That's Rich, And so is That

The assertion that the rich are getting richer is a patently false one and here is the evidence. According to the 2007 Treasury Department report, "Income Mobility in the U.S. From 1996 to 2005", the actual flesh and blood human beings in the top 1% of wage-earners in 1996 actually saw their income go DOWN by 26% by 2005 and more than half of these people fell out of the category altogether..................................................................................And what about the 1% of the 1%, you ask? You just might be surprised to learn here that three fourths of those folks ended up being displaced as well....Look, I'm not saying that we need to start having have tag-sales and fund-raisers for these people, or even feel sorry for them, but we really do need to be a lot more careful in our analysis and check the demagoguery at the door once in a while.

The Shortcomings of Using Household Statistics to Buttress One's Arguments Pertaining to Income Inequality

a) Family size has been steadily declining since the 1960s and, with it, the average number of workers per household.............b) There also exists a huge disparity between the top and bottom quintiles in terms of the average number of workers (people, also) per household. Many households in the bottom quintile in fact have zero full-time or even part-time workers and so of course when you compare this fact to the two and sometimes three workers in the highest quintile, it shouldn't be surprising at all that a massive income disparity exists.............c) Families in the bottom quintile receive far more in terms of transfer payments (the obvious exception here being wealthy senior citizens collecting Social Security and Medicare) than those in the highest quintile and rarely is this ever included in the income tallies.............d) People in the highest quintile have significantly more marketable skills and a much higher education level than those those in the bottom quintile and, yes, this is yet another reason for the difference in family income between them.

On New York Police Commissioner, Ray Kelly, Getting Shouted Down at Brown this Weekend

They don't call it the armpit of the Ivy League for nothing, now do they?

On Obamacare Mandates

I get it to a point but when you start mandating that 60 year-olds carry maternity coverage and Mormons carry alcohol and drug rehabilitation coverage, you're really starting to get into some soft fascism there and at that point my support for it ends (period, to steal a phrase from Obama himself).

On this Morning's Cat-Fight Between Marsha Blackburn and Kathleen Sebelius

Raquel Welch versus Faye Dunaway in 1973's "The Three Musketeers" IT WAS NOT!

On President Obama

I think that there are actually two Obamas. You have the activist Obama who clearly wants to remake the American economy and make it "just". But you also have the pragmatic Obama who occasionally shows a willingness to work across the aisle in an effort to reach what is actually attainable. My feeling here is that the latter Obama would be more than willing at this point to listen to constructive advice if it meant that his signature achievement, health-care reform, could be salvaged. Unfortunately, the Republican Party in D.C. doesn't appear to be in any sort of constructive mood these days and so, yeah, the downward spiral of Obamacare is likely to continue. A pox on multiple houses, I've been thinking.

The Greatest Monotheists in World History

3) Mohammed - Allah....... 2) Moses - God....... 3) Paul Krugman - Demand-Push Government Deficit Spending.

So, Just How Important IS Alexander Amidon to the Boston College Passing Attack?

The dude has 585 yards receiving and the next fellow has 97. He IS the Boston College passing attack.

On Me "Being What I Read"

Well then I must be Flannery O'Connor. I must be Andre Gide. I must be Carson McCullers. I must be Somerset Maugham. I must be Willa Cather. I must be Kate Chopin. I must be Erskine Caldwell. I must be Truman Capote. I must be Edith Wharton. I must be Jack Kerouac. I must be Fyodor Dostoevsky. I must be John Dos Passos. I must be Samuel Beckett. I must be Elie Wiesel. I must be Kurt Vonnegut. I must be Franz Kafka. I must be Ivan Turgenev. I must be William H. Burroughs. I must be John Steinbeck. I must be Sherwood Anderson.

