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About six weeks ago Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama Huntsville (a center for lots of NASA activity and climate research) published an important new paper with William Braswell in the Journal of Remote Sensing entitled “On the Misdiagnosis of Climate Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance.”  Translated from the scientific lingo, the paper essentially argues that discrepancies between what the climate models say should be happening and what we actually observe happening (namely, the pause in warming over the last decade) means we still don’t have a complete picture of cloud behavior.  (This issue is closely related, though not identical, to the post I had up last weekend on Nature’s blockbuster cosmic ray paper.)  As Spencer explains on his blog: “Even the IPCC admits the biggest uncertainty in how much human-caused climate change we will see is the degree to which cloud feedback [temperature change => cloud change] will magnify (or reduce) the weak direct warming tendency from more CO2 in the atmosphere.”

Well, you can imagine what happened next.  Not content with attacking Spencer and Braswell for their heresy, the Climate Inquisition has forced the resignation of the editor of the Journal of Remote Sensing.

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All caused, of course, by the surplus of Chinese males, which is in turned caused by the Chinese one-child policy and the cultural impulse in China to make that one child male.

“The one-child policy has had a considerable impact. Where you have a demographic imbalance, you have a situation where women are in demand. Sometimes, that demand is met through legitimate marriage brokers. Other times it is met by non-legitimate means,” said David Feingold, the International Coordinator for HIV/Aids and Trafficking in Unesco’s Bangkok office, and the writer and director of the 2003 documentary Trading Women.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

There are two ways to get money: Honestly by hard work, or dishonestly through thievery and fraud. If you vote for politicians because they promise to give you money taken from taxpayers, you are practicing the politics of thievery.

We call it “corruption” or “bribery” when businesses give money to politicians in return for their support of legislative favoritism, but we call it “social justice” when Democrats promote programs that give money to voters who support Democrats….

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These are students who demonstrate great daring, creativity and teamwork during long hours playing shoot-’em-up multiplayer video games, a much maligned pursuit that teaches any number of valuable cognitive skills. Yet in the classroom, they stare blankly at chalkboards when they’re not stealing glances at smartphones, doing just enough to avoid being singled out and punished.

Among public school teachers and their advocates, a new phrase is in vogue: “corporate education reform.”  The conceit is that advocates of choice-based education reform really want to privatize public education, to make a profit off young people and embrace the latest corporate fads.

But history tells us that today’s public schools are the legacy of corporate fads from the 1900s, when large industrial enterprises were keenly interested in securing a docile workforce that recognized and respected hierarchies. The tinkering, self-starting spirit that had been a necessity in a frontier society was snuffed out by design. We’ve been taught that education is this constricted, standardized and homogenized thing that happens in buildings called schools in between the ringing of school bells.

Looks like the President’s job creation strategy works about as well as his other ‘initiatives’. What a guy.

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No wonder Johnny can’t read. His teacher can barely read, too.

Don Boudreaux, Chairman of the Economics Department at George Mason University, spanks a college president who ought to know better.

MIT President Susan Hockfield lists America’s “trade deficit in manufactured goods” as one of our “problems” (“Manufacturing a Recovery,” August 30).

I disagree that specializing in producing services such as neurosurgery, web design, and education – and then exchanging some of these for manufactured goods produced by people who specialize in producing such things as MP3 players, kitchen flatware, and snow domes and other trinkets – is a problem. But if I’m mistaken and Dr. Hockfield is correct, I wonder if she’s aware of her role in worsening this problem.

Every non-American student who enrolls at MIT spends dollars purchasing, not American manufactured goods, but American-produced educational services. In consequence, the U.S. trade deficit in manufactured goods rises with every non-American student enrolled at MIT.

If Dr. Hockfield truly worries about America’s trade deficit in manufactured goods, she should impose a moratorium on the admission of foreign students to MIT.

In addition, she can move to close MIT’s Sloan School of Management (whose graduates regularly export their services as business and professional advisors – thereby increasing America’s trade deficit in manufactured goods) and to close MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (whose graduates produce no manufactured goods and who also sell their services to foreigners and, hence, also intensify the “problem” of America’s trade deficit in manufactured goods).

If Dr. Hockfield is right, then a significant portion of America’s problems are being created right there on the Charles.

It’s truly amazing how many people with Ph.D.s turn out to have the intellectual power of a box of rocks. Perhaps the initials really mean ‘Phantastically Dumb’.

