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The Ultimate Answer To THE Question!

WHY did the chicken cross the road?

SARAH PALIN: The chicken crossed the road because, gosh-darn it, he’s a maverick!

BARACK OBAMA: The chicken crossed the road because it was time for change! The chicken wanted change!

JOHN MC CAIN: My friends, that chicken crossed the road because he recognized the need to engage in cooperation and dialogue with all the chickens on the other side of the road.

HILLARY CLINTON: When I was First Lady, I personally helped that little chicken to cross the road. This experience makes me uniquely qualified to ensure right from Day One that every chicken in this country gets the chance it deserves to cross the road. But then, this really isn’t about me.

GEORGE W. BUSH: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. The chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here.

DICK CHENEY: Where’s my gun?

COLIN POWELL: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.

BILL CLINTON: I did not cross the road with that chicken.

AL GORE: I invented the chicken.

JOHN KERRY: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road, I am now against it! It was the wrong road to cross, and I was misled about the chicken’s intentions. I am not for it now, and will remain against it.

AL SHARPTON: Why are all the chickens white? We need some black chickens.

DR. PHIL: The problem we have here is that this chicken won’t realize that he must first deal with the problem on this side of the road before it goes after the problem on the other side of the road. What we need to do is help him realize how stupid he’s acting by not taking on his current problems before adding new problems.

OPRAH: Well, I understand that the chicken is having problems, which is why he wants to cross this road so badly. So instead of having the chicken learn from his mistakes and take falls, which is a part of life, I’m going to give this chicken a NEW CAR so that he can just drive across the road and not live his life like the rest of the chickens.

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other side of the road.

NANCY GRACE: That chicken crossed the road because he’s guilty! You can see it in his eyes and the way he walks.

PAT BUCHANAN: To steal the job of a decent, hardworking American.

MARTHA STEWART: No one called me to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer’s Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.

DR. SEUSS: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I’ve not been told.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die in the rain, alone.

JERRY FALWELL: Because the chicken was gay! Can’t you people see the plain truth? That’s why they call it the ‘other side’ Yes, my friends, That chicken is gay. And if you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the Liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like ‘the other side.’ That chicken should not be crossing the road. It’s as plain and as simple as that.

GRANDPA: In my day we didn’t ask why the chicken crossed the road. Somebody told us the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough.

BARBARA WALTERS: Isn’t that interesting? In a few moments, we will be listening to the chicken tell, for the first time, the heart warming story of how it experienced a serious case of molting, and went on to accomplish it’s lifelong dream of crossing the road.

ARISTOTLE: It is the nature of chickens to cross the road.

JOHN LENNON: Imagine all the chickens in the world crossing roads together, in peace.

BILL GATES: I have just released eChicken2010, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook. Internet Explorer is an integral part of eChicken2010. This new platform is much more stable and will never reboot.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Did the chicken really cross the road, or did the road move beneath the chicken?

COLONEL SANDERS: Did I miss one?

Stolen from: Aurora

Dangerous Chickens In The News!

Dangerously Seductive…..

Dangerous Diet….

And Just Plain Dangerous – Don’t F**k With An Armed Chicken!!!!!

Judging from their recent record of financing stupid productions, somewhere, someone one on Broadway is thinking about making a production of this!

Rant Of The Day!

A friend pointed me to this article today, which notes that tax credits intended to spur economic growth in poorer areas are being misused to build luxury hotels in more affluent neighborhoods:

The landmark Blackstone Hotel in downtown Chicago, which has hosted 12 U.S. presidents, opened in 2008 after a two-year, $116 million renovation. Inside the Beaux Arts structure, built in 1910, buffed marble staircases greet guests spending up to $699 a night for rooms with views of Lake Michigan.

What’s surprising isn’t the opulent makeover: It’s how the project was financed. The work was subsidized by a federal development program intended to help poor communities.

The biggest beneficiary of taxpayer help for the Blackstone revamp was Prudential Financial Inc., the second-largest U.S. life insurer. The company got $15.6 million in tax credits from the U.S. Department of the Treasury for helping to fund the project, according to Chicago city records, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its March issue….

Investors have used the program, called New Markets Tax Credits, to help build more than 300 upscale projects, including hotels, condominiums, office buildings and a car museum, on streets far from poverty, according to Treasury Department records released through a federal Freedom of Information Act request.

