Steamboat McGoo approached me the other day and said “Lemur King, I would love to collaborate on a paper, but I must be top billing and I get to name the misshapen progeny that will result from such a union.
Wanting to flex some brainicles a bit I agreed to his proposal and we worked feverishly on this document that we hope to publish in the Albanian Mathematical Society of Our Lady of Perpetual Menses. Their peer review cycle is generally only as long as it takes to clear a $40 check and requires no edits. Beware, McGoo’s mind is a deep one and his papers should not be taken lightly – I was lucky to be able to include my name. The link will bring you the PDF document (compiled in LaTeX)
ADIABATIC INFLATIONARY THEORY OF
MAMMO-GROUPS IN THE PRESENCE OF TACTILE
MANIPULATION: AN EXCITATIONAL TENSOR
APPROACH
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Kittens grow fast. Ours quickly becomes a demon. Here you see a small kitten in the coat rack, which she has recently decided is a suitable cat-perch. She is in Urban Kitten mode, where she blends passably well into her surroundings.
Below is Melody Demon Song taking a breather and planning out her next ambush on Sir Jack L. Katt and Mdm. Jilly of Boo.
Here she is looking a tad bit less demonic and just skilled at whatever she is doing.
Glaciers be damned, we’ve got more important things going on today.
Note the involvement of Lemurita in this endeavor.
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Time for a reality check.
Contrary to ideas about the disappearance of Pastoruri, engineer Benjamin Morales Arnao, local glaciologist, to state testing a method to reverse the thaw, though many may consider unorthodox, has already received its first positive results: Cover the ice with a layer of sawdust 15 cm thick. The experiment was carried out in the mounts Chaupijanca and Pastoruri. The results are clear: the fields look like a plateau covered in snow. Thus, the first glacier managed to keep four meters of ice and in the second five. “This material acts as an insulator. Contains cellulose and, thus, we managed to decrease the melting glacier. Although this method has worked well, we’ll be testing other alternatives”, refers Morales.. (Yes, wikipedia but reported on NPR today)
Let’s assume for the sake of a silly argument that SOYLENT GREEN is absolutely and utterly full of sh*t (and he is, by his own admission, just not about AGW and many other things †), and we’ll assume that AGW is “real”.
Some numbers based on Arnao’s experiment. Let’s propose that we are going to save that glacier (Pastoruri Glacier) using his method – cover a glacier with 150mm of sawdust.
AG (area Pastoruri glacier) = 3.1 km^2 = 3,100,000 m^2
SNOTTMD (small number of oak trees that must die) = 18,245 oak trees for 3.1 km^2
(breathes, continues)
AGW (oopsie, area top 10 glaciers in the world) = 13,745,426 km^2
At 18,245 oaks per 3.1 km^2 it’s 5,885 dead oaks per km^2…
LNOOTTSTPG (large number of oak trees to save the planet’s glaciers) = 81,255,670,649 oak trees
Now, just prove to me that these numbers are any less silly than the bullsh*t numbers SOYLENT GREEN and others are fighting daily that have come out of Hansen, Gore, Briffa, Jones, etc. Most of the numbers were researched educated guesses based on assumptions pulled out of my ass. Just like science.
I’m pointing out what kind of fruitbats conduct experiments covering glaciers with sawdust.
So next time some idiot spouts off about saving the glaciers remind them that a fellow fruitbat suggested killing 81 billion trees to accomplish that mission.
† SOYLENT GREEN is most definitely not full of shit unless he wants to be
‡ Oak was used because there are a lot of numbers on it and denser trees make for more believable numbers than if we used pine trees
Update: I’m out today. Just not feeling great and tired of going to work no matter what. It gets old showing up day after day to do your job when all you want to do is lie down.
I know that didn’t sound too cheery. This ought to help – Got the link on a tip from Monster (cbullitt) over at Aardvark’s and Asshats. Published in The Canadian. All through the article the author/compiler peppered the thing with “could”, “could be”, “probably”, “as much as”, and my favorite “if validated”. Emphasis mine…
Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012
Hydrate hypothesis illuminates growing climate change alarm – Compiled by John Stokes
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To summarize, human activity is causing the Earth to warm. Bacteria converts carbon in the soil into greenhouse gasses, and enormous quantities are trapped in unstable clathrates. As the earth continues to warm, permafrost clathrates will thaw; peat and soil microbial activity will dramatically increase; and, finally, vast oceanic clathrates will melt. This global warming chain reaction has happened in the past.
Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 rose by a record amount over the past year. It is the third successive year in which they have increased sharply.Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but fear the trendcould be the first sign of runaway global warming.
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Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth’s remaining resources.
Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelarates into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.
Maybe the Mayan 2012 thing had merit? Ohgoshwe’reallgonnadie!
The “hydrate hypothesis” (if validated) spells the rapid onset of runaway catastrophic global warming. In fact, you should remember this moment when you learned about this feedback loop-it is an existencial turning point in your life.
By the way, the “hydrate hypothesis” is a weeks old scientific theory, and is only now being discussed by global warming scientists. I suggest you Google the term.
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing the Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to when we will pass the tipping point and be helpless to stop the runaway Global Warming.
The author paints a picture where all scientists are working day and night as a cohesive organism, grim faced, with scurrying engineers and acolytes – all tirelessly sacrificing to understand the process by which a large portion of humanity will die – all because of greed.
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Whups. That is going to leave a mark.
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That’s what my mother told me when I finally got my diploma and headed towards the “real world”.
Let’s not analyze her or her remarks too closely but focus instead on a generalization that we can make based on the statement as presented.
Education is very useful, valuable even, but if you are a blithering idiot it’s a waste of your time and dangerous to others.
On NPR’s Environment report this morning I heard a piece about toxic chemicals in things we use every day – cleaning supplies, household goods, and even perfumes. The idiocy was here:
Ann Steinemann is an environmental engineering professor at the University of Washington, and has studied hundreds of cleaning products. She says nearly all brands on the market, even those labeled green products, contain undisclosed carcinogens – which are considered hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency:
“According to the EPA, things that are classified as carcinogens have no safe exposure level. There is no safe exposure level. Even one molecule cannot be considered safe.”
Some of the most toxic shit known to mankind, ricin and botulinum toxin – will not kill you with one molecule… NOTHING will.
Nor can it be considered unsafe at any level. This is such a bogus statement. Sure it’s technically true but it has no intrinsic value. It’s like saying human’s diet includes bugs because we get them in chocolate. Well, yeah, we do get bugs in our chocolate, but so freakin’ what?
The EPA is not the final arbiter of information about what is good and what is bad – they hold no universal truths and they can be wrong. The problem is that when you start labeling things as toxic or carcinogenic those claims are based on testing that is the biological equivalent of testing to failure in the mechanical engineering fields. There is no number where you say “Oh, after 10,032 molecules you’ll die of gangrene of the eardrum”.
Why scare people with statements that lead them to believe that even one teensy little bit that can only (maybe) seen wtih a gas chromatograph is going to kill them? What if it is a thousand times some teensy amount? Is that bad enough? It’s not at all clear that even then it’s ok to declare a product “unsafe”. Just claiming that the presense of a substance is enough to ban it is asinine.
Yes, lots of things are carcinogenic. Yes, some things are scary. That doesn’t mean we should freak everybody out with technically correct claims that are still so far removed from reason as to immediately lower the IQ of anyone who hears them.
Disclaimer: I am not even remotely interested in debating chemicals in consumer goods, not even a teensy bit. I’m ranting about scary-sounding statements used to make one’s cause seem more urgent, like the one above.
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It is time to come out, come clean… I… I… I am a fountain pen freak. My father is disgusted – he says “We embraced ball-point pens for a reason!” Yeah, well, my hand gets tired with BP and fine-point pens – and a good fountain pen is smooth as glass. And no one steals them, either, because 97.23% of the people out there can’t write with ’em. Good, I say.
The Skyline model (Eversharp) is something I drool over. Note the art deco design.
I’m showing an image from that link as a teaser… go look at the beautiful pens…
Note: The website requested that I only use this image provided… go look at the pens on the page…
The definition of Irony is to arrive at the same ultimate end but by a manner you could never have foreseen.
You got a headache and you’re going to the drugstore for some ibuprofen. On the way, your car gets run over, killing you… by an ibuprofen supplier truck. THAT is irony.
My goal was to have the flames be in the shapes of little demons – Gore, Briffa, Mann – all running around trying to put it out but only lighting more fires.
