Time Magazine on droughts 1974, and droughts 2007

Take a guess at what factor they decided to blame for the 2007 drought, as opposed to what they felt deserved the blame in 1974.


Why are we not surprised?

Uncle Orson fisks the intellectual and academic dishonesty of the "Global Warming" industry

Greensboro's very own Orson Scott Card gets to the heart of the entire "Global Warming" charade, as only he can, in a reprint of his notable Rhino Times article.

Key point:

" What matters right here and now is that it is time for the world's scientists to apostatize from the Church of Global Warming. It is a false religion. It is based on lies, and its leading prophets know that it is because they're the ones faking the data or stretching it to ridiculous lengths to pretend that the real world hasn't already ruled against their claims.

It is time for our school systems to stop accepting the gospel of that false religion and start doing their due diligence. Our children should be taught about the demonstrable solar cycles and the whole human-caused Global Warming theory, along with the Hockey Stick Hoax, should be taught only as another example, after Piltdown Man and pre-Copernican theories of planetary movement, of how science can be corrupted when ideology gets ahead of the data.

It is time for us to laugh at the ideologues who try to pretend that any criticism of Global Warming alarmism is idiotic and unscientific. They are the ones who ignore the data; they are the ones who believe on faith alone, without evidence; and, most important, they are the ones who are trying to stifle the opposition without answering it."

Easier said than done.

The True Believers' intentional fallaciousness on this matter runs deep, and is aided and abetted by their handmaidens in the media who, for the most part, accept whatever these people dish out without any critical analysis or fact checking.

(hat tip: Fred Gregory)

The CNN Republican Debate Follies

Two words: Total Farce, all designed to make the Republican Party and its candidates take part in their set-up dog and Pony show.

And Dems/Lefties/"Progressives" have the nerve to complain about Fox........

The Greatest Threats to Planet Earth

....are the Excess Environmentalists..

Noteworthy:

"For many, environmentalism is not a consequence of a love of nature so much as a justification of their hatred of much of mankind. 'Defenders of Wildlife' sounds so much better than 'misanthropes.'"

"The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” even has a website and a motto 'Live Long and Die Out.' Note the 'live long' part. None of these selfless people wants to deny themselves life -- just deny it to others."


In a rational society, why are these people even given ANY measure of toleration for their truly dangerous behavior?

Quote of the Day

"Let me ask a question of my Democrat friends: What does John Edwards really believe on Iraq? I mean, really? To pose the question is to answer it: There's no there there.

In the Dem debates, the only fellow who knows what he believes and says it out loud is Dennis Kucinich. Otherwise, all is pandering and calculation."


-- Mark Steyn

Speaking of Doom and Gloom predictions, as opposed to the actual Good News.....

It seems like impending doom of American society as heavily predicted by most of the Dem/Lefty/Progressive seers, and by a lessor number of conservatives, didn't quite turn out as planned.

The good news:


"In attitudes toward education, drugs, abortion, religion, marriage, and divorce, the current generation of teenagers and young adults appears in many respects to be more culturally conservative than its immediate predecessors."

Regarding those who have a vested interest in making sure a "Bad Economy" prevails

We read and hear a great deal about how "bad" our economy is, and how a "recession is imminent", and how the "sub-prime/liquidity crisis" will spread economic havoc everywhere, and how "we'll all lose our shirt in the market/in our investments/in the values of our homes" from many media and blogosphere sources far and near. The beating of the Bad News drums is merciless, incessant, and stultifying.

An example of "far" would be the obnoxious political hack cum economist, Paul Krugman, and an example of "near" would be our very own (King)fish blogger, Ed Cone. They all have one thing in common: To undermine public confidence by talking the economy into a recession in anticipation of next year's election.

Captain Ed is on top of yet one more story where good news about the economy and consumer confidence is painfully absent, as has been the case for the last six plus years.

Excerpt:

"Retailers expected a boost between 4-5% on "Black Friday". They got almost twice that, as shoppers flooded the malls on the day after Thanksgiving, the traditional kickoff of the Christmas shopping season. Consumers shrugged off the credit crunch and the rhetoric of the doom-and-gloom Democrats, who promise that poverty lurks just around the corner."

I am sick and tired of the nonsense.

Do problems in the economy exist? Should we just ignore them?

Yes, of course problems exist, but not to the extent that these Usual Suspects would want you to believe, and no, we shouldn't ignore them, but no, we will NOT let these things be magnified into a disaster by those who want to use bad news to achieve political, social, and economic power.

Any time I see an article or a post which beats this particular doomsday drum or patently ignores positive things about the economy, I will counter it with as intense a response as I am capable.

At the Supreme Court: Parsing the Second Amendment

Some folks (they know who they are) want to make the Second Amendment into something it is not.

Noteworthy:

"Clearly, the founders (and all their fellow citizens who voted for the Constitution) viewed the widespread possession of weapons by private citizens as a bulwark against the evolution of the state into despotism. They remembered all too well that the Revolution began at Lexington and Concord when the British attempted to seize the weapons of the people.

Regardless of how one views the wisdom of gun control at any level, attempts to mutate the meaning of the Constitution should give everyone pause. If the Left can essentially define away the 2nd Amendment, that will set the precedent for the Right to define away another amendment. Before long, we might find we have no meaningful Constitution remaining and that we have no rights and liberties save those which the powerful elites du jour say we have.

Honestly interpreting the the 2nd Amendment in historical context protects everyone by preserving the Constitutional mechanisms that control the innately corrupting power of the state. Playing word games with the Constitution in order to solve a short-term problem will certainly backfire in the long run."