The Dull Hypothesis

The case for catastrophic anthropogenic global-warming is one of the most pseudo-scientific (not to mention, politically corrupt) enterprises in human history. What you essentially had was a bunch of bureaucrats, politicians, reviewers, crony capitalists, and activists creating this theory out of borderline cloth and then hiring a bevy of like-minded/addicted to government largess "scientists"/lackeys to prove it. That isn't science!! Science is all about observations and data collection, formulating hypotheses empirically, and then testing these hypotheses, not to prove them but to DISPROVE them (it's a little something called rejecting the null hypothesis, Michael Mann)...................................................................................And now, of course, the whole damned thing has taken on a life of its own; entire government agencies now existing to fight something that hasn't been happening since 1998, entire departments at major universities groveling for research money (studying the mating cycle of the painted lady butterfly won't get you money but studying the mating cycle of the painted lady butterfly as it pertains to global warming will - that thoroughly corrupt it's become) to study this "something". If it wasn't so tragic (a trillion dollars down a rat hole that could have been spent to eliminate malaria, third-world blindness and provide to millions of folks clean burning and inexpensive butane stoves - this, so they don't have to constantly burn cow-manure), it would almost be uproarious.

He's at it Again, Folks

Only this time, instead of comparing his political opponents to the Taliban, he's comparing them to the equally loathsome KKK. Hey, maybe he and his douche-bag Republican counterpart, Gohmert, can get together some time and compare (vitriolic) notes/brewskis. I'd watch!

On Religious Extremism and Violence

The more extreme that a Jainist becomes, the less that we have to worry about him (or her). The more extreme that a Muslim becomes.......

On Roy Spencer

He is a climatologist, research scientist (University of Alabama at Huntsville), former chief scientist at the Marshall Space Flight Center, and the developer (along with John Christy) of NASA's satellite temperature monitoring system. Amongst his many awards are the NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal (1991) and the American Meteorological Society's Special Award (1996) "for developing a global precise record of the earth's temperature from operational polar orbiting satellites, fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate." The fellow probably knows more about the atmosphere and ocean patterns than just about anybody out there and, so, yes, it is at the very minimum amusing that there are still morons out there who continue to put more stock in contaminated land thermometers and, worse still, those who attempt to slander him (can you all say those douche-bags over at Skeptical Science?).

Catch 22/Hell

Elizabeth Cohen, CNN's medical correspondent, attempted FOR DAYS to register with Obamacare AND COULD NOT. The gal even set her alarm for 3 o'clock in the morning and was stymied yet again. They had better fix this thing and fast, 'cause if we end up here with a situation in which people start getting fined for simply not doing something that isn't even feasible in the first instance, we all gonna be Tea Partiers at that point.

The Gradual Approach to Wealth

According to Wikipedia (2007), the median net worth of a person age 65-74 is $218,000. This is roughly 3Xs the amount of a person in the 35-44 age bracket. Is not this one fact alone proof positive that there exists a) ample income mobility and b) an actual career contingency within which most flesh and blood human beings proceed? I mean, I know that the progressive folks really relish this whole notion that people are somehow these powerless creatures that the government has to rescue and all but maybe it isn't quite as dire as that........................................................................................P.S. I actually could have painted an even brighter scenario here by utilizing the means ($924,000 and $296,000 respectively) instead of the medians but that would have skewed the data much more toward the wealthy and I wanted to avoid that.

Ivy Leaguer? 3

Alright, I'll give you this one.

Ivy Leaguer? 2

Oh, this is too easy. This is way, WAY, too easy.

Ivy Leaguer?

Well you're certainly in good company, numbnuts.

      

The Myth of the Vanishing Resources

According to author and engineer, Peter Huber, the tar sands of Alberta alone possess enough raw energy to power the world for at least another century. Couple that with the fact that the International Energy Agency now says that the world possesses some 30,000 trillion (just try and get your mind around that number) cubic feet of natural gas (enough for another two centuries) and the optimism grows even more. I mean, I know that the radicals have an affinity for scarcity and all (though I doubt that they would ever want to give up their plush locations in New York and Washington and live in a hut themselves) but windmills and ethanol are just plain dumb and anybody with even half a brain knows it. You want to subsidize it? Fine. Just don't make the rest of us.

Tanks but No Thanks - Enough Already!

