Maggie's Farm

Mead: AP Story Breaks US Media Wall of Denial on IPCC Mess; Al Gore Still Silent. (via Driscoll's Global Warming: Is There Nothing It Can’t Do? Part Deux).

Also, from Mead's response to the NYT:

This is limp reportage and does a grave disservice to the Times readership.  In the first place, a number of additional allegations have surfaced — some trivial, some more substantial.  Rosenthal’s readers come away from this piece with no understanding of why the Guardian ran a commentary headlined “The Case for Climate Change Must Be Remade From the Ground Upwards” or another entitled “The IPCC’s Problems Have Been Exacerbated By Its Imperious Attitude“.  They will not understand why in this Guardian report of Monday February 8 (“Climate Scientists Hit Out at ‘Sloppy’ Glacier Error“) climate scientists who worked on the IPCC report are said to be calling on Pachauri to step down. In case any New York Times readers are reading this post, here’s a quick summary of what the real story is and what it means...

 

How Global Warming Makes Blizzards Worse.

If there's no snow in DC next winter, that will be because of global warming too. I guess we'll have to add blizzards to the Complete List.

Also amusing: Moose numbers in MN dropping "because of global warming." Moose numbers in other states burgeoning...because of global warming?

Why they have begun terming snow "blizzards" I do not know. I took a drive this morning and saw nary a Moose, just an ordinary snowy day:

A friend was thoughtful enough to give us a year's subscription to Zagat's online for Christmas. Zagat's has gone global now.

A (free) alternative to Zagat's is Yelp. Pick your city. I have been warned, however, that a 3-star rating on Yelp in NYC is equivalent to a 5-star rating elsewhere. New Yorkers are highly critical and demanding about dining - and about everything else. "If I can make it there..."

For example, we were in the city this weekend at the Irish Repertory Theater and were looking for Venetian restaurants in the neighborhood. We tried Le Zie in Chelsea on 7th Ave. Not pricey. Zie had some rough reviews on Yelp (people love to bitch in reviews) but the place was better than any neighborhood trattoria in Italy. The ten "small plate" seafood appetizers were wonderful, and the Venetian calf's liver with onions and vinegar sauce was a fine treat.

It was fun checking out Zagat for Venetian restaurants in NYC. Here are a few of them, for your amusement.

The menus give a good idea of what Venetian cooking consists of:

Cipriani

Osteria al Doge

Antica Venezia

Osteria Laguna

REMI

All good fun. Here's inside Le Zie:

Prof Jones, via SDA:

Jones (nine years later) in a 2005 email:

(McKitrick and McIntyre) have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a freedom of Information act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone.

Jones three days ago:

We interpret data. We don’t create or collect it. It’s all available from other sources.

Our friend Elissa will have a show of her latest at the Noel Gallery in Bronxville. A sample:

...or if we cannot put up new posts, it will be due to the approaching blizzard. I was amused to read that the opening of the NOAA Climate Change Dept had to be delayed due to snow. Here's their BS:

NOAA, part of the Department of Commerce, is going to be providing information to individuals and decision-makers through a new NOAA Climate Service office. “More and more, Americans are witnessing the impacts of climate change in their own backyards, including sea-level rise, longer growing seasons, changes in river flows, increases in heavy downpours, earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons in our waters. People are searching for relevant and timely information about these changes to inform decision-making about virtually all aspects of their lives,” the release says.

More and more, it seems, we are having weather. There never used to be weather before Capitalism. 

Who are these people? Didn't they get the memo?

The Harvard Psychedelic Club: Did LSD really kill the 1950s?

Is it a tragedy for languages to be lost?

Re the Trapp family, here's a good chronology

Pajamas: Hard truths about the immigration debate

At Volokh: What is the EU all about? I think it's about a bureaucratic empire and unelected mandarins who know what is best for the little people

Please, no! Coming together on a climate bill

Pam Geller destroys Reagan Jr

Thinking about John Jay of Rye and Katonah, NY

Day 386 of Chicago-style politics. Related, even Newsweek is worried (h/t, Dino)

George Will: Charting our way to solvency

From Ben Stein's piece of the above title:

What would my ancestors from the 15th century, probably one day away from starvation each day, have thought about their descendant living in a home with palm trees and a swimming pool and another with a view of the Pacific Ocean? What would they have thought of me being able to appear on a little lighted box so millions of people could see me at once?

What would they have thought of the fact that my father, also their descendant, closely advised presidents of a land they never knew of but that would become the most powerful, most glorious place in the history of man?

I even think of my grandfather, my father’s father, who came here as a fatherless boy and served for many years as a U.S. Army cavalryman. Not in a plane or on a tank, but on a horse . . . What would he think of the fact that his little boy, my father, who helped out with the bills by delivering newspapers in Detroit and Schenectady, would have the ear of world leaders?

What would he, who was unemployed during most of the Great Depression, think of me swimming endlessly in my pool under starry skies as my dogs slumber on the lounges?

