Sunday, January 31, 2010
  Thanking El Niño



Polistra is praying to the Christ Child, el Niño himself, thanking his meteorological namesake for Spokane's easiest winter in recorded history. The previous two winters were deadly and disastrous, probably the worst in the country. This year we're getting the easiest winter in the country, at least relative to local norms. Only 12 inches of snow so far, and none of it stayed on the ground. (Average at this point is 30 inches; last year at this point was 80 inches building finally to 100.) Temps in the 40s most days, only rarely dropping below freezing. Pretty much Seattle weather.

And where did the typical Spokane winter go this year? Oklahoma.
 
  Inescapable irrelevance



I've noticed in recent weeks that most of my incoming links are related to the top word on the sign in this picture, which is part of Episode 7 of Polistra's Dream.

The reason is obvious: all the pictures in this episode had titles containing the word Q*********, and there is apparently a very popular video game named Q********* 2. Yesterday I went to the trouble of changing these image titles from Q********** whatever.jpg to Measles whatever.jpg, and removed the word from the text of the episode as well, hoping to cut down the irrelevant noise.

Also a vaguely Golden-rulish consideration ... I get annoyed when Google hands me a batch of completely irrelevant stuff, so I don't want my blog to be the source of such annoyance for others.

Unfortunately, the change from Q********** to Measles actually made things worse! The Google connections are still present, and the searchers are even more determined to find the reference now that it's nowhere in the pictures or text!

It's like having a phone number similar to the local Pizza Hut. You keep getting calls ordering pizza, and no matter how hard you try, the callers will not be persuaded that you're not really Pizza Hut.

[Footnote: I've "censored" the word that means a disease-preventing lockdown. Not because it's dirty, but just to avoid creating a new irrelevant search target while discussing the removal of the old!]
 
Saturday, January 30, 2010
  LANDMARK



CBS News ran a feature on education tonight that finally broke out of the standard set of lies.

They stated ... for the first time ever on American mainstream media ... that MONEY DOES NOT IMPROVE EDUCATION.

This has been blazingly obvious from all available facts for 30 years. In fact the correlation is almost perfectly inverse: with only two exceptions, the states that spend more get worse results and the states that spend less get better results.

CBS also stated clearly that tenure and unions interfere with improving education. This fact is less absolute; it's only in the biggest cities, especially New York, that the unions are truly abusive and intractable. But it's still an important fact, and it's never been mentioned before in MSM reporting.
 
  The Edwards soap opera

The enemy-controlled media are asking the usual unbreakably stupid questions about recent revelations on John Edwards.

"How could Elizabeth stay with John, knowing that he was lying and carrying on affairs? How could she openly defend him while he was betraying her?"

Here, let me explain it for you.

(1) John is a very good-looking and very rich man, and he was at the very top of the status ladder.

(2) Elizabeth is a woman.

QED.

Complete explanation. No mystery.
 
Friday, January 29, 2010
  See what happens?

This is truly amazing. While other newspapers continue to try all sorts of tricks to forestall their well-deserved death, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review went WAY out of the box, all the way into hyper-weird fantasy land, and increased its circulation by 15% instantly.

What was the wild unimaginable unthinkable science-fictionish gambit?

They told the truth. They stopped parroting standard bullshit.

Good old-fashioned honest journalism by Pittsburghlive.com pointedly embarrasses Penn State and their pernicious professor, Michael Mann. Their editorial reviewing the “Climategate Analysis,” by Australian physicist, Dr. John P. Costella and now available from the non-profit Science & Public Policy Institute (scienceandpublicpolicy.org), has really caught the attention of Pennsylvanian readers.

Since running the editorial on Dr. Costella’s latest exposé, the Tribune-Review's circulation jumped 14.8 percent from 146,520 to 168,218 on the back of Costella’s story.


Will other papers copy this bizarre beyond-the-known-universe weirdness? I doubt it. They'd rather walk on fire, sleep on nails, tear off their faces, than tell the truth.

(For what it's worth, the Tribune-Review has been a good paper for a long time. When I lived in PA in the '80s, that's the one paper I read daily. It was always interesting, balanced and well-edited; always paid attention to ordinary people.)
 
