SEALs court-martialed for captured terrorist scumbag’s bloody lip

This story is so insulting to our armed forces, it almost reads like parody. I can’t even believe it’s true:

FOXNews.com – Navy SEALs Face Assault Charges for Capturing Most-Wanted Terroris

Navy SEALs have secretly captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq — the alleged mastermind of the murder and mutilation of four Blackwater USA security guards in Fallujah in 2004. And three of the SEALs who captured him are now facing criminal charges, sources told FoxNews.com.

The three, all members of the Navy’s elite commando unit, have refused non-judicial punishment — called a captain’s mast — and have requested a trial by court-martial.

Ahmed Hashim Abed, whom the military code-named “Objective Amber,” told investigators he was punched by his captors — and he had the bloody lip to prove it.

He’s probably lying about that, but even if he isn’t, so what?

Really. So freaking what? Is this the new standard now? Terrorist ends up with bloody lip of indeterminate nature, so obviously we must end the careers of the brave SEALs that brought him in? What kind of trade is that?

The obvious criticism is that this is prosecutorial over-reach. But that doesn’t go deep enough.

It’s time to ask some uncomfortable questions.

The first one is, just whose interests does that policy serve?

Not ours, I’m pretty sure. In fact, I’m pretty sure this serves our enemies interests for both propaganda and a clear strategic advantage.

And when a military policy during wartime serves the enemy’s interests, well, that is some pretty bad policy.

Which leads to the second question: just who is responsible for implementing these policies, and what is their background, especially in light of the Ft. Hood murder spree by a major who was also a jihadi. Was that just a one-off? Maybe, but to jump to that conclusion is irresponsible.

Some details about the SEALs charged:

Matthew McCabe, a Special Operations Petty Officer Second Class (SO-2), is facing three charges: dereliction of performance of duty for willfully failing to safeguard a detainee, making a false official statement, and assault.

Petty Officer Jonathan Keefe, SO-2, is facing charges of dereliction of performance of duty and making a false official statement.

Petty Officer Julio Huertas, SO-1, faces those same charges and an additional charge of impediment of an investigation.

Neal Puckett, an attorney representing McCabe, told Fox News the SEALs are being charged for allegedly giving the detainee a “punch in the gut.”

We’ve gone completely off the rails with our cowardly policy of way too much attention to minor discomfort of captured illegal enemy combatants. Simply stated, we’re not going to be able to find SEALs or anybody else to do the heavy lifting, if we unleash ankle-biters on them for doing their damn jobs. Jobs that they love, and that we desperately need them to do.

During the Bush 43 presidency, he decided to capture these scumbags in order to interrogate them and gain useful intel, instead of double-tapping them in the head immediately after capture and leaving their bodies to rot, as per long-standing military tradition. As it turns out, this decision ended up helping the terrorist cause, and has repeatedly set us up to be tried in a court of ridiculous America-bashing opinion.

Rights of any kind are too good for terrorist scumbags. Yet we grant the whole package to them, to the worst that humanity has to offer, as if they were instead American citizens that deserve those protections.

This is insanity. And by granting rights to those who try to kill us, it’s insulting to every American, but most of all, it’s insulting to our troops.

UPDATE: See Jules Crittenden, “Free the Fallujah One!”

Scientific “consensus” is ripe for corruption

There are these inconvenient things called “rigor”,  ”peer review”, and “repeatability” that are all kinda important.

What the Global Warming Emails Reveal – WSJ.com

Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a “unified” view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the “common cause”; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to “hide the decline” of temperature in certain inconvenient data.

There is much, much more. Read it all.

The big picture here is that much of what we’ve been sold as “science” over the last 15-20 years is in fact “politics” with a “sciency gloss”. And it fooled BILLIONS of people into supporting expensive taxation schemes, in addition to all the other BILLIONS who don’t care if the research supports the conclusions or not.

Awesome.

Can I suggest here that we’d all be better off with a bit more suspicion of “scientists” that are forever claiming we are destroying the planet? Along with governments and other taxing bodies?

The sad truth, friends, is that lots of people view mankind as toxic to the planet, and want to remake the world according to that view.

And they will tell you anything that sounds feasible in order to make that happen.

If this is a hate crime, what is it called when you shoot 50 unarmed people on an Army base?

Our descent into madness continues apace:

Woman accused of hate crime against Muslim – Chicago Breaking News

A woman who allegedly yanked the headscarf of a Muslim woman in a Tinley Park supermarket two days after the Fort Hood shootings has been charged with a hate crime.

Bank teller Valerie Kenney, 54, of the 16500 block of Evergreen Ave., is accused of confronting Amal Abusumayah while she shopped at the Jewel supermarket at Harlem Avenue and 171st Street on Nov. 7, Tinley Park police say.

Abusumayah alleged last week that Kenney made a reference to the Fort Hood shootings while passing her in an aisle of the supermarket.

