Scientific deconstructionism

Eduardo Zorita, a researcher on past temperature trends at the Institute for Coastal Research in Germany, writes,

... I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files. ...

These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations,even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the 'pleasure' to experience all this in my area of research.

I still insist that climate science is not primarily concerned with climate change. "Global warming" is on the whole a political movement, not a scientific discipline. Climate science has no "product." The outcomes of climate modeling cannot be used to do anything except what is being done with them - promote statist control of ever-expanding slices of national economies to conform to a transnationalist ideology.

If climate science could be used to do anything else, it would already be happening. But have you ever heard of any report of climate science's findings not in connection with expanding the power of the state or trans-state organs?

Now if climate scientists - products of universities co-opted by modified Marxism since the 1960s - find that their only paying customers are statist bureaucrats, and most of the scientists were taught beginning as undergraduates to believe that ideology, what do you think will be the result?

The result is that climate science will be subordinated to political goals. This is exactly what has happened, as more and more scientists working in the field are speaking out. What we are seeing, I think, is that linguistic deconstructionism has polluted its first scientific discipline.

One of the basic tenets of postmodernist linguistic deconstructionism (which I learned how to do in my postgraduate studies at Vanderbilt) is that all text is tainted by bias and that objective points of view are impossible. Hence, the objective of expression is to exercise power. (Formerly the type of expression so designated has been confined, mostly, to those of history, literature and politics. But now we see that even mathematics may be considered biased and subjective.)

Hence, there is no such as thing as objective truth and statements are never more than propositional in nature. A statement's truth content is never more than opinion, and opinions are nothing but expressions of power. Therefore, in a basic sense, all speech is power directed.

This is a fundamental world view of the Left and is derived directly from Marxism, as reworked by Leninism. Since Marx held that his communist theory was literally scientific, his economic-historical forecasts were not simply likely, they were certain. To understand and partner with this inevitability was to be "on the right side of history" (which is where that overused cliche comes from). As formulated by Lenin et. al., truth is therefore not statements of objective facts, but assertions that move the communist revolution and its fulfillment closer to reality. "Truth" is therefore pliable and impermanent, the concept of truth being only practical. In practice, all of language became subservient to the dominance of the party, a fact recognized by George Orwell in his novel 1984 and its concept of Newspeak.

The Left's domination of the academy began in the humanities departments. The penetration of the Newspeak mentality into the sciences probably began with what we now call climate science. In fact, Earth Day founding in 1970 has Leftist roots, the original April 22 date not coincidentally being the birth date of Lenin himself. From the original "grassroots hippie" event, the whole of modern-day environmentalism was born. And environmentalism has never been freed from its Marxist-Leninist roots.

What this means is that when climate science became dominated by the Left (well, it began that way), then its purpose was not to determine scientific truth, but to use science to exercise political power. A standard Leftist critique of the West's standing values was that they were social constructions, not rooted in objective reality (which does not exist, anyway), but in class struggles. That was the Left's entree into the sciences, as Richard Rorty explained in AtlanticOnline,

Starting with the claim that homosexuality, the Negro race, and womanliness are social constructions, they go on to suggest that quarks and genes probably are too. "Ideology" and "power," they say, have infiltrated sterile laboratories and lurk between the lines of arcane journals of mathematical physics. The very idea of scientific objectivity, they say, is self-deceptive and fraudulent.

If scientific objectivity is a fraudulent concept, it does not mean that science is of no value. It simply means that science is just another tool for the class struggle and that it can be used on the right side of history. Like any other expression, scientific expressions are therefore concerned not with facts but with power.

Power is the goal. When global warmists mount ad hominem attacks against skeptics, most of us see those attacks as tacit admissions of failure of the scientific argument. But the Left does not see them that way since the scientific argument is just a specialized form of power expression. Ad hominem attacks are, too, and so are just another tool in the toolbox of power plays. They are an attempt to change the terms of the battle (and battle it is.)

However, most of our country is not Leftists, far from it. We cannot let the Left set the terms of public debate. We have to keep hammering on the facts and that the Left has bent science to political power-play ends, and that environmentalism is a political movement, not a scientific discipline.

We need also to reject the idea that scientific expression is merely another way of expressing opinion. Although empiricism has its own difficulties, we need to recover a strong sense of a philosophy of science that undergirds science as relating to objective facts about nature. This does not mean that science has no social context, as NYU physicist Alan Sokal pointed out:

Science is a human endeavor, and like any other human endeavor it merits being subjected to rigorous social analysis. Which research problems count as important; how research funds are distributed; who gets prestige and power; what role scientific expertise plays in public-policy debates; in what form scientific knowledge becomes embodied in technology, and for whose benefit -- all these issues are strongly affected by political, economic and to some extent ideological considerations, as well as by the internal logic of scientific inquiry. They are thus fruitful subjects for empirical study by historians, sociologists, political scientists and economists.

The problem is that when the externals become dominant, then in a real sense it is not science that gets done, but something else dressed in scientific costume. There is a danger there that Sokal presciently pointed out 11 years ago:

There is nothing wrong with research informed by a political commitment, as long as that commitment does not blind the researcher to inconvenient facts.

The real "Inconvenient Truth" about climate science is that it is mostly serving, rather than informing, a political agenda.

Related:

Advocacy Science - Climate Science Has No Product

Scientific Constructionism Redux

Global Warming Elitism

Trust me!

Jonathan Adler says that "'We’re the Experts, Trust Us,' Has Clearly Gone by the Wayside." Citing the NYT:

The most serious criticisms leveled at the authors of the e-mail messages revolve around three issues.

One is whether the correspondence reveals efforts by scientists to shield raw data, gleaned from tree rings and other indirect indicators of climate conditions, preventing it from being examined by independent researchers. Among those who say it does is Stephen McIntyre, a retired Canadian mining consultant who has a popular skeptics’ blog, climateaudit.org. A second issue is whether disclosed documents, said to be from the stolen cache, prove that the data underlying climate scientists’ conclusions about warming are murkier than the scientists have said. The documents include files of raw computer code and a computer programmer’s years-long log documenting his frustrations over data gathered from countries in the Northern Hemisphere.

Finally, questions have been raised about whether the e-mail messages indicated that climate scientists tried to prevent the publication of papers written by climate skeptics, which were described by the scientists in the e-mail messages as “garbage” and “fraud.”

“This whole concept of, ‘We’re the experts, trust us,’ has clearly gone by the wayside with these e-mails,” said Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology.

Indeed!

Trust me, I'm a climate scientist.

Advocacy science: Climate science has no "product"

Credit the title of this post to commenter don (not me), number 21 on Vincent Gray's post on how, as an IPCC Expert Reviewer, he knew, "There Was Proof of Fraud All Along." The comment begins, "Perhaps we need to coin a new term in our New Age post industrial world, Advocacy Science."

And so we shall. We should remember that while doing science may be socially or even morally commendable, that fact does not mean that scientists themselves are socially or morally virtuous.

Every scientist is committed to something as number one priority. It is not necessarily science. (This is true for any profession, of course.) A scientist's number one passion might be cross-country running, leading him or her to arrange the work schedules around runs and meets rather than professional opportunities. That does not mean that the scientist does bad science, when it is science he is doing rather than running. It simply means that his science work is not the thing that shapes his life.

But what if the number one passion shaping a scientist's passion is not running, but the conviction that modern economies are too complex and international affairs too complicated for national sovereignty to be vested in the people of the various countries, and that therefore at minimum national governments must dominate economic processes and planning, eventually to become subordinate to supranational agencies that do the same thing for the globe at large?

