Luke, I Am Your …… Worst Nightmare

Founding a new religion can be a bit rough, apparently. But then, when you base your liturgy on the teachings of a movie prop puppet what can you expect? Yes, Jonba Hehol was finally attacked by a badly-dressed Darth Vader impersonator. One wielding a metal crutch instead of a light saber.

A judge has issued a warrant for the arrest of a Darth Vader impersonator who allegedly attacked two Star Wars fans in their own back garden.

Arwel Wynne Jones, who was dressed in a black bin liner and shiny black helmet, is accused of assaulting Barney and Michael Jones while they were being interviewed for a TV documentary about their love of the films.

Barney Jones (or, as he styles himself for his priestly duties, Jonba Hehol) is one of the founders of the British Jedi Church - which I have posted about before. To update my conclusion about the last post, not only is said Jedi priest seriously in need of a life, it would appear he could also use a good suit of full plate armor.

It's not easy being a puppet messiah.

Catch 22 And A Half

Drought strikes. People, exhorted by the politicians and functionaries of municipal utilities exert themselves and conserve water. Then comes the reward for all their scrimping on water: Massive fee increases because the water authorities didn't make enough money what with people saving water and all.

ATLANTA — Many residents of the Southeast who sacrificed greener lawns and longer showers to reduce water usage during the region's historic drought are now seeing the other shoe drop: They're being hit with sharp rate increases as water utilities scramble to make up revenue lost because of conservation measures.
The drought is lessening across much of the region, and the most severe outdoor watering restrictions have been eased in places such as Atlanta, Charlotte and South Florida. Now come the heftier water bills.

Among the price hikes:

•Atlanta's water utility, facing hundreds of millions of dollars in bond debt for a $3.9 billion update of its sewer and water systems, is seeking a 15% rate increase to offset conservation losses; other water utilities in metropolitan Atlanta are likely to follow suit if usage stays low.

"We're estimating a $33 million-a-year loss because of the drop in revenue from people conserving," says Janet Ward, spokeswoman for Atlanta's Department of Watershed Management. "That's the Catch-22 that we're in. People conserve, and you're so proud of them. Then you say, 'But wait, you're going to get hit with a bigger bill for conserving.' "

(My sister lives in Atlanta. I just have to ask her her opinion about this.) Many Florida residents are seeing a drought surcharge added to their water bills that adds about 15% to their bills. That seems to be the magic number all through the story. If you did the right thing and conserved, you get hit with a penalty of 15%. If you didn't do the right thing and wasted water - you get hit with a 15% penalty.

Anyone paying attention here? What is the lesson the water authorities just sent? The next time they call for conservation, people are going to tell them where to put their pleas.

UPDATE: Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link.

An Embarrassing Performance

[I bumped this for an update.] 

Yes, I'm talking about the Pennsylvania primary. No, I'm not talking about Barrack Obama.

I've had running battles (on other sites) about what I viewed as godawful polling practices by an outfit out of North Carolina called Public Policy Polling. Anyone who has had political science training could look at the crosstabs for their polls and see countless red flags. For starters, the weighting that they gave to black voters and to the Philadelphia area seemed all out of proportion to the actual demographics of the state or any historical precedent. Also, the fact they kept the raw numbers hidden from scrutiny was also troubling for anyone trying to gauge them from the perspective of the social sciences. There is nothing wrong with weighting your polls, but you should give people the opportunity to scrutinize them without having to engage in reverse engineering.

There were 39 polls released about the Pennsylvania primary since April 1st. A grand total of three of these polls had Obama in the lead, Clinton led in 35 of the others with one saying it was a tie. All three of the polls that had Obama in front were the handiwork of PPP (last of the three, a massive survey of 2338 likely Democratic voters with a +/- of only 2% -supposedly- here.) In a sense this isn't surprising after you look at the client list for PPP. I conducted searches to see who the majority of PPP clients had endorsed for the Democratic nomination. There were copious Obama endorsements, but not a single Clinton endorsement. Now, this might just be a hell of a coincidence, but given the tightness of the nomination fight that seems a little unlikely. It seems more likely that PPP as an outfit are not simply Democratic pollsters, but pro-Obama (or anti-Clinton) pollsters.

Such a view is confirmed by the actual results in Pennsylvania tonight (at this moment Clinton ahead 10% points with 96% reporting.) PPP's polls, which had Obama ahead by 3%, were not just wrong they were terrible, if the purpose of a poll is to measure a larger population accurately. Of course, if accurate measurement was not the goal of these "polls", well then maybe it is mission accomplished.

Crossposted at The Iconic Midwest

UPDATED: PPP responds to the obvious.  Where Did We Go Wrong?

The networks have called it for Hillary and I think after Florida in 2000 they're not going to make that mistake again, so obviously our polls were wrong.

First off, please do not call us or e-mail us and tell us we suck! We are well aware, and it does not feel good.

….

It's pretty easy, based on the exit polls, to see where we went wrong. We had the black vote at 18% when it turned out to be 14-15%, and we had the under 45 vote at 41% when it turned out to be 31%.

….

Looks like the two areas where we were particularly off, as might have been expected, were with white women and senior citizens. We showed the race too close with both of those groups in our final poll, and Hillary ended up winning them by the kind of large margin that would have been expected.

See, they only misweighted the black vote, the youth vote, the white woman vote and the senior citizen vote.

Otherwise they were solid.

