Colts Organization Should Be Ashamed

After going 14-0 the Colts decide to stop pursuing perfection when they sit their starters and lose their first game.

Coach Caldwell decided to sit his starters with five minutes left to go in the third quarter of a 15-10 game against the lowly Jets. Caldwell sat his best players to preserve their health for the upcoming playoffs. The Colts have clinched home field advantage throughout the playoffs and dont strategically need any more wins at all until they get to the playoffs. They ended up losing.

I dont like this decision the coach made. Sports are all about records and competition. You owe it to the players (who undoubtedly wanted to keep playing to win due to their facial expressions on the sideline when their coach made the decision to ultimately forfeit their game), and you owe it to the fans. If Peyton or any other crucial playmakers get injured from the last quarter and a half of football, I think it would be forgiveable. If the Colts win the Super Bowl this year, I don't know if the decision will be forgiveable.

Here is a link if you want any more information on this very important and hotly debated topic
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4776421

China to America: "The world doesn't have enough money to finance your spending."

I read this short little news bit from Rush Limbaugh dot com. According to the Chinese, the world can not continue to buy up U.S. treasury bonds because there are not enough dollars on the international markets. (This is according to my understanding of the matter.) The World Net Daily websites gives a short explanation.

IT is getting harder for governments to buy United States Treasuries because the US's shrinking current-account gap is reducing supply of dollars overseas, a Chinese central bank official said yesterday.[...]'The United States cannot force foreign governments to increase their holdings of Treasuries," Zhu said, according to an audio recording of his remarks. "Double the holdings? It is definitely impossible.'

'The US current account deficit is falling as residents' savings increase, so its trade turnover is falling, which means the US is supplying fewer dollars to the rest of the world,' he added. 'The world does not have so much money to buy more US Treasuries.'

America is spending way too much money that it does not have. It is somewhat funny that the Chinese are the ones that are the voice reason in this matter. I don't know the complete details of this economic relationship between the two countries, but I have heard that America's and China's economies are interdependent on each other, something to do with the fact that China's economy is tied to the value of the dollar. Maybe the Chinese can keep our government's spending in check. I just thought this was a funny story because our government is spending so much money that the world can not continue to finance its deficit spending, and this puts a little perspective on the level of spending and the debt that goes along with it that is occurring. This is could possibly be a good thing since Americans are saving more which could lead to forcing our government to reduce its spending; yet at the same time this fact also illustrates that our government is spending so much money that it takes the world running out of money to possibly prevent our government from continuing to spend money.

Obama's Afghanistan and Iraq Policies - Status Update

So, what's the RTP consensus on Commander-in-Chief Obama's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan?  The one aspect of Obama's presidency that I've been pleasantly surprised about is his handling of the Iraq and Afghan conflicts so far.  Pleasantly surprised as in not-a-disaster.  He's blown off his political base and pretty much done exactly what George Bush would be doing if he still were in office.  The fact that I can repeat this statement seven months after I first said it is a good thing.

In Iraq: After George Bush made the brave, painful, unpopular, highly risky choice (ie acted like a leader) of endorsing the surge suggested by Gen Petraeus, and ended up winning Iraq War III, Obama did not pull out precipitously as he had said he would in his campaign.  Obama has ordered a phased, steady disengagement, but, probably only due to Bush's efforts, this is happening under the same conditions that it would have happened with Bush at the helm: a combat phase-out happening when Iraqis are able to control things themselves.  From The Whitehouse's own Issues page:

Responsibly Ending the War in Iraq
On February 27, 2009, President Obama announced a plan to responsibly end the war in Iraq.

By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end and Iraqi Security Forces will have full responsibility for major combat missions. After August 31, 2010, the mission of United States forces in Iraq will fundamentally change. Our forces will have three tasks: train, equip, and advise the Iraqi Security Forces; conduct targeted counterterrorism operations; and provide force protection for military and civilian personnel. The President intends to keep our commitment under the Status of Forces Agreement to remove all of our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Assuming things don't go down the tubes between now and then, this is a good, sensible policy, but only because Bush cleared the way for it to be sensible.

