Say Anything Blog

This is something I’ve already commented on in this blog.  BBC finally worked it out by themselves:

China has already overtaken the US as the world’s “biggest polluter”, a report to be published next month says.  The research suggests the country’s greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated, and probably passed those of the US in 2006-2007.

Could you have a better illustration of why climate treaty models that don’t address CO2 emissions from developing nations are deeply flawed?  If human-generated CO2 is such a threat, how does ignoring the primary region where emission rates are increasing make even a little bit of sense???

Even for people who are willing to accept the claims of the global warming advocates, the fact that so many of them supported the Kyoto protocols should give one pause.  If they are this wrong on this one issue, the crucial issue of what do we do about it, what does this say about their judgement of the underlying science?

Thought you guys would get a kick out of this one.

I understand it was shot by a US soldier serving as an advisor for an almost all Iraqi patrol moving into Basra at night time.  Some amazing footage.

In case you guys haven’t heard, the battle is not going well for the Mahdi Army.  They are outnumbered and outgunned and have lost a significant portion of their force strength.

Via Instapundit, it is reported that “Six days after the Iraqi government launched Operation Knights’ Charge in Basrah against the Mahdi Army and other Iranian-backed Shia terror groups, Muqtada al Sadr, the Leader of the Mahdi Army, has called for his fighters to lay down their weapons and cooperate with Iraqi security forces.”

In layman’s terms, that’s called “surrender”.

I have no doubt the battle will go on, there are many who no longer fall Sadr and will wish to martyr themselves pointlessly.  But their ignoring his order to surrender will only further undermine his position beyond what this gamble of his to resist governmental forces has already cost him.

I’m sure the liberals in the crowd can conjure reasons why this is bad news, though.

Harvey over at IMAO reports:

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The number of Iraqi citizens not killed by Saddam Hussein has reached 200,000, the U.S. military said on Monday, just days after the fifth anniversary of a war that President George W. Bush says the United States is on track to win.

The U.S. military said in a statement that the grim milestone was reached when 200 civilians were not murdered by Iraq’s tyrannical dictator late on Sunday when no large groups of people were rounded up and shot in the head for making statements critical of their government. No one was wounded in the non-attack.

Non-tragic non-victims of yet another Saddam Hussein non-killing spree.

The non-deaths came on a day when the very dead Uday and Qusay Hussein were unable to pick women at random to rape and slaughter, owing largely to their inability to breathe, circulate blood, or stop being eaten by bugs as their bodies rotted in the ground. [...]

Read the whole thing.

I mean it.

Ed Morrissey over at Hotair reminds us of this nice little letter sent by McCain to Obama, after Obama broke his promise on campaign reform:

I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere. When you approached me and insisted that despite your leadership’s preference to use the issue to gain a political advantage in the 2006 elections, you were personally committed to achieving a result that would reflect credit on the entire Senate and offer the country a better example of political leadership, I concluded your professed concern for the institution and the public interest was genuine and admirable. Thank you for disabusing me of such notions with your letter to me dated February 2, 2006, which explained your decision to withdraw from our bipartisan discussions. I’m embarrassed to admit that after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble. Again, sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won’t make the same mistake again.

[...]

As I noted, I initially believed you shared that goal. But I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party’s effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn’t always a priority for every one of us. Good luck to you, Senator.

Sincerely,

John McCain
United States Senate

What is the “new” that Obama wants to bringing to the presidency again?

From Gallup:

PRINCETON, NJ—A sizable proportion of Democrats would vote for John McCain next November if he is matched against the candidate they do not support for the Democratic nomination. This is particularly true for Hillary Clinton supporters, more than a quarter of whom currently say they would vote for McCain if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

I would guess this is because Hillary is viewed as more moderate than Obama, so McCain is picking up the moderate Democrat vote.  Shades of McGovern or Mondale?

How the world has changed. 20 years ago, most military analysts would have placed German infantry on par with the US Marines.  Now, apparently not so much:

Berlin - German soldiers are overweight, smoke too much and do not engage in enough sports, according to a report published Tuesday by the parliamentary commissioner for the defence force. “Male and female soldiers are too fat, partake little in sports and pay too little attention to what they eat,” Reinhold Robbe said in his official report to parliament. He called the situation “shocking.”

h/t Drudge

This plays in with one of my pet theories by the way.  Namely, I think that part of the reason that the militaries of socialist names suck so badly is due to the enormous cost of their socialist programs:  They simply can’t afford a top-notch military like our own.  Part of their governmental model, if you want, is there is a beneficent super power willing to watch their backs for them, while they squander their excess productivity in providing unneeded services to lazy slackers.

It is a crazy world indeed.

We now return to our regularly scheduled six year old news hind cast.

