Month: September 2006

…from a U.S. Senator? Yeh, James Inhoffe, who—appart from the now usual *sigh* grammatical and word usage gaffes so common among supposedly literate people—stuck it to climate alarmists* in a speech delivered from the Senate floor, Monday. All the climate alarmists in the Senate, of course, stuck their fingers in their ears and made “la-la-la-la” sounds when he said such things as

…I would like to summarize some of the recent developments in the controversy over whether or not humans have created a climate catastrophe. One of the key aspects that the United Nations, environmental groups and the media have promoted as the “smoking gun” of proof of catastrophic global warming is the so-called ‘hockey stick’ temperature graph by climate scientist Michael Mann and his colleagues.

This graph purported to show that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, then spiked upward in the 20th century presumably due to human activity. Mann, who also co-publishes a global warming propaganda blog reportedly set up with the help of an environmental group, had his “Hockey Stick” come under severe scrutiny.

The “hockey stick” was completely and thoroughly broken once and for all in 2006. Several years ago, two Canadian researchers tore apart the statistical foundation for the hockey stick. In 2006, both the National Academy of Sciences and an independent researcher further refuted the foundation of the “hockey stick.”

The National Academy of Sciences report reaffirmed the existence of the Medieval Warm Period from about 900 AD to 1300 AD and the Little Ice Age from about 1500 to 1850. Both of these periods occurred long before the invention of the SUV or human industrial activity could have possibly impacted the Earth’s climate. In fact, scientists believe the Earth was warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, when the Vikings grew crops in Greenland.

All of that is common knowledge for folks who’ve been paying attention to history, let alone recent (deeply-buried) news articles. That a U.S. Senator has twigged to the Medieval Warm Period and the Maunder Minimum that put paid to it IS news, though. *heh* News that won’t get very far with the Mass Media Podpeople.

Oh, well. The fact that when Greenland was settled, about a millennium ago, it was farmable and was for some time a net exporter of goods (primarily grain and dairy products!) is little known, largely because of an apparent conspiracy (of dunces) to turn Americans into historically ignorant sheeple, prey for alarmist wolves. Oh! But that terrible “global warming” led to mass epidemics, didn’t it? Well, yeh, indirectly. Longer growing seasons led to a population explosion in Europe (and massive increases in wealth, BTW), which, in the existing society meant more rats to spread the plague brought back from trade with China.

Still and all, the warm climate of the Medieval Warm period allowed Europe to essentially breed itself out of trouble, resulting in conditions favorable to the Rennaisance…

Oops. The refining and expansion of Western Civilization. A definitely “bad thing” to climate alarmists in general. Led to the development of *shudder* science and advanced technologies. Things to be eschewed in favor of voodooism (like Mann’s “hockey stick”) and shrill shouting in Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind cant.

Oh, yeh: h.t. Chaos Manor Musings

While the pope may have backed down from the “schoolyard bully” and issued and apology (of sorts, where an apology of ANY sort is inexcusable), others have taken the popes comments that so inflamed an easily-provoked bunch of savages and “revised and extended” them in a way that offers food for thought. Joshua Trevino, at The Brussels Journal is one such.

As we look toward the plight of the Christians of the Middle East at large, we must be reminded that they are an embattled minority in large part because their doctrinal precepts are simply more humane… The superior creed in the eyes of history may be that with the more force and fury on its side; but in the eyes of history’s God, the criteria for rectitude are doubtless rather different.

Worth reading. Anyone with two eyes and a working synapse in their cranium could—and probably has—thought or said (perhaps even thoughtfully said :-)) as much as Trevino, though likely not in so measured a tone. *heh*

Noted at TMH’s Bacon Bits and The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns.

Hey, boys and girls! Let’s all show our tolerance—nay! our overwhelming support!—for the “Religion of Peace” *choke-gag* during the month of Ramadan. I say lets get a movement going to collect food for these stone age savages and ship it by the cargo container lot to alla those poor, needy Mohammedan savages. How about this as a menu suggestion?

Hey! At least then they could have more brains to play lying, savage, muderous brutes with than they have now… and with the added dietary cholesterol, maybe they’d find their trip to Islamic “paradise” (read, “the ninth level of hell”) hurried along, too.

This is an Open Trackbacks Alliance post, open all weekend long. Link to this post and then track back.

---

Click on over to Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor Musings to see what the following is in response to…

The purpose of TSA is to demonstrate to the people of these United States that we are no longer citizens. It serves that purpose well. We are now subjects, and we are to be deferential to those who cannot get better jobs than as TSA screeners. As you say, the disruption to air travel is an effective tool of economic warfare. Even as insanely rich as we are, this is costly. And of course the principle of “equality” (meaning equal misery) demands that we treat 80 year old grandmothers exactly the same as we treat bearded young men clutching Korans and glancing nervously about.

Our masters have gone barking mad, and there seems to be no way to cure this. Electing Democrats won’t do it. They’ll do worse.

Competent Empire we might be able to tolerate. What we have now is clowns in command.

While you’re there, search his site for other references to the Thousands Standing Around… *heh*

---

This is an Open Trackbacks Alliance post. Link to this post and then track back. If you want to host your own linkfests, check out

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.

Crossposted from Stop The ACLU:

In case you haven’t heard, a group of dissenters from the ACLU are rebelling and calling for a change in the current leadership of the main organization. The summary of things this new group is fed up with is hypocrisy and the ACLU is full of it. Purging the ACLU of its hypocrisy is bound to be a goliath task.

