As in mafia crew? Christopher Booker is warning that there appears to be a preemptive whitewashing of the CRU scandal. They must not be allowed to gather their cronies and co-conspirators and stonewall this scandal.
What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.
The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.
Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.
Booker points out that some very strong supporters of global whoring are now “investigating” the CRU scandal. Let the whitewash carpet bombing begin.
There is powerful evidence of conspiracy in the leaked files. American taxpayer’s money has been funneled to these people. We need investigations of what went on – and not the usual suspects conducting the inquiries. Please go read the whole piece, Booker is on a roll.
The British press is working itself into a towering rage – they fully understand that they have been lied to. That has traditionally been a surefire way to draw the wrath of the press. Not so much in America, however. Our media is too far into bed with the conspiracy, apparently.
An odd little story out of Venezuela. Despite (or maybe because of) the antics of (T)hugo Chavez, Venezuelans are flocking to plastic surgeons. Going into debt to get a nip and tuck or a boob job:
“There is never a question of not doing it, but of how you can do it. We all want to get everything done,” said Helen Patino, a 37-year-old former model who had her first breast augmentation when she was 21 and her third about three months ago.
Venezuela’s inflation is the highest in Latin America, up more than 20 percent in the first 10 months of this year and the South American nation is in recession after a five year boom.
Hard times may even encourage cosmetic procedures as people look for ways to lift their spirits, with many dipping into savings or taking on debt to get operations, surgeons say.
“The financial crisis has spurred people to spend more on themselves … to console themselves in this crisis. I have not seen demand diminishing,” said Peter Romer, a plastic surgeon in Caracas.
One wonders if there will be a plastic surgery boom in the new Omerica if the won gets his agenda in place.
The very old now Jefferson Airplane lyrics seem appropriate.
No, the Democrats will not be smarter or better with their schemes for health care. They will drag us right down a road others have already traveled.
And you and yours will pay for it.
The scandal of filthy and inadequate NHS hospitals deepened yesterday as figures revealed more than 3,000 patients could be dying needlessly every year.
Death rates are abnormally high at a fifth of trusts in England, with some 3,145 excess deaths at 26 hospitals during 2007/08.
The figures come at a time of collapsing public confidence in the NHS after two reports within 24 hours revealed high numbers of needless deaths at hospitals.
Yesterday, the chairman of Colchester Hospital in Essex, Richard Bourne, was sacked after it emerged that death rates were a massive 12 per cent higher than expected last year.
It means that there are likely to have been dozens of excess deaths at the trust, where regulators said safety was a low priority and patients had to wait months for treatment.
These are “flagship” medical trusts in Britain. These are as good as it gets under Britain’s socialized medicine.
This is what Obama and the left are gung ho to impose on America. This is what a “public option” looks like in the wild, so to speak.
How’s that hopeandchange working for you, folks?
Or why a relatively tiny place like Dubai could be big trouble for the American banking system.
And while UK banks, such as Standard Chartered, HSBC (HBC), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Barclays (BCS) are much more exposed to Dubai World, with a total of more than $30 billion in default risk according to J.P. Morgan’s note, U.S. banks have extensive dealings with UK institutions. Those include trading and guaranteeing debt, which could translate into losses for U.S. banks.
There’s also U.S. banks’ interactions with their German counterparts. Dubai has loaned a lot of money to Eastern European nations, as has Germany. Any losses from defaults there could expose U.S. banks to some risk.
Finally, there’s the impact of already reeling commercial real estate markets worldwide.
“Dubai may have to unload some very prestigious properties at distressed prices, and this will drive the price of all commercial real estate lower,” said Bove. “That would clearly be a problem for American banks.”
Even though most American banks (other than Citibank) do not have huge direct exposure, the ripple effect looks to be a lot more dangerous at the moment. We are already on the economic ropes in this country right now. Another blow could be a real problem.
Toby Harndon on the narcissist in chief:
There was one world leader absent for today’s commemorations marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly enough, it’s President Barack Obama, who found time last year to give a campaign speech there last year, which Der Spiegel summed up as “People of the World, Look at Me”.