Money spent on high-end development could have been used to build more than 1,000 job-training centers, medical clinics and schools. The program, endorsed by Republican Senator Rick Santorum and House Speaker Dennis Hastert and adopted by Congress, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 2000.

Building high-end commercial projects goes against the intent of the New Markets program, says Cliff Kellogg, a former senior policy adviser at the Treasury Department who helped design New Markets.

“Things like luxury hotels are entirely contrary to what we set out to do,” says Kellogg, who’s now a bank consultant. “Some hotels may create jobs and spur other nearby investment, but you have to ask if these projects prevent worthwhile ones from getting done.”

This doesn’t look good at all. Yet, when I read this “Money spent on high-end development could have been used to build more than 1,000 job-training centers, medical clinics and schools.”… I have to shake my head. Jobs training? Really???? For what jobs???? I can’t believe people fall for this. You get into debt to train for a job, and then, when you’re done… Guess what… You find out there are either no jobs in the field that you studied, or the pay possibilities are much lower than advertised. Now they are stuck with huge student loan debt and can’t pay it back. I have several friends who are in that boat.

Existing medical clinics are closing all around the country. OK. building more will provide some construction jobs, but will that new, more expensive (including rent) clinic be able to stay open when older less expensive ones can’t?

Schools… What good are schools if the states can’t afford to hire teachers and will more than likely be laying more off in the next couple of years (hello California).

This all comes back to good governance. Granted, it doesn’t matter how hard you try and prevent it, there are always going to be loopholes that allow for this kind of misuse and abuse of aid… be it Federal, State, or even the privately variety. When you read the article, it appears the banks and financial institutions in question took advantage of flaws in the program. Some went outside the intent, but didn’t AFAWCT, violate any rules. Others clearly gamed the system (the art museum in Tacoma).

So, the question is… Will anyone bother to correct the flaws in this program, and will anyone try and get some of this money back??? That would take some work, and I doubt, given the amount of bank cash and lobbying common in Washington, that much time will be spent on this.

My bet… Nothing will happen and this just fades away.

Packers Win Super Bowl!!!!!

BTW… This IS my favorite MST3000.

Climate Predictions And Contradictions – Changing With The Wind.

If I learned anything about climate change and global warming over the last decade, continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause North American winters to be warmer with less snow. Here is a NASA press release, circa 1999:

“Why are winters warming up so much faster over Northern Hemisphere continents than over the rest of the globe? A new study by NASA researchers in the June 3 issue of the journal Nature is the first to link the well-documented large degree of North America and Eurasia winter warming and the associated wind changes to rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere….

Note that one of the papers used in this statement was written by RealClimate’s Gavin Schmidt. The statement doesn’t say “less snow”, but this one does:

“Global warming will cause major changes to the climate of the U.S. Northeast if greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, scientists said today. Warmer annual temperatures, less snow, more frequent droughts and more extreme rainstorms are expected if current warming trends continue, the scientists said in a new study, and time is running out for action to avoid such changes to the climate.”

As stated by the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment (NECIA) and  the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in 2006.

So, it’s clear that climate change means warmer winters and less snow.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,”

Said in 2000 by East Anglia Senior Climate Researcher Dr David Viner.

One more:

“New research from UNH’s Climate Change Research Center’s Cameron Wake and his former graduate student Elizabeth Burakowski confirms what anyone enjoying today’s balmy temperatures might suspect: In the northeast, winters are indeed getting warmer. The duo conducted the most rigorous analysis to date of wintertime climate data in the northeastern U.S. from 1965 to 2005 and published their work recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres.”
“Winter is warming faster than any other season and what we’re seeing over time is an intensification of this warming trend,”….

OK. You get the picture. Climate change means warmer, dryer winters.

To make sure you understand, lets review :

“Cold and snowy winters will be the rule, rather than the exception,”…

Just as we said before…. uhm… what? Wait. That must be a misquote….

“That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia . . . The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.“

Oh, come on! You were just saying warmer, less snow….

“The overall warming of Earth’s northern half could result in cold winters, new research shows.

————————————————

Well Crap! You spent the last decade predicting warmer, less snowy winters! What changed???

The Weather…. That’s what changed!

