Vast Majority?

You at least have to give credit to Agence France-Presse for admitting that the 'consensus' on global warming has some very credible dissenters. They try to denigrate those dissenters by marginalizing them, but they at least mention them. They at least pick up the story that a study has found that the widely used, agreed upon climate models are seriously flawed. The study, by David Douglass, John Christy, Benjamin Pearson and Fred Singer, found that the models break down – to the point of reversing symbols from positive to negative, as altitude increases. If global warming gasses were indeed the cause of the warming trend, that should not be true. Yet, there it is. AFP says this about the study – which used actual, agreed-upon data and the actual, agreed-upon models:

These experts believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon, and they point to reams of data they say support their assertions.

These conclusions are in sharp contradiction to those of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which reached its conclusions using largely similar data.

The UN body of about 3,000 experts, including several renowned US scientists, adopted a landmark report in mid-November stating that the evidence of a human role in the warming of the planet was now "unequivocal."

Retreating glaciers and loss of snow in Alpine regions, thinning Arctic summer sea ice and thawing permafrost shows that climate change is already on the march, the report said.

Carbon pollution, emitted especially by the burning of oil, gas and coal, traps heat from the Sun, thus warming the Earth's surface and inflicting changes to weather systems.

A group of US scientists however disagree, and have written an article on their views that is published in The International Journal of Climatology, a publication of Britain's Royal Meteorological Society.

"The observed pattern of warming, comparing surface and atmospheric temperature trends, doesn't show the characteristic fingerprint associated with greenhouse warming," wrote lead author David Douglas, a climate expert from the University of Rochester, in New York state.

"The inescapable conclusion is that human contribution is not significant and that observed increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming," Douglas wrote.

Dr. Douglass' name is misspelled in the AFP article. It is actually David Douglass. I have exchanged emails with Dr. Douglass and he was kind enough to send me a copy of his paper. I reproduced a graph from that paper that shows how off the models are. They are off, rather badly, yet policy decisions are being forced based upon them. There are flies in that pot of ointment, however. Some of the much genuflected to 3,000 scientists have publicly disavowed the IPCC conclusions. There are also problems with the media-propagated stories. Take arctic ice, for example.

Even the greenies are admitting that arctic sea ice is refreezing at a rate never before seen – they have to, NASA says so.

The record melting of Arctic sea ice observed this summer and fall led to record-low levels of ice in both September and October, but a record-setting pace of re-freezing in November, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. Some 58,000 square miles of ice formed per day for 10 days in late October and early November, a new record.

But, of course, the simple fact is that the records only go back a very few years because we have only been keeping them for a few years. We have only had the technology to do so in a human lifespan or so. Before that, we had an occasional observation. Not long before that we had no data at all. Yet we are now supposed to change the world based on this minuscule amount of data.  

The United Nations has proved, over and over again how utterly corrupt and utterly incompetent they  are at virtually everything they touch. Why in heaven's name are we listening to them?

Foreign Money?

Forget the foreign money going to the Clinton Library. If this is true, Hillary may have even more shady money coming in, from even more shady sources than anyone, myself included, would have thought. Could known terrorist supporters be helping raise money for Hillary? The Ministry of Defense of the nation of Sri Lanka says that they are.

Well known activists of a banned terrorist group in the United States are involved in the fund raising activities of the US Democratic candidate Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton.

According to a fundraising web site for the Senator, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) activists are involved in raising funds from 100 Dollars to 2300 Dollars to help elect Senator Clinton as the next United States President. The website could be reached at: https://contribute.hillaryclinton.com/events/nj1212.html

New Jersey residents have expressed the fear, that LTTE or the Tamil Tigers could flush supporters with millions of dollars, to buy influence over the next possible President of the United States of America by infiltrating into democratic fund raising machine.

An email distributed by a female activist, Pat Pathmakumar for the group under the name "Tamils for Clinton" has appealed to contribute for the Clinton fund by sending checks to her or a man named Ram Ranjan, a man who organized the LTTE Heroes day meeting in New Jersey last year. Ranjan has publicly admitted he raised funds for LTTE front, the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization (TRO).

The terrorist group, that introduced innovative methods like suicide jackets to many terrorist groups in the world, is listed as a foreign terrorist group by the State Department and the US Federal police , the FBI has alleged that the group had offered to them millions of dollars as bribes to lift the ban. The group is alleged to be using bribes to buy influence in India, Malaysia and Sri Lanka. The money is being earned mostly by fraudulent business, credit card scams, drug running, voluntary fund raising and extortions of the Tamil Diaspora, according to a recent report of the Jane's Defense weekly.