The White House has cited a packed schedule, though looking at it he had nothing much on yesterday (brief chat to reporters about healthcare – by far his biggest priority) and just blah briefings and a bill signing today until a metting this evening with Benjamin Netanyahu. This time, Der Spiegel has reported it as “Barack Too Busy”.
But Obama is, of course, making time to trot over to Norway to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in December. Didn’t seem to have too much of a problem clearing the diary for that – though his acceptance of the prize and decision to give a another soaring, historical, epoch-marking etc etc speech there will be looked back on as a colossal political mistake and sign of hubris.
Remember the gushing – fawning, really – in the American press about how beloved the Big O is in Europe? I’d say that is more than a bit overly optimistic. This man may be a legend in his own mind, but Europe appears to see considerably less. In fact, they are making fun of the pool-gazer. (And if you do not know the story of Narcissus, go look it up on the interwebby.)
The Wizard of O and his munchkin chorus here in the US may be quite smitten with the Wiz. The rest of the world appears to have seen behind the curtain.
Gordon “Toast” Brown and his government, such as it is, released convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al Megrahi on “compassionate” grounds because the bomber had three months to live.
That was in August.
Instead, three months later, Megrahi was just released from the hospital.
The row over the release of the Lockerbie bomber was reignited last night after it emerged he has been released from hospital.
Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was freed from a Scottish jail on compassionate grounds in August after a medical assessment concluded he had only three months to live because of his prostate cancer.
But the 57-year-old former Libyan intelligence agent and his family now say that, while weak and terminally ill, he is not close to death, and continues to work on clearing his name.
What a proud chapter in British history.
…The Western media would have been rolling on the floor laughing at the latest claim from the Chinese. Now, however, the claims of the Chinese government that they made it snow are treated as straight news.
The unusually early snow blanketed the capital from Sunday morning and kept falling for half the day, helped by temperatures as low as minus 2 Celsius (29 Fahrenheit) and strong winds from the north, Xinhua news agency reported.
Besides falling in the north-eastern provinces of Liaoning and Jilin and the northern province of Hebei, the eastern port city of Tianjin also got its first snow of the autumn, the report said.
“We wont miss any opportunity of artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from the lingering drought,” the report quoted Zhang Qiang, head of the Beijing Weather Modification Office, as saying.
Or any opportunity to claim a widespread natural phenomenon as the work of the government, apparently.
The real story is the early snowfall. Much like what has already hit the US.
Incidentally, Beijing is about to get hit with a really cold snap for this time of year, according to Accuweather.
According to The Daily Mail, it has never before (in recorded history) snowed this early in Austria – but it is doing so today.
In the freezing foothills of Montana, a distinctly bitter blast of revolution hangs in the air.
And while the residents of the icy city of Missoula can stave off the -10C chill with thermals and fires, there may be no easy remedy for the wintry snap’s repercussions.
The temperature has shattered a 36-year record. Further into the heartlands of America, the city of Billings registered -12C on Sunday, breaking the 1959 barrier of -5C.
Closer to home, Austria is today seeing its earliest snowfall in history with 30 to 40 centimetres already predicted in the mountains.
Such dramatic falls in temperatures provide superficial evidence for those who doubt that the world is threatened by climate change.
But most pertinent of all, of course, are the growing volume of statistics.
We here at the Crabitat have been freezing for several days now. Yesterday’s drive to work was through light snow. In October. Not yet mid-October. Accuweather is predicting potentially heavy snow for the Northeast by the weekend. Even if there is no snow, temperatures will be more like December than October.
Welcome to the the brave, new – and much colder – world.
(BCB reported a few days ago on how brutally cold it was in Montana, incidentally.)
Ever had what you thought at the time was an absolutely brilliant response to some perceived outrage that in retrospect seemed – well – stupid? We suspect a certain “lunar explorer” in Germany feels that way today:
A German man mooning at railway staff in a departing train got his trousers caught in a carriage door and ended up being dragged half naked along the platform, out of the station and onto the tracks.
The 22-year-old journalism student shoved his backside against the window of a low-slung double-decker train when staff forced him off in Lauenbrueck for travelling without a ticket, a spokesman for police in the northern city of Bremen said.