Minutes later, Abusumayah alleges, Kenney approached her from behind near the cash register and pulled on her headscarf.

I’m sorry, but this is moronic. Charged with a “hate crime” for pulling someone’s headscarf?

Even worse, a FELONY?! She faces up to three years in prison and a fine of up to $25,000.

(voice over PA) George Orwell, pick up the red courtesy phone. George … Orwell … pick up the red courtesy phone.

If two white women got into a little tussle at the grocery store, and one of them pulled off the other one’s scarf, would that qualify for a hate crime? No, silly, that would just be a “chick fight”.

Hate crimes, you see, require class divisions, with a perceived victimizer exploiting a perceived victim .

Hate crimes are about guilt, basically. There is no guilt to repay when it’s just two white women. Who cares, right? But as soon as we get two people from different sides of the perceived victimizer – victim split, bingo! Hate crime!

Americans: you can now be charged with a felony and face 3 years in jail for the horrible crime of pulling a scarf off of someone’s head. Depending on who they are, and the level of perceived grievance they have against us at the time. Could go up and down over time, we don’t really know.

This is a thought crime. We enjoy Constitutionally protected freedom of speech, and to assemble and worship, but we aren’t allowed to have certain types of opinions about people. Got that?

Yeah, I’m sure the Founders would have been OK with that.

Let’s just lay this out there: the law has no business deciding which thoughts are permissible and which thoughts are not. Why this even needs to be mentioned, I do not understand. It goes against every concept that underlies the meaning of being a truly free people.

And besides, hate crime legislation is unnecessary, because beating up on people and killing them and stuff is already against the law.

Pulling on scarves, though, not so much. There’s the only divide that matters. You either assaulted somebody, or you didn’t. You either killed somebody, or you didn’t. You either committed a real crime, or you didn’t.

Instead, we now go down a bad road, a very bad road, when we lose that distinction and focus more on motivation than actions.

And, of course, as with any law, you have to plan for the inevitable overly-aggressive prosecution. Like this one, it seems. So, now an American citizen has to hire lawyers to fight against her own government–that she funds with her tax dollars–because she pulled off a scarf.

Help me out here. That nutjob Hasan who killed 13 people (plus an unborn baby of one of the victims) on Nov. 5 at Ft. Hood, and who for years had praised jihadis and suicide bombers, and made so many people uncomfortable about his jihadi ways that numerous complaints were filed about him, and who was even caught emailing a frigging terrorist fer-crying-out-loud … well, they just couldn’t quite figure out if he was a risk or not!

What were they hoping to find? An Al-Qaeda membership card? Electronic interception of direct orders from Osama bin Laden himself, like “IMPLEMENT OPERATION ‘KILL INFIDELS’ NOW!”? After getting a search warrant, of course.

This is sheer lunacy.

Obvious craziness motivated by real hatred is virtually ignored, while petty rudeness at the grocery store is elevated to a felony.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a movie, filled with bad dialogue, stupid characters, and a scary plot where the people of a country forget who they are and what made their country great. And then they end up pissing it all away, afraid of their own shadows. I don’t really like that ending much. I’m hoping for a different ending, where people wake the hell up and realize they are under siege. You have to admit you have a problem before you can start to address it.

Maybe there is more to this story, more info that will make it seem less idiotic and dangerous to our Constitutional freedoms. If so I’ll re-evaluate. But as it stands right now, this looks to me like a needless politically-motivated prosecution of an private American citizen by her own government.

If only that same government had felt just as compelled to intervene with the Hasan situation.

AP style

Rich at threedonia.com writes about an AP article and putting the least important piece of the story at the end:

They ran a nineteen paragraph, 703 word story yesterday. When do the writers first mention Hasan’s terrorist connections? In paragraph nineteen (aka: the last paragraph), after 649 words of the story (aka: after 92% of the story has been written), we finally get this:

“The FBI learned late last year of Hasan’s repeated contact with a radical Muslim cleric in Yemen who encouraged Muslims to kill U.S. troops in Iraq. President Barack Obama already has ordered a review of all intelligence related to Hasan and whether the information was properly shared and acted upon within government agencies.”

This then, according to AP’s own stylebook, is the least important part of the Hasan story. Hasan’s terrorist connections (though we note that AP reporters Anne Gearan and Pauline Jelinek scrupulously avoid the use of the “T-word”) are deemed less important than: Army personnel policies, Army mental health services, suicide rates in the Army, the formation of an investigative panel and making the questionable point that Hasan opened fire on “mostly unarmed soldiers and civilians” (emphasis added) – among other things.

Right on, Rich. The AP “style” plus their biases and irresponsibility continues to push people away with a world view that many readers not only detect, but reject absolutely.

In fact, I believe that one major factor in the decline of newspapers is that industry’s near-complete dependence on the AP for non-local news. Life is too short to read anti-American lies and spin every damn day. More and more people have probably said, like I have, “why do I need this in my life?” I started skipping AP stories routinely about 3 years ago.