In other words, our hypothetical scientist's worldview is shaped primarily not by the challenges of doing good science or the challenges of hypermiling, but by the political ideology of statism.

What then?

A commenter (#7) on this Belmont Club post wrote,

I worked in academia (as staff) with “scientists” for 20 years and none of the shenanigans at CRU or elsewhere surprises me.

Even knowledgeable outsiders can’t know the extent to which science is harnessed to a Leftist political agenda these days. Presidential economic adviser Larry Summers, formerly president of Harvard U — until he mused openly about gender differences — can explain.

Commenter #14, observed,

... scientists are human. They are venal. They are arrogant. They want more money for less work. They wish to see their rivals discredited and defunded. They seek to become entrenched bureaucrats, protected from their actions by layers of regulations, political influence and conspiracies. They lie. My experience at the Pentagon merely reinforced all of these observations.

To quote Robert Conquest :”And an ever larger section of society is put through “higher’ education. One element of this is educated in scientific and other specialized disciplines, though often unaccompanied by much in the way of “education” proper. At any rate, the state is to some extent creating a nonproductive class and creating nonproductive work for them.”

Speaking of advocacy science, World Climate Report has a smoking gun, the cover of the latest United Nations Environmental Programme report.

The United Nations Environmental Programme just released a major report in advance of the Climate Change Summit to take place in Copenhagen this December. The report is intended to “show how the science has been evolving” since the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in the spring of 2007.

Although we suppose we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, we are having a lot of difficulty bringing ourselves to think that the contents provide a fair representation of the recent state climate change science.

The title says “Climate Change 2009: Science Compendium” but the cover illustration screams “Political Propaganda!”

Here is the cover of the UNEP report:

What is this illustration supposed to be representing?

It shows the earth, slipping through an hourglass and coming out not as just a pile of sand, but as a desert, replete with sand dunes.

I guess the symbolism is supposed to be that time is running out on our ability to save the earth from this fate. Apparently climate change is going to turn the earth from predominantly a blue and green vibrant planet (in the top half of the hourglass) to a brown lifeless one (in the bottom of the hourglass).

There is another side to climate science that needs to be remembered. (I can't find the web site where I first read this, but I want to disclaim this insight as my own.) Climate science may well be the only scientific study that has no utilitarian value. All other scientific disciplines enable some kind of improvement in the human condition. Physics enables space exploration and medical equipment such as MRIs, for example. Meteorology predicts weather which has all sorts of beneficial applications. Chemistry provides us with new materials and biology with health insights and improved crop productions. All of these things plus countless others.

Yet climate science has no "product." The outcomes of climate modeling cannot be used to do anything except what is being done with them - promote statist control of ever-expanding slices of national economies to conform to a transnationalist ideology.

If climate science could be used to do anything else, it would already be happening. But have you ever heard of any report of climate science's findings not in connection with expanding the power of the state or trans-state organs?

Now if climate scientists - products of universities co-opted by modified Marxism since the 1960s - find that their only paying customers are statist bureaucrats, and most of the scientists are believe that ideology, or are neutral at best, what do you think will be the result?

The money from the customers must be kept flowing (preferably increased) and if that means pushing the customers' agenda along by cooking the scientific books, well, maybe science in and of itself is not the number one passion here, anyway.

Remember, chemists have paying customers who demand accuracy of theory and formula right now. So do weather predictors, practical physicists and scientists of every other discipline.

But the accuracy of climate science is irrelevant and deals in decades anyway. To the paying customers - statist politicians and bureaucrats - it is not accuracy they seek but the forecast itself: "By the middle" or "the end of this century, global temperatures will be a degree or two higher and the oceans will be a a foot (or less or more) deeper."

It's a crisis! And crisis is the health of the state!

Update: Via Rand Simberg, this on-target shot from James Lewis:

The most important take home lesson is that global frauding was the clear and conscious work of a political machine aiming to steal your money, your liberties, and your country. It was a massive, worldwide attempt at a coup d’etat, and the victims were going to include all the free and prosperous peoples of the world. Hitler had his Reichstag fire. Today’s transnational left had its global warming fraud. The political goal was exactly the same: maximum power through maximum fear.

Update: Financial Times:

Sciences at the cutting edge of statistics and public policy can make blood sports seem genteel. Scientists aggressively promoting pet hypotheses often relish the opportunity to marginalise and neutralise rival theories and exponents.

The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all. ...

Concealment and secrecy invites mischief; too many scientists seeking influence accept the invitation.

Read the whole thing. The British press have been much more aggressive than the US media in covering and analyzing the CRU scandal. FT has substantial and specific recommendations to fix the processes in the future.

Obama and Little Mac redux

The Washington Examiner has a piece wondering, "Is Obama's dithering similar to that of Civil War general George B. McClellan?"

Too late. I covered that comparison a month ago.

Climategate and the Sgt Schultz media

Sgt. "I See Nothing, I Know Nothing" Schultz, the new face of the mainstream media


In "Hogan's Heroes," a TV comic series set in a Nazi prison camp, John Banner played Sgt. Hans Schultz, a POW-barracks keeper who was so eager to keep his bribes from the POWs flowing that he willfully could overlook anything the POWs tried to pull. His comic, oft-repeated punch line was, "I see nothing! I know nothing!" Sometimes he included, "I hear nothing!" too.

It's apparent that the mainstream media have adopted Schultz as their news model. No one who follows the legacy media expected the Katie Courics and Grey Ladies of the media industry to do anything about Climategate other than what they have done - ignore it except for a few desultory stories whose angles form an apologia for the massive fraud that practically defines climate science for the last 20 years or more.

Example one, grabbed from Google News Nov. 26 about 9:40 p.m.:

Note there are almost 4,400 feeds associated with this topic, which appeared as a headline topic on Google News last evening.

But surely there are even more feeds for Climategate, now several days old? Right? Wrong.

Grabbed at the same date and time. Wow! This is the most significant story about global warming of the last decade or more, and it warrants a whole 497 feeds. Searching on Google News for "climategate" yields 443 hits:

But maybe the MSM haven't picked up the term, "climategate" yet. So let's search for "climate emails." More for that, 2,497.

Now search for "obama copenhagen" - 17,541.

What is impressive, though negatively, is the MSM's studious and deliberate Sgt. Schulz act about the Climate research Unit scandal. Even Leftist and diehard global warmist George Monbiot gets it: "Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away." Not that he's changed his mind about global warming, mind you. He just accuses "deniers" of cheating worse.

As Glenn Reynolds has pointed out, there was a time when the media thought their job was to tell you what you needed to know. Now they think their job is to withhold things they don't want you to know.

Dem Senator: America - Love it or leave it

David Jeffers reports:

Democrat Senator from North Dakota, Kent Conrad, while defending the Obama Administration's decision to try al Qaeda terrorists in civilian courts, said:

"If people don't believe in our system, maybe they ought to go somewhere else."

Really Senator Conrad? Would you like to retract that statement?

I am a Gold-Star Father, meaning my son Sergeant Eddie Jeffers was killed in Iraq. I am opposed to terrorists being tried in civilian courts. Did I mention that I am a 22 year Army veteran? Is it okay with you if invoke my free speech rights?

Now, when "America - love it or leave it" was seen as a slogan of the Right, it was attacked as being un-American itself (to which I would agree). But I leave its refuation to Vedran Vuk, writing in 2006:

This philosophy is utterly incompatible with real life. "Love it or leave it" is best left to those who cannot defend justifications of state power and laws through logical argumentation.

Senator Conrad, he means you. I can only assume that if you could defend the decision on merits, you would. Since you can't, you just want people to shut up and accept what they're dicated.

