Read it.

And, apparently, made a good case.

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Let’s lock the animal-rights environmentalists and the alternative-energy environmentalists in a room with switchblades and see who walks out.

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A comparison of the actual temperature record at one of the ‘climategate’ collection points compared to what the Global Warming people are claiming it is. Hint: Not even close.

There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we’ve been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they “homogenize” it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there’s a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.

The answer is, these graphs all use the raw GHCN data. But the IPCC uses the “adjusted” data. GHCN adjusts the data to remove what it calls “inhomogeneities”. So on a whim I thought I’d take a look at the first station on the list, Darwin Airport, so I could see what an inhomogeneity might look like when it was at home. And I could find out how large the GHCN adjustment for Darwin inhomogeneities was.

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

Read it.

Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Didn’t know they did that sort of thing in Ireland … Thank God granny’s dead….

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A hint from God to stay away from Nepal.

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A hint from God to stay home.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A couple who claim social services “kidnapped” their baby daughter for adoption are due to flee Britain today to prevent their unborn child being taken into care.

The couple allege that police and council staff forced their way into their home and snatched the girl despite no allegation made against them ever having been proven.

The father, a lorry driver, told the Daily Telegraph: “We are absolutely terrified that social services will do exactly the same thing with our baby boy as they did with our daughter.

“They have already requested that we attend meetings for a pre-birth risk assessment but we are not taking any chances, so we’re leaving immediately.

A rational concern, it would appear.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here … wherever busybodies can find power and wealth working for the government — i.e., anywhere.

Civil Liberties Group Loses $20 Million Donor

A longtime anonymous donor to the American Civil Liberties Union has withdrawn his annual gift of more than $20 million, punching a 25 percent hole in its annual operating budget and forcing cutbacks in operations.

A.C.L.U. board members, who insisted on anonymity because the loss of the gift was reported in an executive session of their meeting, identified the donor as David Gelbaum, who made a fortune as a hedge fund manager and is now better known as a major investor in clean technology.

So the guy gave them over $100 million on the sole condition that he remain anonymous, and as soon as he stops giving, they out him? That rather illustrates the moral qualities of the ACLU board members, doesn’t it? Hope it gives him a warm fuzzy.

Check it out.

Read it.

Dr Dave Reay, senior lecturer in carbon management at Edinburgh University, has calculated that filter coffee is responsible for 50 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than its cheaper counterpart.

Don’t expect that to sit well with the Crust.

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Those French, they’re so hospitable.

Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister said: “This is another gesture of contempt from France to Britain. The only result of this will be to encourage more potential illegal immigrants to try to break our laws.

Oh, ya think?

Power Line connects the dots.

As we have noted many times, the United States is the only country in the world that deliberately fails to develop its own energy resources. Other than instituting price controls, this is the single most destructive economic policy that a country can pursue, which is why no one does it except us.

With a market capitalization of more than $220 billion, Petrobras is one of the world’s 10 biggest companies. Over the past two years, it has been the most frequently traded foreign company on the New York Stock Exchange, trade data show. Among investors bullish on Petrobras is George Soros, who last year made the oil company the largest single holding in his investment fund, according to Bloomberg.

That’s right: the Godfather of the Democratic Party, who exerts his enormous political influence to prevent American oil companies from developing our own petroleum resources in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, has placed his biggest bet–not on the United States, but on Brazil. If Exxon Mobil can’t compete in the Caribbean with Petrobras, the value of Soros’s Petrobras investment will skyrocket. That’s the sort of thievery that lies behind the Democratic Party’s deliberate hobbling of the American economy.

Read it.

Some mistakes are so big that only smart people are tempted to make them. One is the faith in Big Government.

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A long, long time ago, while doing my first round of graduate studies, I took a class that focused on contemporary cults, sects and religious movements and their impact on church-state law. Now before everyone goes nuts talking about what is and what is not a “cult,” please be aware that we were working primarily with doctrinal definitions (as opposed to focusing on some of the more controversial elements of sociology).

They can’t be a cult – cults have principles.

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One lesson that Democrats learned from the failure of HillaryCare in 1994 is that they had to buy the silence, if not the outright support, of the business class. They’ve done this brilliantly by peddling the illusion that ObamaCare will “lower costs” for employers.