On Thursday, about 200 Mexican-American students walked out of class in protest of the flag clothing incident. Members of the group waved the Mexican flag and said they were marching for respect and unity. They also demanded the school suspend the boys who wore the U.S. flag-adorned clothing.
I say:
1) You are either Mexican or you are American
2) Get your damned flag out of my country
3) If you want my respect, have some respect for my nation and my flag – and see #2, above
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Inscrutable Half-Breed passed on this link – a Cracked.com article about how The Karate Kid has irrevocably ****ed up our lives. There’s truth to it. Because of these blindingly unrealistic portrayals of adversity, we’re freaked out when we find that success is hard. Here’s part of his wisdom exactly as it dribbled out in congealing HTML on his site.
I really think Effort Shock has been one of the major drivers of world events. Think about the whole economic collapse and the bad credit bubble. You can imagine millions of working types saying, “All right, I have NO free time. I work every day, all day. I come home and take care of the kids. We live in a tiny house, with two shitty cars. And we are still deeper in debt every single month.” So they borrow and buy on credit because they have this unspoken assumption that, dammit, the universe will surely right itself at some point and the amount of money we should have been making all along (according to our level of effort) will come raining down.
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All of it comes back to having those massively skewed expectations of the world. Even the people you think of as pessimists, they got their pessimism by continually seeing the world fail to live up to their expectations, which only happened because their expectations were grossly inaccurate in the first place. – Dr. David Wong
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Eco-tards continue to impress me with their skills at accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Of course you shouldn’t expect to see anything like Team Polyjule’s car in showrooms anytime soon. The tight-fitting car is worn like clothing more than sat in, and has virtually no practical applications, as is. The idea behind the competition, which was first held in 1939, is drive innovation in new automotive technologies, and get people excited about fuel efficiency.
Oh yeah. Rah. Rah. Rah.
That “as-is” qualifier sounds a lot like a teenager who realizes what he’s saying is a horribly stupid idea and is stealthily trying to build in exit strategies if someone calls him out on how utterly moronic his suggestion is.
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Mickey Rourke – always has been a favorite of mine.
He told Parade.com: “It was important for me to put that aside and go, ‘You know what? This is a business. If you kiss the right a*s and you get lucky on a movie or two, you could last 10 years.’ So, now, I just keep my mouth shut and pet my chihuahuas.”
I’m probably evil right down to my coal-black heart, but I laughed my ass off at this movie. Eco-nuts are trying to shock me into emotionalism so I won’t say “Uh, what is the connection between 400Kg of CO2 from jet aircraft and polar bears falling out of the sky?”
But I laughed my butt off and still asked the question. Sorry Eco-Nuts.
If you are sensitive or have small children, might I suggest you go find the Disney website?
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Enough about polar bears hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement – its been done already on WKRP in Cincinnati using turkeys …
Bardot and protesters: Put yourself in the place of the animals. Literally. If you’re willing to sacrifice your life for that of the animals, if there really is parity, then please do jump in. If you truly believe that the animal is that important, you shouldn’t have qualms about taking it’s place.
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This is hands down the single worst nightmare I could ever have. My mind just skitters right over it when I try to imagine it. A similar thing is if I try to recall exactly what happened when I had my arm compound-fractured in a plywood machine… the brain just skitters over it. Can’t go there.
At last week’s Summit of the Americas, President Obama acquiesced to a 50-minute attack on America as terroristic, expansionist, and interventionist from Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. His response to Ortega’s denunciation of our effort to free Cuba from Castro’s dictatorship was that he shouldn’t be blamed “for things that happened when I was three months old.” Blamed? Hundreds of men, including Americans, bravely fought and died for Cuba’s freedom, heeding the call from newly elected president John F. Kennedy. But last week, even as American soldiers sacrificed blood in Afghanistan and Iraq to defend liberty, President Obama shrank from defending liberty here in the Americas.
Hey, Mitt… where I come from, that’s called “being a pussy”. This is Jimmy Carter for the New Millenium. A guy who is so concerned with being everyone’s friend that he stands for nothing.
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I’m biased, naturally, but many deep and profound brain things go on inside my head when I read:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama on Monday proposed a $100 billion U.S. loan to the International Monetary Fund to boost the IMF’s resources and urged a bigger stake in the IMF for emerging powers.
Provind that Pravda isn’t the only publication that will print anything:
Dr Phil Edwards, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said: “Moving about in a heavy body is like driving in a gas guzzler.”