A prime candidate for a managing editor position at a major American newspaper, no doubt.
The bungfuhrer faces multiple criminal charges as well as the threat of having to pay damages for all the delays his lunar adventure caused other travelers. But he managed to stay attached to his legs.
Jennifer Rubin:
Mickey Kaus is cringing also. And the AP’s Jennifer Loven is stumped, verging on incredulous. Even the Huffington Post is somewhat mortified. In fact, liberals seems more upset on some level than conservatives, because I think the Left takes this award seriously. Conservatives stopped doing that around the time Yasir Arafat got his.
But now the me-is-the-world routine is getting embarrassing for liberals. And they don’t want to be seen encouraging what is already a story line for late-night comics. (The “to do” list on Saturday Night Live will now be amended to include “Win Nobel Prize for Doing Nothing.”)
Rubin is quite correct, I know that when the ignoble committee gave the award to an unrepentant terrorist, Arafat, I personally stopped paying any attention to their seriousness. The media is doing its level best to spin this for Obama, but even NPR by this afternoon was having trouble keeping a straight face on this.
Because this really is a joke and casts the Nobel in a very, very bad light, indeed. This is a meaningless award at this point, given for, now, completely non-accomplishments.
Nice move guys, you actually made the award into less than nothing with this.
I heard this first thing this morning when news broke on NPR. The Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded Barack Obama this year’s prize. Since nominations had to be in by about 12 days after Obama took office, the award is based on nothing whatsoever in the way of accomplishments.
Of course, eight months on, it still is.
East-West relations are little better than they were six months ago, and any change is probably due largely to the global economic downturn; and America’s vaunted determination to re-engage with the Muslim world has failed to make any concrete progress towards ending the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
There is a further irony in offering a peace prize to a president whose principal preoccupation at the moment is when and how to expand the war in Afghanistan.
The spectacle of Mr Obama mounting the podium in Oslo to accept a prize that once went to Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi and Mother Theresa would be all the more absurd if it follows a White House decision to send up to 40,000 more US troops to Afghanistan. However just such a war may be deemed in Western eyes, Muslims would not be the only group to complain that peace is hardly compatible with an escalation in hostilities.
NASA bombed the moon today, too. So much for peace with the neighbors.
The people I work with were livid about this today. They are not at all impressed with the Nobel , it’s recipient or the group who bestows the award. Personally, I think this will backfire.
Obama could have rejected the award and I think that would have raised a few people’s opinions about him, if only a little. But Obama’s not built that way, folks. He’s accepting it and says he’ll donate the prize money to charity. (I do not think that is up to him under existing law, though. Doesn’t the money go to the Treasury? Anyone got a pointer on the law regarding this sort of thing?)
How about you?
A plumber whose arm was left twisted grotesquely out of shape in an accident ten months ago has had an operation to correct it ‘cancelled four times’.
Torron Eeles, 50, has been left unable to work since falling down the stairs and now fears he may lose his home after being denied incapacity benefit.
The father-of-three today hit out at the NHS for the ‘unacceptable delays’, but East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust said Mr Eeles had his operation cancelled on ‘only’ two occasions on clinical safety grounds.
His left arm has hung limply by his side since he fractured the humerus bone in December 2008.
Mr Eeles, from Welham Green, Hertfordshire, applied for employment and support allowance but a doctor ruled he is ineligible for both because he can turn on a tap.
You have to click through to see the pictures. This is what socialized medicine, interlocked with the other government bureaucracies, looks like.
This is what ObamaCare will look like, folks.
In the United States (today) Mr. Eeles – or you – could have that arm fixed in short order. Under the system in Britain today or America if ObamaCare passes – well, you can see the pictures yourself. Start calling your Senators and Representative.
Do you honestly think American bureaucrats will do better than this with your health and wellbeing?
No, that is not a typo. Japanese researchers have discovered a new, anti-Wi-Fi paint that will keep your neighbors from leeching off your wireless:
Wireless security and encryption systems are fraught with problems and insecurity, and other methods to restrict your signal to a small area are cumbersome at best.
Enter a new solution: Anti-Wi-Fi paint.