Our Myopic Scientists

This is not encouraging: Few now doubt global warming

Among scientists in two fields that focus closely on climate—geophysics and meteorology—few now doubt that the planet is warming or that human activity is to blame, even though views diverge on the dangers posed, says a new survey released by the Statistical Assessment Service at George Mason University.

Of the 489 Earth and atmospheric scientists surveyed by Harris Interactive, 97 percent said that global temperatures have increased during the past 100 years, and 74 percent agreed that "currently available scientific evidence substantiates the occurrence of human-induced greenhouse warming." The findings mark a significant increase in concern over climate change since 1991, when a Gallup survey of the same universe of scientists showed only 60 percent agreed that temperatures were up and 41 percent believed that evidence pointed to human activity as the cause.

The scientists were about evenly divided on whether they thought the effects of global climate change over the next 50 to 100 years were likely to be near catastrophic (41 percent) or moderately dangerous (44 percent). About 13 percent saw relatively little danger. About 56 percent of the scientists said that global climate change was a mature science, while 39 percent termed it an emerging science.

The subservience of science to ideology is, more or less, now complete. 

This couldn't have come at a worse time since we may be entering into an era of climate change that will actually put us into peril.  Sorry to ruin the fun, but an ice age cometh

THE scariest photo I have seen on the internet is www.spaceweather.com, where you will find a real-time image of the sun from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, located in deep space at the equilibrium point between solar and terrestrial gravity.

What is scary about the picture is that there is only one tiny sunspot.

Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously.

All four agencies that track Earth's temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence that 2007 was exceptionally cold. It snowed in Baghdad for the first time in centuries, the winter in China was simply terrible and the extent of Antarctic sea ice in the austral winter was the greatest on record since James Cook discovered the place in 1770.

It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.

This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.

It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.

The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.

Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.

That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.

It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.

Here is the current photo of the sun discussed above:

Unlike a lot of the uncertain science behind the global warming hysteria, the connection of sunspot activity and solar cycles to earth's climate is well established.  Unfortunately, in this day and age of pop media scrutiny, many scientists seem to be unwilling to challenge the "in crowd."

For that we might all suffer.

Is The End Near For Robert Mugabe’s Regime?

In what could well be a sign that Robert Mugabe's nightmarish misrule of Zimbabwe may be coming to an end, a Chinese shipment of arms to Zimbabwe has been turned away. Other African nations and organizations banded together to frustrate the planned delivery.

JOHANNESBURG, April 22 — A Chinese ship carrying weapons and ammunition for Zimbabwe's military may be headed back home, reports said, after repeated attempts to deliver its cargo were frustrated by a coalition of legal activists, union workers and human rights groups.

The region's resistance to the shipment, which drew praise from the United States on Tuesday, marks a dramatic turn from southern Africa's traditional embrace of Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and its reverence for national sovereignty.

It also signals the strength of South Africa's mounting backlash against President Thabo Mbeki's traditionally deferential dealings with Mugabe. The resistance from union workers, almost all of whom are members of his African National Congress, was decisive in preventing the ship from unloading its cargo of bullets and mortars on schedule.

The 489-foot An Yue Jiang was near the Cape of Good Hope on Tuesday night, headed northwest at a modest speed, according to Lloyd's Marine Intelligence Unit, based in London. But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said that because the shipment could not be unloaded, despite being part of a "perfectly normal trade," the cargo would probably return to China. Jiang added that she hoped the incident would not be "politicized."

Too late for that, I'm afraid. It has already become a political issue. For once, Mugabe is on the short end of the deal, too. The ship is carrying some three million rounds of ammunition as well as mortars. The shipment has not left the vicinity yet, however, so it is too early to tell if this is over yet. Still, it is encouraging that other African nations are refusing to allow the shipment into their ports.

Barely Double Digit Win

CNN is now reporting that Hillary Clinton won in Pennsylvania by a 10% margin, 55% to Barack Obama's 45%. This despite huge expenditures by the Obama campaign. ABC News is asking the same thing I did last night, though: is it enough?

Clinton's Pennsylvania victory fuels questions about why Obama hasn't been able to sew up the nomination, despite having more money, having won more states and having a lead in the popular vote and pledged delegates, according to ABC News' delegate scorecard.

The pressure was on Clinton today to win by a large margin. She won 55 percent of the vote, to Obama's 45 percent, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting.

"Hillary Clinton needs a clear and convincing victory today in Pennsylvania if she wants to continue on in this nominating process," Democratic strategist Tad Devine told ABC News this morning.

With neither candidate able to get the 2,025 delegates needed to win the party's nomination, tonight's win in Pennsylvania will bolster Clinton's argument to superdelegates — the 795 Democratic party officials and members of Congress who may ultimately decide the nomination.

As the results pour in, pundits, Democratic superdelegates, and the media will characterize whether Clinton won by a large enough margin of victory. Devine and other Democrats have long argued the New York senator needed to win the Keystone State over Obama by double digits, and dig into Obama's delegate lead.

"If she wins by 10 points or more, it will be viewed as a clear and convincing victory, but if it's closer than that, it will be less than a clear and convincing victory," Devine said.

Well, she got the 10 point win despite Obama's huge investment. Hillary Clinton says she was outspent in Pennsylvania by a three-to-one margin. But for all that, the relative delegate count has changed very little. As much as the Democrat's leaders would like it to be, this is not over yet. And there appears to be little hope of a conclusion before the convention, either.