Where do we even begin with the ACLU’s hypocrisy? How about its odd stance on the Second Amendment? They have decided that the term “the people” that is contained in the Second Amendment does not apply to “the people” as it does in all of the other rights contained in the Bill of Rights. They defend even the most radical in free speech for individuals, but somehow have adopted the opposite position on the Second Amendment. Surely it couldn’t be that the Second Amendment doesn’t fall within the boundaries of their liberal agenda! Could it? Continue reading “Stop the ACLU”

…though some might not see it that way.

h.t. The Pirate’s Cove by way of Rightlinx via MsUnderestimated

Up on the rooftops (click, click click) at TMH’s Bacon Bits and Stuck On Stupid (who has the companion graphic of the day for the video above), and down through the chimney at Basil’s Blog and The Conservative Cat.

13 things that tell you you’re living in The Land of the Enstupiated and the Home of the Sheeple:

1. Schools are pressured (by remote educrats) to “mainstream” kids who are mentally and/or physically incapable of learning to so much as tie their own shoes.

2. Those same schools are required to have 100% (ALL students) “at ‘proficient level'” in core subjects by X date.

3. Time and resources that might otherwise be used to actually, well, teach the core subjects to kids who are able to, well, actually learn the core subjects is spent instead teaching the uneducable how to use a pencil without causing severe bodily harm to themselves and others. RESULTING IN

4. Frustrating the trainable but uneducable children AND

5. Cheating the educable (though perhaps just barely, after a few years of “prisons for kids”) children of an education AND

6. Placing pressure on teachers (especially the growing number who are seriously subliterate and don’t even know it) who have been asked to do the impossible (bring ALL children to “proficient levels” in core subjects… that have been dumbed down already) THEREBY

7. Increasing school administrators’ call for more teachers, more funding (and thus, more power to screw up teaching and learning for teachers and, well, potential learners) AND

8. Increasing remote educrats’ turf/funding/ability to meddle and further bring schools to ruination BY MEANS OF

9. An outcry for “Somebody to do something” DIRECTED AT

10. The Feddle Gummint, which in its wisdom runs what is arguably the best model in the country for how to make stupid people by means of an “education system” (the Washington D.C. public schools) WHICH IN TURN

11. Commissions a study WHICH

12. Discovers—alas and alack!—that children aren’t even learning to read and comprehend simple English (producing adults who cannot understand a bus schedule, directions for taking prescription meds or a newspaper editorial, even though they are college graduates!) AND SO

13. Buries those facts in bureaucratese and proclaims that the Emperor’s New Clothes are just jim-dandy and everyone ought to be wearing them!

(Yeh, yeh, I know: not exactly a pretty picture for an inaugural T-13, but what do you expect from a curmudgeon before his third cuppa joe in the ayem, anyway?)

See a few experienced T-13ers’ entries at Thirsday Thirteen.

This is an Open Trackbacks Alliance post. Link to this post and then track back. If you want to host your own linkfests, check out

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.

Now, on to the Fair Tax blogburst. Today’s blogburst features a few letters to editors and editorials from several newspapers around the country, collected by Terry, of The Right Track.

Folks, because “repetition aids learning” I’ll say it again: your grandchildren will either bless or curse your memory depending on how you decide to jump on this issue. Choose well.

---

by TD of The Right Track

A quick and dirty search through Google News for articles, news, and editorials revealed no less than 14 pieces written in the last month regarding the FairTax. Fully 1/3 of those were editorials agreeing with the need for the FairTax.

A sampling:

From the Denver Daily News, an editorial titled “FairTax, not flat tax, needed to fix nation’s taxation woes“:

Dear editor,

The IRS needs to be eliminated and replaced with the FairTax, not the flat tax, as suggested by columnist Aaron Harber in Monday’s Denver Daily News.

The flat tax changes absolutely nothing — the IRS, tax code, regulations, 16th Amendment, corporate taxation and payroll taxes (the way Social Security is funded) stay exactly the same under the flat tax.

At best, the flat tax is temporary, the wrong direction to move towards simplification.

Continue reading “Fair Tax/OTA”

wouldn’t it be a nice lil diversion from the normal press of almost unremitting bad news generated by political loons if the feds, instead of spending billions of dollars harrassing ordinary citizens, would spend a few billions searching the world for a pin whose head was small enough to contain the Clintoons’ moral precepts (and leave room for the contents of the intelligence expressed on the Demoncrappic Underpants)?

It’d be quite a thing to watch: nightly updates on the exploits of intrepid adventurers in the nanoworld.

Now, back to our regular programming. (Oh, BTW, one small light in the darkness: the House passed the Public Expression Of Religion Act: 244 to 173, today. On to the Senate, where poltroons, buffons and those who are bent on modeling Evil Incarnate can have a chance to pull its teeth… *sigh*)

…available ONLY to Opera Browser users (Download Opera 9.02 via the link in my left sidebar). Oh. Just gave you the link anyway… 😉

Opera 9.01+ Browser users: check out the lil “Widgetize this feed” button on my left sidebar. Neat. It doesn’t improve the content here (guys: only more crossposts and guest posting can do that :-)), but it makes accessing it a bit cooler.

Getcher own here.

Latest Opera build: 9.02 final (9.02 build 8585).