Brutal Cold Envelopes Midwest

Accuweather is calling for even more brutally cold temperatures through the Midwest in the next few days. The northernmost areas will have sub-zero temperatures through the day while the midsection will see "balmy" single digits. And it is going to be a very, very cold day for football on Sunday:

The Midwest Regional News story reports two shots of frigid Arctic air by Saturday will spread out of the northern Plains into the Midwest before reaching the East Coast and the Deep South Sunday.
 
The combination of cold air and frigid winds will produce potentially dangerous conditions for anyone venturing outdoors for extended periods.

Motorists traveling across the northern Plains and Upper Midwest should prepare a winter emergency kit for their vehicle.

The Severe Weather Center lists the widespread wind chill advisories and warnings in effect from the Dakotas to northern Indiana.

International Falls, Minn., this weekend will live up to its nickname "The Icebox of America." Temperatures through Monday will fail to rise to zero, and overnight lows will be at least 20 degrees below zero with the wind creating RealFeel® temperatures of 40 degrees below zero.

RealFeel® temperatures overnight across the northern and central Plains include:

Flag Island, Minn.: -48°
Warroad, Minn.: -44°
Bemidji, Minn.: -43°
Devils Lake, N.D.: -41°
Spencer, Iowa: -33°

It will be bitterly cold Sunday for both National Football League Conference Championship games. The RealFeel® temperature will be hovering around zero when the New England Patriots take on the San Diego Chargers in the early game at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Mass.

In the late game at the "Frozen Tundra", better known as Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wis.,  the Green Bay Packers and New York Giants at kickoff will deal with an actual temperature in the single digits and a RealFeel® temperature near 10 below zero.

I just stepped outside a few minutes ago. It is currently a tropical 7° F under absolutely clear skies with virtually no breeze. It's going to be a three dog plus an electric blanket plus a Salamander** night tonight. In honor of the occasion, it seems fitting to think of warmer times. Ten Degrees and Getting Colder sounds pretty good right now. (Gordon Lightfoot song at that last link.)

** UPDATE: The Salamander reference is a joke, folks. Those are not something one uses in a tightly enclosed structure like a house.

Still More Sensitive Personal Data Lost In Britain

Only a short time ago, the British government lost the highly personal data of some 25 million citizens by sending some computer disks through the mail. The disks never arrived at their intended destination. Today, news comes that the personal data of some 600,000 people who are in the military or have expressed an interest in joining has been stolen. A laptop computer containing quite a lot of highly personal information was stolen from a parked car.

None of the data was encrypted. Open the file and read at your leisure.

A laptop computer containing the personal details of 600,000 military staff and recruits has been stolen from a car.

Names, addresses, ranks, bank details and passport numbers were among the highly-sensitive information on the Ministry of Defence computer.

Incredibly, the information was not encrypted - meaning it would be easily accessed by anyone with basic technological knowledge.

Insiders said the laptop would be a "treasure trove" for extremists planning attacks on servicemen and women or their families.

Thieves could steal their identities or take cash from their bank accounts.

An urgent security inquiry was under way as police searched for the computer, which belonged to a Royal Navy officer.

It was stolen in Birmingham on January 9.

Detectives are trying to establish whether the thief targeted the car or if it was a random theft.

The loss is a huge embarrassment to the Ministry of Defence.

A spokesman admitted: "The laptop contained personal information relating to some 600,000 people who have either expressed an interest in, or have joined, the Royal Navy, Royal Marines and RAF.

"The information held is not the same for every individual. In some cases, for casual inquiries, the record is no more than a name.

"But for those who progressed as far as submitting an application to join the Forces, extensive personal data may be held."

Some files are understood to contain National Insurance numbers, drivers' licence details, family details and doctors' addresses.

Read the whole thing. There have been multiple losses of data in a very short time. The British government appears to be unable to hang on to any of the data it collects for any length of time. They also appear to have never heard of data encryption. Because the hits just keep on coming, folks.

Biofuel Costs Outweigh Benefits: EU Study

A study performed by the European Union's own in-house research body, the Joint Research Center, concludes that the costs associated with biofuels outweigh their benefits. No doubt this is a major shock to the EU and their true believer bureaucrats. The costs are very high in terms of money - and there appear to be no savings whatsoever in greenhouse gas emissions. There is only one thing for the EU to do, given this new, damning information:

Change nothing and carry on with their plans exactly as they have been.

