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UH OH: Black Friday weekend spending down 8 pct per person. “U.S. consumers spent significantly less per person at the start of the holiday season this weekend, dimming hopes for a retail comeback that would help propel the economy early in 2010.” I hear that ammo sales were strong, though.

PAUL MIRENGOFF: The Obama-Holder Justice Department turns a blind eye to ACORN. “DOJ has initiated grand jury probes of major businesses, and government contractors, with far less in the way of evidence than is available in the public domain on ACORN right now. It’s also ironic that the DOJ has had in place for several years a Procurement Fraud Task Force that goes after contractors who receive federal funds through fraud or collusion, or bribery, or the like.” But not connected contractors . . .

Look who is whoring herself out for ACORN…

by savage ( 112 Comments › )
Filed under Acorn at November 29th, 2009 - 9:30 pm

THIS IS INTERESTING: Women lead Swiss in vote to ban minarets. Why would women, in particular, be opposed to the visible spread of Islam in Europe?

UPDATE: Some thoughts from Roger Simon.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: Beware The Scientific-Technological Complex"

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present -- and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. - Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1961

 

‘It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.’ - Wegman Report, 2006

2009: Penn State to investigate Michael Mann;

In recent days a lengthy file of emails has been made public. Some of the questions raised through those emails may have been addressed already by the NAS investigation but others may not have been considered. The University is looking into this matter further, following a well defined policy used in such cases. No public discussion of the matter will occur while the University is reviewing the concerns that have been raised.

An unhappy colleague. Mike Hulme of UEA (location of CRU)

But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production - just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

A contributing author to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, Eduardo Zorita, Department of Paleoclimate, GKSS Research Center (Germany)

"Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process"

Frank J. Tipler, professor of mathematical physics at Tulane University

The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable. As Lord Monckton has emphasized here at Pajamas Media, this deliberate destruction of data and the making up of data out of whole cloth is the real crime — the real story of Climategate.

It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy.

Dr. John Lewis, Dep't of Physics & Physical Oceanography, Memorial University (by email);

It is worth noting, in regard to the deletion of raw data by the CRU that real scientific organizations are rather fierce about raw data. NASA, for instance, gives the Principal Investigator (and group) sole access to data for one year, and one year only. After that, the data are placed in the public domain. I do know that some PIs have asked for longer embargos - whether they got them or not I don't know, but if so, not easily. If the PI simply deleted data it would be the end of his or her career.

NASA's view is that data collected with public monies should be available to the public; and without copyright - US gov't materials generally are not copyrighted. All of this is to a good end - the PIs get the obvious results, but some data - e.g. for the IRAS mission - have continued to yield information upon reanalysis even 15 years after the IRAS shut down.

Not every installation is set up to handle terabytes of data, but CRU was very well funded apparently, and anyway, if they couldn't handle it they shouldn't have collected or received it.

The CRU leaks will confirm the views of every half-baked political scientist in the world, that science does not deal in fundamental truths but is, rather, a politically negotiated discourse. It is very disturbing.

Dear Judy,

I am a young climate researcher (just received my master’s degree from xxx University) and have been very troubled by the emails that were released from CRU. I just want to applaud and support your response on climateaudit.org [95% of it :) ]. Your statement represents exactly how I have felt as I slowly enter this community. The content of some of the emails literally made me stop and wonder if I should continue with my PhD applications for fall 2010, in this science. I was so troubled by how our fellow scientists within the climate community have been dealing with opposing voices (on both sides). I hope we can all learn from this and truly feel that we are going to need voices like yours to fix these problems in the coming months and years.

Dr. Judith Curry is Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

MICHAEL BARONE: Global Warming Consensus: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

CLIMATEGATE: FROM JIM TREACHER, A friendly chat with the global warming evangelist who lives in my head.

Related: The worst scientific scandal of our generation?

Plus, the dog ate my climate change data! “SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.”

How convenient. Kinda like the “flood” that “destroyed” Michael Bellesiles’ probate records . . .

UPDATE: “Botch after botch after botch.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Investigations Beginning in the UK.

HOW WIDESPREAD IS THE DAMAGE? Rand Simberg on ClimateGate.

And “hockey stick” graph creator Michael Mann is being investigated by Penn State.

The Sound Of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Wang Affair

It starts...

... with the question of urban heat islands, and their effect on the temperature record. It is well known, and easily measured, that the centres of cities may be up to 4 C warmer at night than the countryside around them [...]