And it changed FIRST! These “colder winter / more snow” pronouncements are reactive, not predictive in any way. Since so much of climate science rests on predicting / projecting future weather and climate changes, and the perils of such, this is not a minor issue. If this were any other field of science, there would be plenty of acknowledgements that the prevailing thinking was in error. That would happen in the field of medicine, in physics, and in geology.  I simply find it astonishing that the climate science community can double back on a decades worth of predictions without even uttering a “Oops, we had it wrong”. But, of course, they don’t have to, because anything that happens is due to human induced climate change.

Hat Tip: N. C. Times.

Bush Administration In Contempt Of Court!

Oh, nope. I got that wrong. It’s the Obama Administration!

Was the Bush administration ever actually held in contempt of court?  I can’t remember if it was, but it was pretty noisy back then, considering all the attempts to sue somebody over something. There was the certainty that Karl Rove would be “frog-marched” out of the White House, but that never happened.

And remember, this oil drilling ban itself was also anti-science too. So this is a two-fer! Maybe Glenn Reynolds IS right when he says: “Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss”.

A Classic Red Herring Fallacy – Vilifying The Source

Today I came across this statement concerning  a notice that Republicans were trying to change the definition of rape:

…can’t support anything that comes from moveon.org as that’s a left-wing propoganda machine just as bad, if not worse as the right-wing propoganda machines.

This is a classic Appeal to Motive: where a premise is dismissed, by calling into question the motives of its proposer. This type of argument is a diversion. It’s dismissing the veracity of the assertion, not based on whether the facts behind it are true or not, but on a prejudice against the source. The left does this all the time, noting that a story “can’t” be true because it’s on “FAUX” news. It’s also wrong when the Right does it, which you here every day on Rush / Hannity / Beck etc. concerning the “main stream media” ( or as Sarah Palin calls it, the “Lame Stream Press”).  Facts are facts, and it doesn’t matter what the source is. That doesn’t mean you can’t take the info from a source with a HUGE Manhattan sized grain of salt. That’s fine. But, just because a story is from a source you don’t like, does not mean the story is automatically bogus or false. Just remember to filter out opinionated slants from actual statements of fact, and you’ll do OK. It’s wrong when global warming hard-liners dismisses an article simply because it has appeared on “Watts Up With That” and it’s equally wrong when global warming skeptics dismiss something that appears on Tamino’s blog, because, well,  it’s Tamino’s blog.

I am not a big fan of World Net Daily, and I admit I don’t trust that source. BUT, I won’t dismiss a story from that site just because it’s presented on that site. I will, however, based on the ease of refuting the crap they pedal, not buy a story from them unless it’s independently verified by a more reliable source. But I don’t automatically assume they are full of shite, even though I’ve found that to mostly be the case.

Oh, and as far as changing the definition of rape… They’ve backed off.

Weather Doing Things! Alarmists Arms Waving!

Notice the alarmists are talking about storms, saying  that these storms are unusual and actually caused by global warming, even though there are  NO PEER REVIEWED papers to support the claim.  Physicist / String Theorist Dr. Michio Kaku, a man who I otherwise admire, said this:

Well, snowstorms take place when dry, ice-cold weather from Canada and Alaska bump up into moist, warm air from the Gulf of Mexico. Monster storms like this are caused by fluctuations which draw more icy weather from the north and there’s more moist air in the Gulf of Mexico because of increased temperature.

Dr. Ryan Maue Ph.D who’s field of study includes Tropical Cyclones and Climatology, Extratropical Cyclones / Warm Seclusions, Atmospheric Predictability, Numerical Weather Prediction and has much more intimate knowledge on this topic than most, , has this to say about Dr Kaku’s recent appearance on TV to try and sell the scare mongering message:

No. The Gulf of Mexico does not have “increased temperature”. It is actually historically, anomalously cold right now. Does he know that the non-stop infiltration of Arctic cold blasts actually chills the Gulf of Mexico? The La Nina has cooled the entire planet due to changes in the tropical eastern Pacific. It’s anomalously cold as well, as cold as it ever was in the past 30-years or maybe more.

Dr. Kaku also got on the wrong site of geologists for spewing alarmist and incorrect information concerning Yellowstone a couple of weeks ago.

Not to be outdone in alarmist rhetoric, Al Gore, in a move to counter Bill O’Reilly, has finally come out of hibernation. He has these quotes on his web site:

“In fact, scientists have been warning for at least two decades that global warming could make snowstorms more severe. Snow has two simple ingredients: cold and moisture. Warmer air collects moisture like a sponge until it hits a patch of cold air. When temperatures dip below freezing, a lot of moisture creates a lot of snow.”