"The costs of EU biofuels outweigh the benefits," the researchers state.

EU taxpayers would have to fork out an extra 33-65 billion euros (48-95 billion dollars) between now and 2020 if the European Commission proposals go ahead, according to the study.

European Commission spokesman on energy Ferran Tarradellas Espuny stressed that the study was just a working paper and one of several opinions being taken into consideration as talks continued ahead of Wednesday's decision.

But he made clear that that the 10 percent biofuels objective for vehicles remained.

"Economically speaking there is only one option, that is biofuels," he told a press conference.

"It is good for the environment, it is good for transport and it is good for European agriculture".

On agriculture however the study warns that the proposed EU measures will require the use of huge swathes of land outside of Europe and it questions whether it will make any greenhouse gas savings at all.

Green groups warn that the EU plans could lead to forest clearances for biofuels or for food crops displaced by biofuel plantations as farmers switch over.

The report concludes that by using the same EU resources of money and biomass, significantly greater greenhouse gas savings could be achieved by imposing only an overall biomass-use target instead of a separate one for transport.

"The uncertainties of the indirect greenhouse effects, much of which would occur outside the EU, mean that it is impossible to say with certainty that the net greenhous gas effects of the giofuels programme would be positive," the study says.

Adrian Bebb, Agrofuels Campaign Coordinator for Friends of the Earth Europe, called it "a damning verdict on the EU's policy for using biofuels."

"The conclusions are crystal clear — the EU should abandon biofuels and use its resources on real solutions to climate change," he said of the leaked report.

Why it is so crystal clear that the bureaucrats can't see it at all. Or pretend not to. Therefore they will just carry on, secure in their self-righteous belief that they know best what is good for the world.

Brutal Cold Kills 200 In Afghanistan

In what the BBC calls the most severe cold seen in decades, some 200 people have died so far as a wave of bitter cold has enveloped Afghanistan. The entire region is under this massive wave of frigid air. The toll is, unfortunately, likely to rise as many areas are completely cut off due to extremely heavy snow. Food and supplies are running out.

Four large provinces in the western part of the country have been especially badly hit. Tens of thousands of livestock have also perished.

Local people are saying the winter conditions have been the most severe in decades. The cold spell is also affecting neighbouring countries.

People seem to have been unprepared for the heavy snow and low temperatures.

Most of the 200 dead are herdsmen - but women and children have also died.

Much of the west is quite low-lying by Afghan standards and the International Committee of the Red Cross says many people only expect a day or two of snow each winter.

Tens of thousands of sheep, vital for local livelihoods, have also perished in the cold.

At the other end of the country, the north-east, people say recent snowfalls have been the heaviest for 20 years.

Here's the current conditions for Kabul. It is actually much colder in many areas of the American Midwest at the moment. But it is a very, very unrelenting cold winter here just as it is in Afghanistan.

Gee, Do These Pants Make Me Look…..

Female police officers in Britain are engaged in howling outrage at the moment over pants. Specifically, they say their pants make their bums look too big.

As officers of the law, they need to present a respectable and sometimes stern face to the public. But according to policewomen, there's no reason why they can't look good as well.

They are pleading with their bosses to dump the current uniform design, which they say is unflattering and impractical.

They complain that the old fashioned cut of the trousers does nothing to enhance their nether regions - and the high waist makes them look like X Factor judge Simon Cowell.

The garments are also bulky and make it hard to chase offenders.

And it is not just the bottom half of the uniform which is hopelessly unsuited to a woman's shape, according to officers.

The stab vests are apparently extremely uncomfortable for those with larger chests.

Some women have even chosen to wear men's uniforms because they fit better than their own.

Meanwhile, the British police have arrested a 73-year old man for daring to tell a group of thugs to stop throwing bricks at ducks.

A pensioner who ordered a gang of youths to stop throwing bricks at ducks on a canal was arrested and thrown into a cell by police.

When police officers knocked on his door Bill Marshall, 73, was expecting them to investigate his complaints about the unruly gang.