"Take up the White Man's burden And reap his old reward:
  The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard."............I cannot claim with certitude what Kipling meant by this. But the poem does in fact remind me (not in racial way, of course) of Europe and America.; the fact that it was US who got rid of Milosevic, the fact that it was US who dropped the bombs in Pakistan (this, in a successful raid to foil the terrorist plans that were targeted for Britain and France), the fact that it is US who continue to house 50,000 soldiers in Eastern Europe to protect the folks/spare them the cost, and of the way that the Europeans continue to not only not appreciate it but to denigrate us as well. I am telling you here, if it were strictly up to this guy, I'd inform them, "You're frigging on your own, peeps."

The Number of Bureaucracies that Have Ever Volunteered to Disband Themselves

0.

On the NSA Spying on German Chancellor, Angela Merkel

Attaway to treat our allies, imbeciles.

On the Obamacare Toll-Free Number Referring People Back to the Broken Web-Site

Can you say, Kafka meets the New Deal meets the motor vehicle department meets Gilligan. I knew that you could.

George Will Nails it Again

"Big government is invariably, primarily, the servant of the strong, of the organized, the educated, the affluent, the lawyered up. That's why Washington is what it is today."

Chistopher Hitchens on Prince Charles

"The chinless, bat-eared elder son of her majesty who has no taste in women and who's only job is waiting for his mother to die."............Boy, do I ever miss the Hitch.

Warm and Seek

This is the satellite temperature data, folks. Observe it. As you can plainly see, there was ZERO GLOBAL WARMING from 1979 to 1997 - this, in spite of the fact that the U.S. and other western countries had all but eliminated those dreaded aerosols that a lot of these same bozos had been blaming for GLOBAL COOLING!! Yes, the temperature eventually did spike the following year in '98 but that was only because of El Nino, a naturally occurring phenomenon that man had absolutely nothing to do with. Hello!!

James Lovelock (Another Former Alarmist Who's Come to His Senses), Unplugged

"I was utterly disgusted (at Climategate). My second thought was that this was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. back when I was young, I didn't want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They're not like that nowadays. They don't give a damn. They go to these massive mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say, 'Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.' That's no way to do science.............I have seen this happen before, of course. We should have been warned by the CFC/ozone affair because the corruption of science in that was so bad that something like 80% of the measurements being made during that time were either faked or incompetently done.............Fudging the data (a la Professor Mann fusing two data sets) in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.............The great climate centers around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they're scared stiff of the fact that they don't really know what the clouds and aerosols are doing.............We do need skepticism about the predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It's almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think that we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many variables that it's wrong to do it."............Brick by brick, folks, it's all crumbling down.

The Lessons of the Enlightenment, Not Lost on All

Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, Robert Austin of Princeton, Freeman Dyson, formerly of Princeton, and David Evans, a former climate modeler for the Australian government, all at one point believed in man-made catastrophic global warming and no longer do. And the reason that they no longer do is simple. They looked at the data and concluded that the models were wrong. These models predicted major atmospheric warming (even with draconian cuts in CO2), ocean warming, a hot-spot located in the upper troposphere, and a marked decrease in the amount of radiation escaping into space. None of this shit happened, and my suspicion is that none of these brave and respected scientists wanted to have omelet on their face. Kudos.

On the Obamacare Web-Site Now Expected to Cost U.S. Taxpayers Over $500 Million

Yeah, I'm thinking a wee-bit over-budget (the original estimate being around $90 billion).

On the Administration Not Sharing With Us/The Media the Actual Number of People Who've Successfully Signed Up For Obamacare

Yeah, I'm thinking not too "transparent".

On Gavin Schmidt and Debating

He doesn't do it anymore. Ever since that fateful night when Richard Lindzen and Michael Crichton wiped the floor with him and that lady from the Union of Concerned (as in concerned that their research money will eventually evaporate) Scientists, the dude won't even go on camera with a skeptic anymore. Yeah, this whole global warming (er, I mean, climate change) debate is over alright.

Note to All Filthy Rich Retirees

If you don't need Social Security and/or Medicare, DON'T TAKE THE MONEY! Put it back into the damned trust fund so people who do need it, now and well into the future, can have it. OK? Enough already.

On Ed Schultz Referring to Ted Cruz as a Loonie

Yeah, but I'm still gonna have to go with, "It  Takes One to Know One", for a thousand, Alex.