The WSJ, on the other hand, is doing just fine. They don’t use the AP, as far as I know.

I hear news types whining constantly about the Internet, and how valuable their role in our society is, and on and on. I never hear any of them say “you know, maybe the monolithic biased content was a problem since only 40% of the country sides with us”.

 

“Everybody wave goodbye to juice box! Literally wave!”

If Lovie Smith doesn’t have answers, who does?.

David Haugh toes the line but doesn’t go over it, so I will. Lovie Smith is just not a good head coach, and it’s time we woke up to that cold hard reality.

In fact, based on the miserable showing of this team in 2 of the last 3 games, I’m questioning the talent evaluators, the GM, the scouts, the front-office people that hire them, and everybody who has a say in a team that displays over-paid mediocrity nearly every Sunday.

The team is a joke, and suffers from a complete lack of leadership at all levels.

Can you even imagine a Ditka coached team from the 1980s losing so badly? Losing close games is one thing. Getting your ass handed to you two weeks out of three, quite another.

Can you imagine a Singletary-led defense playing like that? I sure can’t. Man, I miss that guy. But he seems to have rejuvenated the 49ers, who play the Bears on Thursday night.

Imagine that, a black head coach who got the job because … he’s good at it.

I wonder what that would be like for a Bears team.

Note to ownership: we’ve seen great football in this town, played with passion and intensity and talent and dedication. And this AIN’T it.

I’d never heard of either Jerry Angelo or Lovie Smith when they were hired. But I bought in, and gave them both plenty of time.

Sorry, but I think it’s time to say it: neither one is very good at their jobs.

And so by extension, whoever hired Angelo isn’t very good either.

Wave goodbye to juice box!

Roman Polanski defenders don’t leave any middle ground

I’ve avoided discussing Roman Polanski’s recent arrest for skipping bail on his 1978 statutory rape charge, but I’ve been watching it from afar. And I really don’t believe some of the public comments some people have made about Polanski, and about his 13-year-old victim.

I’m stunned, frankly. And now we can add one more lunatic to the pile: Gore Vidal.

I like to poke fun at Hollywood and the entertainment industry. It’s easy, and it’s fun, because these ridiculous people bring it on themselves. Despite that, the media refuses to criticize any of them, because the media depends on access to these yahoos for much of its content. They are, quite literally, “off limits”.

But what we’ve seen lately really ought to make some of us sit up and pay more attention to the types of people who produce our television shows, our movies, our books and CDs, and our newspapers. Because if their recent comments defending Polanski’s disgusting crime reflect their true vision of right and wrong, then we need to confront some ugly truths about our star-centric culture.

The list of such people is long, and disturbing. I’m not going to bother digging up links to all of them here and glorify their ridiculous statements.

So the big picture here is that it’s easy to dismiss cultural influence as unimportant, but I think that’s a mistake. A really big mistake.

And if the fact that Gore Vidal is an amoral twit with nothing useful to tell us wasn’t clear before, then it is pretty damn clear now.

But he’s like 145 years old, so who cares? Here’s why it matters: his outlandish, insane comments in this Atlantic interview a couple of weeks ago didn’t cause any kind of public backlash in the media.

This tells us just about everything we need to know, about both the media and Hollywood in general. And what it tells us is not good.

I’ll break it down for them: it’s ok to come out in public and criticize creeps that drug and rape and sodomize 13 year old girls. Really.

Give it a shot sometime.

Bears offensive line so bad it screws up the entire offense?

Brad Biggs gives his usual 10Thoughts about Sunday’s Bears game, a dreary 30-6 drubbing of the ridiculous Cleveland Browns.

I have a theory: the Bears’ O-line is so awful that it is screwing up the entire offense.

They can’t run the ball, because the line can’t open any holes. When you can’t run the ball, the defense tees off on pass plays. And since their pass blocking isn’t that great either, this means that on every offensive snap, basically, they are operating at a big disadvantage.

Stated another way, if they had the O-line of the Colts, or the Broncos, or the Patriots, how many of their current issues just go away? A lot, I’ll bet.

I was not convinced when Jerry Angelo said after last season that the QB was the biggest issue to be solved. It seems like I was right, and Angelo was wrong:

Just sticking to offense, and in approximately the order I’d fix them:

• old, slow, offensive line,
• bad, small receivers,
• no discernible fullback,
• a general lack of depth across all positions,
• mediocre position coaches,
• unproven quarterback who has never been given a real chance with a real offense.

Does bringing Tom Brady, or Drew Brees, or whoever else you like, fix all that, too?

Cutler, Brady, Brees, same difference.

Note that Kyle Orton seems to be doing just fine in Denver, with that great offensive line, big physical receivers, and good coaching.

Feel free, then, to draw important conclusions about the people running the Chicago Bears, both on the field, and off.

I know I have.