In Afghanistan, you know, the War that Bush forgot in his pursuit of cheap Iraqi oil, Obama has approved an increase in troop levels by 30,000, in semi-agreement with the request of Gen McChrystal, in an attempt to surge to put down the growing insurgency by the Taliban.  He announced a timetable for departure, which is foolish, but the fact that he is willing to fight the war even temporarily is more than what we expected from him.  This may or may not be the right policy for Afghanistan.  Maybe the right policy here is to pull back to major bases and just fuck up the Taliban when they get uppity.  But, at least it is not cutting-and-running.

I have many, many bones to pick with Obama, but in this critical area, he has been no better or worse than his predecessor, and it must drive his left wing base crazy!  You go girl!

Communist and Socialist are trying to save the planet.

This information is not new to us here. So I will make a short post with some entertaining videos. I got this video from the Hot Air blog and I downloaded it from Youtube.



I got this off of Rush Limbaugh dot com. Hugo Chavez made an interesting speech--minute seven is a good place to start--at the Copenhagen meetings where he generally attacked capitalism by stating that "capitalism is a ghost in the room". He received some applause for these remarks--Rush said it was a loud and long applause, but the one in the video was rather quiet and short. Chavez did give a shout-out to the young people outside of the meetings protesting. Probably not the people in the video above, but all of the other hippies. To sum up the theme of the Copenhagen meetings, Capitalism needs to go in order to save the environment--of course the saving the environment part is just a means to gain legitimacy for their goal of destroying capitalism, a new take on a relativitly old movement.

The remarks by Chavez illustrates one of the main problems with international meetings such as Copenhagen and international bodies such as the U.N.--they give equal time an and clout to these Communist dictators. If there is to be an international governing body that is conductive to free trade and overall freedom--which is necessary, these clowns need to be removed from these organizations or their influence needs to be completely sidelined in these organizations. This of course won't happen because two of the major players in the U.N. are Russia and China, and there can not be an IGB that leaves out over half of the world. These systems of tyranny will never be completely eliminated from the world--the free countries did not have the fortitude nor the means. There can not be a union of freedom or good and tyranny or evil. Tyranny and evil is the one that benefits from such a union. A union between freedom and tyranny is the how the current IGB is taking shape, so it will not turn out to be one that is good for Freedom. Overall, a good video that shows who the people are that are behind this global warming scam and a good illustration of what is wrong with the U.N. and these international meetings--the U.N. and these international meetings are a mixture of freedom and tyranny, and they are a means to disarm the West and to gain its compliance and support in the destruction of freedom.

White people will be the minority in America by 2050.

I read this article on yahoo news. Basically the recession has pushed back the original date of 2023 when white people would become the minority in America. What does this mean? Not much, just an interesting fact. America's demographics are changing. I remember reading about this in my American government class and the effects this would have on American politics--Mexicans will be the second largest majority group. Hopefully, these minorities will be educated with American values. Another interesting fact is that people with the knowledge of what it takes to maintain a free nation are rapidly becoming the minority thanks to the education system. I remember watching a show on the Discovery channel stating that white people are becoming extinct. Hopefully the culture of freedom that has been the hallmark of white people throughout history won't becoming extinct along with white people.

An update on the increase of the national debt limit and some facts about the national debt.

Back in August the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner formally requested that Congress raise the $12.1 trillion statutory debt limit due to the massive amount of debt that the Country is acquiring due to the recession and the massive amount of government spending that is taking place under the guise of helping the economy to come out of the recession. The time has come for Congress to raise the national debt limit which has been increased twice since 2002, "House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Friday that Congress needs to raise the limit by at least $1.8 trillion". This would be the largest increase in to the national debt limit in the history of our.

