Free Republic

Go Gates!

Go Obama!

Let our sailors learn to swim!

Let our flyers learn to flap!

O brave new world that has such wise men in it!

I used that trick in a math exam, sophomore year. I could not get the proof, so I multiplied both side by zero and added the right answer. Got me an “A”. Was it cheating? Damned right it was!

Patience, my friends, patience.

This will soon be rectified. Obama has multiple millions in his stimulus package to “study” global warming. Any active scientist (of which I am one) can read that code. There are bushels upon bushels of money available to those who will publish papers reporting “scientific research” that confirms man-made global warming. We (collectively speaking) are not stupid. We will publish and publish in “scientific” support of AGW until the money runs out.

Notice that even the (highly dubious) data chart posted above shows that “global warming” peaked some years ago and the globe has cooled since.

This chart, of course, is wholly dependent on the accuracy of earth-bound measurements in very suspect locations. Even given that edge, Hansen of NASA (the guru of these things) has been publicly caught, twice, publishing “mistaken” data that promoted his cause.

But the folks who push these ideas make a whole bunch of money off global warming and, given the Obama boondoggle, stand to get much richer in the next couple of years. Hell, I may become a warmist, too. It would be dishonest, but it pays like the lottery!

Fear not! The Obama stimulus package includes many millions for “research” on climate change. We scientists are not stupid. We know perfectly well what is expected of us. The legions of the newly rich who pocket this money will pepper the literature with new “proofs” of global warming, and will wax increasingly eloquent on this subject for as long as the money lasts. You ain’t heard nothing yet!

Notice the multiple posts on this issue. As it becomes more and more apparent that the world is cooling, you will see an increasing proliferation of scientific articles on the horrors of the warming that is just around the corner. These fellows are beginning to panic. Their government research grants have been their iron rice bowl, and they are terrified.

Moving the problem out further into the future is also a great idea. If they can sell this bull (and Gore and Obama will buy it, at least) then their own lucrative careers will be long over before their doomsday predictions are proven wrong. As a scientist, I have more respect for a fellow carrying a sign proclaiming “the end is near” if the near end he is predicting is in his own lifetime, so he will have to live with the result.

She s more like Maggie Thatcher than any American politician of our time.

Regarding message, she was severely compromised in ‘08 by coming in late, with little warning and limited independence. Her message was necessarily a mixture of rather different philosophies - hers and. McCain’s -and rather different approaches - a “pit bull” constrained by an “officer and gentleman” with a distinguished past, who seemed to have left his fight somewhere along the way. The message will be both more forceful and more focused the next time around.

The fight will, of course, be framed as Sarah versus the snobs, “fly-over” America versus the coastal elite, and it should be fun to watch.

I happen to know both of these guys. They are both accomplished, sincere, intelligent individuals. They are also wholly committed ideologues who will not pay the slightest attention to any idea or any data that questions the Warmist’s party line. Our only hope is that neither of them has shown any particular talent for working successfully in the “real world,” so their worst proposals may die abed.

We can also hope that the increasingly evident global cooling trend will cause the voting public to laugh out loud at their more radical proposals. (We cannot realistically hope that the reality of global cooling will cause them to moderate those proposals.)

This is rich - a new standard in political hypocrisy. The campaign that ran the dirtiest fund-raising activity in the history of American presidential politics has now decided to come clean. But only with respect to the fundraising for its victory celebration. Is the American public really this clueless? We shall sees

I don’t know where you find your information. I am an active scientist at a major university with wide international contacts. The significant majority of the folks I know (who have thought about the subject at all - many haven’t) believe the whole global warming bit is either a natural phenomenon or a red herring. Why don’t they say so more loudly? They have no incentive to do that. To the contrary almost all have a strong counter-incentive. Many, or their friends, are living fat off “climate” money. Virtually all live off government money in some form, and the bureaucracy that controls the purse strings has both a stated position on global warming, and a long memory for anyone who crosses it.

Those of us who’ve made the pilgrimage to Lourdes know how utterly superficial this whole “medical miracle” issue is. The true miracle of Lourdes is not the occasional remission of some incurable cancer, but the thousands who finish their visit with the exhilarating feeling of a soul washed clean and a new appreciation for the love of God and His holy mother. After all, no matter how often one’s body is fixed, and however miraculously, the eventual end is the same - it’s just being put off. But when one’s soul is cured ...

I am a huge Sarah Palin fan. But I am neither naive nor stupid. If she is going to achieve the victory I wish for her, she must be sharp, focused and intelligent.

Her speech for good old Saxby tonight fed the base, and, I think, served its purpose. But it wasn’t a good speech. It certainly didn’t hurt her, but it was below her usual standards, and it rallied no one who was not already on board. Was it poor speechwriting, or was it that she just didn’t think this one was really important to her?

If the latter, she needs to re-calibrate. Every speech, including Xmas greetings to the local kindergarten, is now important. And she can no longer live off cliches. These speeches have to hit home, as RR’s did.

If Sarah takes it seriously, she could change America. But she needs help and advice, particularly in the forensic arena. tAnd where is she going to go for that? The powers that be in the traditional party will destroy her, even as they try to help her. She needs advisory support form outside the traditional base. And she needs it soon; the campaign cliches, as on-point as they are,are growing stale.

May God help her to find the help she needs.

I was singularly unimpressed with any of the candidates’ appreciation of history and current events, but was sorely disappointed at Carl Cameron’s reportage on Fix News. Sarah was, if anything, near the best of them. Even if the rumor about her ignorance of the geopolitics of South Africa were true, it would pale beside Barack Obama’s utter cluelessness about the language(s) spoken in Afghanistan (a faraway country of which he knows little, but in which we are actually fighting a war of which he will shortly be the (clueless?) commander-in-chief), and Biden’s bizarre assertion that we had drven Hezbollah out of Lebanon.

I’ll take Sarah. She’s a whole bunch smarter than these “smart fellows” seem to be.

I’m a huge fan of Thomas Sowell, but I think he’s a bit senior for the rigors of the office, so I probably would not vote for him for president. But “chief advisor and most trusted multi-purpose guru” - he’d be my favorite candidate in a minute.

Speaking as one who spent his childhood in that lovely town (and thought himself at least lower middle class since all his friends' houses were so much bigger than his), I find this whole discussion somewhat bizarre. The average yard in Belle Meade has been described elsewhere as a "3-5 iron", which describes the golf club needed to reach the front door from the street (ours was a senior citizen's pitching wedge; my current million-dollar house in CA is an 8-year old's putter). There is a simple solution for old Al, if he really cared: put the damned solar panels on the lawn! But that's beside the point, isn"t it?

Fingers crossed!

I once heard a Washingon bureaucrat described as a person whom "you immediately recognized because, when he walked into a room, the collective IQ dropped by ten points". I have never, in fact, been in a room with Naomi Wolf. But I have a strong sense of how her entrance would affect us all.

I was in Prague for the two weeks of Katrina, with only CNN and the BBC for english-language TV news. The post is right; the BBC was unabashedly anti-american. But CNN was worse - 24/7 Bush bashing by reporters who positively gloated at every flooded neighborhood, every dead body, every lost child ...
As bad as it was, I kept going back to the BBC for more objective reporting.
Thank God for the internet.

Tont Snow is a fine writer and a fine conservative whose columns will, not doubt, grace the paper's pages. His more subtle efforts would, in fact, make a fine complement to Ann Coulter's biting ( and often brilliant) commentary. But there is an obvious quota system at this second-rate rag. Only one conservative viewpoint is permitted. Dare I wonder how many virulent leftists are featured on its opinion page?