You can’t really call it “education” if you aren’t teaching enough facts

E. D. Hirsch, who wrote the bestselling book “Cultural Literacy” in the 1980s, seems to have been validated by education reform in Massachusetts over the last 15 years.

His belief—which I completely agree with—is that background facts are an important piece of the educational puzzle, especially as opposed to the popular practice of teaching reading and writing as skills, completely disconnected from the world around us, and from our history.

His Core Knowledge curriculum, for example, specifies:

… in English language arts, all second-graders read poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Emily Dickinson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as stories by Rudyard Kipling, E. B. White, and Hans Christian Andersen. In history and geography, the children study the world’s great rivers, ancient Rome, and the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, among other subjects.

Today’s high school and college students have great difficulty writing effectively, and comprehending what they read (ask any college or high school teacher). I’ll join Mr. Hirsch in blaming that on the fateful decision to abandon in the early school years both the emphasis on facts, and on reading great literature about real people and places from history.

Context matters. History matters. Knowing what came before us matters. And it all matters in very real ways, not just in being good at Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit.

Hirsch on educating the poor:

“Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” Hirsch writes, and “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.”

He’s right, and we know he’s right because we used to educate our children with more practical knowledge, as he advocates, and we didn’t have poor performance in our students that we see today.

But even though his system works, and he can prove it, Education schools have worked hard to discredit him. Hmmm. Whose interests are being served there?

Education schools have been experimenting on our children for decades, and it is not working.

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be “critical thinkers” and teach them to “learn how to learn,” defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

Please read the whole thing. I’ve just barely scratched the surface here.

Frankly, it comes down to a debate between what the Founding Fathers wanted, and what today’s Ed schools want. Do we really have to ponder that question for long? I know I don’t.

The future of our children depends, at least in part, on our understanding of (1) why we are failing to educate our children adequately, and (2) how to address it. E.D. Hirsch seems to have a pretty good handle on it. Will he continue to be largely ignored?

Bill Ayers has more legitimacy in Ed schools than a genuine educator like E.D. Hirsch. This tells us a lot. And frankly, it makes me ill.

The only government intervention that will drive the economy is “getting the hell out of the way”

I think I just found a new blog to love. It’s called Mean Street, at wsj.com, by a man named Evan Newmark. Here’s why.

He says we should be very careful about buying into this “the recession is over” stuff in A Sham GDP for a Sham Economy. Our GDP “growth” announced today is from government spending, much of it from cash for clunkers. This is just kicking the can down the road in the form of borrowing against the future. Remember how auto sales tanked horribly in September, after the program ended? That is not, by anybody’s definition, an “economic recovery”.

But even better, this post is a must-read: It’s Official — Obamanomics Isn’t Working.

You likely missed it. But Thursday’s Congressional testimony from Obama Council of Economic Adviser Chief, Christina Romer was the big story. She officially admitted what many of us already knew: Obamanomics isn’t working.

The $787 billion Obama stimulus package that was supposed to keep U.S. unemployment at under 8% will not only fail to keep it under 10%. But by mid-2010 “fiscal stimulus will be contributing little to further growth.”

As for President Obama’s big promise last January to create 3.5 or 4 million new American jobs. Forget it. “Unemployment is unlikely to end 2010 much below its current levels.”

Romer’s admission was startling. You’ll recall that it was her January 10th paper that outlined what a mighty job machine the Obama presidency would be. Every 1% boost in GDP would get a million new jobs.

Now here we are running stimulus-heavy budget deficits that will total almost $3 trillion over this year and next. GDP is on the rise again. And still, no new jobs.

What’s even more depressing, is that the Obama White House still hasn’t figured out why businesses aren’t hiring.

The White House seems pretty certain about how American businesses should behave. And it seems pretty certain that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, insurance companies and banks aren’t doing what they should be doing.

But all that joblessness? Who knows? Not Romer. It’s all a macroeconomic mystery of time-lags and GDP multipliers. In her testimony, she offers up seven different guesstimates on jobs created by the stimulus.

Does it ever occur to the White House to see the economy as businessmen do? Does it ever occur to the White House that America’s businesses aren’t hiring because they don’t trust Washington?

No. Business is E-V-I-L!

Just check out President Obama’s Saturday radio address on small business to see what I’m talking about.

The president paid tribute to small business, to “mom and pop stores and neighborhood restaurants we know and love.” Small business, he intoned, was the “engine of our economy,” “the heart of the American dream.”

So did the president propose new ways of cutting payroll taxes, employment costs and red-tape for the “engine of our economy?” Nope. Instead, he promised more federal SBA loans and health insurance reform courtesy of federal intervention and mandates.

How many small businessmen do you know that want government more involved in their business?

I know lots of small businessmen and I can’t think of one. I myself employ just one worker in New York City — and the amount of paperwork, fees, taxes and aggravation involved makes it feel like I’m employing a thousand.