The Heritage Foundation has done a quick run down on the national debt,

Why the Debt and the Debt Limit Matter

• $12,000,000,000,000: The total federal debt has reached a whopping $12 trillion. About $7.6 trillion is debt held by the public, which has been borrowed from citizens and foreign countries, and $4.4 trillion is debt held by the government, which has been borrowed primarily from the Social Security trust fund.
• Debt Is Earning Interest That Taxpayers Must Pay: Public debt holders are paid annual interest from the federal budget, which must be paid with taxpayer dollars. In 2009 interest payments amounted to $209 billion.
• Too Much Debt Will Slow the Economy: Government borrowing reduces resources available for private investment, leading to lower productivity, wages, and economic growth.
• Only Getting Worse: The recession and excessive spending have caused the debt held by the public to grow sharply to 56% of the economy, topping the historical average of 36%. To make matters worse, entitlement programs will double in size over the next few decades and cause the national debt to reach 320% of the economy.[Emphasise mine]
  
• Raising the Debt Limit: Congress will vote to determine the limit for the federal debt, which currently stands at $12.1 trillion. Since the national debt has hit $12 trillion, Congress plans to raise the debt limit.

Congress Plans to Quietly Raise the Debt Limit

• Congress Hopes Americans and Credit Markets Don't Notice: To avoid scrutiny, congressional leadership will likely try to sneak the debt limit increase into a "must-pass" measure, such as the defense appropriations bill. Doing so would limit necessary debate on the debt in the hopes that taxpayers and creditors would not respond.
• Increase Would Be Largest in History: Because this will be a difficult vote, the majority's leadership has suggested raising the limit enough to avoid another vote on the debt limit before the November 2010 elections. The estimated $1.8 trillion increase would be the single-greatest increase of the debt limit in history.

"Entitlement programs will double in size over the next few decades and cause the national debt to reach 320% of the economy." Clearly some of these entitlement programs will have to be cut or drastically reduced. The sad thing is that the government has forced people to be dependent on the government. For example, around twelve point four percent of one's pay check is taxed to pay for Social Security and two point nine percent to pay for Medicare, you pay seven point seven percent and your employer pays seven point seven percent. Fifteen dollars out of every one hundred you earn is taxed just by these two taxes alone. (I got these last figures from my Social Security statement.) So what is going to happen when all of these people are forced to suck on the government teat and it runs dry? As of now I don't see how the latter will be avoided?

Some more interesting information about the debt,

By 2030, Bergsten anticipates the net foreign debt of the United States will exceed $50 trillion, or 140 percent of gross domestic product. He predicted that by 2030, the United States will be paying $2.5 trillion a year to the rest of the world, equal to the nation's current total spending on health care, just to pay the interest on U.S. debt.[...]He continued, It has long been known that large external deficits pose substantial risks to the U.S. economy because foreign investors might at some point refuse to finance these deficits on terms compatible with U.S. prosperity.'Any sudden stop in lending

to the United States would drive the dollar down, push inflation and interest rates up, and perhaps bring on a hard landing for the United States – and the world economy at large.'

I am not fully aware of what the implications that these numbers will have for the economic future of America or the world; but from what I understand, it is not going to be good for the world economy, as much of the other economies of the world are build on a foundation of debt. If an economic collapse is to be avoided, a major shift in the direction of our country needs to occur. Even if this does occur, America will still be dealing with the effects of the debt caused by the recession and all of the other economic reforms and the overall shift of economic power from the private sector to the government that are occurring. The national debt will be a major drain on the overall economy for some time to come. I don't know if what happened in California will happen on a national or world scale, as Melkor stated, because many people are being forced to be dependent on the government for their substance during retirement and, in the next decade or two, their health care. The government is absorbing a lot of the private sector and using a lot of its resources, which there is a limited amount of, so that there will be little left for the private sector to produce anything. From the information I have now and my understanding of that information, I believe a major economic disturbance is a very real possibility at some point down the road.

Happy Birthday M. Dick!

Occasional guest commenter M. Dick turns 49 today!  Happy Birthday M. Dick!

The Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases under the clean air act.