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The German newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung observed shortly before the Cancun summit last year: “The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”   What prompted this conclusion was a candid admission from a UN official closely involved with the climate negotiations, German economist Ottmar Edenhoffer: “But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.  Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this.  One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The fashionable-food meme comes up against reality in the Wall Street Journal.

Unfortunately, my homemade-lunches plan hasn’t been going too well. Just before the last school session ended, my son declared the spinach-rice concoction — a recipe I conjured to get some greens into him — “the healthiest lunch anyone in Millburn township eats,” so now, he simply won’t touch it. Ouch!

Inconvenient truth: The reason everybody wants to move to the U.S. is so that they don’t have to eat all that disgusting foreign food any more. Political correctness stops where a child’s stomach begins; kids are natural libertarians.

Thankfully, aside from the spinach-rice protests, my daughter still seems happy with the chopped fruit, carrots, yogurt, cheese, mixed vegetable rice and sandwiches I’ve been sending with her to daycare.

Well, that may be ‘home-cooked food’ back where Anusha Shrivastava came from, but not in America. Try Campbell’s soup or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and you’re problems are solved.

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Solyndra was touted by the Obama administration as a prime example of how green technology could deliver jobs. The President visited the facility in May of last year and said  “it is just a testament to American ingenuity and dynamism and the fact that we continue to have the best universities in the world, the best technology in the world, and most importantly the best workers in the world. And you guys all represent that. “

And we all see how well that worked out. Win for Obama.

I guess this is the new Obama Jobs Program: Send $525 million to a fashionable ‘green’ company that then goes bankrupt and puts over a thousand out of work. Not sure how this differs from the old Obama Jobs Program, but I guess he’ll keep doing the same thing until the result is different. (Now, what was that defined as…?)

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Post-’60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.

Yeah, it sucks to be us.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A secondary school teacher who also worked as an adult film star and stripper has defended his double life, saying that many of his colleagues spend their spare time drinking and smoking.

Oh, yeah, those are totally equivalent.

There’ll always be an England, but it’s quickly getting to look a lot like California.

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Nanny Bloomberg strikes again.

More scary paternalism in the name of public health from the Bloomberg crew: the New York City government has begun “legally requiring laboratories that do medical testing to report to the Health Department the results of blood-sugar tests for city residents with diabetes — along with the names, ages, and contact information on those patients. City officials are not only analyzing these data to assess patterns and changes in diabetes prevalence in the city, but are planning ‘interventions.’ … If you wish to keep your medical data confidential, you cannot.” Coercive public-health techniques originally seen as needed to combat communicable and infectious disease will now be deployed in hopes of correcting less-than-healthy individual behavior.

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Just what we need — another ‘cook’ pissing in the soup. You’d think they would learn.

Alan Krueger, President Barack Obama’s pick to head the White House Council of Economic Advisers, will likely serve as an administration advocate for more aggressive government intervention to revive job growth.

Oh, yeah, that’s worked so very well up to now; let’s have some more. ‘Thank you sir, may I have another?’

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One of the most dramatic looting and burning sprees during the London riots may have been orchestrated by a gang of professional robbers using the disorder as cover, it has emerged.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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“It should come as no surprise that organizers choose not to invite elected officials who have openly attacked worker’s rights or stood idly by while their political party fought to strip public workers of their right to collectively bargain,” Radtke said.

I guess that means Texas can ban Democrats from the Independence Day parade, they being supporters of dependency and fighters against individual rights.

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It’s not enough to know that the body of your old guitar is made of spruce and maple: What’s the bridge made of? If it’s ebony, do you have the paperwork to show when and where that wood was harvested and when and where it was made into a bridge? Is the nut holding the strings at the guitar’s headstock bone, or could it be ivory? “Even if you have no knowledge—despite Herculean efforts to obtain it—that some piece of your guitar, no matter how small, was obtained illegally, you lose your guitar forever,” Prof. Thomas has written. “Oh, and you’ll be fined $250 for that false (or missing) information in your Lacey Act Import Declaration.”

I’m all for not destroying the environment — and if Gibson is really doing something bad, then that should be dealt with. But some of these other situations just seem flat out ridiculous. Don’t the feds have more important things to do?

