Rats attract rats-
Rat population has ‘exploded’ around Occupy D.C. camps

Truest words never were said

International Liberty:

The key thing to understand is that people prefer leisure to work. The reason they get jobs, by and large, is to obtain the income needed to consume and enjoy life.

Nobody parties like Obama

For Obama, whose main achievements are getting elected and writing books about himself, life is a wonderland.. Unlike for millions now out of work, the presidency for this man is endless golf, holidaying and party. Hey, who wouldn't like to have a never ending ball at taxpayers' expense?

The Obamas have taken it to a new level - secret partying!

Johnny Depp and Obama at the Alice in Wonderland 2009 White House Halloween party.

The big news over the weekend, that the Obama White House had a secret Alice and Wonderland-themed Halloween party, really didn’t surprise me. The taxpayer-funded event featured Johnny Depp in full Mad Hatter costume prancing on tables in the White House State Dining Room. Someone wore the actual Chewbacca Wookie costume, while guests drank punch from blood vials. (An aside: why is Halloween such a big event for some people, requiring excessive decorations and festivities?) The State Dining Room was turned into a Lewis Carroll-themed house of horrors for the invited guests.

Not surprisingly, the White House deliberately concealed the existence of the grotesque party from the public and the press corp. That pesky 16% real unemployment rate required stealth.

So much for the vaunted transparency.
Also note the complicity of the lapdog media in keeping his quiet. Woof, woof - anything else, master?

2012 - the year the world jumps off a cliff?

Here comes the obligatory New Year post - well, OK, like most things in my life a little too late.

There is again that dash of foolish optimism that I feel at the commencement of each year - which, as the weeks shamble along, duly muddies, then blanches and fades. And one goes about the chores with a heart that secretly (secretly to its owner) bides for another year to rally fresh hopes.

Yet this time it is different - and not in a good way. It is not just me that is in shambles  - but seemingly the whole world. There is a pall of uneasiness, a slippery fog in which we might, I fear, lose our way.In a big way. We are, civilizationally speaking, at crossroads of history -history that is the future. Just our luck that instead of clear thinkers that we need the world is run by dense elites. The fog is in their head. They have lead the world to  this crossroad and they will now take the highway to nowhere. They will reliably fail, the world over, as they always have -but this time the consequences will be history making and shaking.

It is not just me. Look at the year's first covers of these magazines:

2012 could be the year when the fools who brought us to the edge of the cliff jump off -and take us with them.

Best of comments

From James Cameron at this page-

With the global-warming jolly about to open in Durban, the CRU whistle-blower released a second tranche of Climategate emails just as tawdry and demeaning as the first. Few outside the ranks of professional physicists consider they are able to adjudicate but most people are capable of recognizing when an investigative procedure is flawed. It is clear the IPCC assessment process has so many serious material defects as to put into grave doubt the soundness and reliability of any of its heavily promoted claims. We know the IPCC report-writing teams are cherry-picked in an opaque process by a secretive bureau in Geneva with no effort to ensure representation of diverse viewpoints. Conflicts of interest abound in the report-writing process and favoured authors review both their own work and that of their critics, inevitably concluding in their own favour. Environmentalist campaign groups are ludicrously overrepresented among the authors who can overrule academic peer review procedures and subsequently rewrite the texts. It is this disreputable behaviour which has been exposed so damagingly by the e-mails and in files subsequently obtained under recent U.K. freedom of information rulings. They show that an IPCC chapter author recruits a contributing author not on the basis of his knowledge or past work but with cloying cronyism which decides if he is 'one of us'. The Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise has recently released her book 'The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert'. It is a classic exposé showing how the IPCC evolved into an activist organization bearing no resemblance to the picture of scientific probity painted by its promoters and its allies. The claim that the IPCC is made up of thousands of the world's top scientists with the most rigorous and exhaustive review processes in the history of science is totally risible. In fact, far from ensuring 'balance, transparency and accountability' the apathetic plenary panel made up from the 195 member governments is the greatest block to reform. Those countries truly seeking objective, balanced and rigorous information about climate science on which to base momentous policy decisions should simply withdraw. Like so much of the UN, the IPCC is irredeemably corrupt and a new assessment body is needed made up scientists rather than green zealots, political placemen and celebrities.

