Using a shooting for political purposes

Using A Shooting For Political Gain | Real Science

Obama isn’t the first politician to use a shooting as an excuse to escalate racial tension.

Encrypt your data!

Good news for those of us who have things they don't want Big Brother to read ... I hope this either stands or gets to the Supreme Court and is upheld ...

Note to self: Encrypt data, memorize password | InSecurity Complex - CNET News

Summary: Court rules that prosecutors can't force people to decrypt data that could potentially be used against them.
In a case that serves as a reminder to: a) use encryption, and b) memorize the encryption pass-phrase, an appeals court has ruled that people have a constitutional right not to be forced to decrypt data that potentially includes evidence that could be used to prosecute them in court.

TrueCrypt forever!

OTGH you are cautioned that not all Big Brothers will obey the law.

XKCD Security

Two more strikes against cloud computing

Why would anyone sane want to put ANYTHING which you might not want your favorite government snoop reading "in the cloud"?  Here are two stories I saw just today....

This story was linked to on the Drudge Report this morning, and I was able to read it earlier, but I suspect that the site is overloaded as it no longer loads:
Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive - FederalNewsRadio.com

The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents.

"We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public," said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. The archives don't contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else — billions and billions of tweets — are there.

A Google Search for "Library of Congress to receive entire Twitter archive" shows the story has been copied everywhere, so if you can't read it on the original site, you can read about it elsewhere.

Schneier on Security: Security Problems with U.S. Cloud Providers

Invasive U.S. surveillance programs, either illegal like the NSA's wiretapping of AT&T phone lines or legal as authorized by the PATRIOT Act, are causing foreign companies to think twice about putting their data in U.S. cloud systems.

I think these are legitimate concerns. I don't trust the U.S. government, law or no law, not to spy on my data if it thought it was a good idea. The more interesting question is: which government should I trust instead?

Real Climate Change We Might Want to Worry About

Coyote Blog » Blog Archive » Real Climate Change We Might Want to Worry About

The sun follows an (approximately) 11-year cycle as sunspots ebb and flow. The peak of these cycles, ie the number of sunspots at the cycle’s maximum, is thought to correlate with the strength of the sun’s output. In the past, periods with very low sunspot activity through an entire cycle have correlated with very cold temperatures (e.g. the Maunder Minimum and the Little Ice Age).

Well, NASA has updated its forecast for this cycle and it does not look good:

Current prediction for the next sunspot cycle maximum gives a smoothed sunspot number maximum of about 62 in July of 2013. We are currently over two years into Cycle 24. The predicted size would make this the smallest sunspot cycle in nearly 200 years.

The low cycle 200 years ago coincided with a decade or more of wicked-cold temperatures, particularly in Northern Europe (think Napoleon’s army freezing to death in 1812).

One of the reasons this probably has not gotten much coverage is that climate scientists have worked hard in the media to attribute the vast majority of past warming, particularly in the period 1978-1998, to ppm changes in CO2 concentration. But this same 2-decade period saw extremely high solar activity (as measured by sunspots) and ocean cycles like the PDO in the warm phase. To maximize how much past warming was attributed to CO2, warming alarmists had to take the fairly absurd position that these ocean cycles and changes in solar output had only trivial effects on temperatures...

Read more on the Coyote Blog

Deaths per TeraWatt-hour

Interesting ... on an IBM page, FWIW.

Many Eyes : Deaths per TWh by energy sources

This visualization compares the energy mix and number deaths related to each of the main sources of energy worldwide - coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, hydro and biomass. details can be found at http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html

U.S. Citizens Have No Obligation To Answer Questions

I am really glad to see this.  I will remember this next time I cross a border.

KNIFE TRICKS: I Am Detained By The Feds For Not Answering Questions

Sherman Oaks, California

I was detained last night by
federal authorities at San Francisco International Airport for refusing
to answer questions about why I had travelled outside the United States.

The
end result is that, after waiting for about half an hour and refusing
to answer further questions, I was released – because U.S. citizens who
have produced proof of citizenship and a written customs declaration are
not obligated to answer questions.

[snip]

Principal Take-Aways

1. Cops Really Don’t Like It When You Refuse To Answer Their Questions.
The passport control officer was aghast when I told her that my visit
to China was none of her business. This must not happen often, because
several of the officers involved seemed thrown by my refusal to meekly
bend to their whim.

2. They’re Keeping Records. A federal, computer-searchable file exists on my refusal to answer questions.

3. This Is About Power, Not Security.
The CBP goons want U.S. citizens to answer their questions as a
ritualistic bow to their power. Well, CBP has no power over me. I am a
law-abiding citizen, and, as such, I am the master, and the federal cops
are my servants. They would do well to remember that.