Climate change is not about climate change

I've been saying this for a long time, but it's good to see a major newspaper finally say it, too:

The problem, however, is those who hijacked science to predict a looming Armageddon unless we do exactly as they say, have already done their damage.

The moment they convinced politicians the way to avert the End of Days was to put a price on emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the unholy alliance of Big Government, Big Business and Big Green was forged.

Big Government wants more of your taxes. Big Business wants more of your income. Big Green wants you and your children to bow down to its agenda of enforced austerity.

What about saving the planet, you ask? This was never about saving the planet. This is about money and power. Your money. Their power. [italics added - DS]

If it was about saving the planet, "cap-and-trade" (a.k.a. cap-and-tax) -- how Big Government, Big Business and Big Green ludicrously pretend we will "fight" global warming and "save the planet" -- would have been consigned to the dust bin of history because it doesn't work. We know it doesn't work because Europe's five-year-old cap-and-trade market -- the Emissions Trading Scheme -- has done nothing to make the world cooler.

All it's done is make hedge fund managers, speculators and Big Energy giddy with windfall profits, while making everyone else poorer by driving up the cost of energy, and thus of most goods and services, which need energy to be lighted, heated, cooled, grown, constructed, manufactured, produced and transported.

The latest time I wrote that was, oh, Tuesday. But Climategate might be the wake-up call. The scientific fraud that emails and database dumps that the CRU positively prove don't matter in the slightest to the Obama  administration or governments of other countries. "Global warming" is a political movement, not a scientific discipline. Unless voters understand that the most important issue before them in 2010 and 2012 is to retain their freedom and vote out every politician who wishes to seize it through the global warmism agenda, those freedoms will be gone forever.

CRU backtracking begins

AJ Strata explains how the CRU-tainted scientists are doing some CYA-ing and hemming and hawing on whether global warming is actually occurring. "They are surrendering to reality, one lame admission at a time."

Water boarding climate data

Did climate scientists manipulate climate data to achieve a pre-determined result? Do polar bears do it on ice floes?

The texts of email messages among researchers revealed by the release of 60-plus megs of information on the servers of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit are condemning enough, but the real nails in the coffin are the programming and database files. These have drawn the scrutiny of computer programmers and computer scientists. And their analyses, new as it is, already shows that climate raw data were not merely massaged, in the words of computer scientist Charlie Martin, climate scientists were "practically water-boarding the data" to get it to support the desired conclusions. The link is to page 2 of Charlie's piece, in which he concludes that the programming was "such a mess that they can’t replicate their own results."

But put this in the context of what else we know from the CRU data dump:

1. They didn’t want to release their data or code, and they particularly weren’t interested in releasing any intermediate steps that would help someone else

2. They clearly have some history of massaging the data — practically water-boarding the data — to get it to fit their other results. Results they can no longer even replicate on their own systems.

3. They had successfully managed to restrict peer review to what we might call the “RealClimate clique” — the small group of true believers they knew could be trusted to say the right things.

As a result, it looks like they found themselves trapped. They had the big research organizations, the big grants — and when they found themselves challenged, they discovered they’d built their conclusions on fine beach sand.

I am no programmer; I took a single FORTRAN college course back in 1976 and my Army computer training was for extremely specialized targeting systems. So it's impossible for me to evaluate the coding of the CRU data.

But others can:

From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.

;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)

This, people, is blatant data-cooking, with no pretense otherwise. It flattens a period of warm temperatures in the 1940s -- see those negative coefficients? Then, later on, it applies a positive multiplier so you get a nice dramatic hockey stick at the end of the century.

More detail here. The "hockey stick," long discredited, was a diagram that purported to show dramatic, rapid of global temperatures in the last 30 years from historic "norms." But it was entirely bogus.

David Warren hits the nail on the head. There is, he says, a "disheartening reality."

For, as we glean from the hacked documents, supporters of the hypothesis have been able to reverse the onus of proof. In the last resort, their argument comes down to: We say the planet is warming. And anyone who says the contrary must "prove the negative" beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt. And we will be their judges.

Global warming elitism

Roy Spencer, Ph.D., a bona fide climate scientist, reacts to the conspiracy to promote global warmism among scientists that was revealed by the release of 60-plus gigs of data stored on Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit servers. His piece is called, "ClimateGate and the Elitist Roots of Global Warming Alarmism." I'll cite his closing paragraph first.

Year after year, the evidence keeps mounting that most climate research now being funded is for the purpose of supporting the IPCC’s politics, not to find out how nature works. The ‘data spin’ is increasingly difficult to ignore or to explain away as just sloppy science. If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

And what of the IPCC? Remember that it is a political body, not a scientific one. And, according to Dr. Spencer, the IPCC is a machine-politics body with all that it entails.

The hundreds of e-mails being made public after someone hacked into Phil Jones’ Climatic Research Unit (CRU) computer system offer a revealing peek inside the IPCC machine. ...

At a minimum, some of these e-mails reveal an undercurrent of elitism that many of us have always claimed existed in the IPCC. These scientists look upon us skeptics with scorn. It is well known that the IPCC machine is made up of bureaucrats and scientists who think they know how the world should be run. The language contained in a draft of the latest climate treaty (meant to replace the Kyoto treaty) involves global governance and the most authoritarian means by which people’s energy use will be restricted and monitored by the government.

Even if this language does not survive in the treaty’s final form, it illustrates the kind of people we are dealing with. The IPCC folks jet around the world to all kinds of exotic locations for their UN-organized meetings where they eat the finest food. Their gigantic carbon footprints stomp around the planet as they deride poor Brazilian farmers who convert jungle into farmland simply to survive.

The "latest treaty" Dr. Spencer refers to is that of next month's Copenhagen summit, where the aim is literally to set up a world government, which is made explicit in the language of the treaty. As Britain's Lord Monckton, former chancellor of the Exchequer, explains, the Copenhagen treaty is designed to eliminate true national sovereignty altogether, especially that of the United States.






Understand: "saving the planet" is not the point of Copenhagen. The point is to compel wealth transfers from rich nations to everyone else and to institute a new class of global elites who get to tell everyone else how to live. Global warmism is a political movement joined at the hip to the two things that lubricate political movement everywhere: money and power. In the US alone, "The Global Warming Science Machine: $79 Billion and Counting," for example. And as Lord Monckton pointed out, the new global government desired by the treaty's backers will definitely not be a democratic one. You and I do not get to choose who represents us nor will we have any say in how they will dictate our lives.

What the Copenhagen treaty will do is set up a new nomenklatura of bureaucracies and factotums and commissioners, providing them with near-unlimited political power, a luxurious lifestyle and upward mobility for their children and political allies. If you think this sounds like the old Soviet system writ global, you're right.

All 181 pages of the proposed treaty are here (PDF).

But there is a glimmer of good news. There is substantial reason to believe that no binding treaty will actually result from next month's Copenhagen summit. But the new commissar class will not quit, they will regroup and try again. "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."

Update: CBSNews.com has a long online report on the brewing scandal of the emails and what they reveal, including that the Congress may investigate whether climate science is in fact rife with cooked reporting.

The veil comes off global warming

Here's a baffling headline: Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out.

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

So why are they baffled? The question answers itself. Their predictive models are inadequate. Instead of simply admitting it, they are saying that nature doesn't play fair because the world is not conforming to their computer predictions.

[M]eteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."