Each fat person is said to be responsible for emitting a tonne more of climate-warming carbon dioxide per year than a thin one.
It means an extra BILLION TONNES of CO2 a year is created, according to World Health Organisation estimates of overweight people.
They’ll just spit anything out. These are somebody’s ESTIMATES, and are BASED ON MANY MANY ASSUMPTIONS.
The hysteria goes on and on, but I found this to be an interesting bias and painfully obvious. A British rag publishes American obesity stats, not British ones. First they vilify anyone who is considered (by who?) to be overweight, and then they cite only – only – lard-butt stats for the U.S. Wonder why?
A staggering 40 per cent of Americans are obese, among 300 million worldwide.
Sounds like someone has an issue with the U.S.
Bitez moi.
Frighteningly, a starkly terrible correlation is dead-on nailed at the end of their article…
Australian Professor Paul Zimmet predicted a disastrous obesity pandemic back in 2006.
And Oxfam warned yesterday that the number of people hit by climate-related disasters will soar by more than half in the next six years to 375million.
The impact of more storms, floods and droughts could overwhelm aid organisations.
UPDATE: The HULC sounds like a hoot. I have concerns about power lifetime and practicality. Perhaps if you put generators on the hip joints you could generate power and it’d go infinitely long?
But climate is known to be variable — a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn’t mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.
That is called an end run, saying that you can’t prove we’re wrong because all facts you’d use to prove us wrong are invalidated by our proven premise.
Here’s my own end-run:
UNTIL CURRENT CLIMATE MODELS CAN PREDICT ACCURATELY THE OBSERVED HISTORICAL WEATHER EVENTS USING THE SAME PRECURSOR DATA, MODELS PREDICTING FUTURE GLOBAL WEATHER/CLIMATE ARE OF LOW RELIABILITY.
There is also a major flaw with even that because the models are always tweaked to account for the latest anomaly. Just because they are so tweaked does not mean that the model can and will predict tomorrow’s events.
This is Hubris. The idea that one can account for every variable and is well documented as a form of god complex.
President Obama said Tuesday that now is a good time for investors to buy stocks if they focus on the big picture.
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Obama apparently isn’t giving anyone anything they can hold on to, just “we have plans”. When Russian President Dmitry Medvedev gets a letter from Obama with no hints or suggestions, I’m just not surprised.
The letter contained an assessment of the situation, but there were no concrete proposals about any mutually binding decisions
Senior U.S. officials say Obama suggested missile shield might be unnecessary if Moscow helped with Iran
But, we’ll probably never know given how untransparent the most transparent administration ever has been so far. Prove me wrong again, Obama.
Elsewhere, we see the results of this concrete made of air. For example, the stimulus package was supposed to stimulate (never mind that it was ill-conceived no matter what) but instead became entitlement money as the largesse morphed into another form.
Most of his “stimulus” spending was devoted to social programs, rather than public works, and nearly all of the tax cuts were devoted to income maintenance rather than to improving incentives to work or invest.
WSJ has a nice graphic. Wanna see? Funny how the sharp loss events seem to correlate to pronouncements of the O-administration that relate to economic policies. For the White House to whisper words monetary is akin to the kiss of death.
For those not in a state of active denial:
…after five weeks in office, it’s become clear that Mr. Obama’s policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence — and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.
[later]
The market has notably plunged since Mr. Obama introduced his budget last week, and that should be no surprise. The document was a declaration of hostility toward capitalists across the economy. Health-care stocks have dived on fears of new government mandates and price controls. Private lenders to students have been told they’re no longer wanted. Anyone who uses carbon energy has been warned to expect a huge tax increase from cap and trade. And every risk-taker and investor now knows that another tax increase will slam the economy in 2011, unless Mr. Obama lets Speaker Nancy Pelosi impose one even earlier.
Ouchie. Another complaint from those who were either deprogrammed or never sucked into the cult in the first place is the fact that capitalism is not being allowed to do it’s job. One nice feature of capitalism is that it is self-cleaning. Think of ants – they eventually pick clean stuff that is dead, usually after predators have taken care of the weakest in the ecosystem.
Obama is keeping the predators at bay, giving the one or two sickly lemurs horribly expensive life support that takes up an entire hospital’s resources, and all for terminally ill critters. The rest of the system is being starved of resources and competed with. Ok, bad analogy, a blend of analogies, and kind of a waste of both your time and mine.