It looks like the White House is not going to let the normal legislative process stand in its way of protecting the public from noxious greenhouse gases. The Congress will not be allowed to stand in the way! It is nice to know that someone is watching out for our welfare. I read this interesting new article yesterday.

The Environmental Protection Agency took a major step Monday toward regulating greenhouses gases, concluding that climate changing pollution threatens the public health and the environment.[...] The EPA said that the scientific evidence surrounding climate change clearly shows that greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people" and that the pollutants — mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

If the EPA goes through with this, what will this mean? It means that the government will have the power to regulate carbon emissions without having to pass legislation. Every form of economic activity that occurs in our carbon-based economy involves the burning of fossil fuels. This is a very clever way for the government to hide its goal of regulating every aspect of the economy and our lives, and this goal is being pursued on a global level. Charles Krauthammer states that this move by the EPA is blackmail and that environmentalism is the new socialism. This is a manufactured crises used to scare people into accepting more government --Very funny! I saw it on T.V. It is stupid. It might not be real. If it is, then WOW. (Where have I heard this before?)

Or as an Obama administration offical said,

If you don't pass this legislation, then ... the EPA is going to have to regulate in this area, the official said. And it is not going to be able to regulate on a market-based way, so it's going to have to regulate in a command-and-control way, which will probably generate even more uncertainty.

"Regulate in a command-and-control way," What does that sound like to you? Obviously, this adminstration is serious about pursuing its goals of increasing the size and the scope of government into the private sector by using this global warming scam. Who knew the clean air act would be used for such purposes? Come on, clean air does not sound that nefarious.

In light of the Climate Gate scandal these people don't plan to reevaluate their stance on the global warming issue. Why? Because the various governments are using bad science and lies to pass and push through their agenda of wealth redistribution and an overall larger role of government in the private sector. Not to mention their desire to create a global governing body to enforce these climate rules.

This is big news, as is this whole Climate Gate scandal. This clearly illustrates how the governments of the world are trying to expand their power and size under the disguise of lies and by creating new regulations that would regulate every form of economic activity by regulating a substance that is essential to our economy--our economy is based on the use of fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases.

Is this some conspiracy, some pie-in-the-sky-amazingly-hard thing to believe? No, the founding fathers realized that due to human nature, governments would naturally try to increase their size and power. Human nature does not change nor can it be reshaped--like communism has tried to do. This is why the founding fathers created checks and balances in our government. Once one gets power they want more of it. As Lord Acton stated, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Alexander Frazier Tytler states this about the different stages of a Democracy, which is what America has deteriorated into.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy[Jeff, this is happening now}, always followed by dictatorship[Jeff, a soft, mild one]. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: "from bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.

America is at the point of going from dependency back into bondage--in this case, dependent on the government to allow and bless any form of economic activity. America's fate is not that hard to comprehend. The fate of a free society is revealed by history and was foreseen by many people that looked at this history combined with a knowledge of human nature. The people will demand change in the leadership of our country(Obama's approval number are very low for this point in his Presidency), but not before a system has been set up and our course has been set.

This attempt by tyranny to expand its control over people by claiming to be watching out and providing for our "general welfare" was foreseen by Tocqueville. This is a must read to understand how our Country is being transformed into a soft and mild tyrannical form of government through global warming and health care. One can not be fooled by all the good intentions and feel-good-emotional hype that surrounds these arguments. (There are other ways to get that tingly feeling running up your spine.)

This is America and it will always exist as a free country, right? Things will always be the same as they were when one popped their head out into this world. Once people allow their freedoms to be taken away, it requires a lot of time and a lot of blood to gain it back. What awaits us is not all that unknowable or secret or amazing, if one knows how to look at current events from a historical perspective. If one knows the general direction we are headed, they can set themselves up to prosper. While this climate conference and the overall global warming debate will not led to America loosing its freedoms over night nor will it set the Country's fate in stone, it does illustrate that there is an attempt to fundamentally transform America and attack freedom, and whatever comes out of Copenhagen will led America and the world closer to universal tyranny. It is all under the guise of solving a non-existent crises, so what good can come out of it? This is all revealed out in the open to anyone who is looking and able and willingly to comprehend what is occurring.