Instead the stunned great-grandfather was hauled off to a police cell accused of attacking the youths on the canal bank.

Yesterday the retired miner - who has a heart condition and diabetes - spoke of his shock and humiliation over the arrest.

He said : "I was shocked when a police officer turned up on my doorstep. I had made a number of complaints about anti-social behaviour from these yobs so I expected it was a response to that.

"I was quite happy to invite him in but then he said I was being arrested and taken to the station accused of assault. I thought it was a joke at first but then I realised he was perfectly serious.

"The officer ordered me to take the laces out my shoes as I was being arrested for common assault. I didn't know what to think."

Mr Marshall was driven to the police station and put into a cell before having to wait two hours for a duty solicitor.

The police have, after several weeks, dropped the charges against Mr. Marshall. But one should point out that it is not the pants making the police look like big…..butts. (Sometimes that policy of mine gets in the way of a great one-liner.)

Blowback

Charles Krauthammer looks at the recent identity politics flap caused by remarks made by Hillary Clinton and explains that it wasn't racism. That fact has been noted by a lot of people, of course. He says the real problem is one of a different time and place - and a vastly changed political landscape. The starting point is that claim by Clinton that it took Lyndon Johnson to enact the civil rights law of 1964.

In my view, the real problem with Clinton's statement was the implied historical analogy — that the subordinate position King held in relation to Johnson, a function of the discrimination and disenfranchisement of the time, somehow needs recapitulation today when none of those conditions apply.

The analogy Clinton was implying was obvious: I'm Lyndon Johnson, unlovely doer; he's Martin Luther King, charismatic dreamer. Vote for me if you want results.

Forty years ago, that arrangement — white president enacting African American dreams — was necessary because discrimination denied blacks their own autonomous political options. Today, that arrangement — white liberals acting as tribune for blacks in return for their political loyalty — is a demeaning anachronism. That's what the fury at Hillary was all about, although no one was willing to say so explicitly.

The King-Johnson analogy is dead because the times are radically different. Today an African American can be in a position to wield the emancipation pen — and everything else that goes along with the presidency: from making foreign policy to renting out the Lincoln Bedroom (if one is so inclined). Why should African American dreams still have to go through white liberals?

Clinton is no doubt shocked that a simple argument about experience vs. inspiration becomes the basis for a charge of racial insensitivity. She is surprised that the very use of "fairy tale" in reference to Obama's position on Iraq is taken as a sign of insensitivity, or that any reference to his self-confessed teenage drug use is immediately given racial overtones.

As Krauthammer and others have pointed out, the Clintons feel entitled to another Clinton taking office. They are enraged that Obama is standing in the way of that. That there is more than a little irony in watching the Clintons squirming under the same kind of charges they are used to wielding against opponents just make this all more amusing. Is it enough to stop her from winning? Maybe not. But the longterm damage may already be done. Clinton herself may have driven the wedge that splits a longstanding political bloc off the Democratic party.

Full Metal Straitjacket

Ralph Peters savages the New York Times' "investigative report" that attempted to smear all returning troops as psychos just waiting for a chance to kill. (I posted about that slime job here.) Peters says that the Times is trying to place a leper's bell on returning veterans. If you don't know what a leper's bell is, this will explain the term.)

The purpose of Sunday's instantly notorious feature "alerting" the American people that our Iraq and Afghanistan vets are all potential murderers when they move in next door was to mark those defenders of freedom as "unclean" - as the new lepers who can't be trusted amid uninfected Americans.

In the more than six years since 9/11, the Times has never run a feature story half as long on any of the hundreds of heroes who've served our country - those who've won medals of honor, distinguished service crosses, Navy crosses, silver stars or bronze stars with a V device (for valor).

But the Times put a major investigative effort into the "sensational" story that 121 returning vets had committed capital offenses (of course, 20 percent of the cases cited involved manslaughter charges stemming from drunken driving, not first- or second-degree murder . . . ).

Well, a quick statistics check let the air out of the Times' bid to make us dread the veteran down the block - who the Times implies has a machine gun under his bathrobe when he steps out front to fetch the morning paper. In fact, the capital-crimes rate ballyhooed by the Gray Lady demonstrates that our returning troops are far less likely to commit such an offense.

