A short while ago a large storm passed over the Crabitat. This is the underside of the wall cloud. The air temperature dropped about 20° F as this passed over the house.
Because I Felt Like It | Gaius Sunday, 12 August , 2007 | 
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We really cannot make this up. Honest. A Greek shepherd, getting up there in years and facing numerous physical constraints to the performance of his duties, has come up this a novel solution.
ATHENS (AFP) - A middle-aged Greek shepherd unable to walk over long distances now drives to work after training his flock of sheep to follow his car, state television Net reported on Sunday.
George Zokos from Tyrnavos in central Greece devised the system after his health deteriorated, and has been 'driving' his sheep to pasture for the past three years, the station said.
Zokos' neighbours have dubbed him "the euro-shepherd" for his advanced sheep-herding method.
If anyone at Chrysler had a lick of sense, they would sponsor Zokos and give him a free Dodge Ram truck to shepherd in. This is serious mega-publicity for free. (We'd appreciate a finder's fee. The "vast climate change dissenter conspiracy" pays bupkis, Newsweek nonsense aside.)
Animals | Gaius | Comments (3)
The huge expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is being fervently touted as being for the children. Anyone opposed is being smeared as being against the children and thoroughly evil. Only the whole bill appears to be more about pork and trying to buy votes for democrat incumbents than anything else. Despite all those promises to clean up Congress and be ethical and honest.
Despite promises by Congress to end the secrecy of earmarks and other pet projects, the House of Representatives has quietly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to specific hospitals and health care providers under a bill passed this month to help low-income children.Instead of naming the hospitals, the bill describes them in cryptic terms, so that identifying a beneficiary is like solving a riddle. Most of the provisions were added to the bill at the request of Democratic lawmakers.
One hospital, Bay Area Medical Center, sits on Green Bay, straddling the border between Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, more than 200 miles north of Chicago. The bill would increase Medicare payments to the hospital by instructing federal officials to assume that it was in Chicago, where Medicare rates are set to cover substantially higher wages for hospital workers.
Lawmakers did not identify the hospital by name. For the purpose of Medicare, the bill said, “any hospital that is co-located in Marinette, Wis., and Menominee, Mich., is deemed to be located in Chicago.” Bay Area Medical Center is the only hospital fitting that description.
The primary purpose of the bill is to expand the Children’s Health Insurance Program while enhancing benefits for older people in traditional Medicare. But a review of the bill by The New York Times found that it would also direct millions of dollars a year to about 40 favored hospitals, by increasing their Medicare payments.
While the Democrats hailed the SCHIP legislation as protecting America's children, its real intent appears to be protecting Democratic backsides. It rewards hospitals in suburban Democratic districts such as Maurice Hinchey's in New York and Bart Stupak's in Michigan by forcing Medicare to pay above-market rates to hospitals in those areas. The Democrats hid these earmarks by casting them in gobbledygook geographical descriptions that sound broad but actually describe specific hospitals.
Democrats want to exploit Medicare to pay above-market rates in these hospitals to curry favor with unions and with local voters. For instance, a rural Alabama hospital that has not even yet been built will get higher payments from Medicare because it will be listed as a "critical access" facility. It normally wouldn't qualify for that status because of the proximity of another hospital, but Rep. Artur Davis (D-AL) got language waiving the standard for any hospital built in Butler. Coincidentally, that's just where Rush Health Systems had planned to build the new hospital.
The secret is out - and anyone trying to smear opponents for being evil and against those poor kids is nothing but a tool of the special interests pimping this bill. The bill really has little if anything to do with kids any longer. It has to do with the outright purchase of votes by Congress. The Democrats promised to clean up government when they took office. They appear to be doing their best to try to clean up. From government.
A pot-bellied pig put in the pokey for pointlessly peripatetic behavior has made bail. The Porcine vagrant was found wandering about Terrell County, Georgia by sheriff's deputies and promptly jailed at the Terrell County Correctional Institution for criminal mopery. But when a local television station publicized the plight of the pig, someone stepped forward to make bail.
Apparently, someone dumped this friendly pot-belly pig in a rural area of Terrell County.
The county's code enforcement officer picked her up near Highway 32 this week, and prisoners at the Terrell County Correctional Institution have been caring for the pig.
After seeing our story Thursday night, a lot of people called wanting to adopt the oinker.