On Hard-Core Partisans and True-Believers

The big question is, do they want to learn, or do they simply want to bow to their masters? Based upon my experience, it is quite patently the latter.

On Vince McMahon Once Referring to the "American Dream" Dusty Rhodes as an Athlete

Probably because he competed in a couple of pentathlons; ribs, wings, beer, pizza, and burritos.

The Left's Favorite Argument for Anthropogenic Global Warming

"The (well-connected, heavily funded, pseudo,and politically driven) experts say."

Yeah, I Would Say that CO2 is Very "Green"

The evidence is overwhelming that an increase in atmospheric CO2 would be beneficial to the planet. Keith Idso of Arizona State is a researcher who has done an exhaustive literature search on the subject and has shown categorically that the growth rates of most plants (92%) in both ideal AND stressful (i.e., excessive heat, limited water, etc.) environments improved massively when the CO2 levels were doubled from 360 ppm to 720 ppm (if anything, he found that the growth rates were BETTER when the stressers were high). The fact that we still have uneducated politicians, activists, and bureaucrats out there who are slopeheadedly trying to demonize this important building-block is embarrassing and, yes, here's to hoping that it doesn't take another 16 years (the current amount of time that the CO2 - warming relationship has failed the test) for the public at-large to wise up and demand an end to this idiocy.................................................................................P.S It also must be stated that a copy of this research was sent out to all 100 U.S. Senators (back in the late '90s) and the vast majority of them (Lincoln Chaffee, Hillary Clinton, Lindsey Graham, etc.) obviously just sat on it, the dullards.

My New Favorite Pol

West Virginia's junior Senator, Joe Manchin. The dude is reasonable (reasonable on gun-control, reasonable on Obamacare - fixing it instead of junking it, reasonable on the deficit, reasonable on energy - ixnay the all-out assault on coal, etc.), bipartisan, AND SANE! In my opinion, if we had 99 more like this guy and less like Ted Cruz and Barabara "yo, please don't call me, ma'am" Boxer, the country would be significantly better off.............P.S. Kinda looks like Joe Theismann, too.

UCF 38 Louisville 35

So much for that vaunted Louisville D, huh?

On Senator Mitch "The Bitch" McConnell Getting Nearly $3 Billion for a Preoject in His Home State as Part of the New Funding Bill

There aren't enough barf-bags in the galaxy to get me through this sucker, folks.

On Shaw's Strange Recent Attempt to Conflate the Republican Party of 50 Years Ago to the Republican Party of Today

I found it utterly offensive. The Republican Party of 40-50 years ago was loaded with statesmen; Everett Dirksen, Jacob Javits, Howard Baker, Lowell Weicker, Ed Brooke, Chuck Percy, Jerry Ford, Margaret Chase Smith, John Anderson, Dick Schweicker, Warren Rudman, Millicent Fenwick, Nelson Rockefeller, John Heinz, Dwight Eisenhower, etc., and to try and somehow lump them in with the likes of Louie Gohmert, Sarah Palin, and Ted Cruz was simply just another piece of partisan idiocy, in my opinion.

Watch it if You Dare/Really Want to Learn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6t2D74UcrY&list=PL15C1190908095519

On Sean Hannity and Mark Levin Repeatedly Referring to Each Other as a "Great American"

Yeah, that one is really starting to greight on me.

The Bad News

The government is open again.

The Good News

The government is open again.