“A rise in global temperature can create all sorts of havoc, ranging from hotter dry spells to colder winters, along with increasingly violent storms, flooding, forest fires and loss of endangered species.”

Of course, the quote isn’t from a climate scientist, but from a journalist, who admits:

That’s simple science even for me, a guy whose scientific education pretty much ended with the old “Watch Mr. Wizard” TV show and a subscription to Popular Mechanics.

and does not link or interview any climate scientists saying that there is any certainty these storms are caused by global warming. This isn’t that hard. They are out there… you can find them via google…  And there are also well respected climate scientists who caution that we can’t certify “these” or any other  storms as a result of global warming. That said, not done being a lazy journalist, Clarence Page repeats this nugget:

What happened to global warming? Ask Vancouver. While the South and East Coast were trying to get rid of snow, the Winter Olympics was reported to be trucking in snow to its ski runs from three hours away.

… not realizing having no snow in Vancouver is, uhm, NORMAL!!!! This is why you can’t just say what you think. You have to at least research this stuff to see how accurate the facts are.

And remember REAL CLIMATE SCIENTISTS, not string theorists or former politicians, are on record saying this:

…within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,”

That quote is from Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia… Yes, THAT East Anglia, the same one that were not very well exonerated for their behaviors revealed in the Climategate scandal. Even Real Climate, home of the most ardent anthropogenic global warming theory proponents, in 2007, said this:

…absolute statements of neither sort are scientifically defensible. Meteorological anomalies cannot be purely attributed to deterministic factors, let alone any one specific such factor (e.g. either global warming or a hypothetical long-term climate oscillation).

To close this post, I wish to point something out. Last year was one of the hottest in recorded history. Some have said “The Hottest”, but statistically the temp values are too close to the temps of 1998, and do not fall outside the error bars. Like 1998, last year was dominated by a strong El Nino, which throws a larger than normal amount of heat from the oceans into the atmosphere, thus abnormally causing an upward spike in global temperatures. As was the case in 1999 / 2000 a strong La Nina has formed, and that has the opposite effect, bringing global temps down. The second coldest January since 2002 is in the record books. So, last year was hotter than usual due to El Nino. This year will be cooler than usual due to the prevailing La Nina (and other factors). It’s my official prediction.

The Second Best Thing To Ever Appear on The Internet! (NQSFW)

You’ll maybe be surprised at what I consider number one.

From a post over at gay Patriot:

We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine.

Duh! When you have a sizable population whose political / theological beliefs lean in that direction… You’re expecting anything different? That said, something has been bothering me while listening to a lot of conservative squawkers concerning this uprising…

THIS IS NOT IRAN 1979!!!

Anyone alive, who paid any attention to the events back then, is not being honest when making the comparison.

• The Shah only remained in power because we kept him there. Though he is an ally Mubarak held power on his own. There is not “spiritual leader in exile” waiting in the wings, pulling strings to gain power i.e. Ayatollah Khomeini.
• Though the Muslim Brotherhood does hail from Egypt, and did give birth to Hammas, they are old, their remaining membership is old in age, and have little sway with the younger general public. Are they labeled a “terrorist organization”? Yes. But from everything I’ve read (which includes “The Looming Towers”) they are today probably only mildly more relevant than the Black Panthers are in US politics. Yes, they exist, but just don’t have the draw they once did. The radicals have other groups to join. The Iranians who took over in 1979 had no connections, no interests in keeping ties with the US.
• Assuming the Egyptian army takes control when Mubarak leaves, they get over a billion dollars and military equipment directly from the US. Keep in mind they have sided with the protesters but have not fired on those who are still Mubarak supporters.

Most important, the people in the streets are not asking for a return to a more religious society, as was the case in 1979 Iran. They are not demanding to be separated from modern society….  Hell, they were able to get this started due to the technologies of the 21st Century! They are plugged in and are participants in modern society. No! They are not demanding to go backwards, and establish a new Caliphate….  They are demanding MORE FREEDOMS!

I am in full support of what is happening.

PS. I am well versed in U. S. revolutionary history, which includes the murderous French revolution. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, who was blind to the bloody deterioration of  that event from revolution to convulsive violence, if things go bad in Egypt, I will not hesitate to condemn it. But nothing has surfaced to indicate Egypt is destined to go  down the same road as Iran of 1979.