I recently discovered that as a self-employed New Yorker I now have the pleasure of paying a new Metropolitan Commuter Mobility Transportation Tax. This measly 0.34% tax on wages is exactly the kind of stupidity that kills jobs. It’s the kind of tinkering that governments can’t resist. And it’s the very reason government terrifies businesses.

Read the whole thing.

How did we end up with a bunch of Keystone Cops in the White House?

 

Pelosi and Reid: “Hey America! Don’t Like My Legislating? Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT!”

“Of the People, By the People, For the People”? Pfffffft.

Sen. Orrin Hatch: “Democrats have decided they have to pass a bill no matter how unpopular it is.”

And by “Democrats”, he obviously means “Nancy Pelosi” and “Harry Reid”.

What a stunning time we live in. Harry Reid I can understand. The Senate is composed mainly of pompous pricks.

But the Speaker of the House? The House is the most democratic chunk of our federal government. Pelosi is a Democrat. Ostensibly, this is the party of the powerless, the man on the street, Joe Six-Pack. All House members face re-election every two years, so they have to at least pretend they care about what we think. Usually, anyway. Of course, they get behind closed doors and stab us in the back when it suits them, but at least they gave the impression of caring about what we wanted in the past.

And make no mistake, the public has made it very clear—via face-to-face meetings with elected representatives, and polling data—that they don’t like the expensive, mostly-hidden piles of crap being sold to us as “health care reform”.

Assessing Chicago 2016 financial risks

Chicago learns next Friday, October 2, whether it will host the 2016 Summer Olympics. But if they do win the games, the taxpayers in Cook County won’t learn until much later just how big the bill might be.

There is a 12% profit factored into the $3.8M budget, but that pales in comparison to the potential cost overruns, as described in this eyes-wide-open article “Peeling back the coverage” at chicagobusiness.com.

For instance, while there is $1.1B of insurance promised, there is no insurance coverage (or not enough) for:

• “… the risk that private lenders won’t shell out $1 billion to finance construction of the Olympic Village”
• “… shortfalls in corporate sponsorship sales, which they predict will rake in $1.8 billion, two-thirds more than London expects to collect for the 2012 games”
• “… overruns on the construction of Olympics venues tops out at 10% over budgeted costs”
• “… $246 million in contributions from private donors, a source already tapped for $72 million to finance the city’s bid”

And that’s just the insurance piece of the pie.

Predictably, construction costs are key, with the main costs being the Olympic Village and the sports venues. The plan is to convince private developers to “transform the former Michael Reese Hospital into athletic quarters to be sold later as condominiums or rental housing”. I’m not quite sure if this means converting the actual buildings themselves–which seems sort of crazy to me–or if it means first tearing down the whole thing and building new.

As for sports venues, the 2004 Athens games went double what they budgeted. The 2010 Vancouver games are running 23% higher than projected. Chicago 2016 is only allocating a 10% overrun, plus another 10% in insurance on top of that.

Then we have concerns about revenue projections.

Just read the whole thing.

The money quote by Allan Sanderson, a sports economist at the University of Chicago: “Athens was three times over budget; London is four times over budget. I don’t see that happening here. But are they going to come in at $4.8 billion? No, I just don’t see it.”

Holy Skewed Temperature Samples, Batman!

Just because some call it “science” does not make it so:

Eighty-nine percent of official U.S. temperature measurement stations are corrupted by poor site selection that gives false warming signals, according to a new study  by meteorologist Anthony Watts.

According to the federal government’s own siting criteria, the corrupting influences at those stations create a margin of error larger than the entire asserted warming of the twentieth century.

Eighty. Nine. Percent.

For those who don’t understand how embarrassing this is for the entire CO2-is-warming-the-planet theory, let me explain.

There are two key points here: the climate data itself is corrupted, and the climate models that use that data are unproven.

Climate Data is Corrupted

Computer models are the main support for the idea that CO2 warms the planet in the first place. There is no other evidence, to my knowledge, that supports CO2 as a primary driver for warming. These models are pretty much it. In fact, historical ice cores show the opposite, that CO2 is a symptom of warming, not a cause, and that the CO2 buildup lags the warming by about 800 years.

Those computer models, of course, need a bunch of historical data points as input in order to crunch the numbers and make predictions into the future.

Among the data they need, of course, is temperature data. And apparently, 89% of that data is basically garbage.

If the input data is garbage, then it doesn’t matter how great the rest of the modeling software is, the conclusions it presents are garbage too.

Climate Models are Unproven

And as it happens, the computer models used by the IPCC are suspect as well, because they haven’t published the source code so that it can be peer reviewed. Here’s why that is important.

I’ve worked in the software industry for over 25 years, most of that as a software developer. Computers are not magic. They can only do what the code they are running tells them to do. If that code has even minor errors in logic, the results are suspect.