  Also no surprise

Killer licensed by the Party, spends 36 years killing thousands of children. Not punished; gets rich; has special law passed to protect him from protests.

Unlicensed vigilante finally destroys the official killer.

The Party can't have unlicensed vigilantes running around, kills the unlicensed vigilante.

Just another wonderful day in Hank Paulson's wonderful Death Camp. All Modern Conveniences, Color TV, Vibrating Beds. Situated on the same territory that once held a nation called America.
 
  Real science

Since the "scientists" are no longer doing science, the police have to do it!

After a recent car accident where an SUV slid off a roadway not long after de-icer was placed on the same stretch of road, Spokane County Sheriff’s deputies set out Friday to conduct skid tests to determine whether or not deicer makes roads slippery.

[They] shut down a stretch of East Wellesley for several hours for skid tests.

When doing a skid test investigators assign various surfaces what is called a 'Coefficient of Friction.' A 1.0 Coefficient of Friction would be sandpaper, 0.8 is dry pavement, 0.6 is wet pavement, 0.2 is snow and 0.1 is ice.

[Until Friday] no study to determine deicer’s friction coefficient has ever been conducted in the United States. ...

For nearly two hours a deputy drove at speeds up to 60 miles an hour and then slammed on his brakes, changing variables such as braking with and without anti-lock braking engaged and then doing brake tests at intervals after the deicer was applied.

One test was done just after deicer was applied and then the test was run every 15 minutes for the next hour and a half. .....

By the end of the brake testing deputies determined two things. First, deicer makes the road only slightly slicker than dry pavement. If a dry road has a 0.8 friction coefficient, than the deicer is about 0.7, roughly in-between dry and wet pavement on the scale.


= = = = =

By damn, a genuine and complete experiment, for a genuinely important purpose.

The deicer in question is an oily liquid that has been used for several years around here, ever since the government-funded terrorist organization EPA decided that plain old sand and salt were saving human lives.

As a pedestrian I've definitely observed that the deicer doesn't deice, and sometimes adds slippage. I haven't been driving since the changeover, so can't say how it feels from a driver's viewpoint.


Basalt sand, which has sharp edges, worked beautifully and saved not only lives but gasoline and labor. The street crews would distribute sand at the first snowfall, and the sand gave traction through several later snows before it had to be renewed. The terrorists at EPA kicked it out because the resulting dust in springtime may have bothered some asthma sufferers, and because it saved lives.

Salt worked beautifully against more serious ice, though it wasn't as durable as sand. The terrorists kicked it out because it may have washed into the river and made life slightly more difficult for the Royal Old-Growth Fish, and because it saved lives.
 
  No surprise

A new message said to be from al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has blamed global warming on the US and other big industrial nations.

"All industrial nations, mainly the big ones, are responsible for the crisis of global warming," the latest tape says.

"This is a message to the whole world about those who are causing climate change, whether deliberately or not, and what we should do about that."

"Bush the son, and the [US] Congress before him, rejected this [Kyoto Protocol] agreement only to satisfy the big companies."


More proof, which wasn't needed, that America and Osama have always been on the same side. After the Hadley revelations, other Western nations are starting to back away from the Carbon Cult. Not quite renouncing it, but making public statements of doubt. Only America remains firmly loyal to Gaia, firmly locked on the path of suicide.

As for the Sheikh's criticism of Bush the son, he's right in a formal sense. Bush the son played a cute game. He didn't sign the treaty, but allowed the EPA to proceed at full speed with regulations to kill all of our people.

Obama is actually continuing the same game. The Kyoto treaty and the newer Copenhagen version are still unsigned, though you wouldn't know it from Obama's verbiage. Meanwhile, our government-funded terrorist organization EPA continues to commit acts of war against our own population, which the Sheikh really should appreciate and applaud. Osama wants to breach our dams, Lisa Jackson is breaching our dams. Osama wants to destroy our industries, Lisa Jackson is destroying our industries. Osama wants to take Western civilization back to the Stone Age, Lisa Jackson is taking Western civilization back to the Stone Age.

The Sheikh is ungrateful to his best Jihadi!
 
Thursday, January 28, 2010
  Bravo Cantwell!