The idea is simple: Use a special paint on walls where you don’t want wireless to pass through (say the exterior of your house). The secret is mixing aluminum-iron oxide particles in with the paint. The metal particles resonate at the same frequency as Wi-Fi and other radio waves, so signals can’t pass through the thin layer of pigment. Outsiders would simply be unable to access your wireless network, just as you, inside the house, won’t be able to interlope on anything beamed on the outside.
Developed by the University of Tokyo, the paint is said to be the first that can block radio frequency in higher spectra where Wi-Fi and other higher-bandwidth communications occur rather than just low-frequency wireless like FM radio. Most Wi-Fi technologies operate at 2.4GHz; the Tokyo paint can reportedly block frequencies all the way up to 100GHz, with a 200GHz-blocking paint now in the works. (Emphasis added)
Get the conspiracy theories dusted off, quick! One suspects that the elusive super-thermite may have finally been discovered.
(If you have not figured this out at this point, perhaps you are not aware of what, exactly, is used to make thermite. That would be aluminum and iron oxide. Or the same ingredients as are in the paint.)
One could, of course, put basic security on their wireless router without redecorating with potentially combustive substances. One could even shut off their router’s SSID broadcast so that the neighbors could not easily piggyback on the homeowner’s signals.
Apparently, that escaped the researchers. They would, it seems, rather address the “problem” with flare. Or flares.
Please pee before boarding your flight:
A Japanese airline, All Nippon Airways, has started asking its passengers to visit the lavatory before boarding, in an attempt to reduce carbon emissions.
All Nippon Airways (ANA) reasons that empty bladders means lighter passengers, which in turn means lighter aircraft and lower fuel use.
The airline will position staff near the boarding gates in terminals to ask passengers waiting for their flight to relieve themselves before boarding the aircraft.
Let’s figure on the back of the envelope for just a moment, shall we? After exhaustive internet research lasting at least five minutes, we have determined that the human bladder can hold something like 13 ounces of fluid. Let’s round that up to 16 ounces, a pint. A pint of water weighs pretty close to one pound. Using the venerable Boeing 747 with a seating capacity of up to 366+ (we’ll use 400 to max this calculation out) we come up with something like a maximum of 400 pounds saved if every man, woman and child drops off a full pint of urine before boarding.
The Boeing 747 uses something like one gallon per second of jet fuel in operation. Jet fuel weighs around 6.75 pounds per gallon.
In other words, less than one minute of operation time.
If you honestly cannot see that the pee-before-you-fly stunt is an exercise in PR over fact, I’m frankly sorry for you. No, it is not a good start, no, it is not an “every little bit helps” moment.
It is moronic. And if you fall for it, it says rather a lot about your math skills.
None of it good.
I suspect AllahPundit has this precisely right. After assuring America that health care “reform” was his number one priority, much, much more important than appealing in person to the International Olympic Committee, Barack Obama is flitting off to Denmark to appeal in person to the IOC for Chicago to get the Olympics. Why?
AP (and NRO’s Jim Geraghty) thinks the IOC secretly offered the games to Chicago only if Obama showed up.
Geraghty’s spot on. There’s no way The One would risk his political capital on a personal appeal in Denmark unless he’d been assured that Chicago will get the games if he makes a cameo. It’s a done deal; the only question is who approached whom. I think the IOC probably forced his hand: Given the terrible optics of the trip plus the fact that, as Geraghty reminds us, Obama said as recently as two weeks ago that he wouldn’t go himself, he had every incentive to avoid this — unless the IOC sweetened the pot by promising him the games if he showed up. Once they did that, he had no choice.
My son, only 14, heard the report with me in the car driving home yesterday. He commented, “The president should stop with the PR stuff and do his job”. Smart kid.
So, if the fix is in, as it almost certainly is, how screwed are the other cities feeling right now? Eventually, the facts about this will leak out. There are plenty of people who will want to make sure of that.
I’d like to join AP in thanking the IOC and Obama for handing the right a club with which to beat both. You know that corruption will be rampant given the venue (and the apparent means by which the venue was chosen), so the opportunities to administer beatings will be boundless!
Thanks!
Crime, Environment, Media, World news | Gaius November 29, 2009 | 
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