Note to Shaw 3 - On Why Obama is Anti-Science

a) The man continues to think that increasing a trace gas (a beneficial one, at that) from three one-hundredths of 1% to four one hundredths of 1% is something that's significant and dangerous.............b) The man continues to spit out that same old thoroughly discredited statistic which claims that 97% of scientists believe in anthropogenic global warming (not that science works by consensus anyway).............c) He trumpeted FOR MONTHS the Spanish green energy initiative; a policy that even the leader of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party has admitted was an unmitigated disaster.............d) He actually thinks that the United States can reduce its carbon emissions by 80% by 2050; a target that would literally put us at pre Civil War era levels.............e) He apparently doesn't understand that the relationship between carbon dioxide and warming is a logarithmic one and that after 400 ppm the effect on warming is negligible (you might get a .2 to .5 degree Celsius increase via a doubling of it).............f) He apparently isn't aware that the ice core data has consistently shown that it is the warming which plainly precedes the rises in atmospheric CO2 (for something to cause another thing, at the very least it has to come first).............g) He apparently doesn't know that global temperatures have essentially plateaued (starting in 1998) and that if anything we're experiencing a slight cooling trend now.............h) He apparently doesn't know that virtually every IPPC model from the 1990s has failed in its predictions (the observed temperatures actually coming in below those that were predicted by Santer and Hansen with draconian CO2 cuts!).............i) He apparently isn't aware of the fact the University of Illinois's Arctic Science Research Center has been measuring global sea ice for 40 years now and that the current level of sea ice is well within normal limits.............j) The man shows absolutely no intellectual curiosity when it comes to subjects such as power density (the fact that you would literally have to cover entire states with corn and windmills just to get the energy from a couple of coal-fired, gas-fired, or nuclear plants) and resource intensity (the fact that it takes a massive amount of energy to make a windmill and that a windmill cannot make another windmill).............k) He is abjectly ignorant when it comes to the economics of climate change; the fact that by virtually every cost-benefit analysis out there, it will be far, FAR less expensive to adapt to climate change than it ever will be to prevent (and it is doubtful that we could).............l) He apparently doesn't know that a significant percentage of the 20th Century warming actually happened prior to 1940, an era in which the atmospheric CO2 levels were still under 300 ppm.............m) He apparently doesn't realize that the United States already IS one of the most energy efficient countries on the planet and that this has come about largely via market forces and not government mandates, U.N. agreements, etc..............n) He apparently doesn't know that wind energy is highly intermittent and inefficient and that it literally ALWAYS needs either a fossil fuel, nuclear, or hydro backup.............o) He (along with Gore) apparently doesn't know that the polar bear population is up by some 300% over what it was in the '70s.......I got more but I'm tired.

It's What They Get for Listening to Hannity, Addendum

And here's the key point, folks. If these damned Republicans had simply started these budget negotiations from where they presently are (i.e., eliminating those special carve-outs, getting rid of the medical device tax, etc.), they probably would have been able to pick off a fair number of moderate Dems like Manchin (who I'm really starting to like a lot), Warner, Pryor, McCaskill, etc. and maybe something constructive would have eventually happened (i.e., a sensical piece of legislation that Obama would have been forced to sign for fear of looking like an asshole). But NOOOOOOOOOOOO, they had to play hardball and let this lunatic, Cruz, call the shots. Unbefrigginglievable.

Niccolo Obama?

If (and I am saying IF) it can be shown that Secretary Hagel and President Obama knew that these death benefits to the families of fallen soldiers were going to be affected by a government shutdown and didn't correct it immediately (the President has discretion and could have solved this easily with an executive order) because they wanted the shutdown to cause pain and make the Republicans look evil, I would then have to officially rank that as amongst the most despicable and cynical maneuvers in American history. I mean, you just cannot play around with something as dicey and delicate as that EVER.

Green Minus Green Equals Red

According energy writer and electrical engineer, Steve Goreham, Germany and Denmark have combined to put up some 25,000 wind turbines and over a million solar panels, and in spite of this massive investment, neither country has been able to close down a single coal-fired plant. The fact of the matter is that neither of these supposedly green alternative would even exist if it weren't for government subsidies and mandates and the regular people getting screwed not once but TWICE (a, via their tax dollars being thrown away and b, via higher energy prices). Thank you, Mr.s Gore and Pachauri.

At the Alter Altar

I worship Gene Tierney (I also worship Cyd Charisse, Hedy Lamarr, Barbara Stanwyck, Vivien Leigh, Greta Garbo, Olivia de Havilland, Eva Marie Saint, Deborah Kerr, and Susan Hayward, but for the sake of simplicity here), but if somebody out there ultimately decided to make fun of the gal, or of me for having these strong feelings, I ain't gonna kill a bunch of nuns. I ain't gonna torch a bunch of embassies. I ain't gonna riot and maim like a madman. And I ain't gonna murder the individual who expresses these views. I MIGHT question there sanity but that is where it ends, and that is where it has to end.

