Monday, November 30, 2009

The Truth About Warming Climate

The Truth About Warming Climate

What tends to be forgotten amid human wrangling and debate is that we humans are mostly concerned with our personal situation, and only put matters into a public frame to make our argument sound more outer-directed. To most of us that is mere style, but when we consider people with ambition to attain great power, the consequences can be dire for the rest of us. Take the presidency. A man craves personal power, and circumstances conspire to put him in a position to achieve it. He will do whatever it takes to succeed. Did Obama ever stop to think, for even a moment, if his narcissism and inexperience made him the wrong person to lead a nation in perilous times? Not a single rational person believes that he did, or would. When Algore refused to concede to G.W. Bush in November of 2000 did he, even for a split second, consider whether his actions that day might hasten a disaster on the order of the events of 9/11/01? He surely did not, yet that is exactly what happened. Now we must deal with the climate crisis. And a crisis it is, definitely. Not a crisis of climate however, but a crisis of governance.

I am willing to concede that all the malefactors revealed in the recent document dump at the East Anglia CRU had the best interests of the planet in mind. I will concede, for the sake of argument, that they are true believers in their theory and genuinely want the best thing for humanity. But clearly, when the twenty year warming trend turned cold after 1998 and their models could not explain it, they began to issue fraudulent documents to support their point of view. They destroyed the careers of those who would stand in their way, if they could. To them, the end justified the means. But means are merely the route to a policy position, which, in the way of humans, consisted of a melange of different actors, each pursuing their single interest. The climate true believers made common cause with the statist Left, whose desire to end democracy and individual liberty has always been beyond question. If we believe the Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd, we need to reorder the entire system of government in the world, so that we can marshal the enormous forces required to stop industrial development and reduce human consumption as quickly as can be done.

They almost got away with it too. They still might. But their task is far more difficult now, as their mask is off. The raw power grab will be revealed for what it always was, as the victims, We the People, are going to be more alert to them now, and far less acquiescent to their claims, and especially to their prescription. And that can only be a good thing.


[Update] Just in case you missed what this is all about, Paul Jacob makes the case pithily. He has the links also.
In particular, scientists reported temperatures in the Medieval Warming Period as cooler than they were, and more recent cooling trends as warmer. Anthropogenic global warming catastrophists have engaged in a massive public fraud.

Now, you might not bat an eye were you to learn that economists associated with, say, our recent bailouts, had been fudging numbers. Trillions of dollars to spend!

But when climate scientists get caught lying — as well as conspiring to keep their basic data secret, and hijacking the peer review process — it’s hard not to feel a bit abused. Natural scientists are supposed to be above this.

Public, open criticism is the hallmark of science. Climate researchers who stonewalled to keep their actual data hidden from critics were scuttling science.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Politically Correct? How about Correct, Period?

Politically Correct? How about Correct, Period?

Amazingly, there is a news item out today that is headed "FBI: 10% of U.S. Mosques Preach Jihad." That report is false, and is yet another example of political correctness run amok.

All this talk about the religion of peace, all this talk about moderate Islam, is misguided, and factually wrong. Islam is a religion of war. The Koran, their holy book, was written as a battle manual, and it was used to enthrall most of the known world right after it was written. The actual number of Mosques that teach jihad is exactly one hundred percent of them, not ten. Jihad is dogma to them, as surely as confession is to a Catholic, a religious requirement, a basic tenet of his faith. No other religion teaches that they are at war with the rest of the world, and they will convert, enslave, or kill everybody living here on this planet. This becomes clear if you have the minimum understanding of the history of organized religion over the last three thousand years, and an ideology that allows you to see the truth when it is set before you.

In the beginning the priests would build an idol and a temple and get people to pay them for things like spiritual healing and to make the rains come, the crops grow. Well, the rain didn't always come, and each independent little idol or God had its own exploiters, therefore it was not centralized and thus, inefficient. In order to facilitate better control and to enable the accretion of more power, monotheism arose, in Egypt and other places. The Hebrews refined it and codified it. Their one God was pretty well uninvolved in the daily affairs of men, and His book, the Bible, was about their history, some prophesy, and rules of behavior. The priest class thrived under this new system, but some realized that they could do better, thus a group of them branched out with a new book, a New Testament, which built on, and incorporated the Bible as its preface. This time they improved the cost-benefit ratio, making heaven a goal everybody could strive to enter, and live out eternity with the most holy. Ten percent of all income was what they charged their believers. This turned out to become a much better business, but they could not attract the believers in the old system to join them, and they were lousy rules for recruiters for new members - missionaries were supposed to use persuasion instead of coercion. Then came Mo and his Koran, which was a more modern and far more effective manual for the priest class to make an even better living, which contained a major improvement.

That signal improvement was in directly seizing secular power, and personally leading the army. An army of believers, led by the priests. They moved the reward for supporting the priests into the next world, thus the believers needed to die to get into heaven. In this way the priests didn't have to deliver anything in this world, except leadership. They named their religion "Submission." In Arabic, that is "Islam."

The "Crusades" were a set of defensive wars that ultimately stopped the Muslim army at the gates of Vienna in 1683, and ran them out of Spain as well. This was the end of Muslim expansion by warfare. Since that time the priests of Islam have continued to teach world domination, and in the last eighty years their war against the rest of the world has really freshened, as they teach their children that Allah gave them oil to finance their victory.