According to the Clinton website, a leading LTTE activist, who came to live in New Jersey in 1994, called Ram Ranjan is one of the fund raisers of the Clinton campaign. Several others who are connected with him are also listed among the fund raisers.

Ram Ranjan has earlier admitted that he had raised funds for the Tamil Tigers front organization called Tamil Rehabilitation Organization (TRO) which had raised funds purportedly for humanitarian purposes but actually diverted those funds for terrorist activities from many countries in the world.

A year ago he told a New Jersey newspaper called Star Ledger that although he supported the TRO; it is not connected with the terrorist group LTTE.

The Star Ledger reported, "… ……… he serves as state coordinator of the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, which raises money for medical services, schools and orphanages and the victims of the LTTE, not the LTTE, Ranjan said."

The US State Department has identified the TRO as a front organization of the LTTE and it is banned in many countries in the world.

Do I think Clinton knows about about this and is encouraging it? No. Do I think it is quite possible? Yes. An official government department of a foreign nation also believes it and is willing to publish that belief to the world. Which requires one to ask a question: why would agents for a known terrorist front organization specifically want Hillary Clinton elected? That could lead to some uncomfortable moments for Clinton if any member of the media actually would ask her that – which you know they would not. It seems unlikely that terrorists would support an American candidate they believe would be tough on terrorism, does it not?

Wretchard at The Belmont Club found this little gem. He asks a pertinent question:

Washington has become the de facto capital of the world. It is to be expected that influence peddlers from the Middle East, China and everyone else are going to trying to get their seat at the table. How vulnerable is the US political system to this kind of influence?

I think we'd all like to know the answer to that.

Down To Stunts

This is funny, in a pathetic sort of way. In order to prove she has the personal touch, Hillary Clinton knocked on the doors of a few houses in New Hampshire to make an appeal for people's votes. She knocked on a total of ten doors, according to the Associated Press. The reporters then spun this effort into a "personal campaigning" victory for Clinton.

The New York senator knocked on doors along a snow-covered block of Manchester, less than a month before the crucial January 8 New Hampshire primary, the second binding contest of the 2008 presidential campaign.

"I'd be honored to have your support," Clinton said on the front porch of Mike Glickstein, a Manchester resident.

Glickstein, a 38-year-old maintenance worker whose beagle howled incessantly as he spoke to the former first lady, said he had intended to vote for Clinton already.

"I like her support of the middle class, I like her husband a lot," Glickstein said, referring to former President Bill Clinton…..

…..In a subsequent speech to voters in Plaistow, New Hampshire, Clinton said the state would be important to her efforts to secure her party's nomination.

"I'm counting on you for this primary election," she said. "It's a decision that I know you take very seriously. That's why you attend events like this, that's why you open your doors to us when we come knocking."

A whiff of desperation? I think yes. Because she pulled out the stops promising to deliver all the hot button promises:

Clinton said that if elected she would work to find a way of providing universal health care to U.S. citizens, a fight she faced before as First Lady when her husband was president. She also said she would do away with the controversial education program No Child Left Behind and that if elected she would call on the leaders of the top emitters of greenhouse gases to meet every three months to agree on a solution to cut back their emissions.

I rather suspect that a lot of this has to do with a steady drip, drip, drip of ugliness coming out in the media all of a sudden. Things like huge amounts of foreign money financing the Clinton library:

Bill Clinton's presidential library raised more than 10 percent of the cost of its $165 million facility from foreign sources, with the most generous overseas donation coming from Saudi Arabia, according to interviews yesterday.

The royal family of Saudi Arabia gave the Clinton facility in Little Rock about $10 million, roughly the same amount it gave toward the presidential library of George H.W. Bush, according to people directly familiar with the contributions.

The presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has for months faced questions about the source of the money for her husband's presidential library. During a September debate, moderator Tim Russert asked the senator whether her husband would release a donor list. Clinton said she was sure her husband would "be happy to consider that," though the former president later declined to provide a list of donors.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has made an issue of the large yet unidentified contributors to presidential libraries, saying that he wants to avoid even the appearance of impropriety in such donations. Obama has introduced legislation that would require disclosure of all contributions to presidential libraries, including Clinton's, and Congress has actively debated such a proposal. Unlike campaign donations, money given to presidential libraries is often done with limited or no disclosure.