Because climate science is a financial racket more than a scientific discipline (more about that in a moment) the wonder is not that the warming predictions were wrong, but that scientists like Latif are finally admitting that they basically don't know what they're doing. Fact is, they have been doing science hardly at all. They've been running computer programs that confirm their own biases, the main one of which is to publish papers that please politicians who are ever-thirsty for more power. Climate alarmism is the hottest thing going for statist ideology today across the globe and politicians reliably keep the gravy train running for scientists who buttress it.

In fact, none of the modeling used to predict the end of the world as we know it accounts for:

• The effect of water vapor, which accounts for 95 percent of atmospheric temperature effects,
• The influence of clouds,
• The influence of cosmic radiation of cloud formation,
• An atmosphere that does in fact end in space - models mathematically assume the atmosphere extends to infinity,
• The effect of deep-ocean, cold water flows,
• The effect of sunspots,
• The intensity of sunlight.

You get the idea. That climate science is not the fact-based, objective discipline its advocates claim is been made even more evident by the recently-revealed emails among climate scientists that prove their collusion in keeping the scam going.

Hundreds of private emails and documents allegedly exchanged between some of the world's leading climate scientists during the past 13 years have been stolen by hackers and leaked online, it emerged today. ...

Climate change sceptics who have studied the emails allege they provide "smoking gun" evidence that some of the climatologists colluded in manipulating data to support the widely held view that climate change is real, and is being largely caused by the actions of mankind. ...

In one email, dated November 1999, one scientist wrote: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."

The emails had been stored on servers of the University of East Anglia (England) Climate Research Unit. Their volume (63 MB), plus documents also released, mitigates against fraud by anyone except the warmist scientists, and that extending over many years. In fact, CRU's director has said the emails are genuine. Lots is email excerpts at that link. Charlie Martin advises caution of swallowing the emails as a smoking gun just yet since they seem just too perfect for warming skeptics' case,

But then, the whole package is very large — 63 megabytes — and seems to be very internally consistent. Several people have already corroborated a number of the emails as being ones they wrote or received. The package also includes substantial data and computer programs, which are being explored as this is being written.

It gets worse for warmism advocates. Proof that global "warming" is not happening came from an unlikely but unimpeachable source. Oprah Winfrey "Wants Biz In LA Not Chicago; 'Why Would Anybody Stay? It's Freezing Here, And I Have A Mansion In Montecito... .' "

When you've lost Oprah, you've lost America!

The New York Show Trials

In 2003, US soldiers dragged deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein out his hole (literally) and took him captive. There followed demands by the Western Left that he stand trial by the International Criminal Court (which actually had no jurisdiction) or other Western-established and -approved court. Ultimately tried by an Iraqi court under Iraqi law, Saddam was hanged for his crimes by the nation of his principal victims. And so justice was done.

In the matter of KSM+four, the same issue pertains that I insisted was at the core of Saddam's trial. On that subject, I wrote a piece for the United Methodist News Service in which I pointed out that "Justice for Saddam must include full account of crimes." KSM and the others planned the attacks on America of Sept. 11, 2001, including training and funding the hijackers of the day. Of that there is not the slightest doubt. They have already not merely admitted it but boasted of it, both before and after their capture.

Herewith an excerpt from my 2003 UMNS essay that, with little modification, directly applies to KSM and his co-conspirators.

The primary question is, "What constitutes justice, and how shall it best be achieved?"

Rendering a judicial verdict against Saddam is not the most important goal because his murderous guilt cannot be rationally questioned. In even the fairest trial possible, "guilty" is the foregone conclusion, at least for his major offenses. Any other verdict would mock justice rather than uphold it.

The real value of a judicial proceeding against Saddam is to render a fair, accurate, public accounting of the terror of his regime.

Fully exposing Saddam's deeds to the Iraqi people and the world is the point. Enabling the Iraqi people to face their horrors so they may grow out of them is the point. Discovering the truth of Saddam's ties to nations and international agencies that propped him up is the point.

Saddam's trial "must be an opportunity to educate the nation and make the psychological transformation from the past to the future," said Laith Kubba, a prominent Iraqi expatriate and senior program officer for the National Endowment for Democracy. "What is important in these trials is not to put on trial the person of Saddam Hussein, but his deeds."

And yet there is no indication from the Eric Holder Justice Department that the decision to try KSM et. al. in New York, in a federal court, will result in a trial different in nature from any other trial held in the court. Any trial for KSM that even remotely possibly could reslt in a jury verdict of "not guilty" would be gravely unjust. It would mock justice, not render it.

There is no reason that a tribunal could not have been ordered by the president, even a public one. American law permits courts-martial or federal trials of foreign nationals who commit war crimes against U.S. forces. An inquiry into whether is guilty as charged cannot be a just objective of any court.

Clarice Feldman gets it right:

The trials will also surely be used as a platform from which to attack the Bush administration’s militant response to terrorism, which included the waterboarding of KSM. Those in the defense and intelligence communities and prior administration officials who have saved us from further outrages will surely be the targets of the defendants on a world stage. The defendants will be allowed to broadcast freely throughout the world by a press generally unsympathetic to those who nabbed these monsters and brought them to account.

To paraphrase an old friend, this would be a first: the victor dragging himself off in chains.

Related:

Saddam's fate: He must not face any verdict but guilty

A fair trial for Saddam

More on the trial of Saddam

That didn't take long

I posted yesterday that it was only a matter of time before the plight of the Palestinians would be used to explain away the violence of accused Ft Hood murderer Nidal Hasan.

Trust me, it won't be long before Hasan will be sympathetically portrayed as enraged by Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, the campaign against Hamas last year, etc. So what else could he do but shoot dozens of his fellow Americans? Terrible thing, tut tut, don'cha know, but really, he just couldn't take what The Jews were doing any more.

And I was right - and a short matter of time it was indeed. In fact, negative time. Reader "Ole55" pointed me to a piece in the University of New Mexico's Daily Lobo, "Fort Hood shooter violated numerous Islamic principles," except I guess the Islamic principles that justify mass murder as long as it's done from anger about the Palestinian problem. UNM alum Sami Shakir first condemns the killings and maiming, but only up to a point. And that point is where the Palestinians enter the stream of a Muslim's consciousness.

All this raises the question of what is wrong with Muslims that an educated man like Hasan resorts to a mindless act of savagery by shooting unarmed colleagues of his who trusted his care as a medical doctor. It is a complex problem but there is one major cause that torments Muslims and reminds them of their impotence almost daily. That issue is the Palestinian problem. As long as the Palestinians are humiliated and deprived of their basic human rights, the average Muslim will feel the throbbing pain of shame and the frustration of helplessness and irrelevance. For young men, this kind of mental anguish drives them to dark areas of the human mind where some might turn to demons.

Alas, it seems that until the Palestinian problem is resolved in favor of the Palestinians. there will be more such violence to come, says Shamir, coming seriously unhinged.

If the world does not help resolve this human tragedy for which both Palestinians and Israelis are paying the price, there will always be weak people like Nidal Hasan who will be vulnerable to the preaching of hate mongers like the terrorists who use Islam as the currency for their demented ideologies or Jewish extremists who preach violence against Palestinians, or Christian hate mongers who preach nuking the Muslims. If we care for the Palestinians and Israelis, we need to step in and enforce international laws on all, because the rest of the world is becoming a victim in this tragedy.

Let's see: we have Muslim terrorists who are "demented" (how true, good on Shamir for saying so), "Jewish extremists" preaching violence against the Pallys and "Christian hate mongers who preach nuking the Muslims," for which a citation would be nice.

Yet there are extremely few "Jewish extremists" attacking Palestinians - and the Israeli government ruthlessly prosecutes those who do. As for "Christian hate mongers" who want to nuke Muslims, well, show me the cite.