To accept the conclusions of a software model that predicts the future, obviously you have no reality to compare the model’s conclusions with. So you need to have a “code review” by unbiased software developers who did not write that code, in order to check for logic errors, remove potential biases, ask questions like “why are you doing this here”, etc. It has to be examined, line by line, to see exactly what is going on in there, what inputs it is using, what it does with those inputs, the assumptions it makes about the effect of the different inputs, etc.

For all we know, a climate software model that hasn’t had a code review could be reading Ted Williams’ stats from baseball-reference.com and then saying “look, the planet is heating up!”. Who really knows? You can’t. Computer software is inherently secretive unless the source code is accessible to experts who can de-cipher it.

And until that code is available for the experts to examine, the models themselves are little more than a plaything.

What Science Does and Does Not Look Like

Yet, somehow, these playthings have been accepted as proof positive by the IPCC and the various governmental agencies the world over. They are untroubled by the lack of accountability on the part of the climate modelers.

That, my friends, is “advocacy”, not “science”.

So. The temperature samples are flawed, and so are the climate models that use the temperatures samples as input. Which means we have not just one, but two layers of obfuscation hampering our predictive ability regarding climate.

And according to the article above, the margin of error just from the bad sampling methodology alone is greater than the entire asserted warming of the twentieth century. Let that soak in for a second.

We keep hearing about a “scientific consensus” that CO2 is warming the planet. What does all of the above that tell you about the “scientists” who formed that consensus? What does it tell you about the degree of confidence we can have in their conclusions?

Science isn’t about “consensus”. This ain’t American Idol.

Science is about proof, and facts, and using those facts to prove (or disprove) theories. Scientists are supposed to be their own worst critics, and turn every implicit assumption on it’s head, and try to disprove their own theory. The science itself must stand on its own, otherwise, it’s bad science, and deserves to be ignored.

Where is the skepticism, the sharing of ideas, the spirit of pushing knowledge forward for the good of all mankind?

Real scientists do not hide their methods and threaten their questioners. Real scientists welcome examination of their data and methods in a spirit of inquiry and the advancement of mankind.

But in today’s increasingly bizarre world, to question any of this is to risk being considered a lunatic. Supposedly, the sane people are the ones who believe in skewed samples and flawed models. How did that happen? It’s like Pope Benedict and Galileo all over again. As Pope John Paul said about that dark period of scientific history, “This led them unduly to transpose into the realm of the doctrine of the faith, a question which in fact pertained to scientific investigation.” And so it seems to be happening again.

But as I must constantly remind myself, global warming isn’t about science, it’s about politics and using fear to scare us into supporting new taxes on our energy use and lifestyle.

And it is all based on the most ridiculous “science” one could possibly imagine: bad data feeding bad models. Now hand over your money!

I am always open to theories that are logically sensible and supported by evidence. And I invite anybody who disagrees with my points above to both (a) point me to a qualified review of any IPCC climate modeling source code, AND (b) disprove the conclusions of Anthony Watts regarding corrupted temperature samples. Real science requires that *all* of the steps along the way be correct. Every. Step.

Until such time, I’ll be disregarding all talk about warming the planet with CO2.

And I have to say I’m not wild about money-grubbing politicians and “scientists” using advocacy and obfuscation to deceive me into throwing money at them, on the pretense that it will fix a future problem for which there is no reliable supporting evidence.

Sorry, I’m not riding that train. Why would anybody?

Government Meddling Led to Financial Crisis? Who Knew?

Well, well, well. Lookee here. Congress agrees with me, and blames today’s financial crisis on “federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market”:

The housing bubble that burst in 2007 and led to a financial crisis can be traced back to federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market intended to help provide homeownership opportunities for more Americans. This intervention began with two government-backed corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which privatized their profits but socialized their risks, creating powerful incentives for them to act recklessly and exposing taxpayers to tremendous losses. Government intervention also created “affordable” but dangerous lending policies which encouraged lower down payments, looser underwriting standards and higher leverage. Finally, government intervention created a nexus of vested interests – politicians, lenders and lobbyists – who profited from the “affordable” housing market and acted to kill reforms. In the short run, this government intervention was successful in its stated goal – raising the national homeownership rate. However, the ultimate effect was to create a mortgage tsunami that wrought devastation on the American people and economy. While government intervention was not the sole cause of the financial crisis, its role was significant and has received too little attention.

In recent months it has been impossible to watch a television news program without seeing a Member of Congress or an Administration official put forward a new recovery proposal or engage in the public flogging of a financial company official whose poor decisions, and perhaps greed, resulted in huge losses and great suffering. Ironically, some of these same Washington officials were, all too recently, advocates of the very mortgage lending policies that led to economic turmoil. In a number of cases, political officials even engaged in unethical conduct, helping their political allies, family members and even themselves obtain lucrative positions in the mortgage lending industry and other benefits. At a time when government intervention in private markets has become alarmingly common, government “affordable housing” initiatives offer important lessons about the dangers of government efforts to manipulate or conjure outcomes in the market.