This is not surmise, they say this stuff openly all the time. Check out the public statements of "mainstream" clergy in the pages of MEMRI, among other places. Mo wrote in his Koran that the world could be divided into two zones, the Dar al Islam, or the world of the believers, and Dar al Harb, the world of war. They have been teaching this to their children since the seventh century. They are on the march to the victory that Allah promised them. One hundred percent of Muslims believe that, if they keep on having lots of children and following Sharia, they can rule the world, even if it takes another hundred years. For most of them this is soon enough. A fair few of them get anxious though, and try to hurry things along. Like Major Hasan.

Major Hasan responded to his religious teaching and his faith, when he took a gun to kill as many of his comrades/enemies as possible, followed by suicide by cop, as his ticket to be home free in his whorehouse heaven with his seventy two raisins. I am sure that he is quite disappointed to still be alive. He is a perfect example of the jihadi terrorist. Now there are some who insist that he was sick, not hateful. Well, if Hasan is sick, so are all the other suicide bombers, but it the sickness of their society, not some special victim syndrome that affords him a free pass from his guilt. It is hate. Religious, murderous, hate. Pure and simple. And few, if any, of his coreligionists speak out in outrage.

Edmund Burke is supposed to have said that "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Or maybe they are not good men, but pious believers, following the precepts of their church.


[Update - Over at American Thinker, Amil Imani has a post up that complements this one. A good read.]

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Is Obama Speech Naive, or Islamist Perfidy?

Is Obama Speech Naive, or Islamist Perfidy?

An interesting analysis of Obama's words and seemingly intentional mistranslation of the Koran makes this observer wonder whether there is something sinister going on here. While the writer/translator tries mightily to sound fair minded, I have no such constraint. When Obama quotes Sura 9 in his speech in Cairo, are we not allowed to remember that he first learned that Sura in a Muslim school in Indonesia? That it could not be unknown to him that this is the very place in their holy book that all Muslims are bound by their prophet to kill all nonbelievers?

Now he does a similar thing in Fort Hood. While his words toward the dead and wounded sound the right tone, his denial of the clear motive the attacker acted under is enlightening. Military brass may have a need to downplay the crisis of political correctness in their ranks, but the president has no need to support the institution. He will, however, support the very devil if it would serve his interest to do so.

Are we allowed to discern the perfidy here, or are we bound to follow The Won into a world in which all evil is American, and all good comes from Allah?

Monday, November 02, 2009

Windows Seven

Windows Seven

I am usually the last guy to upgrade to new software or hardware, but recently my wife bought a new computer with Windows 7 installed, so I had a chance to play around with it a bit. I must say that the program seems to work better than any Windows version I have ever used. This is just a first look, but for me, that is saying a lot. Windows 7 is no Ubuntu Linux, but for the guys in Redmond, this is something new - a program that seems to work right, right out of the box. Last time they did that was Word 5.0, back in the eighties.

I came late to the Windows party. I stayed with Dos 3.3 until everybody was using Windows 3.1, and I had no choice but to switch to it in the mid 1990s, right after the buggy Windows 95 came out. Now I use Widows XP. When I boot into Ubuntu - I have a dual boot system - I marvel at the precision of the program, the way that everything is easily controllable, even the very fact that everything IS controlled by the user. I HATE the way Windows does so much stuff "in the background" where you don't know what is going on.

My computer is always on, and sometimes I can see the little light that means traffic is going over the web start blinking spontaneously for no apparent reason, but with Windows XP I have no easy way to find out what is going on. If I have Linux up, not only can I easily find out what the traffic is, this never happens in the first place. But then I need easy access to all my Windows docs and apps, and Windows is familiar, so as a result of Windows' ease of use, I use Linux infrequently. Also, if I did not have my computer administration and troubleshooting department at hand (my teenage son) I would be daunted by all the understanding that I do not have about Ubuntu Linux, and my expert is not here most of the time during the day. Little thing called high school.

When they decided to make Windows idiot proof, they were thinking about me. But when my computer needs to stay on for a week, such as when I go on a business trip, I leave it running Ubuntu. That way it will absolutely, positively be up and working, and my VPN can access it. Windows XP could never last for a week without needing a cold boot.

I haven't really tested Windows 7, and I probably will wait to use it for a year or two, but what little I saw these last few days is encouraging. Maybe Redmond finally got something right. It has sure been a while since the last time they did that.

Sunday, November 01, 2009

Rich Whistling Past the Graveyard

Rich Whistling Past the Graveyard

Frank Rich, the former movie reviewer for the NYT, now the ponderously distinguished political analyst for the NYT, has come out with a remarkable piece of political spin. He has taken the fact that Dede Scozzafava has resigned her campaign so the more popular conservative candidate can have a better chance to beat the democrat, and spun it into unreality. His spin is more like whistling past the graveyard, as if claiming that the republicans are on the wrong track will put them on the approved path to permanent minority status. A bit of his prose:
The battle for upstate New York confirms just how swiftly the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult that is as eager to eat its own as it is to destroy Obama.
Obama is destroying himself, and when liberal republicans make way for honest conservatives to protect their district from democrat victory, is no paranoid cult. It sounds to me more like concerned Americans, willing to go the extra mile, even at the cost of their own careers, for the greater good. That is a good sign for America, and a black mark on the checkered record of Frank Rich.