World Climate Report has some nice reviews of a flurry of recent publications in reputable scientific journals (Nature, Geophysical Research Letters, etc.) that are repudiating the alarmist meme that global warming equates with more intense storms and more strong storms making landfall.

There is plenty more, but the historical record speaks volumes.

Atlantic Storm landfalls:

Eastern Pacific Storms.:

In either case, the pattern is a reduced number of storms making landfall overtime.  The link above also summarizes the theoretical findings that explain why one would expect this to be the case.

On a bit more serious note on the “global warming” front, we have this:



Notice the near total absence of sun spots.

Then we have this:

Sunspot Cycle Predictions Solar physicists believe the speed of a massive circulating current of hot plasma within the Sun predicts the amplitudes of sunspot cycles approximately twenty years into the future. In recent years that speed has become lower than ever before observed. Based on the plasma-speed/future-cycle-amplitude theory, a team led by physicist Mausumi Dikpata of the National Center for Atmospheric Research predicts Cycle 24 will be intense. NASA solar physicist David Hathaway agrees, but predicts Cycle 25 will be extraordinarily weak. Dikpati’s team prediction for Cycle 24 is shown above in pink. Hathaway’s Cycle 24 and 25 predictions are shown in red.

Finally, there is this, the real punchline: “Solar Activity Diminishes; Researchers Predict Another Ice Age”

Global Cooling comes back in a big way

Dr. Kenneth Tapping is worried about the sun. Solar activity comes in regular cycles, but the latest one is refusing to start. Sunspots have all but vanished, and activity is suspiciously quiet. The last time this happened was 400 years ago—and it signaled a solar event known as a “Maunder Minimum,” along with the start of what we now call the “Little Ice Age.”

It may be a bit premature to be purchasing an extra pair of wool pants, or perhaps a fur coat, but still this is rather disconcerting news.

Wonder how Al Gore will respond to this one?

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

Posted for the irony, and the human interest, since one bad winter doesn’t mean that the Earth is really cooling—anymore than one hot summer driven by El Nino means it’s really warming. 

Trouble is the Gore-iacs want it both ways:  They want to use the data if it confirms, and argue it doesn’t matter, when it tends to contradict their fiercely held beliefs.

50 years ongoing, the results are illuminated by the nighttime view over Korea.

Audioslave, “I am the Highway”

There are lots of ways of interpreting the lyrics to this song.  One of my favorites involves the proper role of government.  “I am not your rolling wheels, I am the highway”. 

It’s the governments role to provide us with the road to prosperity, but it is ours to provide the means to get down that road ourselves.  The importance of this self determination is often missed by liberals, who think it unfair that somebody can go farther down this highway than others.

Got to here with a little practice.  My first try was around 25,600.

European geography quiz with the opportunity to win in a sweepstake.

More here.

There is a new article in the Weekly Standard on How Bush Decided on the Surge
that provides the image of an deeper, more insightful president than the simpletons in the press normally portray.

What is most interesting to me is that the surge was put in place based on the recommendations of the younger advisors and ran contrary to the advice of many high-power groups, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who favored (bluntly) acceptance of failure and ordered withdrawal, the Baker Commission which also favored a draw-down and withdrawal, and the State Departments plan of contain and surround the war zones, and just the two sides fight it out until there was a clear victor.

What Bush had to convince these various groups of was that the price of failure was greater than the cost that the surge presented, that a strategy of wait until Iraq stepped up would fail, that our troops needed to leave the Vietnam-styled pattern of “control and release” (whereby we grabbed a target, then failed to occupy it after gaining control), and so forth.

Probably the part that took the most guts was getting in front of America and a skeptical Democrat-controlled Congress and making the the case for a change in strategy that involved committing additional resources at a time when many felt the situation was beyond repair:

The 20-minute speech on January 10, 2007, was not Bush’s most eloquent. And it wasn’t greeted with applause. Democrats condemned the surge and Republicans were mostly silent. Polls showing strong public opposition to the war in Iraq were unaffected.

But the president, as best I could tell, wasn’t looking for affirmation. He was focused solely on victory in Iraq. The surge may achieve that. And if it does, Bush’s decision to spurn public opinion and the pressure of politics and intensify the war in Iraq will surely be regarded as the greatest of his presidency.

h/t Instapundit.

A recent poll finds

• Growing media attempts to influence public opinion and policies
• Poor quality
• A strong liberal bent in most media
• Fox News, CNN and NBC as the most accurate

A Sacred Heart University Poll found significantly declining percentages of Americans saying they believe all or most of media news reporting. In the current national poll, just 19.6% of those surveyed could say they believe all or most news media reporting. This is down from 27.4% in 2003. Just under one-quarter, 23.9%, in 2007 said they believe little or none of reporting while 55.3% suggested they believe some media news reporting.

In related news, the US media thinks the public is stupid and easily duped (joke).

H/T Gateway Pundit