Yet of demented Muslim terrorists we have no shortage. And they are rewarded, not punished, by Muslim governments as long as they direct their terrorism against Western targets.

It seems not have occurred to Shamir that if the Palestinian issue is resolved at all, at least one of the three extremist groups he named will be unhappy with the resolution. And since the Muslims' demands are the most extreme, how does that bode well for peace?

Gold bull to grow longer horns?

Forget "peak oil." We might have already reached "peak gold."

Aaron Regent, president of the Canadian gold giant, said that global output has been falling by roughly 1m ounces a year since the start of the decade. Total mine supply has dropped by 10pc as ore quality erodes, implying that the roaring bull market of the last eight years may have further to run.

"There is a strong case to be made that we are already at 'peak gold'," he told The Daily Telegraph at the RBC's annual gold conference in London.

"Production peaked around 2000 and it has been in decline ever since, and we forecast that decline to continue. It is increasingly difficult to find ore," he said.

Ore grades have fallen from around 12 grams per tonne in 1950 to nearer 3 grams in the US, Canada, and Australia. South Africa's output has halved since peaking in 1970.

Scarcity of supply is only one reason gold's spot price has reached an all-time high or more than $1,120 per ounce. Doubts about the strength of the dollar have also made central banks, like India's and China's, increase their gold stocks.

Yet India's most recent gold buy was only 200 metric tons, a ting fraction of the more-than 145,000 tons of refined gold in the world. It's not just basic supply and demand factors running the price up, it's the global belief, shared by central bankers, that gold is real money and paper money is not. As confidence in the dollar falls around the world, there is an increasing movement to convert dollars and other currencies to something literally solid.

How high can gold go? Some analysts say that $2,500 per ounce is possible. But the downsides are severe. First, it means that truly colossal amounts of money will be parked in vaults and safes in the form of god, and not circulated in the globe's economies to create jobs and wealth. Second, it would show that the dollar has been devastated in value, which would be of terrible consequences for the American economy, and bad news for every other country.

Because swine flu is spread by vampires

Headline: "Swine flu causes surge of garlic sales in Serbia"

Ft Hood: It's the Joooos!

It was only a matter of time before someone declared that the Ft Hood killings involved, however, peripherally, a Jewish plot. Charles Krauthammer writes the the jumping to conclusions of the leftwing media (but I repeat myself) in their frantic attempt to divorce any hint if Muslim faith from accused murdered Maj. Nidal Hasan ("Explaining Away Mass Murder")"

WASHINGTON -- What a surprise -- that someone who shouts "Allahu Akbar" (the "God is great" jihadist battle cry) as he is shooting up a room of American soldiers might have Islamist motives. It certainly was a surprise to the mainstream media, which spent the weekend after the Fort Hood massacre downplaying Nidal Hasan's religious beliefs.

"I cringe that he's a Muslim. ... I think he's probably just a nut case," said Newsweek's Evan Thomas. Some were more adamant. Time's Joe Klein decried "odious attempts by Jewish extremists ... to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs." While none could match Klein's peculiar cherchez-le-juif motif, the popular story line was of an Army psychiatrist driven over the edge by terrible stories he had heard from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. [italics added- DS]

They suffered. He listened. He snapped.

As I wrote yesterday, "Whose fault are the Ft. Hood killings? Ours, of course."

Be that as it may, I have argued for for years that anti-Judaism is a hallmark of the Left. The blinding glimpse of the obvious that Hasan's motivations absolutely included his radicalized Islamic beliefs is not acceptable to the Left. And, like almost anything else that challenges their reality-divorced worldview, the unacceptable notion is attributable to a conspiracy theory. There is no lack of evil conspirators in the set of the favorite Snidely Whiplashes of the day - the Religious Right, Big Oil, Big Pharma, for example - but always, lurking underneath every rock, ready to ruin the world as the Left wishes it to be, are The Jews.

It's The Jews who have fostered the ludicrous idea that shouting the jihadist war cry, "Allahu akbar!" ("Allah is great," I refuse to call the sick twisted deity imagined by Muslims, "God") has anything to do with, you know, Islam!

How long will it be before we are instructed that the actual killings themselves are an understandable result of Jewish conspiracy against Muslims in general? Trust me, it won't be long before Hasan will be sympathetically portrayed as enraged by Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, the campaign against Hamas last year, etc. So what else could he do but shoot dozens of his fellow Americans? Terrible thing, tut tut, don'cha know, but really, he just couldn't take what The Jews were doing any more.

Just wait for it. It's coming.

Related:

I was cited, along with other bloggers, in Antisemitism International 2003, an annual research journal of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Anti-Judaism = anti-democracy

And this is an interesting take.

Whose fault are the Ft Hood shootings?

Why, ours, of course.

David A. Love, editorial board member of BlackCommentator.com, and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project and theGrio, but not a physician, ascribes the whole grisly mess to "secondary" PTSD inflicted upon Maj. Nidal Hasan in his psychiatric work.

Secondary trauma involves the emotional and psychological effects of working with traumatized people. Therapists, social workers and others who associate with victims of violence can develop symptoms of PTSD. As for an Army psychiatrist such as Hasan, listening to the horrific war stories of his clients on a daily basis must have taken its toll.

This piece is political correctness run amok. Earlier in the piece is this nugget:

All of America's young white male ex-marines did not bear responsibility for Timothy McVeigh and his bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, so why should the Muslim community shoulder a burden that does not bear their name?

Well, McVeigh was never a Marine, but never mind. He was convicted and executed for mass murders after he truck-bombed the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. As a principal staff officer of US Army Criminal Investigation Command at the time, I played a part in the Oklahoma City bombing investigation task force. No one attributed McVeigh's crimes to PTSD, including McVeigh himself. Using McVeigh to shore up his argument is a strawman of no substance.

Just because we "should not jump to conclusions," as the president made sure to caution, does not mean that we can't draw conclusions at all. Mr. Love's article would have a lot more credibility if it at least tried to account for Hasan's long history of increasingly radicalized Islamism, that has by now been well-attested by witnesses both in Washington, D.C. and Texas. These accounts are so credible that the Army, FBI and DOD are doing the typical DC kabuki-two-step dance to make sure no finger gets pointed at them. That, my friends, is smoke (I worked in DC for five years) and for sure there is fire. But Love apparently doesn't even know about that topic. His eyes are shut to contrary facts.

To say at this point that Islamism had nothing to do with the acts Hasan is accused of makes no more sense than to say that John Wilkes Booth could not have been motivated by radicalized Confederate sympathies. Sorry, it just doesn't wash. There may well have been other factors impelling Hasan, but summarily and pre-emptively to push Islamism off the table marks Mr. Love as a decidedly unserious person.

Then come Dr. Scott Mendelson, M.D., practicing psychiatry at Roseburg VA hospital in Roseburg, Oregon, who writes,

Everyday, I treat combat veterans, many of whom suffer Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. ...

It has been suggested that Dr. Hasan's behavior may have arisen from a "nervous breakdown" he suffered due to the stress of treating so many young soldiers returning from war. Phrases such as "secondary" or "vicarious" PTSD are being tossed around. ... Let me be very clear about this, it is no more possible to get PTSD from listening to soldiers tell their tales of their traumatic war experiences than it is to catch gonorrhea from hearing one talk about an unfortunate sexual experience.

And the rest of his article is basically a disassembly of Mr. Love's arguments, from a medical-psychiatric perspective. He concludes,

Stress from dealing with the emotional trauma of returning soldiers does not explain and certainly does not excuse his behavior.