The vote to confirm Bugsy Bernanke was worth watching because it was uncorrelated with party line, and uncorrelated with geography.

You can tell with perfect certainty who has taken bribes from Wall Street and who hasn't.

The most interesting of the unbribed members is Maria Cantwell of Wash, who is typically a quiet and loyal Dem vote. She also knows Wall Street from the inside.

She's pleading for a hard prohibition of derivatives, not a soft and easy-to-loophole regulation. "Fact is, you can make more money in derivatives than by doing IPOs or real investment." Therefore the only way to force investors into honesty is by absolutely outlawing the dishonest paths.

Won't happen, of course, because 70 members of the Upper Nuthouse have confessed to their own criminality this afternoon.

Still, it's wonderful to see a previously undramatic politician like Cantwell rebelling against the forces of darkness.
 
  President McCain's first SOTU

No real surprises from President McCain last night.

All of the usual McCain points, designed to destroy the country as always. Fanatic obeisance to the Planet Goddess Gaia [pbuh], brief lip service to nuclear power. Open borders, free trade, donate the economy to Wall Street. Treat Mohammedan bombers like royalty, treat American citizens like rat turds. Fight more perpetual unwinnable wars in foreign countries with no benefit to America. Bipartisanship, deficit reduction, dislike of earmarks. Special barb directed at the Supreme Court for upholding the Constitution and overturning his precious campaign censorship. Finally, a real signature McCain move: a dumb little trick, freezing a whole 1% of the federal budget. Whoopie shit.

The only unusual thing is that President McCain had one of his fellow Senators, a young black guy named Obama, read the speech for him. Must be one of those bizarre ancient unconstitutional Senate rituals like proxy, filibuster, and quorum calls.

Funny, though.... seems like I had a dream or something in which this Obama character ran for Pres and defeated McCain. Guess I'm getting old.
 
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
  Populism, populism, populism?

Oregon approves a significant tax increase:

Oregon voters have approved two measures raising taxes on businesses and the wealthy, averting budget cuts legislators said would have meant larger classes in the schools and less help for the poor and the elderly.

Voters in Tuesday's special election approved Measure 66, which raises rates on people earning well above six figures, and Measure 67, which increases business taxes.


Excellent!

TV commentators this morning are calling this an anti-populist movement. Chuck Todd: "Everybody talks about populism, populism, populism, but this shows that other factors are now in play."

No, you fucking idiot.

Populism emphatically does not mean hatred of taxes.

"Zero tax" is the complete total solitary platform of the Republican Party, which wants to reshape the government of this unfortunate land into a more Haitian form so that billionaire Jew gangsters can own and run everything. (The Democratic Establishment wants the same goal but describes it less honestly.)

A Populist believes something quite different. A Populist believes that the government of America should serve the people of America, not the interests of Dubai, not the interests of China, not the interests of billionaire Jew gangsters. When the people of America are best served by decreasing taxes, you decrease taxes. When the people of America are best served by increasing taxes, you increase taxes. And the present situation falls into the latter category.

See how simple it is? You just need to understand that a number can go either up or down.
 
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
  Failing? No, succeeding magnificently.

This morning some commission has given the DC Government a grade of 'F' on bioterror prevention.

"Nearly a decade after September 11, 2001, one year after our original report, and one month after the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the United States is failing to address several urgent threats, especially bioterrorism," said former Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the commission.

"Each of the last three administrations has been slow to recognize and respond to the biothreat. But we no longer have the luxury of a slow learning curve, when we know al Qaeda is interested in bioweapons," Graham said.


Nonsense. DHS is doing its assigned job very well. DHS has 3 basic missions in this area:

(1) Insure that American citizens are maximally vulnerable to all threats. Disarm them, demoralize them, disinform them, make them terrified to name the enemy.

(2) Insure that the Mohammedan enemy has maximal access to all important facilities. Guarantee infiltration of the Army, military research, nuclear facilities, etc.

(3) Insure that no American citizen gets a chance to expose the treason. When a wise guy gets too close, discredit him, arrest him, or "suicide" him.

How do we know these are its assigned duties? Because DHS has been accomplishing these missions from the start, and nobody has been fired, demoted or reprimanded.

