Thursday, December 3. 2009
 Right Wing Prof is in a nursing home now, more or less, I think, and dealing with his apparently terminal cancer, pain, and frustrating dependency on others - yet posting as he is able at his Central Pennsylvania Orthodox site.
God bless this sweet, devout, tough, shy fellow who has been a blog pal for several years. From his posts at his other site, Right Wing nation, he has been one heck of a devoted, creative, and demanding prof of mathematics, statistics, and business-and accounting-related numbers.
I recently accused him of morphine-blogging. That was my attempt at levity. One of his recent posts:
One of my brothers and his family came the night before last, and are still here, but they’re leaving tomorrow morning (they went to eat; they’ll be back later this evening). My other brother and his wife got here a couple of hours ago, and will leave Monday. And April, who has been here for a couple of days, will leave the day after tomorrow, then, it will be back to Christopher and the folks from Holy Trinity, until next weekend, when yet more family comes from Indiana.
Dark place or not, I have people who love me, and I’m not sure that’s the case for everybody here.
Image is Mark of Ephesus, from his site.
 Authors can be judged in many ways. The timelessness of one's book. Its readability. The deep, underlying truths contained therein.
But those aren't the only ways to judge an author.
What about ingenuity? Originality? The brilliance of an idea never thought of before? A correlation; a conjunction of ideas that few others, if any, have made?
Some guy chases a big whale all over the place. Moby-Dick. A lawyer defends an innocent black man. To Kill A Mockingbird. A bunch of Okies migrate to California. The Grapes of Wrath. Architect makes it big. The Fountainhead.
These are original ideas? They might read well, and there are certainly some deep, underlying truths running around the place, but, by my definition?
Pretty boring, really.
Below the fold I present the case that the late Michael Crichton was perhaps the greatest original author of all time.
I'll present the argument. You answer the challenge.
Continue reading "The Michael Crichton Challenge"
Image via Driscoll's Bowling For Afghanistan
Related: We have always said that the problem with Afghanistan is that it isn't a country - it's a place. Community Organizing in Afghanistan
Bad news for the Washington Times
Sort-of related: Murdoch Plans $15 M. N.Y.C. Edition
From I own the world:
OK, now Obama’s presidency is becoming super embarrassing. I honestly feel like someone is going to come out and pat him on the head all patronizingly. His latest Jobs Forum, (kind of like a Summit, I think, only not as fancy pants) to be hosted on Thursday, is yet another example of how woefully unprepared and hopelessly in over his head he is.
Related: Democrats Threaten a "Jobs March on Washington," to (Seriously!) Protest Their Own Feckless Incompetence
Medicare cuts and other D.C. fairy tales: Obama's so-called 'savings' are pure political fantasy
From The Telegraph:
...even if you accept the IPCC predictions, look what happens. The IPCC says that world temperature will increase by 2100 by somewhere between 3.2F and 7.2F. A warming of half way between these two points works out at an average temperature increase of 0.05 degrees F per year. In the last 25 years of the past century, temperature increased at the rate of 0.04 degrees per year. (In this century, it has not increased at all!) Has this proved so appalling to manage?
Lord Lawson then notes that the IPCC predicts that, at this level of temperature rise, global food production will actually increase. He takes the IPCC's gloomiest prediction of the economic effects of global warming over the same period. By its own figures, the difference between what would happen with global warming and without it amounts to this: in a hundred years' time, people in the developed world would be "only 2.6 times better off than they are today, instead of 2.7 times, and their contemporaries in the developing world would be "only" 8.5 times as well off as people in the developing world are today, instead of 9.5 times better off".
So this is the projected catastrophe, to avoid which the people of the present generation are being asked to curtail their carbon emissions by 70 per cent.
Jim Miller: It's more complicated than warmists and deniers
Via Steyn:
Slice your average environment correspondent through the middle and you're going to find a left-leaning liberal arts graduate who is utterly out of his/her depth. Their world view is being swept from underneath them and they are being shown — in ways that they do not really and have never had to understand — that the guys they thought were the goodies are in fact "at it" and that those they have spent a decade disparaging as deniers were in fact spot on.
I would find that hard to report too.
That quote is from the post CRUdGate: Why this can't be swept under the carpet, who includes a few images of which this is one:
Wednesday, December 2. 2009
Scathing op-ed by Driessen in Wash. Times: Pseudoscience cesspool. A quote:
...the Climategate e-mails reveal an unprecedented, systematic conspiracy to stifle discussion and debate, conceal and manipulate data, revise temperature trends that contradict predictions of dangerous warming, avoid compliance with Freedom of Information requests, and pressure scientific journals and the IPCC to publish alarmist studies and exclude dissenting analyses so as to manufacture "consensus."
