overrun with strip malls, developments of McMansions, and second and third homes.
Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by
scientific articles in “legitimate peer-reviewed journals.” But if a
journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition
not “legitimate.”
The EU has a Ten Year Plan. How could that go wrong? Central planning worked just great for the Soviet Union. Euroland is heading swiftly back towards the Feudalism they seem to love.
If nothing else, watching the Democrats sacrifice so much on behalf of
this monstrosity is fascinating, appalling—and dramatic. Common sense
suggests that they shouldn’t do it. The basic laws of political physics
say they can’t do it. And yet on they march.
...we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.
When the government proposes a major program, one expects a meaningful national consensus behind it. I neither see nor sense any national consensus behind a government takeover of medical care. Quite the opposite, and the polls agree with my impression.
Watch this video at Gateway to see what I mean. I think there is far more dissension on this issue than I ever heard about going into Afghanistan or Iraq.
Not very many people want what they are trying to "give" us. One of the things they want to "give" me is to make my family's medical insurance - my carefully considered free choice - illegal.
My message to my government: Quit giving me stuff. I am an adult. Leave me the heck alone.
He's not in the showers in jail picking up the soap, so why do this so constantly? Is it a twitch? A twitch of submission, like a beta dog? I think it is pathetic - and it reflects on me as a free and proud American. Please tell me it's only because the Asian leaders are short of stature height-deprived, and not ass-kissing.
I cannot imagine Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt bowing to a dictator premier of China, a Sheik of Arabie, or an Emperor of Japan.
The only people to whom the O does not bow is to people like me, the honest, hard-working, tax-paying, slightly overweight citizens of the USA. As Bob Grant says, "It's sick out there, and getting sicker."
I've been slow to realize this: the O is turning out to be a dud. I did not vote for him, but I had some hope that he would try to govern as a pragmatist-moderate - against all evidence, of course. Even the thrill is gone for Chris Matthews.
"Carter tried weakness and the world got tougher and tougher because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators, when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead," Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker in the House of Representatives, recently said. And then he added: "This does look a lot like Jimmy Carter."
President Obama took office wanting to distinguish himself from President Bush. That was foolish and arrogant. Now, as Der Spiegel concludes, he is trying desperately to distinguish himself from Jimmy Carter.
Just 38% of voters now favor the health care plan proposed by President Obama
and congressional Democrats. That’s the lowest level of support measured for the
plan in nearly two dozen tracking polls conducted since June.
Changing admissions requirements from favoring extended family members to favoring high-skill immigrants could give Republicans cover from charges that they are anti-immigrant. They could argue that, in a time of high and extended unemployment, it makes sense to switch from admitting job seekers to admitting job creators.
The 1965 and 1986 laws resulted in a large illegal immigrant population because they promised things that proved beyond the capacity of government to deliver. Now that a combination of public indignation and high-tech ingenuity have increased government's enforcement capacity, and while the inflow of immigrants is slowing and an outflow of illegals may be accelerating, we may have reached a point when we can put in place immigration laws with enforceable limits and that encourage an influx of the kind of immigrants we need most. Can Congress act?
ARGH. Just went back to check on synthetic production. Apparently - I have no memory of this at all - we're not doing observed rain days! It's all synthetic from 1990 onwards. So I'm going to need conditionals in the update program to handle that. And separate gridding before 1989. And what TF happens to station counts?
OH FUCK THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found.
Quite possibly. We have been calling "fraud" on this site since forever. The raw data has been carefully hidden for years (see conceal the decline). It's heart-warming to see a Viscount rant. One quote:
As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.
Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.
Should you financially support my mother-in-law or sister-in-law, if they legally immigrated to the US?Both are of very limited financial means.Government benefits here in the US are actually better than in Germany.Is it up to you to pay to offer them a better life?My wife and I don’t have any family to share events with or nearby for our sons to share life’s love-lessons with.And, isn’t that our problem, not yours?
Under pressure of both common-sense, elevated unemployment in the US that is likely to last, and increased opposition to amnesty schemes, the Obama administration speaks a good game about improving enforcement of illegal immigration laws, and with due credit has actually taken some positive steps.But, one of its other goals is to increase what is called “family unification,” or letting in near and extended family members of those legally here and those millions to be made legal if the Obamites have their way.At the same time, laws to require those who bring them in to be responsible for supporting them are eliminated or opposed.
Today’s editorial in my local newspaper speaks of “The New Normal,” where increasing numbers of Americans are looking for jobs abroad, “[A]nd those who are willing to move to a new city – or even a new country – for their next opportunity are the ones who will be the most likely to succeed. It has always been thus. And in a global economy, this is how it will remain for many years to come. It’s the new normal. The sooner Americans accept that, the better off they’ll be.”
It’s not just increased numbers of American citizens looking for jobs abroad.Increased numbers of Indian and Chinese scientists who gained their advanced education in the US and have been major contributors to our entrepreneurial economy are, instead of staying here, returning to India and China for better opportunities.It is these and other educated immigrants who are not a drain upon the US, actually adding more than the average American.It is the uneducated and their uneconomic relatives that are the major drain upon our government budgets.Some in latter generations may rise, but in the meantime our own poorest are most harmed by their wage lowering competition, and our richest helped by their enthusiastic hard work for low wages.
A regular fairly liberal columnist in my local newspaper rightfully bemoans, "One of the sorrows of contemporary life is the broad failure to create paying jobs for preteens and teenagers. We scold children (and childish adults) for being financially illiterate, oblivious to the virtues of thrift. But what do we expect of those forced to live exclusively off the parental dole?... But the idle rate for children — 80 percent? 90 percent? — also signals a sort of cultural distress. Imagine children by the millions, holed up with video games on a sunny day. Or trooping off to soccer practice in the minivan, oblivious that the uniform costs real money. In high school, the closest many come to real labor is community service, light work for the college application. One of the most important jobs of a parent is to be a child’s employment counselor, starting with essential chores around the house. Help them find honest work that hurts so good.”
The new normal needs to be emphasis on raising our children to honor and do honest labor and jobs.Before that, our emphasis – our own new normal -- needs to be on us growing up ourselves and facing up to the impossibility of fewer taxpayers paying more to support the lazy and irresponsible.Enterprise-stifling government expansion and more meddling bureaucrats is not the answer.It’s the problem.
It was supposed to be all about the end of politics as usual. But while
President Barack Obama has been happy to bring about change while abroad by
doing all he can to diminish the superpower status of the United States, at home
it's been the same old, writes Toby Harnden
"2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the
establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The
climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global
management of our planet."
Whether you call it global warming or climate change or greenie hysteria or a religion or Lefty politics, the fact is that it's an industry, and one which has become increasing lucrative over recent years. 
Cheers on St. Andrew's Day to our Scots friends and readers!
It’s Not Marriage, It’s the Woman.
Noonan: 
Wines for Thanksgiving. 
When the government proposes a major program, one expects a meaningful national consensus behind it. I neither see nor sense any national consensus behind a government takeover of medical care. Quite the opposite, and the polls agree with my impression.
I've been slow to realize this: the O is turning out to be a dud. I did not vote for him, but I had some hope that he would try to govern as a pragmatist-moderate - against all evidence, of course. Even t
Add to the climate list: Climate change 