But slowly as the legislative details become clear, it is dawning on executives of businesses large and small that reform is boiling down to a huge tax increase to finance a gigantic new entitlement. The cost and quality of care are afterthoughts that will both suffer, as a growing roll of medical experts have been writing on these pages.

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That’s precisely what happened in 2007 to Paul Wolfowitz, who was run out of the World Bank on the pretext that he had given his girlfriend a raise. In fact, Mr. Wolfowitz had made bank officials aware that his girlfriend already worked at the bank before he accepted the job as president, and bank officials had raised no objection to the job change that removed his girlfriend from any direct reporting to Mr. Wolfowitz. The ethical uproar was a politically convenient excuse, fanned by the media, to oust Mr. Wolfowitz when his real offense was that he was too hard on corruption.

So it’s going to be fascinating to see how the press corps and political class react to the news that Montana Senator Max Baucus recommended a staff member who was his girlfriend for the plum job of U.S. Attorney. Mr. Baucus disclosed the attempted sweetheart deal early Saturday after media inquiries made clear the story was breaking. The 67-year-old Senator disclosed that he had recommended Melodee Hanes and two others earlier this year for the U.S. Attorney post in Montana. While Presidents appoint U.S. attorneys, by tradition home-state Senators have significant influence in the selection, especially Senators from the same party as the President.

My advice: Don’t hold your breath waiting for it.

Eric Raymond on Climategate.

That’s a theme in a lot of recent revelations. As long as the lid was on the CRU’s fraud, nobody dared speak up about for fear of being dismissed as a crank. Now that the AGW crowd’s power to suppress dissent has been broken, expect to hear a lot more actual scientists — not politicians, but scientists — coming forward to confirm that the emperor has no clothes.

Read it.

Rather a long way from Tennyson here, aren’t we?

But, of course, the same could be said for modern Britain as a hole whole.

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Liam Clancy, who died on December 4 aged 74, was the last surviving member of the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, the first and arguably the most authentic of the Irish folk groups to make an impact far beyond their homeland over the last half-century; rated by Bob Dylan “the best ballad singer I ever heard in my life”, he was also a fine guitarist.

I have an album on which Tommy Makem introduces Liam as ‘the young fellow over there, Liam Clancy’. Makes me feel old, I’m telling you.

Read it.

Schumpeter. Creative destruction. You can look it up.

Read it. And watch the video.

The U.S. unemployment numbers are out today, and most headlines will show that the U.S. unemployment rate in November was 10.0 percent, down from 10.2 percent in October. That number is depressingly large, but even that under-counts the true number of unemployed. For instance, it doesn’t count those people who don’t have a job and have given up looking for one, or those who have found marginal part-time work but still can’t make ends meet and are still looking for a full-time job.

The government keeps stats on all of these “marginally attached workers” and people “employed part time for economic reasons” (rather than by choice). If you add all of those people in, the total unemployment rate in the U.S. is 17.2 percent, compared to 12.6 percent a year ago. The only good news is that number is down from 17.5 percent in October.

And we’re supposed to put our health care in the hands of people who lie to us this way. What a great idea.

Check it out.

Really, it’s not all that hard to get that many dicks in one place at a University….

Read it.

Remember too that when you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And indeed federal revenues have been rising faster than median wages for decades now, thanks to the rich getting ever richer.

Given the government’s insatiable appetite for cash, it’s only natural that it would prefer to tax plutocrats, spending some of that money on poorer Americans, rather than move to a world where poorer Americans earn more (but still don’t pay that much in taxes), and the plutocrats earn less, depriving the national fisc of untold billions in revenue.

The government’s interests, then, are naturally aligned with those of the plutocrats — and when that happens, the chances of change naturally drop to zero.

Read it.

If the cost of assembling a Big Mac were higher than its selling price, McDonald’s would soon drop it from the menu. Capitalists know that when you’re losing money on each unit of production, you can’t make it up in volume. The lesson has dawned on the United States Mint, which reports that because of the high price of zinc and copper, manufacturing a penny now costs 1.38 cents.

This development brings to mind economist Ludwig von Mises’ observation about the causes of inflation. “Government,” he said, “is the only agency which can take a useful commodity like paper, slap some ink on it, and make it totally worthless.”

