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Sunday, November 29, 2009

All Mum on Global Warming

None of my Global Warming enthusiast friends are peeping right now. Hmmm. Maybe it's because the theory that co2 is driving climate change is slowly but assuredly unraveling, as all politically backed "scientific" theories do. The Earth warms, and cools, and warms again. Suddenly our lawnmowers and autos and jets are the cause. Wow. What an easy target, for a skeptic, like me.

I wish more enthusiasts would go on the record, on this blog, proclaiming the truth of Global Warming. Later, I'll use the posts to further rub it in. My point, always, is that science should be free of politics, and it's clear in this particular debate that pure science in this sense is an obvious illusion. Time will only make this point stronger.

So, speak up, you Global Warming folks! You're already on record on the blog, but let's hear more.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Where can I get "Mike's Trick"?

Here's the story on the Global Warming email leak. Original story from CBS News. From ZDNET.

Hide the Decline

Thanks alot, Global Warming folks. What I've been saying all along. It's not that I have super knowledge of non-global warming, it's that I'm capable of spotting the intrusion of politics into science. That doesn't take a scientist. Now the one bastion of non-political thinking, science, is further eroded in the eye of the public. The hypothesis that "Co2 is driving climate change", as opposed to other hypotheses (like that sun perturbations are more salient), we assumed would be evaluated on pure scientific merits. That's science. And I'm afraid the Global Warming enthusiasts following the IPCC either don't care about unadulerated science if it runs counter to political aims, or they really do, and they've been duped.

By the way, an interesting factoid: it was Margaret Thatcher, on the Right, who first gave political prominence to the view that it could be man-made causes responsible for variations in climate temp. Why? She was seeking a counter to the power of the coal miners unions, who would instigate strikes that threatened her ministry. This irony I'll let stand without further comment.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Global Warming Swindle

Global Warming is such complete bull shit that your IQ automatically drops (in my estimation) if you really think it's an established scientific fact, like foot fungus. You dimwits. Trying to help the planet by selling your epistemic souls. Watch The Great Global Warming Swindle, a documentary that challenges the Global Warming hypothesis and goes a long way toward de-politicizing what has become a knee jerk political position. Hey, I watched Al Gores An Inconvenient Truth, jerks, so do me a favor and watch the documentary. Then comment.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan

On the back and forth in the media as to whether the Fort Hood suspected shooter was an Islamic terrorist.

Ugh. I don't like labels either. So, think of it this way, and I'll leave you to your own conclusions. Timothy McVeigh, white dude with sympathies with the KKK, a virulent dislike of government authority over individual citizens, and a profound belief in guns rights and the right of revolution, is commonly known and we expect will stay known as a terrorist. Yet, here is a guy, disenfranchised by the military (he failed the physical exams for U.S. Special Forces), unable to secure a meaningful job after his military career (he worked as a security guard), frustrated by his inability to attract a mate (his co-worker Andrea Peters shunned his advances), and turning to a destructive lifestyle (he became an obsessive gambler), who by all accounts seems to fit the mold of an increasingly unattached and ultimately psychochotic lone killer. So, why is he only a Terrorist? Apparently this simple label, for most of us, fits just fine with him. But why? Because he wasn't deranged? Or psychotic?

If one digs into this comparison, it eventually becomes clear that "Muslim terrorist" is treated differently than the anti-government radical white dude. In the the latter case, there's an unmistakeable eagerness to attach belief system to violence. In the former, it's quite the opposite. Wow!

To make my point clearly and once again, imagine the feeling of bizarrness if McVeigh, in some alternate universe, was no longer a terrorist after the Olkahoma City Bombing, but simply a psychotic, sexually frustrated, lonely ex-military guy who just needed the right treatment, if only we could have recognized the symptoms early enough. Imagine if we blamed the military, and the U.S. government (he railed against excessive taxation), and all things governmental. so stifling to sensitive, stressed out McVeigh. This kind of bull shit gloss would never fly for the guy who eviscerated 168 people in that horrific terrorist act, and it repays careful attention why in Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's case, there is currently such a raging debate as to whether he was just sick, or something more. McVeigh, always, was just that something more. And if one is truly Enlightened, as I am, one would see that McVeigh was treated as a moral actor, an autonomous agent, and Maj. Hasan is on his way to being treated like an effect of so many causes outside of himself. And in this way, weirdly, perhaps we do win the battle of words, in Orwellian fashion perhaps, by making those enemies under the panoply of our political correctness not true humans, but only poor actors in dramas that they themselves did not and could not create. Only big bad Western World could create them, you see. We win by proclaiming our guilt.

Then again, maybe we're just chicken shit. And maybe our chicken shit nature is why McVeigh has his label, and others, theirs.