(I should qualify that other branches of DHS appear to be operating for the people of America. When FEMA failed in Katrina, Heckuva Brownie was fired, indicating that disaster response is a straightforward duty, not a reverse duty.)
 
Sunday, January 24, 2010
  Dream warning of space debris

Odd... during this afternoon's nap, I dreamed that I was hearing a warning about incoming space debris. The incoming stuff would be more plentiful and faster than the usual meteor shower, so a lot of it would reach the ground and it would do a lot of damage.

Astronomical matters are distant from my usual thoughts and interests, and the radio and TV were turned off during the nap, so I can't identify any obvious external source for this. The "report" mentioned that the debris was traveling at 117 MPH. The number 117 also lacks connections in any recent thinking, so it could be relevant to something or other!

Nearly all my dreams are (sometimes dull, sometimes clever) remixes of recognizable thoughts and experiences, so when a fresh "signal" like this one occurs, it's worth writing down. (4PM PST)
 
  Claire McCaskill, I love you.


A rare moment of complete sanity in the Upper Nuthouse!


 
Saturday, January 23, 2010
  What's wrong with this picture?

Polistra and Happystar as seen by a highly-paid Climate "Scientist":



What's wrong with this picture?

1. Gravity calculated as negative instead of positive. Nobody caught the switched sign.

2. Sea level rises to 2000 feet, engulfs Kansas. Physically impossible, but that doesn't matter; it's required by the model.

3. Polistra barefoot because leather shoes not allowed by Gaia-worshipping vegan "scientist".

4. Two suns required to achieve the temperature predicted by model. Extra sun added.

= = = = =

Polistra and Happystar as seen by an unpaid graphic hobbyist:



= = = = =

Here's the point: In the little hobby-style world of 3d graphics, we test things far more carefully than the trillion-dollar crimate industry.

When I make a product for sale, such as the Arcade Hotel that was the setting for Polistra's Dream, I have to find someone to test it before submitting to the store. The tester checks all relevant details, makes some pictures using the model, tells me what's wrong. [The tester is "paid" by receiving a free copy of the finished product.] Then I fix the problems and the store tests it again. On the rare occasions when a significant error slips through, you can be sure a customer will catch it; finally, if the artist won't respond to customers, other customers will hear about it publicly in the forums.

This is a strict and highly functional peer-review system. And it's applied to products that often bring in no money at all, products that have exactly zero consequence. Purely for fun, occasionally used in education and in TV commercials. No government makes draconian laws or starves its people in response to these graphic products.

Meanwhile, the Crimate Industry's graphic products bring in billions in grants and create a trillion-dollar market in carbon credits. Their wildly obvious and unchecked errors, intentional and unintentional, become the policy of ALL GOVERNMENTS IN THE WORLD.

And their errors do in fact impoverish nations and kill people by the millions. And killing millions, or more precisely 6.6 billion humans, is the open and explicit purpose of environmentalists like James Hansen of NASA.

No organization or ideology has ever amassed so much power. Not Christ, not Mohammed, not Marx, not the Roman Empire, not the British Empire. Maurice Strong and his acolytes are the most powerful and most evil force in human history.
 
Friday, January 22, 2010
  Loony, loony, loony, fishy, fishy, fishy

Headline: "Oregon Plagued by Steelhead"

A thick run of early winter steelhead is returning to hatcheries on six of Oregon’s North Coast rivers through the end of January.

If anglers miss them the first time, fish managers plan to trap them, truck them downstream and “recycle” the fish for another run past anglers’ hooks.

“We have a pile of steelhead showing up in some of these rivers,” said Oregon Fish and Wildlife biologist Robert Bradley, noting that the run will be over by the end of the month.

“We really don’t want these fish spawning in the wild. We want them caught.”


And why?

Because the Steelhead Trout is classified as Endangered by the government-funded terrorist organization EPA.

But wait! I thought the Endangered Species Act was supposed to recover endangered species, not kill them???? Shouldn't we be wonderfully happy that the Steelhead Trout has not only recovered but boomed????

No, we are not happy.

Why are we not happy?