I think of the specific luck of Ben Stein to be in America, but I also think of the luck of every American just to be in America.

Highly recommended and hilarious: Pat Condell on the Saudis, human rights - and England. Pithy, as always.

Form Rick Moran:

There are few human beings on planet earth more annoying than Deepak Chopra, the touchy-feely, New Age Guru whose fetid, gooey, and completely banal nostrums regarding health and healing have reached a new low in the history of civilized thought.

But, Rick, remember that he has gotten fabulously rich from his banal nostrums. So maybe he's not a complete idiot. Maybe he is our P.T. Barnum.

I do not know how many of Lorenzo di Medici's country villas are extant, but he helped design a few of them, one of which was an architectural inspiration for Palladio.

This one, sitting on the hills overlooking Florence, was built by Cosimo for his second grandson Giovanni, and came into Lorenzo's hands after his brother was assassinated by a cabal which included the Pope. It became one of Lorenzo's favorite hangouts with his philosopher, artist, and poet pals (and girlfriends).

(By the way, we recommend staying in Fiesole when visiting Florence, and it's just a 15-minute bus ride down the hill. November and May are good months.)

A friend was enthusing about (Habanos) Romeo y Julietas the other day. He views them as the best brand. Photo is their medium strength 42 ring gauge Corona - a good "starter cigar." Now that cigar appreciation is no longer the yuppie fad that it had been for a while, it's OK to enjoy them again.

A reader referred us to a Weisberg post at Slate, subtitled Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.

I don't know what he means by "political crisis." The essay does seem to reinforce our post yesterday about liberal condescension. However, does he have a point or not, here?

Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we're suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.

At the root of this kind of self-contradiction is our historical, nationally characterological ambivalence about government. We want Washington and the states to fix all of our problems now. At the same time, we want government to shrink, spend less, and reduce our taxes. We dislike government in the abstract: According to CNN, 67 percent of people favor balancing the budget even when the country is in a recession or a war, which is madness. But we love government in the particular: Even larger majorities oppose the kind of spending cuts that would reduce projected deficits, let alone eliminate them.

Let me put the hypothetical question this way: What Federal programs would you cut or eliminate (in addition to the Federal Dept of Education) which affect you or your family personally?

Luke 5:1-11

5:1 Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God,

5:2 he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.

5:3 He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.

5:4 When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch."

5:5 Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets."

5:6 When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break.

5:7 So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.

5:8 But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!"

5:9 For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken;

5:10 and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who are partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people."

5:11 When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.

In the (now, sadly, defunct) New York Sun:

Given the nearly total absence of fanfare, you could be excused for not knowing that this was the quincentenary of Andrea Palladio's birth. Generally it is a kind of condescension to treat the great cultural figures of the past as though, in some sense, they were, or needed to be, our contemporaries. And yet a respectable case could be made that, of all the architects who lived before the 20th century, few were as influential as Palladio (1508-80) or came closer, in the arc of their reputation, to being what we would now call a "starchitect."

Read the whole thing.

Here's Wiki on Palladio. Below is a photo of Villa Capra, aka Villa Rotunda, in Vicenza.

Story by Alexander in the WaPo. One quote:

...even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival.

Read the whole thing. For many, we think, Liberalism is a matter of social fashion; conformist, self-congratulatory, conspicuously virtuous and "open-minded" (not that I think it is virtuous or open-minded at all - how many Liberals check out Maggie's for fresh views on things?). It says that they aren't rubes, but rather "caring," sophisticated, and bien pensant. Part of the crowd, acceptable. Nice. 

I don't think that we Maggie's Farmers are morons or uncaring even though we do like our guns and our Bibles and our Constitution and our ceegars...and lots of other things.

I also think that the condescension often passes over into raw hate, as Dr. Bliss discussed recently. Related, see Liberal Hate Speech at Am. Thinker.

Photo is Lionel Trilling, a neurotic Liberal who also had interesting things to say about literature.

It's not what you think it is.

I have never been disappointed in The Teaching Company, but I have never enjoyed a series as much as Prof. Sutherland's Classics of British Literature. It is college as it should be.

As with any excellent humanities prof, you learn as much about thinking about life as you do about the topic at hand. His soft brogue is pleasant too.

Today, I am listening to his Chaucer lectures. Time flies by on ye olde elliptical machine.

The American is the Englishman left to himself.

Alexis de Tocqueville, in a piece about de Tocqueville at Chicago Boyz

"Pleasing your enemies does not turn them into friends."

Who knows who first stated this ancient truism, but I snipped it from Kate.

Droll Yankees produces many good, squirrel-defeating bird feeders. They have the Whipper, the Dipper, the Flipper and the Tipper. I am trying the Tipper because it doesn't need batteries.

Yes, I always throw a few handfulls of seed on the ground each morning for the squirrels and the ground-feeders.