His Treasury has been making a similar mistake with its financial bailout plans. The banking system needs to work through its losses, and one necessary use of public capital is to assist in burning down those bad assets as fast as possible. Yet most of Team Obama’s ministrations so far have gone toward triage and life support, rather than repair and recovery.
What’s he going to do when even the deniers realize that he can’t pin this on Bush any more?
No, no, no, no, NO. Let the bad banks FAIL and let the ones that are still viable grow stronger without the crippled resource-wasting competition. Zombie companies are not adding anything valuable to the party, only serving as a fiscal black hole (think AIG).
** Note, if you have not read clear through this post and you ping me about the HULC and the impossibility of perpetual motion, rather than recognize sarcasm, please be aware that I’m going to skewer you verbally.
Wanna know how Obama feels about globular worming?
“The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over,” he said on Tuesday after meeting with former Vice President Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. “We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years now that this is a matter of urgency and national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way.
Oy. He met with creepy uncle AlGore. You know, the uncle that always wanted you to “sit on his lap”…? Man, didn’t anyone tell the poor man that he’d be targeted by this guy? Really, it’s like that family member that everyone is ashamed of and you just run around behind him doing damage control all the time.
Well, our AP writer, SETH BORENSTEIN, has certainly bought into the Church of Meteorology, as he hews to the line to the end. In what is an embarrassing display of opinion trying to masquerade as fact. It’s simply… well… embarrassing… it’s like the little kid who tries to sneak something out of the room and believes that you can’t see it behind them… except this is an adult who is as clueless as the kid and thinks everyone around him is as well. His words, not mine:
Mother Nature, of course, is oblivious to the federal government’s machinations. Ironically, 2008 is on pace to be a slightly cooler year in a steadily rising temperature trend line. Experts say it’s thanks to a La Nina weather variation. While skeptics are already using it as evidence of some kind of cooling trend, it actually illustrates how fast the world is warming. (Source: APNews)
They can get away with feelings disguised as facts now! Oh. Wait. They can’t, which is why newspapers are dying.
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A cat gets contact lenses… Imagine that with claws it doesn’t put in and take out its own.
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I know… how about some inconvenient truths from France, where we’ll just sweep ’em under a rug?
You can’t get me to believe this is any worse than the S&M principal (you know… he really likes spanking?), the bus driver who is a transvestite at a bar two towns over on the weekend, or the PE teachers who invariably knock up one of the girls at school every other year.
Implying that Ms. Gunns was revvin’ her motor at every warm-blooded critter at school daily, the District Superintendent said…. Oh, just read what he said.
Vineland School District Superintendent Charles Ottinger released a statement saying, “It’s one thing if it’s an illegal activity, because that would come up in the check. There is no way for us to know if a person is involved in these types of activities.”
My my my my… you mean, if someone had not come forward you might NEVER HAVE KNOWN? Oh God, and miss out on your chance to be self-righteous?
In fact… if she was doing her job and cooking food for the kids, that is good enough for me. But unless she is selling these movies at the condiment stand, what is she doing wrong? Everybody has done something in their past that they’d just soon not air out – and hers wasn’t illegal. It just isn’t as (ahem) as sexy as smoking crack or pot like “The Rock” Obama or the oh-so-preppy “I-Never-Inhaled” Clinton.
Another snippet…
When Tuck’s past was revealed in November…
Here’s what I want to know… how did her past come up? Who is going to admit that they were watching their complimentary “Christmas Season’s Best of Smut Past” DVD and came across an old video of her? Didn’t show up in the background check – couldn’t have – it wasn’t illegal. So was it the principal, little Johnny’s dad, or little Suzy’s shrink who put two and two together?
I think we need to start going hard against Karaoke next. Lots of sickness there, yeah… yeah… heh heh.
LK here… a side note… out of insane curiosity, I poked around out there searching “Crystal Gunns”. Uh. Yikes. Sorry, but more than a wheelbarrow full is wasted, I always say. Actually I never say that – this is a first. From now on, however…
Good gravy. She had implants. They implanted watermelons or something and then put implants in the implants. It really is so far out there that it’s really going to appeal to the fetishists.