(bolding mine)

Now why can't all those environmental reporters scrambling feverishly like headless chickens put it as simply and precisely as this instead of copy pasting press releases from green groups? 

Bad day for Phil Joneses

First the Phil Jones of the Climategate infamy is found further vitiating the scientific process in the new release of Climategate emails with mails like this-

Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process

Then Phil Jones, the Manchester United center back, scores an own goal in a crunch match with Benefica that United needed to win. The match was drawn

There is still hope about America-
Anti-Obama sales outpace pro-Obama nearly fourfold at popular online clothier

Climategate strikes again!

With some explosive emails of climate "scientists" (the scare quotes seem quite appropriate) like-

Thorne:
I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

Wils:
[2007] What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably [...]

Wilson:
Although I agree that GHGs are important in the 19th/20th century (especially since the 1970s), if the weighting of solar forcing was stronger in the models,surely this would diminish the significance of GHGs.
[...] it seems to me that by weighting the solar irradiance more strongly in the models, then much of the 19th to mid 20th century warming can be explained from the sun alone.

Wigley:
Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

Mann:
 I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s doing, but its not helping the cause

Mann:
the important thing is to make sure they’re loosing the PR battle. That’s what the site [Real Climate] is about.

Cook:
A growing body of evidence clearly shows [2008] that hydroclimatic variability during the putative MWP (more appropriately and inclusively called the “Medieval Climate Anomaly” or MCA period) was more regionally extreme (mainly in terms of the frequency and duration of megadroughts) than anything we have seen in the 20th century, except perhaps for the Sahel. So in certain ways the MCA period may have been more climatically extreme than in modern times.

Jones:
[FOI, temperature data]
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.

Jones:
Basic problem is that all models are wrong – not got enough middle and low level clouds.

Jones:
I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process 

So much for truth and honesty in science.

Government support of science has corrupted it -like everything it touches. We now have tax-payer funded activists whose only 'science' is to find/stretch/twist/make up evidence for their religious  beliefs(hard to call them scientific theories).

There is much, much more here and here.

The Renewable Scam

Renewable Energy: Bubble, Scam, or Both

When private industry starts looking to Washington as their primary area to make profits, we’ve made a mess of things.

Read it all.

Oxford bends rules for a torturer

What is it with the love affairs among the Western intellectual elites and Third World brutes-

Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani -  the brute Oxford bent over to please

The torturer Oxford “bent over backwards” to admit

The son of a former Iranian President has been found culpable of torture and has been ordered to pay his victim millions of dollars in compensation while studying for a DPhil at Oxford.

Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani – who was admitted to the University with a “let-off clause” for language skills – had a judgement brought against him by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in August for ordering the torture of a Iranian businessman who refused to surrender control of his oil consultancy to Rafsanjani and pay a demanded $50 million.

In the judgement made against the 42-year-old, seen exclusively by this newspaper, the judge described how Mr Houshang Bouzari suffered “unspeakably outrageous torture at the hands of the defendant or at his instigation”.

And speaking of left wing historians-
India's young Chomsky, Pankaj Mishra reviews Niall Ferguson's new book Civilisation: The West and the Rest and shit hits the fan.

Which was inevitable, given the loads of gobar (cow dung) with which Mishra's upper hollow is stuffed.

So England started WW2?

Russia invades Georgia- and lefties blame the victim!

No, Condoleezza Rice Does Not Blame Georgia for the War
Strangely preoccupied with undercutting the pro-Georgia attitudes prevalent in the American national security establishment’s position on the sometimes-violent Russia-Georgia conflict, leftist writers have sought—unconvincingly—to portray Georgia as the aggressor in the two countries’ August 2008 war.