4. U.S. Citizens Have No Obligation To Answer Questions.
Ultimately, the cops let me go, because there was nothing they could
do. A returning U.S. citizen has an obligation to provide proof of
citizenship, and the officer has legitimate reasons to investigate if
she suspects the veracity of the citizenship claim. A U.S. citizen
returning with goods also has an obligation to complete a written
customs declaration. But that’s it. You don’t have to answer questions
about where you went, why you went, who you saw, etc.

Of course, if you don’t, you get hassled.

But that’s a small price to pay to remind these thugs that their powers are limited and restricted.

Seriously disgusting abuse of government power

Back to blogging ... been "AFK" for a while. Will try to post links and more a little more often.

Morning Links | The Agitator

Department of Transportation fines non-profit air ambulance service $30,000 for using the wrong pronoun.

Global Cooling Is Coming -- and Beware the Big Chill, Scientist Warns

FOXNews.com - Global Cooling Is Coming -- and Beware the Big Chill, Scientist Warns

Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, a scientist who has written more than 150 peer-reviewed papers has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.

Like a drunken sailor?

Here's a really short, right-on-the-money comment on Congress's spending "like a drunken sailor".

» One Sailor’s View of Obama & Congress
Dvorak Uncensored: General interest observations and true web-log.

It's a sad day in America when this is good advice

Unfortunately America is becoming more and more like AmeriKa ... "papers please" is becoming the norm, and the Obamination that is our current "leader" isn't making it any better ....

The Liberty Papers »Blog Archive » Flex Your Rights Presents: 10 Rules for Dealing with Police

The Bill of Rights provides citizens basic protections against unlawful searches and seizures via the Fourth Amendment, protections against self incrimination via the Fifth Amendment, and the right to an attorney via the Sixth Amendment. On a theoretical level, most people probably know this but what does this mean on a practical level?

If the police pull you over, are you required to answer the officer’s questions if he hasn’t informed you of your right to remain silent? What does “probable cause” and “reasonable suspicion” mean when a police officer wants to search your vehicle and do you have a right to refuse the search? Should you consent to the search if you know you have nothing to hide? If the police knock on your front door, are you legally required to let them in if they don’t have a warrant? Are the police legally required to tell the truth or can they make false promises or otherwise trick you into waiving your constitutionally protected civil rights?

If you are unsure about the answers to these questions, don’t feel bad; I wasn’t too sure myself. The 4 part video series 10 Rules for Dealing with Police from the group that calls itself Flex Your Rights answers these questions and more in terms a lay person like myself can easily understand. Some of the advice is common sense (see rules 1, 7, & 8 below) while others are more legal in nature.

Whether you are a “law abiding citizen” who almost never has an encounter with the police or a “cop magnet,” this advice not only could keep you from being in serious legal trouble but also keep you from being beaten, tazered, or shot (if you follow these rules and these things still happen, you have more legal recourse against offending officers).

If you don’t have time to watch these videos right away, here are the 10 Rules for Dealing with Police in brief:

Read the article ... Flex Your Rights Presents: 10 Rules for Dealing with Police

Don't trust Wikipedia when it comes to climate issues

When you are researching on the Internet, Wikipedia has become the "place to go" for most research.  However, when it comes to climate issues, particularly those related to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), Wikipedia can't be trusted.  This has been well documented by several researchers -- if you make a change to an AGW article which mentions climate skeptics favourably, the change will be reversed quickly.

Climategate: the corruption of Wikipedia – Telegraph Blogs

If you want to know the truth about Climategate, definitely don’t use Wikipedia. “Climatic Research Unit e-mail controversy”, is its preferred, mealy-mouthed euphemism to describe the greatest scientific scandal of the modern age. Not that you’d ever guess it was a scandal from the accompanying article. It reads more like a damage-limitation press release put out by concerned friends and sympathisers of the lying, cheating, data-rigging scientists

Which funnily enough, is pretty much what it is. Even Wikipedia’s own moderators acknowledge that the entry has been hijacked, as this commentary by an “uninvolved editor” makes clear.

Unfortunately, this naked bias and corruption has infected the supposedly neutral Wikipedia’s entire coverage of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory. And much of this, as Lawrence Solomon reports in the National Post, is the work of one man, a Cambridge-based scientist and Green Party activist named William Connolley.

The American Spectator : Wikipedia Meets Its Own Climategate

.... the use of Wikipedia itself to inflame the political debate by permitting activists to rewrite the contributions of others. All by itself, that surely is a contributor to online incivility.