A great lesson on how government policy caused the current economic downturn.

I just read this twenty page pamphlet from the Foundation for Economic Education--a great website with lots of information about the economy. The pamphlet is a little long, but it provides a great summary of what caused the current economic recession. It is well worth a read- it is a required read, in my opinion--to see how the government, purposely or accidentally, caused the recession.

"All government intervention in the economy is based on the belief that economic laws need not operate, that principles of cause and effect can be suspended, that everything in existence is 'flexible' and malleable,' except a bureaucrat's whim, whic is omnipotent; reality, logic, and economics must not be allowed to get in the way."(Rand, "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal", 81)

Basically the pamphlet illustrates how the government caused the recession and that the government is preventing the economy from correcting itself; and as a result of this, the economy will be slow and sluggish for many years to come,

More of what caused the Great Recession of 2008[Jeff, which is exactly what the government is currently doing]– easy money, regulatory interventions to direct capital in unsustainable directions, politicians and policy-makers rigging financial markets – is not likely to produce anything but the same outcome; asset price inflation and an eventual “adjustment” we call a recession or depression.

Many of the same policies that caused the recession are being carried out on a greater scale. It is worth learning a little about the economy so that one can be aware of what the economic forecast will be in the future.

I got this picture and the quote that follows off of Boortz dot com.

Are you really aware of just how much politicians - and I'm talking politicians from both parties - have trashed the future of your children and grandchildren? Are you sitting out there just blissfully thinking that since this country has been here all of your life, in generally the same shape it is right now, that it will always be here in something resembling its present form for your children and grandchildren? Have you ever heard that all good things come to end? Well then, what makes you so sure that this saying doesn't apply to this country? Do you think we're somehow bulletproof? Has it occurred to you that the citizens of the Soviet Union might well have thought the same thing?

AGW Scam/cHopenchangin' Summit Update

Things have been moving fast on the AGW-scam front since my last post on the subject. 

As Houston, TX experiences their earliest Gore-ble Warming on record, here is the latest:

- At the University of East Anglia in the UK, the Director of the Climate Research Unit, Professor Phil Jones, has stepped down while an independent committee examines the scandal that resulted from the leaked e-mails of his and other members of the Unit.  This is not some random department at a random university.  This is the chief Global Warming research department in the world.

- At Penn State University, Professor Michael Mann, developer of the now debunked 'Hockey Stick', graph of global temperatures used in Al Gore's propaganda piece 'An Inconvenient Truth' is being investigated by the university, also as a result of the exposure in the East Anglian e-mails of his faulty, fraudulent, covered up data and modelling programming.

- NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (formerly directed by Al Gore's climate change guru James Hansen) is resisting calls to release their Global Warming data.  A Freedom of Information Act request filed by Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has been stonewalled by NASA for two years, though NASA is a government organization run by taxpayer dollars, and this is not classified information.

- Al Gore, Chief Huckster of the AGW scam, has declared that he is cancelling his planned $1200/ticket speech at the Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference which begins Dec 7.  He has not given a clear reason for the cancellation yet.

- Conservative members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (surprisingly, there are some) have asked that Al Gore's Academy Award for Best Documentary, awarded in 2007 for 'An Inconvenient Truth', be rescinded, again based on the new information coming out that it is mostly a scam.

- But, is the massive momentum built up around the world in favor of drastic reductions in Western standards of living, and massive increases in Governmental Regulation of your lives able to be stopped at this point?  Leader of the Socialist World, President Obama, is going to the Copenhagen conference to lend his weight to get a treaty signed.  Think of it as Kyoto II - Revenge of the Fascists.

