Oct 26 2009
Fly By 10_26_09
Sorry for the light posting, having to take care of business issues, thanks to the fact Congress has yet to pass this year’s budget. You would think with wide margins in both houses of congress and the presidency the Democrats could get their work done on time.
Anyway, some interesting reading. Rasmussen now shows the GOP has the lead in all major issues. They lead by:
- 4% on Healthcare (46-40)
- 14% on the Economy (49-35)
- 23% on National Security (54-31)
- 19% on Iraq (50-31)
I as shocked to see the GOP even ahead on education, abortion and immigration! Clearly the Dems have destroyed their credibility by failing to address the rising unemployment. Their vaunted liberal experiment in economic stimulus through government spending has been an abysmal failure. And their efforts to ration health care through a government takeover if health insurance is way beyond the comfort level of most voters.
Iraq is also not much of a surprise. After crying “failure, failure, failure” and then have victory show up the Democrats started out looking incompetent. Americans can’t stand quitters.
A post crossed my way about the situation in southern Afghanistan. It seems things are going better than expected. I would be wary on banking the good news just yet, but the truth is the bad guys are running out of bad guys. Not only have they been decimated over the years, their recruiting is drying up as the Muslim Street turns sour on the Islamo Fascists. Moreover, the Pakistanis are about to knock down the door on the main sanctuary of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and I would suspect all hands are back in Southern Waziristan trying to defend the core leaders:
Pakistani aircraft attacked Taliban in the South Waziristan region on Sunday a day after the army said it had captured a strategic town on an approach to the militants’ main base area.
Interestingly, sanity seems to be breaking out when it comes to Global Warming. I plan to post on and argument I made to Charles Johnson at LGF, because the debate I was having over their enlightened me to new aspects of the debate. But before that happens, it is interesting to note in the latest poll on GW only a small minority believe the current warming (sort of an oxymoron there) is caused by human activity:
Only about a third, or 36 percent of the respondents, feel that human activities — such as pollution from power plants, factories and automobiles — are behind a temperature increase. That’s down from 47 percent from 2006 through last year’s poll.
A decade of cooling can have that affect.
Welcome back AJ. I Missed your posting. Looking forward to hearing about your arguments with CJ.
The most interesting debate point in the whole AGW “thing” is the argument of why there are no peer-reviewed studies by skeptics. That is an interesting argument with a very simply explanation:
If something isn’t happening, you can’t prove a negative. It is impossible to prove that something isn’t happening. You can only prove something IS happening. As there are already tons of studies that document natural climate variability and that variability has been greater in the past than anything we have seen in the recent past, there is nothing to prove.
So far every study claiming to show human caused global warming has not passed muster once the data and methods have been revealed. Other studies are often founded on the debunked studies. Debunking the foundation studies is sort of like knitting unraveling.
Mann took four series of data and inverted them. Only when he turned the data “upside down” did it show warming in the recent period so that is what he did. He turned warmer into colder and colder into warmer by simply inverting the graph.
Briffa created modern warming by simply eliminating data from tree cores once they started to disagree with the desired result. He would include a core sample’s data as long as it agreed with the agenda and then once it began to diverge, he truncated the data. By the time you get to recent years, he was down to four of five cores with ONE core sample (out of hundreds) being the one that created most of the “warming”.
Steig used three weather stations in specific region to imply warming of all of Antarctica. It is sort of like having a group of 100 people whose average height is 5 feet 10 inches. Now you introduce three people into the group who are 6 feet 6 inches tall and claim that the average height increased. It did, but to try to imply that all those other people are now taller than they were is nuts. Steig implied that all of Antarctica was warming by spreading out that “average” over the entire continent. And on top of that he truncated the data going back in time to only the point where it showed warming. Had he gone back farther in time (to 1980) even his own record shows a cooling trend from 1980 to present. He selected a start and stop time in the record that recorded a (temporary) warming trend.
And they (the Hockey Team) are at it again and are trying to get yet another paper published based on the earlier debunked studies. They are currently shopping that new one around to the various scientific journals but it really contains nothing new. It is simply an abstraction layer on top of the earlier studies which, when audited, are shown to be flawed.
To reiterate … there has not been to date ONE SINGLE STUDY that links human activity with global climate change. Any local human induced change (from, say, irrigation or urbanization) is swamped by natural variation.
So, Afghanistan is going better than expected,
http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/1094/A-Tough-Nut-for-McChrystal.aspx
And Iraq resulted in “Victory”
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTk0NWRmY2U2OTUyNWIzNDVkYzE3MGNmYmNiNTRlYzk=
Some Infidels are very blind.
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MmZjNTlhYTU4ODExNzc4YTJkMzFhZjczNTE3ZmJjZmI=
Hopefully their vision will improve.
Priorities first, AJ. Go take care of business. Looking forward to some more detailed analysis from you soon, though.
Hey folks, maybe this also explains the immigration problem in the US.
It seems that the Labour government in the UK *intentionally* allowed mass immigration in order to change the demographic makeup of the electorate to people who are more likely to be supporters of the Labour party. It was completely (and secretly) intentionally done to change the electorate.
Sounds just like what the Democrats are doing here.
“And Iraq resulted in “Victoryâ€
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YTk0NWRmY2U2OTUyNWIzNDVkYzE3MGNmYmNiNTRlYzk=”
Sorry stevevvs, the insurgency has enough capacity for an occasional bombing and that’s it. Strategically and military irrelevant, just pornography for anti-American types like yourself.
steve:
I have always felt that there was not a dimes worth of difference between a paleo con and a progressive when it comes to national security, you are a good example of that. Extremes meet.
crosspatch:
I saw a link the other day to a story that said 22% of the people in Great Britain would consider voting for the far right party. I think the plan to bring in a lot of immigrants had some unintended consequences.