On '90s Sex-Kitten, Linda Fiorentino

She's got a little Gene Tierney thing goin' on and I like it.

On the Crazy Person's Assertion that Ed Schultz ISN'T a Radical, Ignorant, Leftist Version of Glenn Beck

I stand corrected. Beck has a much better sense of humor, isn't anywhere near as mean-spirited, and doesn't foam at the mouth remotely as much (though, yes, I still maintain that they're both extremely paranoid).

Dot Con

In an era of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter, you really would have thought that the largest corporation on the damned planet, the United States government, would have been able to come up with at least a workable web-site for a policy that they've been planning to implement for going on three years now. Or, I don't know, maybe you wouldn't. Never mind.

Finally, Some Sanity

Jon Huntsman (a Republican) and Evan Bayh (a Democrat), two members of the bipartisan group, No Labels, have taken to the airwaves and called for a ceasefire (and an obvious end to this moronic shutdown) in Washington. Here's to hoping that at least somebody is listening to them.

It's What They Get for Listening to Hannity

The Republicans are sooooooooo stupid. The Democrats and Mr. Obama have passed this ridiculous healthcare bill that basically nobody (from the Tea Party all the way to Jimmy Hoffa Jr.) cares for and which obviously isn't ready for prime-time and instead of simply allowing the Democrats to own this monstrosity and potentially hang themselves with it, THEY TAKE AWAY THE ROPE!!! Duh!!..............................................................................And just the way that they've handled themselves from the get; threatening to to defund a law that had already been passed, signed by the President, and even deemed Constitutional by the courts. I mean, yeah, they eventually moved and what they're advocating now isn't all that unreasonable (delaying the individual mandate just as the President has delayed the one for business) but when you come out of the gate acting like a douche immediately, who's going to take you seriously?...............................................................................P.S. And here's the real ironic part of it. I'm beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that Obama is going to delay the individual mandate anyway, ON HIS OWN, and that this whole GOP suicide mission will have been for naught. 8% approval rating, indeed!!

The Keynes Curve?

"...taxation may be so high as to defeat its object, and that, given the sufficient time to gather the fruits, a reduction of taxation will run a better chance than an increase of balancing the budget."......John Maynard Keynes. Gee, I wonder if he said this before or after Hoover raised taxes 152% and plunged a recovering U.S. economy into a depression.

On Ed Schultz Referring to Obamacare as a "Smashing Success"

The dude obviously hasn't tried signing up for the sucker.

Sam Harris on the Intractable Hatred Between Pakistan and India

"Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about 'facts' that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer. And their discourse is such that they are capable of mustering a suicidal level of enthusiasm for these subjects without evidence. Their conflict is nominally about land, because their incompatible claims upon the territory of Kashmir are a direct consequence of their religious differences. Indeed, the only reason India and Pakistan are different countries is that the beliefs of Islam cannot be reconciled with those of Hinduism."............I cannot believe that this fellow doesn't have a fatwa on his head.

Some Points Pertaining to Atmospheric CO2

a) Combustion of fossil fuels is only one of the sources for atmospheric CO2. Most of the other sources are poorly documented.............b) 96% of atmospheric CO2 comes from native sources.............c) Satellite analysis of CO2 by region shows that most of the highest ppm readings are NOT located in populated, industrialized regions but in regions such as the Amazon basin, tropical Africa, and Southeast Asia.............d) Net increases in atmospheric CO2 per year vary immensely; from nearly zero in 1993 to nearly 3% in 1998 (not so ironically the year of El Nino).............e) The divergence of atmospheric CO2 and temperature has been absolutely unequivocal for 16 years now and, for more than half of the years from 1880 to 2010, the 2 variables also diverged in opposite directions.............f) It is a well established fact that the IPCC cherry-picked 19th Century CO2 levels in an effort to make the baseline look small and the 20th Century increase humongous.............g) According to Princeton professor, William Happer, U.S. submarines (which often keep their sailors underwater for months at a time) are currently allowed a CO2 level of upwards of 8,000 ppm (the point at which the red light starts blinking), and this has in no way been deleterious.............h) It is a well established scientific fact that higher CO2 levels invariably lead to improvements in both crop yields (the major reason why it is pumped into greenhouses) and overall vegetation.