Because the wonderfully numerous fish are not from the Royal Fish Family. These Common Vulgar Peasant Plebeian Steelheads, bred in Common Vulgar Peasant Hatcheries, are crowding out the Royal Aristocratic Wild Old-Growth Steelheads. Therefore we must spend tremendous resources to DESTROY the Plebeian Steelheads, who are not of Noble Blood. Only the Royal Aristocratic Wild Old-Growth Steelheads are protected.

If you can make any sense of this, you belong in an insane asylum.
 
Thursday, January 21, 2010
  Where's the gratitude?

The partisan response to the Supreme decision kicking out much of McCain shows not just one but two of those agreed-on falsehoods.

Both "sides" agree that (Falsehood #1) corporations will now suddenly begin contributing to political candidates for the very first time in recorded history, and that (Falsehood #2) corporations are right-wing Neanderthal Nazi Fascists.

Brand-R loves the decision because their "right-wing friends" will suddenly be free to start contributing, and Brand-D hates it because their "right-wing enemies" will suddenly be free to start contributing.

How in the world can you begin to believe any of this crap?

Fact #1: 100% of our political action is already determined by big corporations. They can't gain more influence because they already have it all. Every single action taken by Clinton, Bush, and Obama is taken to please one or another set of corporations. Slightly different sets for different parties.

Fact #2: The vast majority of big companies are solid Commies. Firmly for the Carbon Cult, loudly for affirmative action, solidly pro-homosexual, loyally pro-abortion. (Smaller companies are more likely to be non-Communist or non-political.)

Well, where's the gratitude? You'd think the brand-D politicians would be ecstatic that their loudest and best supporters are now free to contribute somewhat more easily, with slightly less regulatory overhead.

As for me, I'm just grateful that the Magnum Opus of Soviet Mole McCain has been torn down. It won't matter much in the big picture, but anything that rips McCain is bound to be good for the country.

I'm also glad to see the Court agreeing with that old ancient obsolete document called the Constitution. This also doesn't matter much because we haven't been anywhere near the Constitution for a long long long time. Still, the Court's job description requires them to interpret, not rewrite... and they have now eliminated a law that obviously, transparently and brazenly violated the old dusty unused document, so they are doing their job properly for once.

Well, sort of. It still aggravates me no end that we pay and OBEY a set of 9 interpreters when only one of them (Thomas) is doing his job. Let's say you hire a set of 9 programmers. Only one of them writes code that passes through the compiler and runs every time; 4 of them write nothing but destructive viruses guaranteed to crash the system, and 4 of them occasionally write usable code. You'd keep the Thomas type who writes valid code, fire the 4 semi-competent ones, and prosecute the 4 virus-writers.
 
  0.1 Cheers for Volcker!

Obama has finally, a year late, proposed new rules on bankers.

From his speech, it sounds like a near-complete restoration of Glass-Steagall, which would be wonderful.

Unfortunately, this is only a suggestion of laws that could be written by the Lower and Upper Nuthouses. If Obama had been serious, he would have written an executive order.

Since this is just a proposal, we can be 100% certain that the final result will make life vastly easier for the Wall Street Mafia, while giving them even more trillions of dollars to fuck around with.

= = = = =

Oops, end-of sentence preposition alert. To be understandable by conservatives, the last sentence should be recast:

Since this is just a proposal, we can be 100% certain that the final result will make life vastly easier for the Wall Street Mafia, while giving them even more trillions of dollars, around with which to fuck.
 
  Drugging the world, breaking the circle

An article in New Superstitionist, titled "How the US exports its mental illnesses", describes the medicalization of culture but misses the main point in a typically leftist way.

IN THIS age of globalisation, you would expect people to value and be sensitive about their local differences and diversity. And few areas could be more critical than different peoples' understanding of the human mind when it comes to mental health and illness.

Laurence Kirmayer, director of the division of social and transcultural psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, had a front-row seat as GlaxoSmithKline launched its antidepressant Paxil in Japan in 2000. Kirmayer, an authority on the impact of cultural beliefs on mental illness, had been invited to a GSK-sponsored academic conference in Japan. It was only when he arrived that he realised the true agenda: the company wanted his knowledge to help it understand how cultural beliefs about illness can be changed.