The issue that I am particularly thinking about is "climate change" -- or global warming as it was once called (until the globe stopped warming, about a decade ago). Recently the Financial Post in Canada published an article by Lawrence Solomon, with this remarkable headline:

How Wikipedia's green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles.

Solomon draws attention to the online labors of one William M. Connolley, a Green Party activist and software engineer in Britain. Starting in February 2003, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. I continue with a two-paragraph direct quote from Mr. Solomon's article:

[Connolley] rewrote Wikipedia's articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug. 11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band [of climatologist activists]. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world's most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band [of activists] especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.

All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn't like the subject of a certain article, he removed it -- more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred -- over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley's global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia's blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.

Lawrence Solomon: Climategate at Wikipedia - FP Comment

A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC - Telegraph

VERY good article about why the IPCC is dead in the water.

A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC - Telegraph

Graphical proof of a long-term global cooling trend

The big picture: 65 million years of temperature swings « JoNova

David Lappi is a geologist from Alaska who has sent in a set of beautiful graphs–including an especially prosaic one of the last 10,000 years in Greenland–that he put together himself (and which I’ve copied here at the top).

If you wonder where today’s temperature fits in with the grand scheme of time on Earth since the dinosaurs were wiped out, here’s the history. We start with the whole 65 million years, then zoom in, and zoom in again to the last 12,000 from both ends of the world. What’s obvious is that in terms of homo sapiens history, things are warm now (because we’re not in an ice age). But, in terms of homo sapiens civilization, things are cooler than usual, and appear to be cooling.

Then again, since T-rex & Co. vanished, it’s been one long slide down the thermometer, and our current “record heatwave” is far cooler than normal. The dinosaurs would have scoffed at us: “What? You think this is warm?”

With so much volatility in the graphs, anyone could play “pick a trend” and depending on which dot you start from, you can get any trend you want. — Jo

AGW High Priest says Medieval Warm Period real, no warming since 1995

No surprise here.

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Phil Jones blows the gaff

The AGW true believers who determinedly reasserted their faith after the Climate Research Unit emails leaked have just been embarrassed by one of the high priests of the cult. Phil Jones, the former head of the CRU, now admits that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

Reading this is an entertaining counterpoint to the sight of the five-foot-long icicles hanging from the eaves outside my office window. Dunno whether it means anything — probably doesn’t — but the last time I saw icicles this size was during the bizarre six-day-long ice storm that socked Philadelphia early in, I think, 1993.

Jones himself claims to still believe in AGW, but he’s also now conceding that temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period (Remember? That thing Mann and the Hockey Team tried to flimflam out of existence?) may have averaged higher than today’s. And he trots out the reliable old “the dog ate my primary data” excuse for another walk.

Stay tuned. As bad as it looks now, I’m pretty certain that the depths of embarrassment and disgrace waiting for AGW true believers have not been fully plumbed even yet.

Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made

No kidding.

ESR on Naming and Shaming the AGW fanatics

Well said, good explanation of the AGW crowd.

Armed and Dangerous » Blog Archive » Naming and shaming the AGW fraudsters

James Delingpole, in Climategate: Time for the Tumbrils, noting the public collapse in credibility of AGW “science” utters a fine rant summed up in this wise (parochial references to British political figures and organizations omitted):

I’m in no mood for being magnanimous in victory. I want the lying, cheating, fraudulent scientists prosecuted and fined or imprisoned. I want warmist politicians booted out and I want fellow-travellers who are still pushing this green con trick to be punished at the polls for their culpable idiocy.

For years I’ve been made to feel a pariah for my views on AGW. Now it’s payback time and I take small satisfaction from seeing so many rats deserting their sinking ship. I don’t want them on my side. I want to see them in hell, reliving scenes from Hieronymus Bosch.

I too long to see the frauds and the fellow-travellers in the hell they’ve earned for themselves. But revenge, while it’s a tasty dish that long-time public “deniers” like Delingpole and myself are now thoroughly enjoying, isn’t the best reason to hound them and their enabling organizations out of public life. The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:

If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.

More Climategate fallout, this time from the UK Guardian

Here's another story about (probably fraudulent, certainly unverifiable) data being used in a now-discredited story that forms one of the cornerstones of the rapidly-crumbling AGW edifice:

Chinese Urbanization Study | Climate Skeptic

Why it matters

The Guardian writes:

[I]t is important to keep this in perspective, however. This dramatic revision of the estimated impact of urbanisation on temperatures in China does not change the global picture of temperature trends. There is plenty of evidence of global warming, not least from oceans far from urban influences.

