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We're All Conformists Now!

I am typing this using my brand new iPhone. Yes, that’s right. I am now a follower. A part of me feels ashamed… Oh, the heck with it! This is one nifty gadget!

What I'm Reading: "The Forgoten Man" – Naming Names…. And Not Liking It.

I’m reading “The Forgotten Man”. I’m on page 139. I can’t say how much more I will read or if I will finish the book. To say that I’m underwhelmed would be an understatement. It’s dull. I expected some real economic information about the underpinnings and policy decisions made in the twenties that set the stage for the depression, and how FDR’s actions helped or hurt the possibility of economic recovery, you know, policy A leads to B which causes C, that sort of thing. Yet all I’m getting is a continuous rambling about this person and so-and-so who would end up working in the Roosevelt government who had some misplaced admiration of socialism and or Stalin. If Mrs Shlaes is to be believed, it’s a virtual commie love-fest. The was she writes about this period, it is the socialist intellectuals who caused and perpetuated the great depression. Yet so much of the info presented feels like gossip and innuendo (there are such things as footnotes you know – see Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton”). She’s almost McCarthyist in the zeal in which she names names. She has mentioned so many names that I can’t keep them all straight; they have become “Forgotten Men”. I will continue to read the book, but I can already say that you will get more usefull information from the 40 or so pages devoted to this time period in the fun and concise “The Great Game” than from Mrs. Shlaes effort.

Global Warming – The New Baking Soda.

It’s going to affect gravity. Is there NOTHING it can’t do?

Hat Tip: WUWT

Yes Men.

For Cliff.

Happy B-Day To Me!!!!!

I had a subbing job today, but it was, as it turned out, to be a one class assignment. Good birthday present right there because the job is listed as a full day job, which means I a full day’s pay. Happy Birthday Indeed!!

So now that the rest of my day is unexpectedly free, here is the list of things I will do for my birthday:

• Finish replacing the tranny in Red, the 1994 Subaru Alpine wagon.
• Have lunch with the Sonic-Mate.
• Clean Cathy Phipp’s filter and sell her a new Polaris sand / silt bag.
• Continue updating my Quickbooks entries – taxes are coming due.
• Study more math and algebra to prepare for the CSET I hope to take in April or May.

That should fill my day nicely.

BTW, Happy Birthday To Me!!!

Hooray! I'm Psychotic!!!!

Eyes…. roll….. to…… back…… of….. head….. Oh….. Hell…… they’re stuck…….. can’t see…….

Not buying the party line on global warming is a mental disorder. Great, one more thing to worry about.

Favorite quotes

However much one distrusts environmentalists, it is harder to discount the scientists… depending, of course, on which scientists one listens to.

So the scientists who disagrees with the doomsday faction of climate scientists are hacks. Any scientist, even the ones that are noted specialist in their field, say atmospheric science, are discounted if their research and peer reviewed studies either discount or indicate flaws in the dogmatic AGW party line.

Dr Myanna Lahsen, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Colorado, has specialised in understanding how professional scientists, some of them with highly respected careers, turn climate sceptic. She found the largest common factor was a shared sense that they had personally lost prestige and authority as the result of campaigns by liberals and environmentalists. She concluded that their engagement in climate issues “can be understood in part as a struggle to preserve their particular culturally charged understanding of environmental reality.”

Or maybe there actually is resistance from the true believers who control the peer review process. Example – a comment from one of the peer reviewers at Journal of Climate, who felt the paper should be rejected because:

“the only object I can see for this paper is for the authors to get something in the peer-reviewed literature which the ignorant can cite as supporting lower climate sensitivity than the standard IPCC range”.

The paper was later published in the peer review journal “Theoretical and Applied Climatology”. So tell me Dr. Myanna Lahsen, who here is struggling to preserve their particular culturally charged understanding of environmental reality. Maybe there is a nugget of truth to the concerns of scientist who publish studies that don’t tow the party line.

I could go on, but why bother. I’m psychotic, remember…..

PS. BTW, The quote from Dr Myanna Lahsen in the Guardian article misspelled specialized and skeptic. Jeez, you know it’s bad when someone of my flawed spelling skills has to point that out!

The Art Of Honesty (and a plug for Amazon.Com).

A few days ago I purchased an MP3 album from Amazon.com. I have the “One Click” feature enabled and the download completed flawlessly, and even now I am listening to “Animal Logic II”. The band features uber musicians: former Police drummer (and personal favorite) Stewart Copeland and Stanley Clark on bass, and a fantastic vocalist by the name of Deborah Holland. This was a favorite CD that went missing a couple of years ago. I have looked far and wide for a replacement, but had never come across this album either in used record stores or various online stores…. until now. It popped up on Amazon, and I immediately bought it. A few minutes later, i got an e-mail saying that my credit card did not go through and my order was being canceled (the card number had change and I forgot to update my Amazon account). Problem is, I had already received the digital merchandise. Many would have walked away with the “free” unpaid for music, but not me; I want to pay for the goods delivered. I just got off the phone with an Amazon.com associate (someone in India who I could barely understand) and cleared up the payment issue. Cool thing is that they went ahead and waived the charge, and I got the music for free anyway. I think they were shocked that someone would call in and try to correct this. Regardless, thank you Amazon.com. Will be shopping with you in the future.

PS. Speaking of Amazon.Com, my Birthday is tomorrow. I wonder what I will get for myself? ^_^

NOAA Admits Global Warming On Hold.

Now THIS is the change I’ve been waiting for!!!! NOAA scientist reluctantly admits we may be in a cooling phase and the current climate models may be broken.

“This [cooling] is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. “Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn’t have one.”

There have been a few details that have long bothered me about the way many have approached the theory that man-made CO2 is causing out of control warming. (1) CO2 has not been shown in paleoclimate records to cause climate warming – it has been the other way around; warming has caused the elevation of CO2 levels. (2) In the 130’ish years of what we consider accurate temperature measurement we have had two major warming periods, the first from 1910 to 1940, and the second from 1980 to 2001. Both warming trends occur at a similar pace and for a similar duration, yet excessive man-made CO2 can only explain the second temperature rise, while the first is vaguely attributed to natural variation, but there is no explicit cause. They have said that the sun enplanes it, but that was not an accepted certainty even before this paper came out. It redefines the way that total solar irradiance is measured, which means that the current predictive climate models need to be recalculated. More in this here.

Push-Button Diplomacy!

I hear that after visiting Russia, Hillary’s next stop was Germany, where she gave Angela Merkel another red button adorned box, this one proudly proclaiming “Ich auch bin ein Berliner!”.

Kingston Trio's John Stewart R.I.P.

John Stewart is most famous, not for being in KT, but for writing the Monkey’s hit “Daydream Believer”. The Kingston Trio was one of the groups that heavily influenced my musical sensibilities; they were one of the handful of groups that I credit with teaching me how to harmonize. My family used to sit around the table and sing along to their records. The love of their music is one of the reasons why I enjoy being in Acoustic Highway so much. I didn’t know the members by name (I was very young at the time), but sometimes they are such an influence, that they feel like family. Goodbye my friend.