I remember when a penny was worth something. But that was a while ago.

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I guess they were right.

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

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Three years ago, a Soviet defector was assassinated on British soil. Why was he murdered? And who was behind it? In the most detailed account of the killing yet, former Russian military intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky reveals all.

Few bear in mind that, before democracy broke out in Russia, Vladimir Putin was a career KGB officer. Would you trust one of Heydrich’s boys in charge of post-war Germany?

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

The Other McCain says:

Gluteoplasty? She died trying to get a bigger butt? I’m sorry, but why didn’t someone tell her about the miraculous American butt-growth formula known as bacon double cheeseburger?

A senseless tragedy . . .

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When the D.C. Council votes Tuesday on a historic measure to legalize same-sex marriage in the District, one of the most visible faces of opposition will be an unlikely one: Catholic Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl, a mild-mannered man known for compromise, pragmatism and working behind the scenes.

That’s what happens with ‘compromise’ and ‘pragmatism’, which is prog-speak for ‘giving in’. Eventually you reach a point where you either (a) sell out completely, and the angels weep for you, or (b) you suddenly discover that the slippery slope is more slippery than you realized, and you go ‘Aaaaaaaaaaugh!’, thus pissing off the people who thought that they had rolled you. Either way you look like a moron. NTTAWWT.

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Not surprising, of course, to those of us who rightly consider facebook a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot exercise in narcissism. Whence comes this kick-me urge to broadcast private information to the entire world? Hopefully natural selection will delete these people from the gene pool.

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A fairly strong reminder that the U.N. is a force for evil in the world.

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Most climatology papers submitted for peer review rely on large, complex and custom-written computer programs to produce their findings. The code for these programs is never provided to peer reviewers and even if it was, the peer climatologists doing the reviewing lack the time, resources and expertise to verify that the software works as its creators claim.

Even if the peer reviewers in climatology are as honest and objective as humanly possible, they cannot honestly say that they have actually preformed a peer review to the standards of other fields like chemistry or physics which use well-understood scientific hardware. (Other fields that rely on heavily on custom-written software have the same problem.)

Read it.

The emails and documents leaked last week from some of the world’s leading climatologists offer a rich trove of evidence that scientists were massaging the data and corrupting the scientific process to support their own preconceptions. But they also offer the beginnings of an explanation for why. In the words of another famous leaker, follow the money.

Here it all is in a nutshell.

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His sentence was commuted due to the “mercy” of then governor Mike Huckabee who cited his tender years at the time his crimes were committed. Should Clemmons turn out to be responsible for the killings of the four police officers, I’d say Mike Huckabee should hang up his further political aspirations in America for good. This would be Huckabee’s Willie Horton moment only several orders of magnitude larger.

Read it.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S recent trip to China reflects a symbiotic relationship at the heart of the global economy: China uses American spending power to enlarge its private sector, while America uses Chinese lending power to expand its public sector. Yet this arrangement may unravel in a dangerous way, and if it does, the most likely culprit will be Chinese economic overcapacity.

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It is an iron-clad rule, presumably taught in journalism schools, that when discussing black single mothers and their children, one must never, ever ask: Who and where is the father, and how many fathers are there?  Tens of thousands of articles have been written about the struggles of black single mothers, and the appearance of their children is always treated as a virgin birth. Not only are there no fathers in sight in such articles, there is no curiosity about where the  fathers are and why they’re not stepping up to the plate.  Instead, the reader will learn in great detail either about the callous lack of taxpayer-funded social services or, as in the present article on black infant mortality, about the provisions that a wise and benevolent government has made available to the mothers and their miraculously-conceived children, who seem to appear with the same inevitability as the tides.

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The ICC’s chief prosecutor, though, has no intention of waiting for Washington to submit to the court’s authority. Luis Moreno Ocampo says he already has jurisdiction—at least with respect to Afghanistan.

Because Kabul in 2003 ratified the Rome Statute—the ICC’s founding treaty—all soldiers on Afghan territory, even those from nontreaty countries, fall under the ICC’s oversight, Mr. Ocampo told me. And the chief prosecutor says he is already conducting a “preliminary examination” into whether NATO troops, including American soldiers, fighting the Taliban may have to be put in the dock.

And Obama would be just the guy to surrender to it. Give the man some cheese, it’s traditional.