The far left, led by Michael Moore, made much of ties between Saudi Arabia and the Bush family. It seems the Clintons are in the same boat – and maybe are even more beholden to foreign money. For the record, I don't think any American president should take funds from a foreign government or private individual even for a library. The appearance of impropriety is too great even if there are no strings or expectations. (George W. Bush would be blasted if he does so, so he's better off leaving that money on the table and walking away.)

But how desperate is the internal polling if Hillary is down to stunts for the camera to try to gain traction?

For Unto You A No Child Is Born

Mark Steyn muses on a Christmas – and a world – with no children. It is a dark picture and it is suddenly all the rage among the true believers of the new church of global warming.

As I say, the above demographic audit has become something of an annual tradition in this space. But here's something new that took hold in the year 2007: A radical antihumanism, long present just below the surface, bobbed up and became explicit and respectable. In Britain, the Optimum Population Trust said that "the biggest cause of climate change is climate changers – in other words, human beings," and professor John Guillebaud called on Britons to voluntarily reduce the number of children they have.

Last week, in the Medical Journal of Australia, Barry Walters went further: To hell with this wimp-o pantywaist "voluntary" child-reduction. Professor Walters wants a "carbon tax" on babies, with, conversely, "carbon credits" for those who undergo sterilization procedures. So that'd be great news for the female eco-activists recently profiled in London's Daily Mail who boast about how they'd had their tubes tied and babies aborted in order to save the planet. "Every person who is born," says Toni Vernelli, "produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases and adds to the problem of overpopulation." We are the pollution, and sterilization is the solution. The best way to bequeath a more sustainable environment to our children is not to have any.

What's the "pro-choice" line? "Every child should be wanted"? Not anymore. The progressive position has subtly evolved: Every child should be unwanted.

By the way, if you're looking for some last-minute stocking stuffers, Oxford University Press has published a book by professor David Benatar of the University of Cape Town called "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence." The author "argues for the 'anti-natal' view – that it is always wrong to have children … . Anti-natalism also implies that it would be better if humanity became extinct." As does Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us" – which Publishers Weekly hails as "an enthralling tour of the world … anticipating, often poetically, what a planet without us would be like." It's a good thing it "anticipates" it poetically, because, once it happens, there will be no more poetry.

A cheerless picture, indeed. Many in the blogosphere – on the right side at least – cheered the fact that Toni Vernelli had decided not to breed, assuming that the madness would die out eventually. Unfortunately, the madness can do a lot more damage between now and the day the non-breeders eventually depart this earth. That, I think, is the biggest worry right now. The idea that the earth would be better off without humans is growing as the elites succumb more and more to the dogma of their new church.

Right now, brutal winter weather is sweeping across the United States, arctic sea ice is refreezing at rates never before seen, people froze to death in Argentina this summer – their winter and Australia suffered record cold. Yet the Bali conference went on anyway, throwing megatons of carbon into the atmosphere so protesters could parade about in polar bear suits in the tropical weather. The delegates, the media and the activists lived it up in a luxury resort and worked out a way to gut the western economies. With the assistance of the western economies.

How long, do you suppose, until some true believer suggests retroactive birth control? I expect it will happen soon enough.

The Paradox Of Human Intelligence

Joseph Weisberg, a former CIA employee who worked in the Directorate of Operations, writes an op ed in the Washington Post that destroys the myth of the valuable human intelligence asset. To put it bluntly, most spies are not trusted at all and many, if not the vast majority, are very likely double agents, fully controlled by the intelligence service of the country they are supposedly spying on.

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran appears to rely heavily on notes from a discussion between Iranian military officials involved in that country's nuclear weapons development program. What if, instead of such easily manipulated documentary evidence, the CIA's National Clandestine Service had been able to recruit a spy at the highest reaches of the Iranian government, someone who could just tell us what the country's nuclear capabilities and plans were?

It wouldn't have made any difference.

Ever since the inception of the CIA, the operational side of the agency has both believed in and spread the fantasy that foreign agents can provide vital secret intelligence that will clear up great mysteries, change the outcome of wars or prevent terrorist attacks. But this view of intelligence is a myth. To understand why, it's useful to look at what happened the last time the United States desperately needed a spy to get to the bottom of a covert weapons program and what happened when we actually got one…..

….Intelligence from almost all CIA assets is unreliable for the simple reason that so many of them are double agents, meaning that the CIA recruited them but that they are being controlled by their own countries' intelligence services. When I worked at CIA headquarters in the early 1990s, I once suggested to a friend who worked in counterintelligence that up to a third of all CIA agents could be doubles. He said the number was probably much higher.