I am not a professional climatologist but a common-sense fellow. Therefore I think I have more credibility than the average person who makes a living from "climate change." I enjoyed Coyote's Catastrophe Denied, but I think even he gave too much credence to existing data.
It seems to me that there is no accurate way to measure "global temperatures" or "global climate" other than via the troposphere. Tree rings and sediments and weather stations are ridiculous "proxies" for "global climate." Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "global climate" anyway.
The reason is that, at sea level, the earth consists of thousands of climates and millions of micro-climates - all on land undergoing constant fluctuation and all impacted by natural ebbs and flows and much of it impacted in some way by man and his land use, urbanization, etc (The earth's population was 1.2 billion in 1850, now it is 6.8 billion.) - and the ocean remains incomprehensibly complex with all of its oscillations and strange fluctuating vertical and horizontal currents.
I am not a climatologist, but I am always a skeptic about whatever experts tell me. I am a skeptic even about the 0.6 degree F change in the past 150 years. I think all of our temperature data is meaningless beyond its immediate locale - except for the troposphere data which we have only for recent years.
Science is never about truth. It's just about the theory and hypothesis du jour. That's what it's supposed to be.
 The Sam Adams Winter Classic selection is interesting and very tasty this year. The Cranberry Lambic is unique, but whether it is a true Lambic or not I cannot say.
Here's a review of the selection at Fermentedly Challenged.
(Disclosure: The Boston Beer Co. was kind enough to ship 1000 cartons of Winter Classics to Maggie's Farm as a neighborly thank you. That should get us through December, anyway.)
I was being facetious yesterday about Climategate and Palin, but not today: is the Afghanistan "plan" timed to provide cover for health care? Sort of a wag the dog thing?
Am I getting smarter about how pols manipulate us, or am I getting paranoid? Or both?
See it? A tiny green 3 1/2- story 1860 brownstone in mid-town Manhattan:
That photo is brought to you by Scouting New York, who says:
I work as a film location scout in New York City. My day is basically spent combing the streets for interesting and unique locations for feature films. In my travels, I often stumble across some pretty incredible sights, most of which are ignored every day by thousands of New Yorkers in too much of a rush to pay attention.
As it happens, it's my job to pay attention, and I've started this blog to keep a record of what I see.
From Spiegel Online re the O's speech. It is devastating. The US media would never be so bold or direct.
 Reason: The Scientific Tragedy of Climategate -Can climate change science recover from the damage done by leaked emails?
Watts: Climategate: hide the decline – codified
Pajamas: The Fraud Is Everywhere: SUNY Albany and Queens University Belfast Join Climategate (PJM Exclusive)
Slate: Confused by the O's speech. I thought the speech was dull, rambling, and incoherent until he tried to wrap himself in the flag at the end.
Ace: Obama's Speech: To Keep Afghanistan from Becoming Vietnam, I Hereby Propose the Strategy of "Vietnamization"
Am Thinker: Dick Morris and the Crusade against ObamaCare
Howard Dean Declares Debate Between Capitalism and Socialism to Be Over. Isn't that nice to know.
MIT students to protest Copenhagen. h/t SDA
Dr. Sanity: EDUCATION IS A WEAPON
Green cremation:
Two hours later all that's left is some bone residue and a syrupy brown liquid that is flushed down the drain.
That almost made me barf.
Another contender for the worst medical reporting ever: "Coma man". h/t, Vanderleun
And from Vanderleun on Climategate:
Looking back it is easy to see that the emails, far from being just trivial statements exchanged between pals, partners in deceit, and collegial others, were indeed the window into the entire mind-set that drove and sustained what is looking to be the largest and most far-reaching hoax in the history of science; a hoax perpetuated across decades by dozens if not hundreds of "scientists" for the sake of "saving the planet" and money, and fame, and status, and power. Indeed, this hoax makes Bernard Madoff look like a street-corner three-card-monte hustler. Looking through the window provided by the emails you can discern, with no effort of imagination whatsoever, the much greater real-world environment in which the hoax was born, grew, took on a life of its own, and was fed and sustained until it swept the whole world into its maw.
Roger Simon: Climategate: The White House Stonewalls with Stupidity
Moonbattery: UN's Green Blueprint for World Domination
I suggest that the Swiss tell the UN to stick it
MIT professor of meteorology Richard Lindzen has a few well-chosen words on global warming.