Again, the Times' smear certainly wasn't an accident. The paper's staff is highly paid and highly experienced. Its editors know that a serious news story has to put numbers into context. But their sole attempt at context was to note that offenses by former soldiers have ticked up since we went to war.

The Times is trying to make you fear our veterans (Good Lord, if your daughter marries one, she's bound to be beaten to death!). And to convince you that our military would be a dreadful place for your sons and daughters, a death-machine that would turn them into incurable psychopaths.

Peters touches on the way the left and the media (i know, I know, that's redundant) seems to be increasingly pathologically against the military. He mentions how they try to make the veterans fit into their Hollywood-driven picture of what they believe the military is. Damn the truth, full smear ahead. The twisted Hollywood fantasy of the military has been noted before, of course. The only real bright spots in all of this are that a) the Times version of the military is being thumped pretty widely at this point and b) their stock price continues to plummet - likely as a result of this kind of "journalism." Their latest attempt to fit every returning vet with a full metal straitjacket appears to have backfired.

Bobby Fischer Is Dead

Former chess champion and long time, serial America basher Bobby Fischer has died. He was 64.

In 1992, he agreed to a rematch with Spassky, scheduled to be held in Yugoslavia and carrying a prize in excess of $3 million. The match — which Fischer won — was a high-profile violation of U.S. sanctions imposed on the Yugoslavian government of Slobodan Milosevic. U.S. officials issued a warrant for his arrest.

The warrant — and rage against the country that once hailed him — dogged Fischer for a decade. Known as much in later years for his ideological tirades — against Jews, in praise of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — he was arrested in 2004 in Japan where he was traveling on an invalid U.S. passport.

Fischer died in Iceland, where he went to live after renouncing his US citizenship.

The Three Faces Of …… Bill?

The Washington Post notes that Bill Clinton stumping for Hillary is as much about Bill Clinton as it is about Hillary Clinton. More, in fact. The former president spends a lot of time on the campaign trail talking about himself rather than the candidate. This is a phenomenon others have noticed, of course.

The question was about a campaign polling memo in 2008, but somehow the answer drifted back to the political wars of 1998. Bill Clinton was holding forth to a group of college students in New Hampshire too young to remember much about the investigations and battles of his presidency. But Clinton remembered.

"Ken Starr spent $70 million and indicted innocent people to find out that I wouldn't take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon," he told the students last week, his eyes narrowing and his finger jabbing the air. At another point, he complained that the investigations during his White House days virtually bankrupted him: "The Republicans were so mean to me when I was president that I was poorer when I left than when I got there."

Ten years ago Monday, the story of Clinton's relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky and the perjury investigation that independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr had initiated as a result of it broke in the media, and the former president's anger over that time can still seem close to the surface.

As Clinton travels the country campaigning for his wife with characteristic intensity, he is fighting not only to promote Hillary Rodham Clinton's candidacy but also to set the record straight on the two terms he spent in the White House. And if some cast the Democratic nomination battle as a test of whether the party wants to turn the page on the Clinton years, then he is determined to win the referendum.

Friends describe a man who has made peace with the past since leaving the Oval Office, but with his wife's campaign now on the line, Clinton's frustration seems to be boiling over. He has likened her Democratic rivals to Republican "Swift boat" attackers and castigated Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for making up a "fairy tale" about Obama's war position. Just this week he berated a television reporter who asked about a dispute over Nevada caucus rules.

"What he perceives is a lack of fairness — equal scrutiny, equal accountability," said the Rev. Carolyn Staley, a longtime friend from Arkansas. "While their lives have been an open book for all these years they've been in public service, other candidates have not been subject to that sort of scrutiny."

Republicans were "mean" to him? What is this, grade school? The article goes on to say that Bill Clinton doesn't "dwell" on past events. Frankly, it sounds more like he wallows in them. I think the Republicans made a mistake going down the Clintonian road of personal political destruction, but that is what they chose at the time. As a result, we're seeing Clinton, mark II this year.

Lord, I am so tired of these two. I think the media is as well, but they are still afraid of the Clintons as well. They, of all people, know how utterly vicious the Clintons are.