The challenge GSK faced in the Japanese market was formidable. The nation did have a clinical diagnosis of depression - utsubyo - but it was nothing like the US version: it described an illness as devastating and as stigmatising as schizophrenia. Worse, at least for the sales prospects of antidepressants in Japan, it was rare. Most other states of melancholy were not considered illnesses in Japan. Indeed, the experience of prolonged, deep sadness was often considered to be a jibyo, a personal hardship that builds character. To make Paxil a hit, it would not be enough to corner the small market for people diagnosed with utsubyo. As Kirmayer realised, GSK intended to influence the Japanese understanding of sadness and depression at the deepest level.

"What I was witnessing was a multinational pharmaceutical corporation working hard to redefine narratives about mental health," Kirmayer said.


Nasty stuff indeed. But this isn't really a case of imposing an American culture on the rest of the world. Focus on this: "prolonged, deep sadness was often considered to be a personal hardship that builds character." That may be a modern Jap view, but it was also the American view of melancholy before Freud took over our elite culture in the 1950's.

Thus the problem isn't shrinks and drugmakers conspiring to infect the rest of the world with an American view of mental problems.

Rather, the problem is shrinks and drugmakers conspiring to break up natural healing processes in America and in the rest of the world. Neither Americans nor Japs nor anyone else can be allowed to build character; all must pop pills.

Kirmayer's original article is interesting, objective and humble .... qualities that are rarely seen in public science writing these days.
 
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
  Brown echoes Medvedev

Clearly I hadn't been paying enough attention to Scott Brown... he struck me as more or less standard brand-R.

Nope, he's considerably better. Quoted by the O'Sullivan climate blog:

Interviewer: Do you think that whole global warming thing is a big fraud?

Brown: It's interesting. I think the globe is always heating and cooling. It’s a natural way of ebb and flow. The thing that concerns me lately is some of the information I’ve heard about potential tampering with some of the information.

I just want to make sure if in fact . . . the earth is heating up, that we have accurate information, and it's unbiased by scientists with no agenda. Once that's done, then I think we can really move forward with a good plan.


Pretty good. Nowhere near Inhofe's clarity and firmness, but sounds a lot like Russian pres Medvedev.
 
  Andy's point

Andy McCarthy tells us something that the enemy-controlled media didn't: Scott Brown won in Mass because he actually expressed loyalty to the people of America. The Republican establishment in 2008 deleted all candidates who were loyal to the people of America and gave us Manchurian Candidate McCain, who explicitly stated that he would rather watch millions of Americans die than offend his own delicate prissy enemy-loving feeeeeeeeeeeelings. Traitorous bastard. In a sane country his oath of disloyalty would have led to prison or hanging, not eligibility for President.


McCarthy says:
The opposing position, espoused most prominently by Sen. John McCain, was counterfactual and incoherent. Senator McCain pronounced both that enhanced interrogation (which he called “torture”) never works (which is patently untrue) and that an interrogator might at most use it in a ticking-bomb situation (the last situation in which you’d want to use it if, in fact, it never works).

...Scott Brown went out and made the case for enhanced interrogation, for denying terrorists the rights of criminal defendants, for detaining them without trial, and for trying them by military commission. It worked. It will work for other candidates willing to get out of their Beltway bubbles.

Yes, the Left will say you are making a mockery of our commitment to “the rule of law.” MSNBC will run segments on your dark conspiracies to “shred the privacy rights of Americans.” The New York Times will wail that you’re heedless of the damage you’ll do to “America’s reputation in the international community.”

The laws of war are the rule of law. They are not a suspension of the Constitution. They are the Constitution operating in wartime. The Framers understood that there would be wars against enemies of the United States — it is stated explicitly in the Constitution’s treason clause (Art. III, Sec. 3). The American people understand that we have enemies, even if Washington sees them as political “engagement” partners waiting to happen.


Yes. Yes. Yes.

Of course one Senator won't be able to do much about this, since the Senate is the worst of the worst. The Upper Nuthouse is an unbreakable gang of blackmailers and traitors**, with the single shining exception of James Inhofe. Best chance for redemption: Brown uses his Senate seat as a springboard to run for Pres in '12.