Giving Thanks

(hat tip: jaycee)

The Cone Project

As many of you know, Ed Cone is the Big Fish in the Little Pond of local blogging. As you probably also know, he has an insufferably large and undeserved ego that is increasingly out of control.

His standard procedure to control those who expose his nonsense takes several parts:

First, he attempts to pigeon hole those who disagree with him.

Next, he tries to schmooze them.

Finally, he tries to marginalize them.

As I've noted over at The CA, he's taken to deleting my comments.

Here's the first step I will take in handling it.

I will continue to leave appropriate comments on Cone's blog. When he deletes them, I will post them here, after posting a link to the comment to which I was responding.

Feel free to comment here and on his blog regarding the situation.

Others need to be made aware in depth of this cretin's methods and behaviors.

DiFi: The new Lieberman?

Dianne Feinstein looks like she might get waterboarded by the Nutrooters/Kook Kos Klanners if she doesn't start toeing The Line.

Key point:

"Feinstein no doubt meets that description in the eyes of many liberals, even though last year, she earned the lowest possible 0 percent rating from the American Conservative Union, and voted more liberally than 76.5 percent of her colleagues on economic, defense and foreign policy issues, and more than 70 percent of senators on social issues, according to National Journal. By any objective standard, she remains a liberal. But, like Lieberman, according to the American left, she's a right-wing Bush clone, in need of taking down."

Ron Paul under the microscope

He doesn't turn out so well, despite what his supporters would like you to believe.

Mona Charen has the details.

Noteworthy:


"He does not explicitly endorse the crazier theories out there, but he hints at dark forces in the U.S. government threatening our liberties, he inveighs against the “neo-cons” (shorthand for Jews in some circles) and he gives aid and comfort to the paranoid by appearing on their favorite radio shows.

No, Ron Paul is not my candidate. Not for president. He might make a dandy new leader for the Branch Davidians."

He's the Republican version of Dennis Kucinich.

Cartoon of the day

Words Fail

(from Fresh Meat, via American Digest.)

Yet another debunking of John Edwards' "Two Americas" nonsense

The cherished Dem/Lefty/"Progressive" talking point about "rising American income inequality" keeps getting broadsided.

The facts:

"The study, to be released today, is a careful, detailed piece of research by professional economists that avoids political judgments. But what it does do is show beyond doubt that the U.S. remains a dynamic society marked by rapid and mostly upward income mobility. Much as they always have, Americans on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder continue to climb into the middle and sometimes upper classes in remarkably short periods of time."

Related point:

Clown Prince John the Worst would issue a Universal Heath Care fiat on those knaves in the legislature when crowned as our emperor.

Veterans Day reflections

"The Name In The Stone"

Cartoon of the Day

(Hat tip: jaycee)

Saying NO to the trial version of Hillary Care/Bigger and "Better" SCHIP

Voters from all portions of the political spectrum in Oregon resoundingly rejected what the national contingent of Dems/Lefties/"Progressives" are trying to ram down our throats.

Key points:

"We're surprised the Governor thinks voters in his left-leaning state are so easily gulled--especially in a contest between "healthy kids" and cigarettes. More persuasive is the notion that voters didn't want to pass a state tax increase to finance a health-care expansion that Congress might soon pass, along with buckets of federal dollars. But most likely, voters understood that a tax increase on cigarettes is still a tax increase, and a highly regressive one at that. Only about 20% of Oregonians smoke, and most of those are lower income.
They may also have figured that to the extent tobacco taxes reduce smoking, they will soon not yield enough revenue to pay for ever-growing health costs. An analysis by William Conerly, a member of Governor Kulongoski's own Council of Economic Advisors, found that a straight Schip expansion funded by a tobacco tax was unsustainable, with costs exceeding revenues by $115 million by 2017.

Counting "crowd out"--the migration to public from private insurance--Mr. Conerly predicted a $638 million deficit within the decade. Oregon tried a similar universal health experiment in the 1990s, only to see it raise havoc, and voters may not have been eager for a low-budget sequel."

This nonsense needs to go away.....permanently and now.

How LA reclaimed its Skid Row

What can Greensboro learn from this story?

BDS starting to be replaced by GDS

As we get closer to the presidential nomination/election time, the Usual Suspects/Nutroots are already hard at work developing their Giuliani Derangement Syndrome tactics.

Here's just one example of many:


"The possibility of a Giuliani presidency had the Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias struggling for words: 'One thing I'm wrestling with is finding a way to convey how terrified I am of the prospect of a Rudy Giuliani presidency in terms of its impact on our foreign policy.'"

Good.

It's reassuring to know that those of us who support Giuliani as the right person to lead our nation have had our judgment confirmed by the nonsense we hear from the Dems/Lefties/"Progressives" on his candidacy.

Thanks guys......we can ALWAYS count on you to tell us we're right.

How "global warming" alarmism endangers legitimate science.

It's all too clear that the politicizing of "global warming" by the constant drum beating of alarmism, and the lock-step insistence on the cause being anthropogenic corrupts legitimate science.

Noteworthy:

Noted physicist Freeman Dyson....

"...all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. ... I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. ... They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."

The article mentions the DDT nonsense, and the BSE ("Mad Cow") farce. To that list I would add the overhyhped Avian flu pandemic talk of a few years ago.

History is full of examples of pathological science. The "scientific consensus on anthropogeenic global warming" is just the most recent, but I warrant it won't be the last.