Therein lies the problem. The CIA knows that most spies are either plants or are working in their own interests – not for the good of the US. The world of spying is not as it is portrayed in a Tom Clancy novel. There is a simple, undeniable fact here: it is incredibly difficult to recruit an agent at a high enough position in a foreign government to gather the kind of information needed.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Although we dedicate enormous resources to recruiting "human sources," there just aren't many good ones available. The central problem is that the people who actually know the secrets we'd be interested in aren't recruitable. Officials at the highest reaches of foreign governments have wealth and power and usually no compelling reason to put those at risk. The most knowledgeable members of terrorist groups are ideologically committed and aren't going to work for the CIA or anyone else.

It may not be impossible, but it certainly is highly unlikely. So we are left with a paradox. If the intelligence gathered by the CIA fails to detect vital information, the routine scapegoat of "human intelligence failures" is trotted out. If the human intelligence gets it wrong, the same scapegoat is again trotted out. If the CIA gets suckered by a human intelligence asset, whether that asset is a double or merely acting in their own interests, same result. Weisberg suggests one possible fix that might improve the outlook or will at least cut the number of bad assets, I'll let you read it for yourself. I don't know if it will work or not or if there really is any way out of this particular conundrum.

A Series Of Clumsy Slurs

Toby Harnden from The Telegraph thinks that Barack Obama has surged ahead in polls mostly because of the incredibly inept series of clumsy slurs the Clinton campaign has launched in recent weeks. While he may be overly optimistic – which he admits is quite possible – he may also be right. The awkward, almost flailing actions of team Clinton have made them look weak and terrified at the same time and have made Hillary Clinton a laughingstock in many ways. If Obama wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, it could well be deadly trouble for Clinton.

It was the moment that Barack Obama became the front-runner in the race for the White House. As he waited at a private terminal in Washington airport to board his charter plane to Des Moines for Thursday's Democratic debate, an aide to Hillary Clinton approached him. The former First Lady would "like to have a word".

The two senators work in the same building – the Capitol – and had been criss-crossing the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire on the same bleak roads. They sometimes stayed at the same hotels – though, by design, never at the same time.

But apart from the briefest of pleasantries, the rival candidates for the presidency had not spoken for almost a year. Back in January, on the day Mr Obama's presidential ambitions became clear, Mrs Clinton had ignored his outstretched hand.

Mrs Clinton, about to turn 60, had based her campaign on the idea that she would make history as the first woman president. But this upstart, nearly 15 years her junior, could trump that: as the son of a white woman from Kansas and a former goatherd from Kenya, he would be the first black president. Her contempt for this impertinence was never far from the surface.

Although taken aback by the overture, Mr Obama hesitated only briefly before assenting. On the tarmac, where their planes had been parked alongside each other, they talked for 10 minutes.

Startlingly, Mrs Clinton wanted to say sorry. The New York senator told her colleague from Illinois that he probably wanted to "hear from me" that comments by Bill Shaheen, a senior Clinton campaign figure, suggesting that Mr Obama might have been a drug dealer, were "unauthorised and inappropriate".

Yeah, right. Which is why she went in front of the press yesterday and promised that there were "no surprises" to be found in Hillary's history. That's vintage Clinton hardball, hinting that she has even more dirt to dredge – most effective if said dirt never actually comes out. The dark hint is meant to leave a lingering odor that something may be a bit off about Clinton's enemies. I don't think there are too many people who don't believe the entire kabuki starring Billy Shaheen was not orchestrated by the campaign right from the get-go. Even the apology was a set piece to demonstrate Clinton's "presidential" qualities. The important thing was to get the slur out there and into the news. Shaheen was merely the loyal designated scapegoat. He has too big a reputation as a sharp operative to have done this accidentally.

Will all of Clinton's schemes backfire on her? It is possible. She really is not well liked by a lot of even loyal Democrats. Things like a string of clumsy slurs may be enough to turn just a few people away from her. A candidate with as high a negative rating as Clinton has cannot afford the loss of a single vote. Her machine may recover, but the wheels may also be starting to come off. We'll know in a few weeks. If she places third in Iowa, she may really be in trouble.

The Day The Music Died

63 years ago on this date, a a single-engined Noorduyn Norseman UC-64 bearing the United States Army Air Force Tail Number 44-70285 took off from the runway at Royal Air Force Twinwood Farm on a flight to Paris. On board was Major Glenn Miller, on his way to entertain troops who had liberated the French capitol. The aircraft and Glenn Miller were never seen again. The world lost a great talent.