In short, no. To the bureaucrat in these degenerate modern times, all offenses are equally offensive; there is no proportionality. And, with the pervasive modern state, not all offenses can be addressed, so the bureaucrat will address those that give optimal return, i.e. the maximum amount of ‘See, I’m doing something to justify my salary!’ with minimal effort. Hence shutting down kids’ lemonade stands is more important than keeping Mexican drug cartel mules from crossing the border.

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Of course not. They’re all dictators themselves; it would set a bad precedent.

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The 22-year-old television presenter says she wishes that she had been dissuaded from covering her body with “art” work. “Fourteen-year-old girls should not be allowed to have tattoos,” she tells Mandrake. “The ones I have from that age are more like prison tattoos.”

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A man in China was left to die on the operating table after his doctors fled from a fire that had broken out in the next-door room, a hospital official in Shanghai admitted on Friday.

Let’s hear it for government-run health care.

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A Japanese company is taking the national campaign to reduce power consumption to extremes by prescribing an energy-saving haircut for all its staff.

I’m trying to think of what an ‘energy-saving haircut’ might be, and I’m drawing a blank.

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Two men were hurt by an explosion in the cab of their pickup. They said it was a drive-by bomb attack.

Hmm.

However, witnesses saw the men throwing something into a nearby field before the police arrived. Police later found unexploded mortar rounds in the field, and a “mortar-like device” in the truck.

Again, hmm.

All this occurred in Michigan, but my knowledge of the state’s ethnic geography is insufficient to determine how culturally-enriched Columbia Township is, or how likely it is the miscreants victims were adherents of the Religion of Peace. I suppose we’ll have to wait for the men to be charged and named by the police, if that ever happens.

Heartland of America, that’s Michigan.

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Why should they, when they know that Stupid Rich White People will do it for them?

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Environmentalists just aren’t happy with any technology that became useful after 1900. They want us to go back to riding horses and trains. Jerks.

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Jeremy Hill, a 33-year-old father of six, claims he killed the bear when it wandered in the yard where his children are playing. He faces prison over the death of a protected species.

Your tax dollars at work.

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Then I realized what had happened. Some computer had shown the airline that it was going was cheaper to bump and re-route everyone on our flight than to try to re-route the people on the Chattanooga flight. That way the airline wouldn’t have to put all of them up in a hotel. That made me feel a bit better about the safety of the airline, but not so good about our chances of making it to Florida on time.

Evidently the computer had said that our flight was one where they could put the fewest people in a hotel because almost everyone could reach their destination through other flights that afternoon. There was one destination that they couldn’t reach–Panama City Beach where we were going. In all fairness the people who helped arrange a hotel for us were courteous and friendly.  They gave us our tickets for the next day along with vouchers for the hotel and a few meals. I carefully checked the tickets to make sure we were all sitting together and discovered there were no seat numbers. I was told the seats would be assigned the next day.

After an uneventful (but not particularly restful) night in the hotel, we checked in our luggage and got our seat assignments. Unfortunately the person making the seat assignments decided that the best place for us to sit was in the very back–where the engine completely covers the windows and the kids can’t see out at all.  Maybe I didn’t adequately explain that yes we all needed to sit together and yes the ability to see out was somewhat important–something I had put a lot of effort into earlier when selecting our flights.

We finally did make it to the beach a day late. It was a nice week spent talking with family, watching dolphins, playing in the waves, making sand castles and swimming in the pool.

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It is simply a fact that people who work hard, finish their education, get married, and stay married are rarely — very rarely — poor.  There is no other proven formula for lifting Americans out of poverty.  None.  Food stamps don’t do it.  Medicaid doesn’t do it.  Soup kitchens don’t do it.  Good intentions don’t do it.  Hundreds of billions of dollars of transfer payments have not budged the poverty rate.

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 As The Economist reports this week, many women in the richer parts of Asia have gone on “marriage strike”, preferring the single life to the marital yoke. That is one reason why their fertility rates have fallen. And they are not alone. In 83 countries and territories around the world, according to the United Nations, women will not have enough daughters to replace themselves, unless fertility rates rise. In Hong Kong, for example, a cohort of 1,000 women would be expected to give birth to just 547 daughters, at today’s fertility rates. (That gives Hong Kong a “net reproduction rate” of just 0.547, in the language of demographers.) If nothing changed, those 547 daughters would be succeeded by just 299 daughters of their own, and so on. At that rate, according to some back-of-the-envelope calculations by The Economist, it would take about 25 generations for Hong Kong’s female population to shrink from 3.75m to just one. Given that Hong Kong’s average age of childbearing is 31.4 years, it could expect to give birth to its last woman in the year 2798. (That is some time after its neighbour, Macau, which has a higher reproduction rate, but a much smaller population.) By the same unflinching logic, Japan, Germany, Russia, Italy and Spain will not see out the next millennium. Even China, which has a recorded history stretching back at least 3,700 years, has only about 1,500 years left—if present trends continued unbroken.