And yet we really have no evidence that Maj. Hasan was suffering from "Stress from dealing with the emotional trauma of returning soldiers." Commentators (and no one else, be certain) have simply assumed constructed a self-fulfilling tautology:

1. Dr. Hasan counseled combat veterans

2. Combat veterans are psychologically scarred and many or most have some level of PTSD

3. Dr. Hasan felt their pain to the point where he cracked up.

Therefore: Dr. Hasan blew away 41 people, a perfectly understandable outcome of feeling the pain of so many scarred combat vets.

Oookkaaaaayyy.......

And yet there is nothing in the public record that evinces support for the notion that Hasan was affected by "secondary" PTSD, which Dr. Mendelson says doesn't exist in the first place. What there is, is ample evidence that Hasan became an increasingly-radicalized Islamist who openly denounced his nation's military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the point of saying to his fellow doctors in a formal presentation that Americans who fight Muslims should have "boiling oil poured down their throats."

Conclusions are being jumped to, make no mistake. But the jumping is being done by the hand-wringing liberals and others (coff, Gen. George Casey, coff) who are shocked that someone shot 41 defenseless people, and who are devastated that the shooter turned out to be a Muslim. Whatever the facts, they tell us that the murderous spasm Hasan is charged with committing could not possibly have anything to do with his religion.

There's your conclusion, folks. Start jumping.

Hasan charged with 13 counts of murder

Breitbart news:

FORT HOOD, Texas (AP) - The Army psychiatrist suspected in a deadly rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, has been charged in a military court with 13 counts of premeditated murder.
U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command spokesman Chris Grey told a news conference Thursday at the Texas base that additional charges may also be filed against Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

Hasan is suspected of killing 12 soldiers and one civilian in last Thursday's shooting spree at Fort Hood. He was shot and wounded by two police officers at the base, and remains in recovery at an Army hospital in San Antonio. His attorney says he was read the charges at the hospital.

The code of military law is called the Uniform Code of Military Justice, UCMJ. The articles of the UCMJ that define crimes are called the "punitive articles." Each punitive article defines a crime and in so defining lays out what must be proved by the trial counsel (prosecutor) in the court martial. Murder is Article 118 of the UCMJ:

§ 918. Art. 118. Murder

Any person subject to this chapter who, without justification or excuse, unlawfully kills a human being, when he— (1) has a premeditated design to kill; (2) intends to kill or inflict great bodily harm; (3) is engaged in an act which is inherently dangerous to another and evinces a wanton disregard of human life; or (4) is engaged in the perpetration or attempted perpetration of burglary, sodomy, rape, robbery, or aggravated arson;

is guilty of murder, and shall suffer such punishment as a court-martial may direct, except that if found guilty under clause (1) or (4), he shall suffer death or imprisonment for life as a court-martial may direct.

In order for Hasan to be sentenced to death if he convicted, the court-martial must be convened as a General Court Martial (GCM) empowered specifically to render that sentence. Only a General Court Martial can render the death sentence. A General Court Martial is so called because only a general officer in command can convene it. There are courts that may be convened by commanders of lower rank than general, but the level of punishments they may sentence are considerably less.

[Army] officials said it is not yet decided whether to charge Hasan with a 14th count of murder related to the death of the unborn child of a pregnant shooting victim.

My guess is that Hasan will be charged with this crime, Article 119a:

§ 919a. Art. 119a. Death or injury of an unborn child

(1) Any person subject to this chapter who engages in conduct that violates any of the provisions of law listed in subsection (b) and thereby causes the death of, or bodily injury (as defined in section 1365 of title 18) to, a child, who is in utero at the time the conduct takes place, is guilty of a separate offense under this section and shall, upon conviction, be punished by such punishment, other than death, as a court-martial may direct, which shall be consistent with the punishments prescribed by the President for that conduct had that injury or death occurred to the unborn child’s mother.

(2) An offense under this section does not require proof that—
(i) the person engaging in the conduct had knowledge or should have had knowledge that the victim of the underlying offense was pregnant; or (ii) the accused intended to cause the death of, or bodily injury to, the unborn child.

They can also charge Hasan with 29 violations of Article 124, Maiming, one for each person Hasan is suspected of shooting, although this article is not punishable by death.

The Mayans or your lying eyes?

Yep, who ya gonna believe - the Mayans or your lying eyes?

The End Of The World As We Know It (TEOLAWKI) scenario in 2012 "revolves claims that the end of time will come as an obscure Planet X -- or Nibiru -- heads toward or collides into Earth." But NASA's not taking that claim lying down.

"There is no factual basis for these claims," NASA said in a question-and-answer posting on its website.

If such a collision were real "astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye," it added. "Obviously, it does not exist."

As Casey Stengel said about a baseball record, "You can look it up." Or in this case, just plain look up. See anything coming right atcha? Didn't think so.

But that's not to say all is well. Don't forget the supernova and galaxy-attack scenarios. And then the massive gas cloud speeding toward a collision with the Milky Way! Then we learn that the earth's atmosphere may detonate. And then the asteroids. Then the black hole death stars! And we might be swallowed whole by the sun. And there's an intense beam of gamma rays coming our way. Then there was the fear that "human society is very quickly headed to a violent and disturbing end." Then the earth began to kill people for changing its climate. Then there is the voracious, galactic Hoover in Switzerland that will suck the whole planet into a black hole. And the massive destruction along the coasts of countries like the USA, UK and many on the African continent, within a matter of hours.

I tell ya, I'm starting to think that sooner or later, every one of us is going to wind up dead.

Can Obama save his presidency?

I understand that not everyone thinks that president Obama has failed in his tenure so far to the point where he will go down as a failed president if he doesn't make serious changes PDQ.

Joel Kotkin, executive editor of NewGeography.com and a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University, doesn't think so, either, but does think the day could be close at hand.

A good friend of mine, a Democratic mayor here in California, describes the Obama administration as "Moveon.org run by the Chicago machine." This combination may have been good enough to beat John McCain in 2008, but it is proving a poor way to run a country or build a strong, effective political majority. And while the president's charismatic talent – and the lack of such among his opposition – may keep him in office, it will be largely as a kind of permanent lame duck unable to make any of the transformative changes he promised as a candidate.

If Obama wants to succeed as president he must grow into something more than movement icon, become more of a national leader. In effect, he needs to hit the reset button. Here are five key changes that Obama can implement to re-energize and save his presidency.

Here are the five changes Kotkin identifies, without his expansive text on each point:

1. Forget the "Chicago way."

2. Focus on Real Jobs, Not Favored Constituencies

3. Step on the Gas. [For this one Kotkin means natural gas, the greenest energy source available right now and its use needs to be ramped up pronto.]

4. Rediscover America.

5. Chuck the Nobel; Embrace Exceptionalism.

Kotkin is optimistic that Obama can "hit his own reset button" and make lemonade out of the lemons of the year so far.

I am not so sanguine. I don't think that Obama knows how to hit his own reset button. Absent a near-truly catastrophic personal, not professional, crisis narcissistic people never do reset themselves. Furthermore, who is going to advise him to consider it? No one will print out Prof. Kotkin's essay and place it in Obama's inbox. He has surrounded himself with like thinkers and outright sycophants. Sort of like this guy.





There is nothing in Obama's resume that shows he ever had to hit his own reset button before. He has never had to make highly difficult, greatly consequential decisions that depended on his own personal reservoir of wisdom and experience. The years are long gone when he could have been mentored by people who could have taught him those skills and virtues. Even the Europeans realize now that Obama is in thrall with himself as much as the Europeans are.