Read it all.
Turning facts upside down is all in a day's work for left wing scholars and historians. Unfortunately, their joke of a 'history' is force fed to children in text books. Child abuse!

BTW, I missed all those anti-imperialist rallies against Russia. It's as if the lefties didn't care about a small, independent country being attacked by a traditionally imperialist power. Either that or I must have been hibernating in a cave.

Top News

Red Green threat

China and bullying ought to be next to each other in the dictionary:

China Threatens Massive Venting of Super Greenhouse Gases in Attempt to Extort Billions as UNFCCC Meeting Approaches

In the run-up to the international climate negotiations in Durban later this month, China has responded to efforts to ban the trading of widely discredited HFC-23 offsets by threatening to release huge amounts of the potent industrial chemical into the atmosphere unless other nations pay what amounts to a climate ransom.

China's threat comes after the European Union and other nations moved to ban HFC-23 credits from internal carbon markets in recognition of the perverse incentives created by these credits under the UN Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The vast amounts paid for HFC-23 offsets have led factories in China and elsewhere to manufacture far more HCFC-22 and its HFC-23 by-product than necessary, just to maximize the amounts paid to destroy HFC-23 through the UN-backed carbon trading scheme.

Green fail continues.

Do read it all.

Welcome to the 21st century!

Mother models lingerie with her 19-year-old daughter

Down with stupid taboos!

The parallel lives of Laura Pollan and Prof. Mushirul Hasan

Laura Pollan was born in 1948 in the pre-Castro Cuba.

Mushirul Hasan came on this planet a year later in a newly independent India.

Laura Pollan - Cuban freedom fighter

Laura Pollan, a simple housewife, a mother and a teacher, died recently of medical complications possibly caused by a long, wrenching struggle against a brutal regime that had imprisoned her husband for being an independent journalist.

  Prof. Mushirul Hasan - influential academic and Castro admirer
image source 

Prof. Mushirul Hasan, a world famous scholar and academic, is a vocal champion of that regime.

Best of comments

Razlon-

At the tail end of the Vietnam era, I served as an Air Force public affairs NCO. What was striking, even at the time, was the wide gulf between the Ernie Pyle and the David Halbertram generations of civilian journalists.

The former were overwhelmingly veterans themselves, never went to J school, had a wide variety of life experiences outside both the classroom and the newsroom, and regarded what they did as a trade learned on the job. The later were virtually all graduates J schools, regarded the military with open contempt,had little to no life experiences outside of journalism, felt they were on a mission to "improve" society, and considered themselves practitioners of a noble profession. Today they are the managing editors and publishers who, without any reflection or self-awareness, decide what the rest of us need to know.

No wonder the profession is dying.

Media - wiping Obama's ass

Media Attempt to Cover up Obama Comments on Israel

--
There are a couple of excellent articles about this, though not much in the mainstream media: one is by Arnold Ahlert in Jewish World Review, in which he writes that “it is hard to decide which part of this story is more revealing: the incident itself, or the subsequent reaction by the Fourth Estaters whose commitment to the standards of journalistic integrity—or perhaps more accurately JournO-listic integrity—seemingly never reach the bottom of an apparently bottomless barrel.” And to the issue of reporters agreeing, after the fact, to keep this quiet, Ahlert writes, “What reporter in his right mind would sign anything that prevents him from reporting on a story made available, not by subterfuge or anything else resembling illegality, but by the carelessness of two world leaders? Since when did a legitimate ‘gotcha’ moment become off limits to the press?”

Read it all. Free press has willingly become King's courtiers. 

All is not for the BEST

Remember that BEST study(non-peer reviewed if I might add, as if that matters to the Warmists) that was supposed to blow up the AGW skeptics' case to outer space?

Turns out that the BEST is not good enough-

The skeptics have now counter-attacked Muller and BEST, in a controversy that could swell to Hockey-Stick dimensions.