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Dr. Jackelinne Pilar Villalobos was one of Brooklyn’s few female English and Spanish-speaking obstetricians. She loved the city and her patients, and never wanted to leave — but 18 months ago, she moved to Houston, where we’re delighted to have her.

Villalobos’ journey to Texas began in 2003, when our Legislature reformed Texas’ legal system — including sweeping medical-malpractice reforms. Back then, doctors in New York and Texas were paying about the same for medical-liability insurance. In Villalobos’ case, it was more than $100,000.

But under the Texas reforms, rates immediately began to fall — 15 percent in the first year alone. Since 2003, medical liability rates in New York have increased more than 60 percent; in Texas, they’ve dropped by 54 percent.

I guess these are some of the ‘freeloaders’ we can expect from places like Michigan.

By 2009, Villalobos’ premium was $186,000 — with a rate hike of 5 percent to 12 percent expected within the year. Even delivering as many as 10 babies a day, she couldn’t practice enough medicine to even cover her cost of doing business.

But she didn’t give up. She took a second job in a free clinic so that the clinic would help pay the insurance premiums — and she went to Albany to explain the need for lawsuit reform.

Her sister, a trial attorney in New York, finally told her to “pack her bags and go” — the trial bar has too much influence in Albany, she warned; the law will never change. Reluctantly, Villalobos left for Texas.

No wonder trial lawyers hate Rick Perry.

Meanwhile, New York has used tax dollars to create a “Patient Compensation Fund” as a type of malpractice coverage and a way of inducing physicians to stay in New York. It’s not working — frivolous suits have not abated; it’s just more money flowing to the plaintiff’s bar, this time from the taxpayers.

Of course — New York has some of the finest legislators that money can buy.

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They’re probably waiting to see when he’ll trade in his current wife for a new one. The first one lasted 18 years, the second 19; this one has 11 years in, so she’s got another eight or nine left.

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Increasingly, skin color has little to do with it — it’s the dysfunctional culture.

One of the most striking things about the England riots is where they did not happen: Yorkshire, the North East, Wales and Scotland. These areas contain some of the worst pockets of unemployment in the country. But they are also characterised by a powerful sense of regional or national identity and difference that cuts across all classes and binds them together. And it is this, I am sure, which has inoculated them against the disease of “gangsta” culture and its attendant, indiscriminate violence.

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And Obama plays golf.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Boy, those strict gun control laws really work, don’t they? They certainly prevent ordinary citizens from defending themselves.

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The US has lost or is on the verge of losing its ability to develop and manufacture a slew of high-tech products. Amazon’s Kindle 2 couldn’t be made in the US, even if Amazon wanted to:

• The flex circuit connectors are made in China because the US supplier base migrated to Asia.
• The electrophoretic display is made in Taiwan because the expertise developed from producting flat-panel LCDs migrated to Asia with semiconductor manufacturing.
• The highly polished injection-molded case is made in China because the US supplier base eroded as the manufacture of toys, consumer electronics and computers migrated to China.
• The wireless card is made in South Korea because that country  became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets.
• The controller board is made in China because US companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia.
• The Lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook computers.

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The Obama administration has chosen a Friday afternoon in the summer to put out the news that it is refusing New York City’s request to prevent food stamp recipients in the city from using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to pay for soda or other sugary drinks. So if you are poor enough for food stamps – which are subject to only an income test, not an asset test — you have a federal entitlement to spend the vouchers on full-calorie Coca-Cola or Pepsi.

‘I want to go to America. I want to see a country where the poor people are fat.’

Again, as a general matter, I don’t think government should tell anyone what they should or shouldn’t eat or drink, and for those reasons I’ve opposed proposed taxes aimed at sugary beverages. But if food stamps are really a Nutritional Assistance program, it’s not really clear to me how Coke and Pepsi fit into that.

Better not tell Michelle.