Caption and photo came in over the transom - might be photoshopped but we don't know -
By the length of his beard and the gray legs this bull moose must be over 10 years old. He appears to be over 8 feet at the shoulder hump … this fellow is ONE BIG BOY! The picture was taken near Elliott Lake, Ontario, Canada on a dirt road, probably the width of 1.5 cars.
One of my oldest and, deservedly ten times over, most respected friends, a combat veteran, a journalist, a frontline refugee aid worker, a man of the cloth, a professor, major scholar, a mentor and example to generations, wrote me this email below. He offers insights based on real experience that is lacking in mere scribblers in media and blogs who haven't ever been on the front-lines of life, death, and hope and effort despite odds due to undefeatable faith.
My friend's email, to all of you:
From a column by David Ignatius:
"When I asked Obama if the Taliban wouldn't simply wait us out, he was dismissive: "This is an argument that I don't give a lot of credence to, because if you follow the logic of this argument, then you would never leave. Right? Essentially you'd be signing on to have Afghanistan as a protectorate of the United States indefinitely."
Are Germany, Italy, South Korea, Philippines, and the horn of Africa protectorates of the United States? Maybe he thinks so. Maybe this explains his treatment of the Poles and the Czechs on missile defense.
As for never leaving: Well, we would "never leave" if (a) it is impossible to defeat the Taliban, or (b) we shouldn't even try to defeat them because we never should have been there in the first place, the Taliban will eventually be the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan, and this is just a face-saving way for us to leave.
I think Obama believes in and has opted for (b). It's David Ignatius, not Obama, who refers to the Taliban. Obama in his speech never mentioned the Taliban as the enemy we were fighting. Only Al Qaeda. In fact, he spoke of certain Taliban participating in the government. Remember a few months ago when the White House was leaking hints that we could live with the Taliban back in power? They have convinced themselves that there is a significant difference between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and this whole strategy is designed not to turn it around, as the surge did in Iraq, but simply to get us out and shift the blame. And if the Taliban return? Who cares? Their problem. We can live with what the Iranian government does to its people, why not the Taliban?
This is all just a distraction from health-care and cap and trade. If the Taliban do come back Kabul will be too dangerous for anyone other than Frank Rich to visit, so we won't know what's going on, and what we don't know can't bother us.
He says in the speech that we are not patrons but partners, and then he speaks of the Pakistan and Afghan governments in an utterly dismissive tone, as if he were speaking to ADHD children. The Karzai government is corrupt and inefficient? Compared to what? Najibullah or Mullah Omar, Kharzai's predecessors? Is the Afghan government more corrupt than the governments of Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, NYC, Illinois, Massachusetts, Louisiana, or the District of Columbia? Wait, I almost forgot. The last Minnesota election for US senator should be included. Is the Kharzai government less accountable than our own and it's 18 million dollar website tracking the stimulus funds?
Obama says Afghanistan is different from Vietnam because in Afghanistan we are not facing "a broad-based popular insurgency." So it was the "broad-based insurgency" that finally won in Vietnam? Why are there so many Vietnamese in this country? Why did South Vietnam become a gulag for twenty years after 1975? (I went back for the first time in 1995, and it was one of the most oppressive societies I have ever experienced.) Where did the soldiers in the South Vietnamese army come from? If North Korea were to overtake South Korea tomorrow, would it be the result of a broad-based insurgency? The entire North Vietnamese army--after we had withdrawn all support from the South--overran the country. Not the Viet Cong, the North Vietnamese Army. Some South Vietnamese units fought to the last man. Some were still fighting a rear guard action in the central highlands for five years after the fall of Saigon.
However, if the Afghans, as Obama suggests, don't want a return of the Taliban, why are we about to facilitate their return? Obama's whole plan sounds like just enough to keep his generals from resigning, but not enough to defeat the Taliban. An upfront capitulation and retreat would actually be better. That would say we don't want to win but would leave open the question of whether we could have won if we wanted to. But the result we'll get will say we couldn't have won in any case, that American arms simply couldn't prevail. Notice that he said nothing about why he's sending 2 brigades less than his commander asked for. It probably polls better that way.
But Obama doesn't believe that any war can ever be legitimate. Read his speeches from Cairo, Normandy, or Berlin. He has talked about the progress of American blacks from slavery to his presidency, without ever mentioning the civil war. It just didn't happen. It was like the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was no military involved, no "cold war," people just "came together" and the wall fell.