- Finally, maybe you're still thinking "what is all the kerfuffle about?  Didn't Al Gore say The science is settled?  A former Vice President wouldn't lie would he?"  If my earlier article didn't convince you that something is rotten in Denmark, take a look at this comment, left by a guy named Sean, on an article at the Watts Up With That? blog.  Since it's a comment, and it's so good, I'm just going to copy the whole thing so you don't need to go to the link:

I am a climate scientist, and it is clear that the evidence that “human activity is prominent [sic] agent in global warming” is NOT overwhelming. The repeated statement that it is does not make it so. Further, even if we accepted the hypothesis, cap-and-trade legislation does not do anything about it.

Here are the facts. We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model. We have known for years that the Medieval Warm period (Bud-D: MWP) occurred, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England).

Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason. If the MWP is “allowed” to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a “runaway greenhouse” in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen’s runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now. We now know that the models on which the IPCC alarms are based do not do clouds, they do not do the biosphere, they do not explain the Pliocene warming, and they have never predicted anything, ever, correctly.

As the believers know but, like religious faithful, every wrong prediction (IPCC underestimated some trends) is claimed to justify even greater alarm (not that the models are poor approximations for reality); the underpredictions (where are the storms? Why “hide the decline”?) are ignored or hidden.

As for CO2, we have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 300,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). IPCC scientists know this too (see their “Copenhagen Diagnosis”); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well. We have also known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered.

We have long known that Jones’s paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380). Everyone except Briffa knows that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn’s plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming).

Prof. McCarthy is, of course, part of the IPCC that has suppressed dissenting viewpoints based on solid climate science. His claim to support by “peer review” is nonsense; he has helped corrupt the peer review process. We now have documentary evidence that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review and blackballing opponents. On this point, the entire IPCC staff, including Prof. McCarthy, neither have nor deserve our trust.

We have tolerated years of the refusal of Mann and Jones to release data. Now, we learn that much of these data were discarded (one of about 4 data sets that exist), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment. We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science “settled”, refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled). The very fact that Prof. McCarthy attempts to bluff Congress by asserting the existence of fictional “overwhelming evidence” continues this anti-science activity.

All of this was known before Climategate. What was not known until now was the extent to which Jones and Mann were simply deceiving themselves (which happens often in science) or fraudently attempting to deceive others. I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word “trick”. Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only “value added” data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud).

But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed in), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it.

If, as Prof. McCarthy insists, “peer review” was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught? When placing it in context made it highly likely that this type of fraud was occurring?

The second question is: Will this revelation be enough to cause the “global warming believers” to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps it will.

Contrary to Prof. McCarthy’s assertion, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive. A huge set of primary data are apparently gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these few studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago.

But now we know that peer review was corrupted, and that no “consensus” exists. The “2500 scientists agree” number is fiction (God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets).

The best argument now for AGW is to argue that CO2 is, after all, a greenhouse gas, its concentration is, after all, increasing, and feedbacks that regulated climate for millions of years might (we can hypothesize) be overwhelmed by human CO2 emissions. It is a hypothesis worthy of investigation, but it has little evidentiary support.

Thus, there is hope that Climategate will bring to an end the field of political climatology, and allow climatology to again become a science. That said, people intrinsically become committed to ideas. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, Prof. McCarthy may claim until the day he retires that there remains “overwhelming support” for his position, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted. As a graduate student at Harvard, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die

Now that's a comment!!!!

Pasadena, Here We Come!

Oregon is going to the Rose Bowl!

Oregon defeated Oregon State to win the Pac Ten title and earn a right to play in the Rose Bowl against America's sweet hearts: The Ohio State Buckeyes.

Oregon State played well, but Oregon earned this win and they earned the conference championship.

My last memory of an Oregon Rose Bowl berth was in 94. I was in fourth grade and we were to play Penn St. I bet Paul Sherwin one dollar and some pogs that Penn St would beat Oregon. Don't get me wrong, I liked the Ducks then and I do now, but I know my sports and knew Oregon would lose. The tables have turned though. I will place my bets on the Ducks this year!!!

Final prediction: Oregon 34, Ohio St. 24.

GO DUCKS!!!!!