= = = = =

** I have to say "blackmailers and traitors" now instead of my previous phrase "blackmailers, murderers and traitors." Now that Emperor Kennedy is in the ninth circle of Hell, eternally drowning over and over in a sunken Oldsmobile, the only known murderer has been removed from the Upper Nuthouse.

 
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
  Nature's revenge on Arnie

A stem cell researcher in Calif has a highly promising cure for a form of brain cancer. Seems to work well in mice, but the FDA, as usual, is saving Americans from the horrible danger of being cured:
Reams of safety data must be amassed to satisfy the FDA. Scientists struggle to navigate all that red tape. Many don’t even try.

Now the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine has stepped in – with an $18 million grant financed by state taxpayers, courtesy of 2004’s Proposition 71, which created the state agency.

Well, well. So Scheissenesser's funding of embryonic stem cells is finally bearing fruit, finally poking those pesky Christians in the eye. Scheissenesser must be enjoying the screams!

Oops, not so fast:
For 3 1/2 years, the agency focused on the basic groundwork needed to someday use human embryonic stem cells to replace body parts damaged by injury or disease. Such cures are still far in the future.

Now the institute has a more immediate goal: boosting therapies that are much further along in development and more often rely on less glamorous adult stem cells.


The word glamorous tells the whole story.

For Arnie and his fellow Herodians, torturing Christians is glamorous. Saving lives is booooooriiiiiing.

Or more precisely, saving American lives is boring. Saving a handful of Haitian lives is glamorous because it's a totally futile and purposeless activity that consumes resources which might otherwise have helped Americans.
 
Monday, January 18, 2010
  FBI age-adjusts Ringo

As a semi-pro graphics type, I'm half bemused and half enraged by the FBI's clumsy attempt to produce an age-adjusted picture of Sheikh Osama.

They used a picture of Spanish politician Gaspar Llamazares as the "morph target" ... result looks a lot like Ringo Starr (and something like me, for what it's worth!) but only a little like Osama.



So a TSA agent using this picture as the mugshot would quickly arrest Ringo or me but wouldn't recognize Sheikh Osama.

Fucking fools. Or collaborators. Pick one.
 
  Forget the truck

Sultan Obama's rhetoric is nearly always FDRian, while his actions are nearly always Bushian. Every now and then the rhetorical magic slips and the Bushian heart shows through.

In his speech for Coakley, talking about Brown's political symbolism:

"Forget the slick ads. Anybody can run slick ads. Forget the truck. Anybody can buy a truck."

Really? Anybody?

I suppose this doesn't strike an immediate alarm bell to a man who has lived among the Wall Street Mafia most of his life. But the people who can't afford to buy and maintain a truck notice it.
 
Sunday, January 17, 2010
  Bravo Gregory

David Gregory on Meet the Press finally asked some sensible questions about the Haiti fiasco, and got completely meaningless answers from Sultan Bush and Sultan Clinton.

From the transcript:

MR. GREGORY: Beyond the initial rush, does there have to be some kind of U.N.-U.S. temporary government? Do we have to have a role in running the government for a time?

FMR. PRES. CLINTON: Well, I don't think we have to have a role in running the government. But we have, have to have a role in helping them to do things that require an organization that no longer exists.....

In other words, we'll be running the place but as usual we'll pretend we're not, and as usual we won't get shit in return. Just one more way to consume private and federal resources for absolutely no purpose, just one more way to dilute and distract our military from its assigned job of DEFENDING THIS UNFORTUNATE LAND, NOT SOME OTHER GODDAMN PLACE.

MR. GREGORY: Look at its neighbor, the Dominican Republic, so much better off. Should that be a factor in part of the conversation about how much is given, that resistance to change, the fact that aid on a massive scale has not proven to lift countries like Haiti out of poverty?

Now that's a GREAT question.
FMR. PRES. BUSH: Well, I, I, I think this. First of all, the initial thrust of aid is going to save lives, and that's really important. Secondly, as President Clinton mentioned, there is a strategy in place to help Haiti build in a different direction, and, in other words, learn lessons from the past and focus on what'll work in the future. And I, I, I think it's going to be very important for our country never to give up on Haiti. Obviously it's OK to ask whether or not the plan is going to make sense, but we shouldn't abandon our neighbor down there. It's--there's just too much human suffering that can take--has taken place and can continue to take place if we neglect Haiti.