Via Doug Ross’ Twitter feed. and the Carpe Diem blog.

More Restrictive Rules of Engagement in Afghanistan

Sounds to me like this another way of saying “we don’t want to win”:

GIs Told Not to Risk Civilian Lives

KABUL — Beginning today, American Soldiers in Afghanistan will be under orders to back down when they’re chasing Taliban fighters whenever they think that civilians might be at risk.

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, will issue the directive as part of an effort to cut down on civilian casualties, which have enraged the Afghan government and residents. Instead of calling in air support or firing into civilian homes where Taliban fighters have sought refuge, commanders will be instructed to reach out to tribal elders or undertake other efforts to dislodge the fighters.

The order is consistent with what national security adviser James L. Jones told McClatchy Newspapers in Washington Wednesday was President Barack Obama’s concern about civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

“General McChrystal has been given instructions when he left here that, in all military operations, that we redouble our efforts to make sure that innocent loss of life is minimized, with zero being the goal,” Jones said, noting that, “In one mishap you can create thousands more terrorists than you had before the mishap.”

Nobody wants civilian casualties, obviously. It is a PR problem, it kills people who may or may not be innocent, and it stirs up local anger.

But we aren’t fighting uniformed fighters on a battlefield with tanks and planes. We are fighting insurgents, who use the fact they blend into the scenery as a tactical advantage. You could even call it a strategic advantage, especially now, with these new rules. In that world, you have to be willing to accept civilian casualties, or you might as well throw your weapons down and go home.

Plus, what is a civilian, anyway, when the local population supports the insurgency, as in a place like Waziristan? It is, essentially, Taliban-istan.

Whose interests are served by pretending there is a bright line to be drawn between civilian and militant in such a place?

We’d better be pretty careful with this question, because it will be used to our opponent’s advantage, and it will hurt our chances of success. It is perceived as weakness during a fight, because that’s exactly what it is. And in a more general sense, it has already affected our perception of who has the moral high ground, in a war against terrorists who blow up children running for candy.

We were already fighting under too-restrictive Rules of Engagement, and now we’ve gone even further in the wrong direction. Supposedly, Obama wants to win in Afghanistan. This is not how you do that.

And don’t be surprised when terrorists play us for suckers by dressing up like women in order to escape confrontation. Hey look, they already did.

Getting Wise Down Under

Good Beer and Demanding Evidence: Two Qualities to Admire in a Country

Australia, at least, is starting to ask serious questions about the “science” behind global warming. Heaven and Earth, a book by Ian Pilmer, is credited with starting that global warming backlash in Australia.

Quoting Rick Moran at the American Thinker piece linked just above:

Cap and trade is not about saving the planet. It is about enriching government at the expense of private industry. Obama expects that selling of carbon credits will bring in hundreds of billions of dollars that will finance his health insurance power grab and other schemes. They are not interested in the science. They are interested in the dollars.

And the American family – to the tune of at least $1300 in increased energy bills – will pay for it.

Exactly right. Same as it ever was.

Read the whole thing.

Our governments are lying to us and treating us like idiots while they prepare to forcibly take our money to pay for a “solution” that won’t work.

Putting aside for a moment all the highly-charged emotion about this … why would anybody want that?

Letterman Finally Offers Real Apology to Palins

Good for Dave. He seems to understand why this was a problem for many people, and he also seems contrite about it. And it’s been accepted, so we can all move on now.

Frankly, I always thought he was better than this, better than the raging loon we’ve been seeing on TV these last eight years or so. Maybe he’s been sucked in by all the other raging loons that inhabit that strange city.

But I’m still not sure people “get” what this is all about.

I think the accepted storyline in the eyes of at least some people is “Letterman made fun of touchy conservatives who then threatened a boycott like a bunch of spoiled children, so he finally had to give in and apologize”.

In truth, the takeaway from this is that Letterman made a joke about conservatives that he would never make about liberals, and he did this because conservatives aren’t viewed as fully human in the eyes of the media establishment, so you can get away with it. They aren’t real people, so who cares?

It’s pandering to the audience they clearly prefer, and nothing more.

“Tolerance: It’s Just a Word We Like to Throw Around!”

The climate that allows it to happen in the first place has to change. And until it does, nothing is really changed.

My earlier post is here: So . . . This is Where We Are Today? Really?

Global Cooling = Very Very Bad

While politicians and other silly people prattle on about global warming, the smart money is on disastrous cooling which could kill crops and people. But “green” is big business today, so that’s the important thing!

Read all of this excellent post at EU Referendum: The road to starvation.

The climate may be changing, all right, but not in the direction you might think.

We live in truly scary times.

Re-Open TWA800?

Jack Cashill says “Reopen the TWA Flight 800 Case”.

Pretty good idea. Not going to happen.

I’ve always been fascinated by this case, and never bought the TWA 800 explanation about a spark in the fuel tank.