A farmer from Webster County is the lucky one. He'll pick up his new pet Saturday.
Let's hope the farmer is ready to deal with this. Prison changes a pig.
Animals | Gaius | Comments (2)
A bear out on a golf course in Boulder, Colorado has been euthanized by state officials.
BOULDER, Colo. — State wildlife agents killed a bear that was hanging around Boulder's Flatirons Golf Course.
The Boulder Daily Camera said the bear had repeatedly approached humans and broken into homes, and had been transplanted to a remote area but returned.
Wildlife spokesman Tyler Baskfield said the two-year-old bear was killed Friday. It had an ear tag so there was no confusion about it being the same bear that had caused problems before.
Man, are they strict about tee times there.
Animals | Gaius | Comments (2)
Peaches the Moluccan cockatoo was raised in a tough neighborhood and has some really bad habits. Such as swearing like a longshoreman. Or worse.
Peaches is a Moluccan cockatoo, and staffers at Black Pine Animal Park say she used to be a pet in a household where she picked up a vocabulary that can be as colorful as her feathers.
The bird didn't miss anything when a volunteer construction worker started cussing recently after a chimp threw feces at him, said Jessica Price, senior zookeeper at the sanctuary about 30 miles north of Fort Wayne.
"She started laughing and carrying on," Price said.
Peaches then reverted to a few of her own favorites.
"Go away, shut up, shut your blankety-blank mouth," Price said. "She says a lot of very bad words."
Peaches would appear to be a regular commenter on Daily Kos.
Animals | Gaius | Comments (1)
Scanning the various news sources today, I cam across yet another column taking on Newsweek magazine's wild accusation that everyone who questions anything about global warming is part of a vast, well-funded conspiracy. This time it is Newsweek itself, in the person of Robert Samuelson dismembering the holier-than-thou morality fable. His take is a bit different.
The global-warming debate's great un-mentionable is this: we lack the technology to get from here to there. Just because Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to cut emissions 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 doesn't mean it can happen. At best, we might curb emissions growth.
Consider a 2006 study from the International Energy Agency. With present policies, it projected that carbon-dioxide emissions (a main greenhouse gas) would more than double by 2050; developing countries would account for almost 70 percent of the increase. The IEA then simulated an aggressive, global program to cut emissions based on the best available technologies: more solar, wind and biomass; more-efficient cars, appliances and buildings; more nuclear. Under this admitted fantasy, global emissions in 2050 would still slightly exceed 2003 levels.
Even the fantasy would be a stretch. In the United States, it would take massive regulations, higher energy taxes or both. Democracies don't easily adopt painful measures in the present to avert possible future problems. Examples abound. Since the 1973 Arab oil embargo, we've been on notice to limit dependence on insecure foreign oil. We've done little. In 1973, imports were 35 percent of U.S. oil use; in 2006, they were 60 percent. For decades we've known of the huge retirement costs of baby boomers. Little has been done.
I've linked to things Samuelson has written before. I still do not agree with his favored solution - raising gas taxes and CAFE standards - because the two together effectively cancel out. Even if gas costs more, if the MPG ratings increase significantly, people will drive more. That's beside the point of what Samuelson is really beating Newsweek over here, though:
But the overriding reality seems almost un-American: we simply don't have a solution for this problem. As we debate it, journalists should resist the temptation to portray global warming as a morality tale—as NEWSWEEK did—in which anyone who questions its gravity or proposed solutions may be ridiculed as a fool, a crank or an industry stooge. Dissent is, or should be, the lifeblood of a free society.
Precisely. And a lone dissenter, bucking the "consensus" and refusing to be intimidated by the extremely well-funded true believers of the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of Global Warming®, managed to force incorrect data to be changed, didn't he? That is the real danger of the new McCarthyism. Intimidating others into silence will force bad, voodoo solutions that will likely do more harm than good.
Besides, as I have been pointing out - repeatedly - there are definite results coming from the actions of the true believers in the most holy church of Gore. For example, there's the eradication of the orangutans. There is the total destruction of rainforest and displacement of native peoples. There's the wholesale murder of the poor in land grabs to grow more palm oil. There are skyrocketing food prices and soon there will be a shortage of food to export to the poorer countries. There are scads of results! It has simply never been easier to rape the planet. All you have to do is pay lip service to Pope Goreus I, say you're doing it to save the planet and you are good to go. There are results all right.