The IPCC relied on a particular paper published in 1990 by Phil Jones in Nature that basically said the UHI effect was trivial, which in turn relied in large part on data from China supplied by professor Wang of Albany, State University of New York.

In describing this data, Jones et al. said “The stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times.” which in turn was based on the similar statement in Wang et al. “They were chosen based on station histories: selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times…” The truth of these statements was essential for the papers to be valid, which in turn was relied on in part by the IPCC report. The problem is, they’re not true. And what’s more, somebody must have known it.

At first, nobody knew because the source data was (of course!) unpublished and unidentified. But because Phil Jones is in the UK and subject to FOIA, the Climate Audit crew managed after a fight to extract the list of weather stations from him. (One reason, no doubt, why he is so wary of FOIA compliance now!) This enabled the mathematician Doug Keenan and others to trace the Chinese weather stations used in the papers, and found that of the 84 stations used, there were in fact no records of station location for 49 of them, 8 had inconsistent histories, 18 had substantial relocations, 2 had single-year relocations, and only 7 were known not to have been relocated at all. Wang could not possibly have selected them on the basis claimed, and indeed there was other evidence that he knew of their problems in advance.

It caused the good Professor Wang no end of trouble until New York State University at Albany came to his rescue.

SDA flashback(2007) - "Douglas J. Keenan raises serious questions about the Chinese surface station data ...."

The urban heat island issue, as it pertains to surface station data, is more than significant; in the long run it will in all likelihood supplant the damning revelations of the CRU emails/data. The Hadley emails have certainly caused people to at least consider the fraudulence of the "science" of global warming, but the science of AGW had massive holes in it long before the Hadley data was leaked.

For those of you who have only recently come to SDA, or have only recently become aware via Hadley emails of the comprehensive fraudulence of the global warming promoters, the corruption of surface station data, i.e. temperature readings taken at particular measuring stations, is a critical issue. If you go through Kate's numerous links in her archives you'll see that the surface temperature-readings which have been used to justify the AGW theory, and it's concomitant demands for the expenditure of potentially trillions of dollars, are, to put it mildly, badly - deliberately, mindfully - corrupted. It's a sadly common occurrance thattemperature-measuring stations that were once in a grassy field were replaced by stations in asphalt parking lots, and/or beside large buildings, and, in more than a few instances, physically proximate to air-conditioning exhaust units, with the measured temperature differential being used by warmists as "evidence" for global warming.

Corrupt data, in other words, has been used as a justification for an international rent seeking, massively funded juggernaut, in just the same way that they Hadley emails show. While the Hadley emails helpfully point to the mindset behind such corruption, there's much, much more to this fraud than just the Hadley emails.

The rest of us who have been keeping up on the - factual - corruption of temperature data, and the suppression of historical data showing no disastrous effects during previous, far hotter periods of time in recent history, including that which occurred during the Renaissance period, need to understand how important it is to not overplay, in the long-term, the CRU emails/data. Ride this story for as long as it's efficacious to do so, but the emails aren't the most important evidence. They certainlyshow in shocking detail the existence of a pervasive culture wherein credible, reasonable scientists were blacklisted, and their findings proscribed - written off - as not credible because they weren't published in the very journals whose editorial process was, we now know, rigged, but the Hadley emails are not by any means the entire story, and it would be a mistake to put all our eggs in that basket.

The laggard and gatekeeping media is just now started to evince a coordinated line of defense which goes something like, "Ah yes, but those are merely a few emails from a particular research center, and these emails don't obviate in any way the findings of thousands of other credible scientists over the years..."

The credibility to AGW science has been quietly and comprehensively exposed - to a minority of non-MSM-informed people - long before the Hadley emails. The emails may, in the long run, be what woke up a propagandized public, but the hard evidence of the fraudulence of the warmists goes far, far beyond the information contained in the Hadley emails.

Hopefully the emails will spur people to work backwards and start examining the hard and incontrovertible evidence against the validity of the AGW theorists. The battle hasn't been about science at all, but about propaganda and vast amounts of selective funding.

Non-warmists have truth on their side, they just haven't had their hands on the propaganda machine.

I don't expect anyone to take that statement on faith, but I respectfully ask that all reasonable, thinking people do their own research, stop buying the "consensus" bullshit, and start drawing their own conclusions based on available evidence.

Just take a look at the last century, across various continents, and see what consensus wrought, and start drawing your own conclusions based on hard evidence. Don't take anyone's word for anything - you might be surprised by what you find.