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Think only India has castes? Think again — America is planted thick with them.

Liberalism has built an entire “Western Sharia Law” around this; a religion inextricably intertwined with a way of governing. If you’re a straight white guy, you get one package of rights & responsibilities; if you’re black, you get another, if you’re gay you get another, if you’re a woman you get another. Expectations are made. If you’re Latino, you m-u-u-u-s-t support illegal immigration even if it offends you deeply — even if the reason for the offense, is that you and your relatives, or your grandparents, meticulously followed the rules when coming here. And we already know from the good Rev. Jesse Jackson that “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.” Of course you can’t. Expectations have been made.

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Whatever floats your boat….

Ponder the fact that most of the world’s fashionable wacky ideas are underwritten by people who inherited money from more productive ancestors. Perhaps massive inheritance taxes aren’t such a bad idea after all.

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A study of 20 titles, including many from the Call of Duty and Tom Clancy series, carried out by Pro Juvenile – an organisation which aims to protect kids from unlimited videogame violence – and Trial, which fights to prevent people who commit war crimes getting away with it, found that most of the games contained “elements that violate… international standards”.

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

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

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I thought that rude staff were the hallmark of a first-class restaurant?

A spokesman for the Lehigh Pub said the restaurant menu makes it clear parties of six or more have a mandatory 18 per cent gratuity.

Uh, guys, if it’s mandatory, it’s not a gratuity, it’s a service surcharge. I’d love to be the lawyer on this one.

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The Obama administration says the answer to that question, or at least part of the answer, is the Chihuahuan Desert. Send illegals across the border at San Diego, immigration authorities have argued, and they’ll just hit a couple of happy hours in Tijuana before coming right back across to the United States. But get them on the other side of a vast and inhospitable desert, and the heat and the cactuses and the coachwhip snakes will do what the U.S. Border Patrol cannot: Keep Mexicans in Mexico.

It’s a great theory, with one glaring flaw: It assumes that the Mexican authorities are going to transport deportees across the desert and back to their hometowns in the interior. Mexico is not going to do that. Mexico is a corrupt and oligarchic backwater, and illegal immigration is its main anti-poverty program. Anybody who has even a passing familiarity with the Mexican federal law-enforcement authorities knows better than to expect them to behave responsibly. And it’s not just negligence — Mexico actively encourages its poorest citizens to break north and send remittances (about $25 billion last year) south. Mexico exports its poor to the United States because it’s a lot cheaper than trying to care for them itself and, while the Mexican government has a woefully inadequate infrastructure for providing basic social services, it has a pretty good infrastructure, both formal and informal, for shunting its unwanted poor into the United States. It even issues its own identification card to illegals, the matricula consular, which is accepted as valid ID by some U.S. government agencies. The idea that deportees are going to get out of those Wackenhut buses convoying them down to Presidio and be taken inland by some putative El Wackenhut is preposterous.

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It’s getting pretty bad when even the British notice.

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No mention of whether it comes with a dynamite belt among its fashion accessories.

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A Rome bank has what it thinks is the solution: to make the jobs hereditary. Under a deal signed with unions this week, 76 employees of Banca di Credito Cooperativo di Roma (BCC di Roma) must take early retirement but they will get a choice: either take a payoff or leave your job to your son or daughter (or indeed any relative “up to the third degree”, which would allow the post to be left even to great-nieces and nephews).

Everything old is new again.

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Several years ago, while researching the extensive and confusing data on radical Islam in Pakistan, I read a number of articles by B. Raman and other experts on Indian national security. The wealth of information they presented about Pakistan’s devious maneuvers made me realize that Pakistan is one of the three epicenters of the Great Jihad, with the other two being Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In the heat of events during the fall of 2001 — when President Bush lauded Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan as a “friend of the United States” — it was easy to forget that the Taliban had been the creation of Pakistan’s security services, and were their preferred means of controlling Afghanistan.

Just another wonderful day in the neighborhood….

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It is a complicated story, involving a whole chunk of the Periodic Table, high secrecy, patent battles and conspiracy theory.

But it boils down to this – 97% of the specialist metals that are crucial to green technology are currently mined in China.

China is already limiting exports and has plans to limit them some more. As a result much of the hi-tech metals industry is also moving to China.