Obamaya!

Hmm. Just saw the latest poll numbers on Hardball with Yelling Mathews, and it seems the American People want the Republicans back. The change we can believe in?

Obama, that political phenom that had media pundits, bloggers, and just about everyone speculating that the country was in fact (or now) center left, is now in real danger of political losses in the House and Senate, and on that crucial litmus test question of whether Americans feel that the country is on the right track, he's losing.

Why? Why so soon? Because he looks like what-the-left-thought-about-dubbya right now. No, he doesn't sound like your crazy Texas neighbor gettin' his shit kickers on for a hoe down. No, he didn't breeze through Yale drinking cheap beer and keeping in close touch with his well-connected father. He's a legit Harvard guy. An elite. Educated, thoughtful in demeanor and in speech.

Only, he makes rediculous political decisions. As a libertarian, right leaning (mostly libertarian) guy, I'm applying the "Obamaya" label to him now. Why? We're sending troops into Afghanistan, a war that likely can't be won, and we're doing it in a way that maximizes discontent by left and right: more troups (left: bad!), but not as much as the general recommends (right: bad!). Nice.

He pushes through that fucked up stimulus package, 780 billion or whatever, deferring to the speaker of the house to write it, a political move that gaurantees it will be loaded to the brim with political goodies for every constituency in the Union. Ah, heck, we only created temporary gov'ment jobs? Nuts! And now unemployment is 10.2%, when originally forecasted to stay at or below 8% given the magic stimulus sauce. Oh, bull. Even liberal economists, like Jeffrey Sachs, think it's a political cookie jar and missed opportunity, nevermind the consevative-minded economists who've been screaming all along that it'll just add to the national debt (which no one doubts, by the way, that Bush initially created) without doing anything much substantive for working folks. Nice job, Obamaya.

Then there's the Health Care debate, a never ending back and forth on cable news, local news, in newspapers, C-Span, shut up! Health care, the pressing concern. Oh, and by the way, it's all about left-right fighting points: abortion, public option, et cetera et cetera. No one spins it as a cost saver (because it's not), and everyone on the Hill just keeps fighting about their favorite ethical issue, all the while losing millions of Americans who want to feel confident again about the basic direction of the country. Fix health care? Sure, we should fix it. It's broken. Start with trial lawyers. Or start with expanding access to plans across state borders, freeing up competition among private insurers. Or start by policing existing insurers on hot button issues like preexisting conditions, and so on. But this turd is a big ole' pile of make-Obama-less-popular. Wrong time. Wrong discussion. Why can't Obama see this, if he's so damn not-Dubbya? Doesn't sound very Harvard to me (unless by "Harvard" you mean do-things-that-make-an-elected-official-be-not-re-elected).

What else? Beers with some yahoo cop in Cambridge and a professor friend? Cool. Fly off to Copenhagen or where the hell it was to lobby for Olympics in Chicago? Cool. Screw the Global Warming issue, spewing tons of jet exhaust into the upper atmosphere to transport a handful of important folks half way across the globe in search of that ultimate nobel goal of sports in your old neighborhood. Woo hoo! Hey, I like sports as much as the next guy. But I wouldn't jump on that flight and then grab the mike back home to guilt everyone else about the necessity of cap and trade and making you polluters pay. You may as well be Al Gore with this level of blind hypocricy.

So, people aren't buying it.

Why not? A really crappy theory: American-style Democracy is to blame. Uneducated populace, that sort of thing. If only the red state folks would drop their guns and religion and spend four years on a college campus not getting laid unless they parroted politically correct points made by their wish-it-was-the-sixties-again professors. Yes, there's an objective criterion! Dumb asses. You make lemmings look like General Patton (but isn't the lemming thing apocryphal?).

But surely, getting back to whatever the hell I was talking about, the troublesome AP polling data should not be read to suggest that Obama is failing at his job, surely not (this is sarcasm). Obama's job is: what? Inter alia (cool Latin phrase used only by the educated, so if you're not down with it you're almost definitionally an ignoramus, and probably a racist), Obama's job is to bring back confidence in the country, and bring that change that we all can believe in. Surely the fact that the majority of Americans now think we're heading in the wrong direction doesn't impugn Obama, does it? Hal? Hal?

He's from Harvard, after all. Not Yale. He ain't no Dubbya! No, he's not. He's Obamaya! Only, unlike Dubbya, who's gritty gut sense kept his base and enough independents on board through an improbable re-election, Obamya's bleedin' off independents by the month. Maybe he'll turn it around, we'll see (if not, we can always blame Dubbya!). But lately, it seems he shoulda been a Yale man (or is this spurious? doesn't matter, still not change, change we can the sloganizer came and took my sentence away...). Believe in! Huh.