Pollution 1 Treasury 0

According to energy expert, Robert Bryce, Frank O'Donnell, the President of Clean Air Watch, Donald Stedman, a professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Denver, and even the damned EPA, the government's decision to allow the percentage of ethanol in gasoline to go from 10% to 15% will increase pollutants such as volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxide by as much as 7%. To quote from Professor Stedman directly here, "More ethanol means worse air quality, period....and it doesn't do anything to reduce greenhouse gasses."...And to think that the American taxpayer dished out tens of billions of dollars to subsidize this garbage.

On Sean Hannity Being Demoted to 10 PM

I'da put him on 2,3 in the morning myself.

A Spate of Wisdom From Various Geniuses

"One can easily be deceived by deferring to the authority of supposed experts.......(On giving government advice) If you present only results that favor the government's position, you're not giving scientific advice, you're being used." Richard Feynman............."The IPCC's mission is to find and assess the the risk of human-induced climate change. The answer was defined at the outset. That's not the modus operandi of a scientific body.......If you're mission is to find human-induced climate change, you better find it. Otherwise you're not going to be in business very long." Murry Salby............."Heretics who question the dogmas are needed. I am proud to be a heretic. The world always needs heretics to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies." Freeman Dyson.

The Wind Industry's 2011 Solution to Getting Whipped in the Marketplace by Natural Gas

Yep, you got it, additional subsidies and mandates. I guess that the previous billions just weren't quite good enough for the cronies.

Hide and Heat

According to the Reynolds Optimum Interpolation Sea Surface Temperature Data Set (Volume 2), the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean ceased its warming in 1994. This stands in stark contrast to virtually every one of the IPCC's climate models which all had predicted significant warming there. And, while, yes, these modelers were a little bit more accurate when it came to predicting temperatures in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans (the warming there not so much the result of human-based CO2 but naturally occurring oscillations), even with those two bodies of water, the warming had all but ceased by 2003. How anybody with a straight face can continue to push this idiotic theory (based almost entirely on computer simulations that are currently 0 for 40-something) is totally beyond me.

On the Assertion that a 1 Degree Celsius Rise in Temperature in a Century Will Lead to Mass Extinctions

It's absurd. It didn't happen during the previous interglacial. It didn't happen during either of the Holocene Warming Optimums. It didn't happen during the Minoan, Roman, or Medieval Warm Periods. It didn't happen in central England in the early 18th Century when a 2.2 degree Celsius rise was noted. AND IT ISN'T HAPPENING NOW! IN FACT, according to a 2007 article in "Bioscience" (Botkin, et. al.), we are currently living through a period where overall extinctions are probably at a relatively low ebb and that, while human activity may be a factor in some species dying, CO2 most assuredly ISN'T the driving factor (an absolutely absurd notion on its face).

The CO2 - Global Warming Theory Deconstructed, Addendum

"As for the 2 periods, 1910-1940 (a miniscule percentage of man-made CO2 emissions having occurred during this time-frame), and, 1975-1998, the warming rates are not statistically significantly different." Phil Jones, University of East Anglia............Boy, do I ever enjoy slaying these bastards with their own damned words or what.

The Ugly Side of Global Warming

Kari Norgaard, a sociology professor at the University of Oregon and a global warming true believer, has recently asserted that man-made global warming skeptics are the equivalent of racists and old Southern slave holders. She has also asserted that skeptics (which I gather includes such luminaries as Roy Spencer, John Christy, Judith Curry, Freeman Dyson, Richard Lindzen, Robert Austin, Ian Clark, William Happer, Ian Plimer, Richard Keen, Michael Crichton - RIP, Ivar Giaever, Nir Shaviv, William Briggs, etc., etc.)  have a mental disorder which needs to be treated. Great to have such pleasant people to debate, isn't it?

Oh My God

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101087965 - Even I didn't think that it was going to be this bad.

