MaxRedline

Motor City Madness

Strangely, this story doesn't seem to be getting much play in the American media, but U.K. media manages to report it.  MoTown once was famous for music and muscle cars, but now represents something entirely different.

The abandoned corpses, in white body bags with number tags tied to each toe, lie one above the other on steel racks inside a giant freezer in Detroit’s central mortuary, like discarded shoes in the back of a wardrobe.

Some have lain here for years, but in recent months the number of unclaimed bodies has reached a record high. For in this city that once symbolised the American Dream many cannot even afford to bury their dead.

It Couldn't Have Come At A Better Time

The High Priest hath annointed his Disciple, yea and verily, and hath found him wanting not.  AlGore has endorsed Billy Bradbury for the Oregon governorship. Having built so much, and having worked so hard to stoke hysteria among governments and inDUHviduals alike, the annointment by the High Priest comes at the very moment wherein the evidence that many of us were certain was out there is finally exposed: Man-Made Global Warming Climate Change is clearly and undeniably a fraud.  Billy apparently didn't get the memo.

I will fight tooth and nail, as I have already done, to not allow Liqufied Natural Gas facilities in the Columbia River or anywhere in Oregon.  I will chain my Segway to a LNG tanker if I have to.

Thus spake the Disciple.

Good thing, too, as if that idiot toady were to get his way, there'd be no source of energy with which to charge his expensive little toy - so it might as well be used as a boat anchor.

He Never Campaigned On Competence

The average Joe seems to know what completely escapes BO:  The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 62% believe tax cuts are a better way to create jobs and fight unemployment.  BO, on the other hand, continues to mull the idea of yet another Porkulus plan.

And while BO continues to dither on the conflict in Afghanistan, his attorney general dithers on the prospect of investigating ACORN; prompting Andrew Breitbart to note that if the esteemed attorney general cannot or will not do his job, a number of additional tapes are waiting in the wings.  The Columbia Journalism Review accused Breitbart of engaging in blackmail, and have been roundly criticized for their stance, even on their own website.

Meanwhile, the Dean of Harvard Medical School gives ObamaCare, PelosiCare (or whatever the current trendy name happens to be) a failing grade; contending that it would harm the country and impede medical innovation.

And in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled "In Praise Of Inexperience" James Taranto notes that A president who knew what he was doing could do lots more damage.

How's that whole Hope'n'Change thing working for ya?

SleazeWeek

Some years ago, Newsweek held an aura of respectability.  As local blogger Rob Kremer recently pointed out: Newsweek used to be a very good rag. Decent columnists, good business coverage, intelligent writing. Now it is just another failing liberal media outlet.

The only problem with Kremer's observation is that he didn't take it far enough; his larger issue being the cover portrayal of Sarah Palin using a photo taken from Runner's World, he missed an opportunity to delve into the more salient issues relating to Newsweek:  the headline read "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah?", followed by a subhead which stated "She's Bad News for the GOP — And for Everybody Else, Too."

Fortunately, IBD picks up where Rob left off.  They note:

Getting a jump on its competitor, this past year Newsweek reinvented itself as a "thought leader," moving beyond interpretive reporting to outright point-of-view argumentation.

That's inarguable, but they go on to cite chapters and verses from recent issues that clearly demonstrate Newsweek's decidedly Leftist bias.  At some point, the magazine will simply have to fold, as its makeover from a quasi-news and analysis outlet into a megaphone for left-wing cheerleading yields ever dwindling readership.

 

The AGW Religion, as noted previously, is in serious trouble.  Things are unraveling, and quickly.

It's unfortunate that Crichton isn't alive to see this.

Plane Stupid. And Busted.

How desperate is the Religion becoming?  When they resort to stuff like this, it's obvious that they're desperate indeed:

 

The high-pitched whine of a low-flying jet engine fills the air as the camera tracks across images of shimmering glass buildings, the Towers of Mammon in an unidentified urban CBD. No, this is not the opening credits of The Apprentice, and dropping out of the sky is not UK Business Czar "Sralan" Sugar in his helicopter, but huge, hairy half-tonne polar bears. Their falls are (presumably deliberately) reminiscent of jumpers from the 911 towers and with visceral violence the poor ursine beasts crash cruelly into the concrete and tarmac with sickening thuds.

The effect is shocking; the message brutal: every short haul flight you take emits four hundred kilogrammes of carbon dioxide – the equivalent weight of an adult polar bear.

And this is propaganda defined.  The disciples have good reason to worry, as the news emerging overnight and this morning demonstrates rather conclusively that the underpinnings of their Religion are composed of lies and collusion.

Not since the infamous Piltdown Man hoax has such massive scientific fraud been perpetrated.  In brief, a hacker gained access to the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabites of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)

The files released include nearly 1100 emails and over 70 documents.  How damaging are they?  In a word: Very.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room– he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

This breaks AlGore's get-rich-quick scheme wide open (too bad it didn't gain traction while the Penguin was waddling around Portland):

The computer files were apparently accessed earlier this week from servers at the UK's University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, a world-renowned centre focused on the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege that they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind. So far the veracity of the emails has not been confirmed and the scientists involved have declined to comment on the story, which broke on a blog called The Air Vent.