Another fine Netizen has seen the light, the (soft) spoken wisdom of AlGore, the one who paved the way for the Obamessiah. Radioactive Liberty helps paint the grim picture in the care and attention that it deserves. And he did it in June of this year. A true peripheral visionary.
Snow in New Orleans is a rarity. The last time it snowed was Christmas 2004; before that, the last snow recorded was in 1989, according to Jim Vasilj, a forecaster with the National Weather Service. Since 1850, snow had fallen in “measurable amounts” rather than traces in the city just 17 times, Vasilj said. Of the 17, today’s snowfall was the earliest in the season recorded.
As much as 6 inches had piled up in Livingston Parish as of 10 a.m., Vasilj said. Similar amounts were reported in Bogalusa and St. Helena Parish, while in Mandeville, between 2 and 3 inches had accumulated, according to Vasilj.
Just more evidence nailing the coffin shut in arguing for the harsh realities of globular worming.
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The Dude sent me this. No idea where it came from – if you did it, shout it right out!
Non omnia possumus omnes – Not everyone can be a possum.
Or something like that.
Sue me… it’s actually sort of a subset of the real meaning, so get over it.
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More hysterical breast-beating and another response that won’t convince the Chicken Littles of the world that maybe, just maybe, they ought to settle for a debate instead of making this into an Inquisition for Globular Worming as led by His Holiness AlGore.
Join us on Tuesday, November 18th at 12 noon as hundreds come together on Capitol Hill to call for Climate Action Now! We will be welcoming our newly elected leaders and calling upon President-elect Obama to attend the crucial United Nations Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland in December.
A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
I’m sitting here in snow. Before Thanksgiving. Inches and inches of snow. Been looking forward to driving in it, too. Yah. Hoo.
So much for my dream of being bitten by a mosquito in December.
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Ok, by now many MoronBloggers have been saying “Pffft! To hell with this Mr. Lemur King jerk. He gets a game and drops us like a bad habit.”
Well, uh… yes. Sorry. But to be fair other things like work, family, my neck, the dog, and sleep (rare as it is) have conspired to give me just enough time to do one of two things in the free hour or so that I have before bed… Blogging – or – Being a Bad Guy and ridding Africa of Even More Bad Guys.
Until, that is, Part 2 of Far Cry. It got lots harder and they started shoving entire companies of bad guys at you all at once in cramped quarters with nowhere to run. And being stingy with the ammo. Not very “open ended” and in fact I don’t believe I’ll buy another game from them. Tell me: Why do companies who make software that is a major hit go and take the very things that made the game “The Best” and NOT do them in the sequel?
Cases in point:
Far Cry —> Far Cry 2 :: Ignore the open-ended strategy and force essentially linear play just as soon as the game gets really good
Deus Ex —> Deus Ex: Invisible War :: Every damn thing that made the original good… they DID NOT do in the sequel, and they dumbed it down for consoles
Doom I and II —> Doom III :: Hello? I seem to remember open areas and a whole lot more lighting – this flashlight/gun/pit-of-darkness crap was pretty worthless
You would think that they never once asked a hardcore player off the street what they thought, wouldn’t you? You’d be right.
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So, instead, I’ve seen the error of my ways. That choice was clearly unacceptable and totally unfair. I’ve decided to go back to the start and have chosen to play Fallout 3 instead. Is it quite like FO1 and FO2? Nope. Is it indeed “Oblivion with Guns”? Weeeeeelllll… yes and no. It feels like Oblivion in terms of movement, dialogue, and interaction with the world. What it does have is an absolutely creep-your-butt-out atmosphere and sound and it really really feels like after the bombs fell. My movement from point A to point B to get back to town at night was 1/10th speed because of turning around all the time, looking for sneaky bad guys.
VATS targeting system is a hoot, and if you hit the bad guy critically… parts go flying. Heads, too. That must sound gross. And it is. But once you get numb to it, bullet-time takedowns of the bad guys are what you live for.
Morris essentially has said (and I agree) that something warm and squishy is going to hit the fan and it might as well splatter all over the democrats. If conservatives had to lose, this is the time to do so.
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Many voters and supporters of Obama did so out of a sincere belief in the words “hope”, which they had plenty of, and “change” which they won’t see much of.
The hard reality is that the changes promised by Obama are outside of the comfort zone of many of the congressional members because of the current political/social climate.
So what will happen when these supporters don’t see the dramatic changes enacted to care for their every need?