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Boy, that Obama stimulus really worked out great, didn’t it? Wonder what he’ll come up next time — cancer, maybe?

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These have always struck me as probably being uncomfortable, putting too much artificial space between the toes. On the other hand, if you’re trying to convince people that you’ve found BigFoot, this would seem a good start.

Read it. And watch the video.

As of Thursday morning, there have been 202 incidents of sabotage since 45,000 Communications Workers of American (CWA) and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) members went out on strike to preserve their Cadillac health plans.

Of course, that was Thursday morning and, since the strike has been going on for about 10 days, the number of incidents caused by unionunknown vandals will have likely increased, which makes the number cited in this Verizon-prepared video already outdated….

Look for … the Union label….

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Was it something he said?

The Other McCain has an insight.

After all, why spoil a good thing?

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Another day, another flashmob story.  A bunch of people in Baltimore used the internet (platform unspecified) to organize a stop and rob.

More accurately, a bunch of black people. Guess criminals don’t treasure diversity as much as the Crust does.

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Congress? Who pays any attention to Congress?

The Obama administration announced Thursday that it would launch a case-by-case review of illegal immigrants slated for deportation, in a move that could grant a reprieve to so-called DREAM Act beneficiaries and thousands of others.

The DREAM Act is a proposal in Congress to give illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children a chance at legal status if they complete two years of college or military service. Though the bill has not passed, supporters and critics alike suggested Thursday’s announcement could serve to unilaterally carry out its provisions.

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Immigrant rights advocates this week are organizing protests against a federal initiative aimed at deporting illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes.

There can be no legitimate objection to such a program. In fact, the government ought to consider it a core duty and function to get rid of such people.

But critics of the program have staged protests in cities across the country this week, claiming Secure Communities should be terminated on the grounds that it snares minor offenders, many of whom are never even convicted of a crime, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Apparently these ‘critics of the program’ don’t know what ‘illegal’ means in the phrase ‘illegal immigrant’. If someone is in this country illegally, then they are by definition a criminal, and not a ‘minor offender’.

George Will turns over a rock.

We are in the fifth month of the Libyan intervention that Barack Obama’s administration said would involve “days, not weeks,” an undertaking about which Prime Minister David Cameron was much more enthusiastic than Obama, who rarely mentions it. The intervention resulted from Cameron’s and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s sudden zest for waging humanitarian war.

In 2002, during preparations for the invasion of Iraq, the then head of the British army, returning from a Washington visit, told Hastings, “Mass matters — and we don’t have it.” Hastings notes that the U.S. Marine Corps’ air wing is larger than the Royal Air Force. Americans know that “if the British army shrinks as scheduled after withdrawal from Afghanistan, we shall thereafter be able to deploy only a single brigade group of 7,000 to 8,000 men for sustained operations overseas.”

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Soya got pregnant by a 17-year-old boyfriend who is allowed by Janis to stay overnight at the family home.
Jobless single mum Janis, 48, said she was delighted because the council will now have to give her a bigger house. . . .

She added: “Our three-bedroom place was already overcrowded with her sisters Coco and Ritzy, her brother Tarot, Soya’s boyfriend Jake and one of her sister’s babies.

“Once the new baby comes the council will have to find us a place with four or five bedrooms. . . .
“I’m sure she’ll make a wonderful mum and will teach her children discipline like I have.”

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With around 25 employees, John King owns one of the largest non-union electrical contracting businesses in the Toledo, Ohio area. As a non-union contractor, his business happens to be doing well at a time when unions in the construction industry are suffering. This, it seems, has made the usual animosity unions have for him even greater, making him a prime target of union thugs. So much so, that one of them tried to kill him last week at his home.

Hey, they aren’t called ‘union thugs’ for nothing.

Since he’s been in business, in addition to the legal battles and verbal abuse, King’s company has been vandalized and threatened on numerous occasions.

“Back then, it was nothing to have to regularly buy a new set of tires.” King said during a telephone interview on Tuesday. “The ice pick was the weapon of choice.”

Until Wednesday, the worst of the union attacks on King and his business came in the mid-eighties during the UAW strike at AP Parts. During a lull during the lengthy strike, King’s business was picketed by more than 50 IBEW picketers. This was at a time when he only had eight or nine employees. One of his employees, whose car was trashed by the union picketers, was also beaten up by IBEW thugs.

Look for … the Union label….

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The End Times are very near….