A spokesperson for the University of East Anglia (UEA) said: "We are aware that information from a server used for research information in one area of the university has been made available on public websites. Because of the volume of this information we cannot currently confirm that all of this material is genuine.

In essence, then, the UEA spokesman inadvertently verifies that at least some of the material - if not all - is genuine.  This release strikes at the very heart of the Religion's claim that "the science is in".  What is in is evidence of collusion, suppression, misrepresentation, character assassination, and other games popular in the world of grant funding.

I do not condone in any way the means by which the information was obtained; the efforts involved serious criminal acts, and the perpetrators should be dealt with accordingly (if found).  At the same time, the evidence needed to be released before further damage is done by the "scientists" and the politicians invested in the Religion.

I've discussed before the manner in which science is really carried out, based upon my experiences in the arena of peer-reviewed journal publication, and I've noted the machinations involved in grant-funded scientific pursuits.  These releases serve to buttress my previous statements both in regard to the Religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming and of the conduct of science in today's world.

Scientists Baffled? AlGore Told Us It Was Settled.

We need to have cfc bulbs to "Save The Planet".  The EU is already into a mandatory switch, so the USA won't be far behind - incandescent bulbs will soon be a thing of the past.  We'll all save energy with our (mercury laden) compact fluorescent replacements.  Incandescent bulbs lose about 7% of their brightness before burning out after around 2,000 hours of use.  By contrast:

Energy-efficient light bulbs lose on average 22% of their brightness over their lifetime, a study has found.

In some cases they emit just 60% as much light as traditional models which are being phased out of shops, it says.

Well, the politicians who mandate such idiocy have never performed well in brightness competitions....

In the meantime, "Climatologists" are reportedly "baffled" by the fact that so-called "man-made Global Warming" has halted over the past decade.   It has to be disheartening when perfectly good computer models - that could be used toward establishing policies that might dictate how people live  - turn out to be definitively bogus.  It seems that they may have to find other ways to try to scare you to death.

But always up for a challenge, AlGore isn't backing down.  He has a lot of money at stake, after all, and the Penguin has evidently resorted to having NASA images of the planet Photoshopped to his satisfaction.

That version appears on the cover of his latest Bible, by a number of accounts, and includes such gems as a 'shopped image of a hurricane spinning backwards, and another sitting on the equator, and the central ice mass of Greenland melted (while the thinner, peripheral parts appear intact), and other discrepancies.  Bad enough that it's 'shopped, but even worse that it's so stupidly done.

Politicians are purportedly snapping the book up just for the cover, which they then have framed and hung in the office to show that they "care".

Metro: Don't Bogart That Joint, My Friend

At its November 12 meeting, Metro’s Joint Policy Advisory Committee on Transportation (JPACT) adopted “performance targets” calling for a tripling of walking, biking, and transit use by 2035. This came despite the release of the Annual Portland Resident Survey conducted by the City Auditor, showing that levels of solo driving for commuters actually increased by 4.6% this year and that transit use dropped by 9%.

Oh, and the million more people that the area's supposed to draw?  That's not happening either.  Apparently, all of the barista jobs are full.  Of course, facts never get in the way of Metro's grand plans.

This is really what Metro would like to do - they'd like nothing better than to force the entire metropolitan population to live in a giant beehive.  But they can't, so they make do with shiny trains and bicycle paths instead.  For now.

Cage-Fight In Portland!

AlGore's in town to stump for his acolyte, Billy Bradbury (and of course, to push his latest vision of the impending Apocalypse).  In the other corner, Greenies have apparently vandalized the venue (Keller Auditorium); spray-painting slogans all around.  This being Portland, you have to wonder where the Greenies got their spray-paint, because Portland City Councilman Randy Leonard pushed an ordinance through a while back that restricts the sale and storage of spray-paint.  But there it is.  There are some things that legislation just can't deal with, Randy.

The grassroots free market group Americans for Prosperity (AFP) today condemned the overnight vandalism of the Keller Auditorium, the venue set to host former-Vice President Al Gore’s speech on global warming.  Vandals scrawled messages that seemed to point toward environmental group’s discontent over cap-and-trade legislation largely seen as environmentally ineffective, including: “Climate Justice Not CO2 Trading” and “Don’t buy false solutions.”   - communication courtesy of OregonGuy

Senator Jeff Merkley On Health Insurance Mandate

CNSNews.com asked Merkley: “Specifically where in the Constitution does Congress get its authority to mandate that individuals purchase health care?”
 
Merkley said: “The very first enumerated power gives the power to provide for the common defense and the general welfare. So it’s right on, right on the front end.”

Obviously, Merkley isn't well-versed in the Constitution, and has no interest in improving his knowledge in this regard.  The federal government has no authority to require citizens to purchase any product or service, whether it be a car, auto insurance, a box of Pampers - or health insurance.  The federal government has no authority by which to issue fines and/or jail to any citizen for their failure to purchase any specific product or service.

Merkley thinks that the federal government has that authority.  But if it doesn't, then he wants to ensure that, eventually, it does.

It's likely that he also supports gun control, albeit not in the sense that gun control involves reliably shooting the target.

Guns kill people the way spoons made Rosie O’Donnell fat.