The "solutions" are already doing more harm to the planet than good, aren't they?
Mark Steyn pens his weekly column for the Orange County Register on the subject of what he calls malignant narcissism in America and the West. He manages to tie fraudulent climate data, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, Jesse MacBeth and cheeseburgers together. The man is an artist.
Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.
Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.
And yet we survived.
So why is 1998 no longer America's record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA's handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an "oversight" that would be corrected in the next "data refresh." The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.
Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he's not even American: He's Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won't do, even when they're federal public servants with unlimited budgets? No. Mr. McIntyre lives in Toronto. But the data smelled wrong to him, he found the error, and NASA has now corrected its findings – albeit without the fanfare that accompanied the hottest-year-on-record hysteria of almost a decade ago. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but, when it comes to global warming, the experts prefer to stick the thermometer where the sun don't shine.
You'll just have to read the whole thing to admire the way Steyn can tie all those diverse elements together into a coherent structure. His point that America - and the West in general - has reached a point of malignant, narcissistic self-loathing is effectively argued. Everything America does is interpreted as a) evil, b) existing completely in a vacuum where no other country, group or people have any impact on world events and c) really evil. Unless it's an energy-guzzling, strip mining magnate with a huge financial stake in making global warming hysteria into a religion. That's seen as good and benevolent.
I'd modify Steyn's phrase and call them malignant, mendacious narcissists.
Jay Ambrose, writing at the New York Post tears into Newsweek magazine and the global warming true believers today, calling them new McCarthyites. He is relentless in this one, but misses noting the really big news of the week, unfortunately.
August 12, 2007 — NEWSWEEK magazine, which tells us in a recent edition about a "well-funded," global-warming "denial machine," is itself something of a trashing machine, a journalistic pretender that mistakes smear for substance.
The stumbling, bumbling exercise in ad hominem McCarthyism takes it as an unchallengeable truth that global warming is a human-induced catastrophe that could be readily prevented, and concludes there is just one way to explain the "naysayers" to this holy writ: They are part of a "well-coordinated," heavily financed scheme cooked up by self-serving corporate interests to dupe the public and confuse or buy off politicians.
The article not only fails to make so sweeping a case, but skips over a fact that the rawest newsroom rookie should have picked up - namely, that the Chicken Littles have outspent the cited think tanks and other groups in trying to inflict everyone with the willies, scientific exactitude be hanged.
As some of the skeptics have noted in response to Newsweek's nastiness, the expenditures of the doubters are in fact dwarfed by the multimillions skillfully deployed by environmental groups. Sure, some corporations have sought to persuade lawmakers and the public that the alarmism is itself a danger, and why not? These businesses could be badly damaged by some suggested policies that, in terms of actually achieving anything, might be little more than voodoo dances.
Newsweek thinks they would be jim-dandy. On the basis of what analysis? Nothing precise is offered.
That is, of course, the nasty little bit of misdirection that the cultists do not want you to know. There is an enormous amount of money in play from people, groups and corporate interests who want the global warming frenzy to benefit them. For instance, Ambrose offers this interesting tidbit:
If the magazine thinks that is how the world works, why didn't it similarly point out that NASA's James Hansen, a supporter of John Kerry in the last presidential election and one of the most outspoken scientists about the threat of warming, received a $250,000 prize from the Heinz Foundation, administered by Kerry's wife?
James Hansen's big contribution to the global warming liturgy of the true believers is the US climate data of course. (Well, that and his much-reveled in role as "heroic martyr".) Which was just quietly corrected by NASA when it turned out to be incorrect. If a global warming skeptic, Steve McIntyre, had not been relentless about tracking down the weird jump in the data, the false information would have continued to be holy writ. It would seem that a man who is responsible for false data being accepted as holy truth - while getting a big chunk of money from an interested party would be worthy of note. (If the situation were reversed, you can bet the true believers would be screaming for an auto de fe.)
Side note. I only noted one left-leaning sites's mention of the correction of the erronious data. The argument there was that, hey, this only affects US data. But an intellectually honest scientist, when told that a fairly large amount of some of the best and most complete data in the world was subjected to a systematic error would have to ask whether all of the global data was subject to the same flaw. Not dismiss the one known - major -error as a one-off and maintain that all the rest is still good.
Oh, and as to Newsweek's charges that anyone who is questioning the "settled" science is on the take, all I can say is the pay sucks.
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