Obama lives at the top of the Washington, D.C. political culture, a town that makes Hollywood look like a Sisters of Compassion convent. As his foundering continues, his staff and advisers will finally realize that, like RMS Titanic 97 years ago, Obama's ship of state has taken on too much water to stay afloat. When that dawns on them, they'll take to the lifeboats to save their own careers. They'll let the captain go down with the ship.

The most important question is how much of American's freedom and prosperity will go down with him.

Veterans Day 2009

May I simply direct you to my essay for this day five years ago.

The never-ending world apology tour will continue

Don Surber:

Obama plans Hiroshima and Nagasaki trips

President Obama could not find time to join in the celebration of teh 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall in Berlin.

But as he heads to Japan, Obama he promised a reporter that he will visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki sometime in his presidency.

“The memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are etched in the minds of the world and I would be honored to have the opportunity to visit those cities at some point during my presidency,” our president said.

How about Bataan? The Rape of Nanking? The Changjiao massacre? The Manila massacre? The Sook Ching massacre? The Kalagong massacre?

The 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor will take place in 25 months. Any0one want to start a betting pool on whether our country's president will attend that commemoration?

Well done, Mr. President

I am listening to the president's address at Ft Hood on the radio - he just concluded - and I have to say it was outstanding.

The only grating note was when he spoke of the military exploits of his grandfather and other family members. It only served to highlight, however briefly, Obama's own lack of military experience and urge to inject himself into every occasion. But the moment passed quickly.

There was one line near the end that I cannot quote exactly, but it seemed very close to counting the slain and wounded as falling from an act of war. I don't think that the president actually was trying to do that, but the line struck me that way. I'll look it up when I get back to my desk, as I'm posting this via email from my Blackberry.

In all, a speech just about perfect for the occasion.

Update: Here's the line:

Here, at Fort Hood, we pay tribute to thirteen men and women who were not able to escape the horror of war, even in the comfort of home.

Full text of the address is not on the White House's web site, but may be found on Huffington Post. YouTube links are Part One and Part Two.

Ft Hood shooter's rotten timing for condemned DC sniper

Did condemned murderer and mini-jihadist John Allen Muhammad have a sinking feeling in his gut when he heard last week's news of the mass murders at Ft Hood, Texas, by a Muslim suspect who was heard to yell, "Allahu akbar"?

Muhammad is set to die tonight for shooting to death Dean Harold Meyers in in Manassas, Va., on Oct. 9, 2002. He and a then-minor accomplice are connected to 10 other fatal shootings in the area and some other shootings across the country. Through his lawyers, Muhammad applied for clemency but the Supreme Court declined to order a stay. Then the request reached the desk of Va. Gov. Tim Kaine, who won't stop Muhammed's execution.

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said Tuesday he will not intervene to stop the execution of John Allen Muhammad, meaning the D.C. sniper will be put to death as scheduled at 9 p.m. EST.

Mr. Kaine, Democrat, made the announcement in a news release that also stated he was satisfied the case had been reviewed by the courts.

"Accordingly, I decline to intervene," Mr. Kaine said.

Gov. Kaine is known for his opposition to capital punishment even though he has refused to stay nine executions so far in his term. That he would have ordered clemency for Muhammad seems quite unlikely, especially because Muhammad's crimes were so coldly calculating.

Even so, timing could not possibly be worse for Muhammad. With the killings at Ft Hood last week by an apparent freelance jihadist, and the memorial service for the fort's slain taking place only a few hours before the time of Muhammad's execution, his chance of clemency was knocked right down to zero.

Obama comments on House health care bill

Asked for a comment to the American taxpayer on the passage of the House's health care bill over the weekend, the president replied,

The horrific backlash against Muslims has begun

At the end of an essay, Victor David Hanson explains what Homeland Defense Secretary Janet Napolitano has been up to since the murders at Ft Hood:

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — The U.S. Homeland Security secretary says she is working to prevent a possible wave of anti-Muslim sentiment after the shootings at Fort Hood in Texas. Janet Napolitano says her agency is working with groups across the United States to try to deflect any backlash against American Muslims following Thursday’s rampage by Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, a Muslim who reportedly expressed growing dismay over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

US Army Chieff of Staff, Gen. George Casey, appeared on ABC’s “This Week” with host George Stephanopoulos.

Casey, when asked about the role Hasan’s Muslim faith may have played in the shooting, said the issue was something "we need to be very careful about."

"The speculation could potentially heighten backlash against some of our Muslim soldiers,” Casey said. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here."

Sadly, I have learned that the long-dreaded backlash has already begun. However, these incidents are not being reported by the media, not even the fanatically rightwing FoxNews Channel, which breathes Islamophobia with every host.

DES MOINES, IA--Upset by killings at Ft Hood, Texas, by a suspect believed to have been motivated by his Islamic faith, a Methodist minister pulled his car next to the car of a Muslim woman attempting to change a flat tire. The minister changed the tire while the Muslim woman made sure her first-grade Muslim child did not stray out into traffic.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, immediately demanded that the woman's husband beat her severely with a rod no thicker than his thumb for spending time in the company of a man to whom she was neither married nor related by blood. It is not known whether the husband has yet complied.

MONTGOMERY, ALA.--Southern Baptists of this deep South city, enraged that a Muslim had apparently shot more than three dozen people at Ft Hood, gathered boxes of Gideons New Testaments and walked through Muslim neighborhoods passing them out and inviting the Muslims to Christian worship this Sunday.

The imam of Montgomery's largest mosque has filed a complaint with state authorities demanding that the Baptist churches' tax-exempt status be revoked for engaging in political activities.

"It is takfir for Muslims even to touch infidel books," he said, "so their gesture was extremely offensive to us. This incident just illustrates how hard Muslims have it in America."

HOPE, ARK.--After three known white supremacists were arrested while trying to set fire to the only mosque in the same town where Bill Clinton grew up, men of a local African Methodist Episcopal Church began patrolling the mosque's perimeter 24 hours per day.

The men are equipped with cell phones to call police and two-way radios to contact one another. AME Pastor Andrew Thomas said that no one would permit anything to happened to the mosque like happened to a few black churches in the 1950s.

"We don't know how long we'll walk these patrols," he said. "We have several men who served in the Army and Marines since Nine-Eleven who say that this is nothing compared to what they had to patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan."

Other local churches volunteered to bring hot food and drink to the AME men. "The Church of Christ has been very helpful," said Pastor Thomas.

"The only thing we have to be careful about is not to set foot on the mosque's actual campus," he continued. "The congregants here told us that would defile their mosque."

[Satire off]

However, there is real discrimination against Muslims in the American armed forces that does need serious attention, but is unlikely to get it.

In the South Asian and Arab immigrant communities where the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are deeply unpopular, Muslim military members have often felt criticized for their service, Muslim chaplains, military members, veterans advocates and others said in interviews.

Some return exhausted and traumatized from their tours, only to hear at their local mosques that they will go to hell for “killing Muslims,” said Qaseem A. Uqdah, the executive director of the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council.

“Imagine you are 20 years old and you hear you’re going to purgatory,” Mr. Uqdah said. He argued that Muslim groups must work harder to help their veterans cope with coming home. “We are failing as a community here in America."

No one oppresses Muslims more than other Muslims. And no one has killed more Muslims than al Qaeda and it's ideological allies.