A Jihad on Perspective

I find it a little strange that the Democrats in Congress (George Miller, for example) won't use the term, jihad, to describe the actions of Major Nidal Hasan but they will use it to describe the Republicans in the House over this budget crisis. Methinks that the vitriol has at long last overtaken them (not that the Republicans are necessarily superior, mind you).

The CO2 - Global Warming Theory Deconstructed

a) The present day warming trend started in the late 17th century, well before any human-induced CO2 contribution could have happened.............b) Yes, we experienced a rather pronounced spike in temperatures from 1975 to 1998, but that trend-line wasn't any more pronounced than previous spikes; 1695 to 1735, 1860 to 1880, and 1910 to 1940.............c) Temperatures have not shown a significant increase in 16 years and the warmest year on record (according to the satellites and radiosonde balloons) continues to be El Nino's 1998 - this, despite the fact that man-made CO2 emissions have skyrocketed by some 28%.............d) The ice core data has consistently shown that it is the warming which precedes the increases in CO2 and not the other way around (the warming of course being natural and caused by things such as ocean currents, solar forcings, volcanic inactivity, plate tectonics, cosmic rays, planetary perturbations, etc.).............e) From 1940 to 1975, the planet actually cooled by nearly a half a degree Celsius - this, despite the fact that man-made CO2 emissions skyrocketed in the post war era.............f) It is a scientific FACT that the relationship between CO2 and warming is a logarithmic one and that the biggest jump in temperature happens in the first 20 ppm.............g) It is also a scientific fact that CO2 essentially becomes saturated (with infrared radiation) at 400 ppm and that even if you doubled it to 800 ppm the warming would be minimal.............h) Yes, it is true that CO2 can have an amplifying effect on water vapor but it is also true that this effect can be one of increased cloud cover and therefore a negative feedback.

Isabelle Huppert Through the Years

On French Film Starlet, Isabelle Huppert Recently Cracking 60

Twouldn't hesitate for millisecond, troops.

On Why Global Cooling is Far More Dangerous than Global Warming

This one is so elemental that it's embarrassing. What happens during intense episodes of global cooling (glaciations or ice ages, if you prefer), people? Yeah, that's right, a little something called massive ice sheets covering entire damned continents, food shortages, desertification/long droughts, and, yes, mass extinctions (the worst mass extinction happened 252 million years ago and was more than likely caused by basalt volcanoes that triggered major cooling).......................................................................................Compare this to episodes of global warming in which there has invariably been an explosion of life (the Cambrian explosion of 520 million years ago and even the most recent interglacial in which homo sapiens evolved, for example) and you really do have to wonder about the sanity of these alarmists.......................................................................................P.S. Researchers at Cal Poly have also linked the late Ordovician mass extinction to global cooling and that is hardly surprising, either - http://www.sciguru.com/newsitem/13576/What-Triggers-Mass-Extinction-Caltech-researchers-say-habitat-loss-and-tropical-cooling-were-blame

Note to Sean Hannity 3

You're right. Many laws in this country have been overturned. But they've been overturned via additional legislation, through elections, and via the Supreme Court ruling on them, NOT by some demagogic partisan fool rambling about them for 21 hours................................................................................Look, I don't particularly care for Obamacare, either (not to mention the way that he unilaterally delayed the employer mandate). But it's the law, dude. You're just going to have to accept the thing, at least for a while. There, now go change your damned pampers.

Note to the Republicans, Addendum

I would also suggest that you walk the walk a little bit here and look to the private sector. John Mackey of Whole Foods, in particular, has put forth an outstanding health-care plan that just might be a template for the entire nation. The plan provides to his employees (at no cost to them) a high deductible ($2,500) policy, and then he supplements that with a $1,800 a year stipend deposited directly into a personal health savings account that accrues over time. The plan all but eliminates the middle-man (excepting of course for major illnesses) and it does so in a way that fosters competition and empowers the individual. If I were you folks, I would pick this fellow's brain until I could come up with something tangible for the whole (no pun intended) damned country.............................................................................................P.S. Just for the record here, there were some people who did complain about this new approach, and so Mr. Mackey ended up giving his employees a choice between what I just described above and the previous HMO model. 77% of the people opted to stay with the new approach.