He plans to "end" both wars--no matter the consequences--before the 2012 campaign season begins. This will aid his reelection and help him "earn" his Nobel. I'm beginning to wonder if I can in good conscience encourage a student to remain in or enter ROTC with a commander-in-chief as unprincipled and feckless as this one--and an Army chief of staff as stupid as Gen. Casey. I've always encouraged our students to at least consider military service. I never thought this would be a question for me. But it is becoming one now.
My friend is a bit discouraged tonight, to say the least. Neither you nor I nor he need worry that he will remain that way. His life is one of striving with all his being and integrity to overcome evil and to contribute good to the world. He will keep on, as must we, as Obama too shall pass, and be replaced with a better.
P.S.: My friend saw this and a private email comment to him that "spirit demands fiber". He replies
Yes, of course you're right. You'll know I've despaired if I give up teaching before I have to. I was thinking today that Obama's--and Axelrod's and Emanuel's--incredible ingnorance of history show how harmful it is when colleges get rid of core requirements.
Obama graduated from Columbia and he knows absolutely nothing about US and World history. Nothing! Listening to him reminds me being in a coffee shop in the late 60s, trying to make my move on a beautiful girl, but as the 4th international idiocies tumbled out of her mouth, the beauty slowly vanished, and chastity became easy--at least with her. Four things can kill sexual desire: hunger, exhaustion, fear, and listening to an idiot. That's why in Ranger school, all I could think of was a good meal. On a LRRP patrol in Vietnam, just getting safely back to base. In the coffee shop in Minneapolis, just getting the hell out of there. Wonder why these memories came back as I listened to Commander Zero's speech tonight?
BTW, Related: Read this op-ed, by another friend, of course a former Marine, and much more: Counterinsurgency Incoherence
And, Related: Ralph Peters gets to the point.
Tuesday, December 1. 2009
A fellow can always use another comfortable jacket. Here are a few outdoor and sporting jackets from the Orvis Hunting catalog. (For full disclosure, Orvis was kind enough to UPS $1 million in US currency to our Cayman banker as our compensation for posting this.)
These fine-looking fancy jackets are obviously not meant for heavy brush-busting, chain-sawing, snow plowing, duck hunting, or ditch-digging. (Waxed jackets are a separate topic.)
Top one is Beretta's Gun Six Coat. The middle one is Orvis' Waterproof Loden Wool Shooting Coat. The bottom one is Orvis' Estate Tweed Gore-Tex Jacket.
Climategate arrived just in time to drive Sarah Palin off the front pages. Surely no coincidence...
I loved this quote from the CRU computer guy: "We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"
Today: Jones stepping down. Penn State to investigate Mann. That's the core of the IPCC's numbers factory. Plus there has already been a political fatality in Australia - probably the first actual victim of global warming.
Tierney in the NYT says:
Dr. Mann now tells me that he was unaware, when he wrote the response, that such grafting had in fact been done in the earlier cover chart, and I take him at his word. But I don’t see why the question was dismissed so readily, with the implication that only a tool of the fossil-fuel industry would raise it.
If Mann is telling the truth, he is utterly incompetent. I suspect he is lying, but a gullible Tierney appears to buy it. How would you not know how your cover graph was constructed?
 A daily online advent devotional guide.
I am going to have them send me a daily reminder.
 The Christmas Season runs from the first day of Advent until the end of Epiphany. Joseph Bottum discusses. Advent and Epiphany are the religious, mysterious, joyful part, and Christmas is the secular, fun piece. It's all good, in my opinion.
The American people are mad as hell
Food stamps becoming normal in America. The richer our population becomes, the more people getting free food. Related: Starvation in Gaza?
NY Post: The Climate-cult con. I enjoyed this: 'Botch after botch after botch.''
Tiger:
...basically we are being asked to restructure the entire economy of the planet on the say-so of a few "scientists" whose work cannot be verified or even reconstructed. Is there any intellectually honest person who thinks that is a good idea?
Meanwhile, today from the self-satirizing BBC:
Climate change is not just an environmental problem, it is a human rights issue. In fact it's the biggest child rights problem of our time. With the potential rise of up to 160,000 child deaths a year in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia directly resulting from climate change, it is children, the most vulnerable children, who will be caught at the centre of the storm.
And similarly, this from the self-satirizing UN:
Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion "as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity," according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world's would-be environmental watchdog.
Politico: 7 stories Obama doesn't want told
The about-face on Honduras
Sunrise Sunday morning in northern CT while scouting for the black powder deer season, via Capt. Tom.
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