Told ya so

Sister Toldjah on the topic of President Obama's habit of private meetings with select reporters:

This is becoming a regular occurrence, isn’t it? What’s happening with this WH? Are they so concerned now about MSM journalists like Jake Tapper asking them tough questions that they’ve taken to meeting “off-the-record” with liberal talking heads (and David Brooks – I know, same thing) in an effort to get “the real truth” out? Answer: Most likely. Hell, that’s why they’re pretty much boycotting Fox News at this point, and demanding that other liberals follow suit or else, because they can’t stand the heat and prefer “friendlier” news outlets, so it only stands to reason that the same rule applies here with these “off-the-record” chit chats where no one outside of the “inner circle” knows what was said. But of course, the “scratch my back, I’ll scratch your back” rule applies here. Write a favorable column, or say favorable things about the administration on either your show or a show where you’re a guest, and you’ll continue to get invited to “off-the-record” WH get togethers.

So much for “open government, accountable only to the people.”

To which Cornell Law Prof. William A. Jacobson adds,

... I'm not sure the big issue is open government.

To me, it's Obama's obsession with image. Like the girl looking in the mirror who cannot seem to get that last strand of hair in just the right place, Obama never is satisfied with his media image.

Fox News is the stray strand in Obama's otherwise perfectly coiffed media hairdo, and the more Obama obsesses over that slight imperfection, the worse he looks.

As for Sister's observation that if reporters write stories favorable to His Presidency, they'd get private time with him, I said three weeks ago that this was an integral part of the Alinskyite attack plan against FoxNews:

The other media may expect to be flattered as "real" reporters and news organizations who are actually the ones being "fair and balanced." The more a White House reporters and editors toe the White House line, the greater access they will be granted, especially to power figures such as Rahm Emmanuel, David Axelrod and, ultimately, Barack Obama himself, whom we may expect to give a one-on-one interview with the biggest suckup reporter gaining Dunn's favor. Reporters who don't fall into place will discover they are being frozen out of access and will have to rely exclusively on press briefer Robert Gibbs, which is the kiss of death to a White House reporter.

"Obama's obsession with image"? Are you kidding me? This is the Mae West presidency!

What is not forbidden is required redux

Last July, I wrote in "What is not forbidden is required,"

That was how someone once described life in the old Soviet Union, a few decades ago. The state tells you what you may not do on the one hand, and what you must do on the other. Personal freedom? Fugeddaboudit. ...

The tragedy is that we are, as a nation, willingly surrendering an enormous level of our freedom to gain a little level of health care. We should remember, as Ben Franklin warned in 1775, if we give up liberty to obtain security, we will find ourselves with neither.

It stinks to be right. Now we learn that in the US House's health care bill to be voted on this weekend or next week is a section requiring every American to buy a government-approved health insurance or get fined plus jail time.

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

In response to the JCT letter, Camp said: “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”

Key excerpts from the JCT letter appear below:

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

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“If the government determines that the taxpayer’s unpaid tax liability results from willful behavior, the following penalties could apply…” [page 2].


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“Criminal penalties

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]

When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties. The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.

“The Senate Finance Committee had the good sense to eliminate the extreme penalty of incarceration. Speaker Pelosi’s decision to leave in the jail time provision is a threat to every family who cannot afford the $15,000 premium her plan creates. Fortunately, Republicans have an alternative that will lower health insurance costs without raising taxes or cutting Medicare,” said Camp.

According to the Congressional Budget Office the lowest cost family non-group plan under the Speaker’s bill would cost $15,000 in 2016.

Hope and Change!

It's time to quote Alexis de Tocqueville again:

The sovereign extends its arms about the society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of petty regulations—complicated, minute, and uniform—through which even the most original minds and the most vigorous souls know not how to make their way… it does not break wills; it softens them, bends them, and directs them; rarely does it force one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting on one’s own … it does not tyrannize, it gets in the way: it curtails, it enervates, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Once again:

Constitution? We don't need no stinkin' Constitution!

Political correctness was not why Hasan was retained

The full-bore media and blog frenzy about the motivations of Ft Hood's shooter suspect, Maj. Nidal Hasan, is fully underway. After Ft Hood's commanding general told The Today Show that Hasan was the shooter and that Hasan shouted "Allahu akbar," "Allah is great," while firing, I posted that he was unwittingly setting the stage for Hasan's acquittal, if Hasan is ever brought to trial. The repeated media and blog pronouncements that Hasan is guilty are also potentially poisoning the potential prosecution, with reporting missing the usual words such as "alleged" shooter or "accused" killer much more frequently than normal.

But the Constitution hasn't changed. Hasan presently has only been named a suspect. He has not actually been accused or charged with anything. Like anyone else, he enjoys the rights to enter into trial, if there is a trial, with the full presumption of innocence which the government must overturn beyond reasonable doubt.

One one side of the frenzy, the commentati are clear that Army commanders turned a blind eye to Hasan's reputedly-increasing Islamic radicalism because of political correctness. For example, Jerry Pournelle:

Political correctness was the cause of the Fort Hood Massacre, and we ought not forget that. The fact that someone could go through -- at government expense -- an undergraduate education with ROTC, then medical school at a US military institution, and remain a traitor to the United States is a significant warning. A very significant warning that the idea of Political Correctness has consequences we can't afford. Corruption of the Legions is one danger the Republic cannot endure.

On the other side, commentators are running away from the idea that Islam had anything to do with the shooter's motives; Chris Matthews, for instance, saying that "we may never know" whether the shooter's religion was a factor.

Dr. Helen demands to know why Hasan was not investigated long before this week. After all, it is reported that he left a trail of anti-American statements that came to federal authorities' attention at least six months ago, although in fairness it is not certain that this Nidal Hasan was the author, his name being more common that Westerners might imagine. So, asks Helen,

Was it political correctness and concern for his Muslim heritage that kept officials from looking further into his mental health? Was the army so desperate for a psychiatrist (there is always a shortage) they didn't dare do anything?

So was alleged killer Dr. (Maj.) Nidal Hasan given a pass because the Army 's policies and commanders are so cowed by political correctness that they simply turned a blind eye to his reported, increasing Islamic radicalism?

I think there was less PC at play in continuing Hasan's career than you think. I don't mean "none," but low enough not to be a major factor. He was most likely given a pass because he was a doctor who by all accounts performed his physician duties well. And the Army is short of doctors, in some specialties critically short.

[T]here just aren’t enough military doctors to go around. So many MDs have been deployed to war zones that coverage back home — for military family members, retirees, and garrisoned troops — has been spread awfully thin.

I spoke to one Army doctor the other day - a chief of family practice at a good-sized facility. Let’s call him Dr. Jonah. He oversees about a dozen doctors, each with at least 21 patients per day.

Which sounds like a lot - until you consider that he’s got a patient base of over 18,000. Which means that diabetics or hypertensives — who should be seen at least four times annually– are only seen once a year. "There are women who haven’t gotten pap smears in years, who go without mammograms for years," Dr. Jonah says.

"The people that the government promised would take care of their health care are not getting nearly the coverage they need," he sighs.

There are Army doctors in my church, near Ft Campbell, and they've told me the Army is short. My second son wants to go to medical school after he graduates college (he's a senior now). I asked one of the Army doctors what he needed to do to get the Army to pay for it.

"First, get accepted to an accredited medical school," he answered.

"Then what?" I asked.

"That's pretty much it."

The NYT reports that Hasan tried to get released from active duty, claiming he was being harassed because he was a Muslim. "But the Army, which had paid for his education and was in great need of psychiatrists, refused, family members said."

According to the AP, Va. Tech. says that Hasan was never enrolled in ROTC there. As an honors graduate in biochemistry from the university, he had no problem getting accepted in the Army's "become a doctor on our dime" program.

The reason Hasan never came under military scrutiny for his increasingly-radicalized Islamism I think had much less to do with political correctness than with the Army Medical Department's fear of losing a doctor, who by all accounts performed his medical duties well, and not having a replacement.