Let’s look at Michael Bloomberg, Ruler of New York City. Apparently everyone was to receive a $400 refund. The concept of a refund sounded pretty good to many. But when the realities were examined and the heavy breathing subsided, not only did the $400 just turn to bitter dust and blow away, the good mayor began to make suggestions of a 7%-15% increase in city resident taxes.
NYC residents are somewhat bitter from all accounts.
The same sort of thing is highly likely here with President-elect Obama. He’s made many promises and people have looked at what he said he believed in and said “We like this!” But, the money has to actually come from somewhere and there is nothing that leads one to believe that “sharing the wealth” will ever be anything outside of a pipe dream.
So then what?
At worst we would see cries of “Racism!” and “Partisanship!”. Perhaps even “Conspiracy to make Obama fail!”
At best, Obama could be hampered by not only Republicans chastised by this election cycle (realizing that perhaps the party has strayed from it’s core) but by the so-called “Blue-Dog Democrats” who will insist on reining in the fiscally irresponsible excesses that have become the norm in recent history.
Not that this would be a bad thing.
But the end result is that large numbers of voters who are happy today and have invested so much of themselves emotionally in this election will be sadly disappointed. They do not realize that the current state of affairs is far larger than the office of POTUS. Giving people false hope in change is worse than giving them moderated hope that has some basis in reality.
Detroit, MI – In a historic moment, yesterday Barack Obama was elected President of the United States by a sound margin and the streets of Detroit thusly remained quiet, much to the disappointment of many city residents… [more]
Had to address issues that were on my chest so I’ve added this second blog for today on top of the VacationBlogging Installment #3 below.
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First off is my Junk Science pet peeve, Globular Worming. Never fear, oh fearful huddled ignorant masses! Those who are far far more intelligent than me and thee are on top of things!
To put it succinctly, the process involves adding large amounts of carbon-negative (ultimately) lime to the oceans to create an alkaline environment, which will be MUCH better at soaking up CO2. Seems that adding Coronas does bad things because of the carbonation. Evil CO2!
Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O’Driscoll in SCI’s Chemistry & Industry magazine published today. (physorg.com)
This process has the potential to reverse the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would be possible to reduce CO2 to pre-industrial levels – Tim Kruger, a management consultant at London firm Corven(physorg.com)
Oh, bra-vo. So we’ll “fix” a “problem” that may not be a problem by a process that we barely understand in the context of entire ecosystems and climate systems?
Are people born this stupid or do they have to practice and/or be educated to these levels?
Note: YES, I know the lime they are referring to does not grow on trees and add nice flavor to gin and tonics. Don’t bother me about that, ok?
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Did anyone really think that Obama had the cojones to expose himself to uncanned events? This is old news, but geez, really. He couldn’t go fifteen rounds unscripted and everyone knows it. Get used to hearing his representatives saying “We’re not saying that” a lot.
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From Reuters, where science means never having to back it up…
New estimates show that least 56,000 people become infected with the AIDS virus every year in the United States — 40 percent more than previous calculations
“NEW ESTIMATES”. Based on… what, exactly? We have a bit of “news” based on “estimates” being compared to “previous calculations” (presumably based on earlier ‘estimates’). Wow, I’m all ears.
The CDC stressed that actual infection rates have not risen but said better methods of measuring newly diagnosed infections and extrapolating these to the general population led to the higher estimates. (emphasis mine)
Ah, so this is a news article about nothing, then. Bravo. Again, reporting estimates as if they were facts.
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More news. This time from Fox.
Obesity Treatments That Don’t Require Invasive Surgery
… A handful of companies are aiming to fix that with treatments that aren’t invasive and don’t require an overhaul of one’s life. … [entire article here]
Focus on that for a second. Treatments that are (1) uninvasive, and (2) require absolutely no effort on the part of the individual.
My sister, whom I am incredibly proud of, lost a huge amount of weight on her own w/o any of that stuff. Know what she says? She says “It comes down the fact that the only one that controls what I put in my mouth is me.” How is THAT for a person to be proud of?
But, why do that when you can be a Transpecies Assignment candidate, become a mouse (because you’ve always felt like you were one inside) and get this quick-fix?
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Funny how the sharp loss events seem to correlate to pronouncements of the O-administration that relate to economic policies. For the White House to whisper words monetary is akin to the kiss of death.
Lemur King's Folly 