First of all, how many billions of air miles have been flown in the last 80 years? And this happens exactly once? Sorry, not buying that. Even an exceedingly rare occurrence, requiring many variables to be just so, happens more often than that.

Second, aerospace engineers go to great lengths to 100% guarantee that a spark could never occur anywhere near a fuel source. If they screwed up, well, once again, we are back to the “just once?” argument. Design failures occur more than once every hundreds of millions of trials.

Third, there is credible eyewtiness testimony from 270 people who say they saw something else happen, and evidence that some witness testimony was doctored or completely made up to support the conclusion that it was due to a spark.

Well, that’s when I say hold the phone.

Two hundred and seventy people. Not just one person, or three, or seven. And not all in one place. They didn’t even know each other. But they all looked into the night sky and saw something bright flying UP from the horizon, turn at an angle, and fly into something else and cause an explosion.

Two hundred seventy examples of this kind of independent eyewitness testimony is awfully tough to explain away. And when you read the way their testimony is twisted into something else, well, what does that tell you?

I don’t claim to know what happened, but I have heard the theories, and all are frightening.

1. Shoulder-fired SAM from terrorists in a small boat in the ocean
2. U.S. Military training accident
3. Submarine-fired missile

None would shock me, and all make more sense to me than a spark in a fuel tank.  

But I do know this: there was more than enough means, motive, and opportunity for shadowy government influence on both the investigation and the official conclusions.

I’m not going to go into tons of detail here. Read the above (including the comments, some very interesting), read Cashill’s book “First Strike”, read the twa800.com site. Examine it yourself. Make up your own mind. Remain open to theories that fit facts. That’s what I do.

Remember, though, that investigations are not perfect. They are subject to meddling, malfeasence, and ineptitude. This is the government we’re talking about. The same goverment that can’t decide if eggs are good for you or not. The same government that included corrupt and overtly political leadership at DOJ, which controls the FBI, and which used that FBI to investigate political enemies of the Clintons.

To pre-suppose that Truth often results from any investigation by that group into an “accident” with a distinct terrorist flavor is to live in fantasy land.

Governments have every motivation to cover up military accidents or terrorist operations run by other nations. Because they are not just embarrassing, they reflect potential national security flaws. And in the face of admitting “yes, some losers dressed in rags sat in a boat a few miles off our shores, and used arms we sold them to shoot down a defenseless civilian airliner”, a government may well try to steer the investigation to a more comfortable conclusion. To the extent that information can be controlled and manipulated, it may well be. None of that should shock us. 

Powerful interests intersect here. Covering up truth, rather than revealing it, is often the whole point.

Again, I don’t have the answer here. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a spark in a fuel tank.

Which line does CO2 get in to get it’s reputation back?

Another day, another debunking of CO2 as a driver of climate:

“Each successive cooling cycle has had an increase in the rate of CO2 growth over the previous warming cycle,indicating that there is no possible correlation of CO2 with global warming.” – How Many IPCC (and Other) Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research?, icecap.us

Note that the data at the link doesn’t even allow a correlation model to be constructed, let alone a causation model.

It’s going to be pretty embarrassing to reel in all that talk about man-made global warming now, isn’t it? Especially since opportunistic politicians are trying to raise our taxes to pay for this non-existent risk?

There are so, so many really good reasons to completely ignore all this global warming hysteria, but the best one continues to be that there is no data to support it.

Things We “Know” That Aren’t True

Facts are stubborn things. By their very nature, they are immutable, unmovable, eternal. There is no equivocation with a fact. It just is, always and forever.

That’s why we like them. Their “truthiness” is an intrinsic good, with real value.

Then we have pop culture facts. Things we “know”, that aren’t really true. These are far less valuable, but we seem to uncover more and more of them every day.

Some of the best pop culture facts are “green” myths. For example, from a csmonitor.com green blog, a few of the Top Ten Green Living Myths:

• Green myth: Recycled paper is better for the environment than virgin paper. Fact: It depends!
• Green myth: Local food is always greener. Fact: It depends!
• Green myth: Washing dishes by hand uses less water than a dishwasher. Fact: It depends!
• Green myth: An electric car is best for the environment. Fact: It depends!
• Green myth: If you want to help alleviate global warming, plant trees. Fact: It depends!

But don’t worry. I’m sure all those *other* environmental crises are based on solid, true facts that you can take to the bank, instead of the pop culture kind.

And while you’re there, take out a bucketful of cash to help pay for all the new taxes that we’ll soon have to pay. In order to somehow stop warming that has already stopped.

Not only that, the dangerous warming has turned into dangerous cooling. Potentially historic cooling, the kind that kills crops. Which causes starvation.

Also, the silly idea that CO2 is dangerous and even toxic to our health seems to be losing momentum.

A bunch of pop culture facts we thought we knew. Turns out … a lot of it is b.s.!

Imagine that.