This is correct. Further, it is absurd to deny the world has warmed over the last 150 years as the little ice age of the 17th and 18th centuries was one of the coldest periods in thousands of years, and thus it is totally natural that we have seen warming in recovery from these frigid times.

But here is what it is important to understand: The real debate between skeptics and alarmists is not over whether the Earth has warmed over the last century or whether CO2 from man contributes incrementally to warming. The real debate is over whether the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 is high or low. Skeptics like me argue for low sensitivity, on the order of 0.5-1.0C per doubling once all feedbacks are taken in to account. Alarmists argue for numbers 3C and higher.

The problem alarmists have is that it is very, very difficult to reconcile past warming to high-sensitivity forecasts. It takes a lot of mathematical contortions, from time-delays to cooling aerosols to ignoring ocean cycles and natural recovery from the little ice age to make the numbers reconcile. Halving the actual historic warming by attributing the other half to measurement biases makes it even, uh, more impossible to reconcile high sensitivity models to actual history.

Reason series on Climategate - Update 1: The China Syndrome

Climategate Update 1: The China Syndrome* - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

Climategate just gets more interesting all the time doesn't it? The Guardian is reporting that the Climatic Research Unit (the U.K. research group at the center of the Climategate affair) has somehow lost critical temperature data again, in this case data from Chinese weather stations that are supposed to prove that the urban heat island effect accounts for a neglible portion of the warming trend found in temperature records. The abstract for the study published in 1990 in Nature reads:

Read the rest of the Reason article at the link above.

In any case, Phil Jones and the CRU crowd are in the process of finding out the truth of the old adage, "It's not the crime, it's the cover up" that eventually brings someone down.

Surprise, surprise, CO2 increase may cause COOLING ....

» Study: Earth Self-Regulation Discovery may make Carbon Credits, Etc. Irrelevant Dvorak Uncensored: General interest observations and true web-log.

Despite the apparent bias of many climate researchers, they do have one thing right; carbon levels have risen notably over the twentieth century from about 300 ppm to 375 ppm. While still far from the estimated levels of around 3,000 ppm during the time of the dinosaurs (appr. 150 MYA), the rising levels do mark a legitimate trend. However, there is increasing evidence that the rising carbon, contrary to alarmist reports is actually having remarkably little effect on global temperatures.

A new study authored by Susan Solomon, lead author of the study and a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. could explain why atmospheric carbon is not contributing to warming significantly. According to the study, as carbon levels have risen, the cold air at high altitudes over the tropics has actually grown colder. The lower temperatures at this “coldest point” have caused global water vapor levels to drop, even as carbon levels rise.

Water vapor helps trap heat, and is a far the strongest of the major greenhouse gases, contributing 36–72 percent of the greenhouse effect. However more atmospheric carbon has actually decreased water vapor levels. Thus rather than a “doomsday” cycle of runaway warming, Mother Earth appears surprisingly tolerant of carbon, decreasing atmospheric levels of water vapor — a more effective greenhouse gas — to compensate.

Describes Professor Solomon, “There is slow warming that has taken place over the last 100 years. But from one decade to another, there can be fluctuations in the warming trend.”

The study was published in the prestigious journal Science.

The Sun Also Flares

And now for something completely different -- sort of.  Maybe the Mormons are right -- stockpile enough supplies to survive for a year independently. If a solar flare of the magnitude of the "Carrington Event" were to occur tomorrow, the world would be in Serious Trouble ...

Cliff May : The Sun Also Flares - Townhall.com

The strongest solar storm on record is the Carrington Event of 1859, named after Richard Carrington, an astronomer who witnessed the super solar flare that set off the event as he was projecting an image of the sun on a white screen. In those days, of course, there was nothing much to damage. A high-intensity burst of electro-magnetic energy shot through telegraph lines, disrupting communications, shocking technicians and setting their papers on fire. Northern Lights were visible as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. But otherwise life went on as normal.

The same would not be true were a solar storm of similar magnitude to erupt today. Instead, the infrastructure we depend on would be wiped out. Most of us would not adapt well to this sudden return to a pre-industrial age.

How likely is a repeat of the Carrington Event? Scientists say it is not only possible -- it is inevitable. What they don't know is when. The best estimates are that super solar storms occur once every 100 years - which means we are 50 years overdue.

Both the Wikipedia page and the NASA page on the Carrington Event suggest that such events are twice-a-millenium events, or once every 500 years, not once a century according to the Townhall.com "report". I guess it's just another life-gamble: should I worry about surviving a once-in-10-lifetimes event or should I just live like a grasshopper?

Stray animals and welfare recipients ....

dispatches from TJICistan » Blog Archive » offense intended

The main difference between welfare recipients and stray animals is that there’s actual demand for stray animals.