This wouldn't even be an acceptable answer from a Miss America contestant. "Well, like I think there's like just so much suffering, you know? And like anything that like saves like just one life is like awesome, you know?"
 
Saturday, January 16, 2010
  Language update for January



Professor Polistra has a new update on overused or misused Words In The News.

Heart-rendering for heart-rending.

Properly, heart-rendering should mean removing the heart and converting it to useful by-products like dog food and gelatin. However, rending is archaic, only surviving in this one pat phrase and a few biblical quotations. So the switch to a more current word is expectable.

Noise

The journalistic branch of the crimate conspiracy likes to call the real scientists "noise".

And the CIA types are trying to use "noise in the system" as an excuse for their failure to detect Abdul bin Underpants.

Noise in the system is a real and important technical problem. In communication or data analysis, prying a meaningful signal out of the roar of competing junk can be extremely difficult. But that's not at all what we have here. In the crimate case, the "noise" is plain truth backed by perfectly obvious facts and logic. In the Underpants case the "noise" is a direct report by Abdul bin Underpants Senior to a CIA agent.

Both are pure signal, presented in direct and readable form. The only noise is the buzzing mass of wildly false delusions crammed into the alleged so-called quote "minds" unquote, and I use that term extremely loosely, of the establishment "scientists" and the establishment CIA types.

Someone who

An unnecessary pleonasm, suddenly epidemic.

"If you're someone who needs pain medication ..."

"He's somebody who always takes the easy road."

"I'm someone who's working on a new non-fiction book."

"Palin hasn't been someone who has gone on Meet The Press."

This reminds Prof Polistra of the circumlocutions that clutter up French, such as "qu'est-ce que c'est."

Extablish

Old 'hypercorrect' pronunciations like excape and excetera are rarely heard nowadays in educated circles, but extablish seems to be spreading. It may be coming from Obama, since elites always ape the King. Expecially when the King belongs to the elite party. Prof Polistra will check on this ...... Later: No, it's not coming from Obama. He clearly says establish.

Labels:

 
Thursday, January 14, 2010
  "Something backward"

Excellent point by Denis Boyles at NRO.

"Science that devotes billions to predicting weather badly, while not predicting massive earthquakes at all, seems to have something backward."

Yup. Especially when the "science" actually predicts weather backward, not just badly. The "scientists" have us spending trillions of dollars supposedly to cool the earth off, while the earth is already cooling faster than we can handle.

Earthquake prediction shouldn't be all that hard. Quakes are unquestionably preceded by a detectable phenomenon. Many birds and mammals sense it; some humans sense it. As mentioned before, I was able to sense quakes about 18 hours before they popped during Spokane's swarm of minor quakes in 2001, and others reported the same feeling.

This predictive feeling can't be mysterious or spiritual; it must be responding to a physically measurable change, probably a distortion of the earth's magnetic field. (Coincidentally or not, a change in magnetic field is also the main driver of cooling and warming.)

Trouble is, American "scientists" will never never never touch the whole subject because it (1) requires trusting human observations and (2) vaguely suggests a connection to the world of religion. An American "scientist" only trusts computer models running on guaranteed false data made up by other computer models. Observed data, especially data observed by humans, is absolutely forbidden. And an American "scientist" has one purpose in life: to EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE EXTERMINATE anything that has the slightest taste of religion.

Chinese and Russian scientists have been studying these organic measurements for quite a while, because they aren't violent murderous anti-human bigots; they are willing to examine natural phenomena that might help to save lives.
 
  Haq sentenced

SEATTLE — A judge has sentenced Naveed Haq to life in prison without release on his convictions for killing one woman and wounding five others in a rampage at a Seattle Jewish Federation office.

Mental illness impaired Naveed Haq's judgment but not seriously, Judge Paris Kallas said.

"Mr. Haq understood his plan, knew it was wrong, and carried it out anyway," she said.

Good enough.

In theory death would be better justice, but in practice a "death sentence" is just a vastly more expensive life sentence. At least the insanity defense didn't work this time.

= = = = =

Semi-related: Wash Gov Gregoire has proposed a new law that would allow the Scottish verdict of "guilty AND insane" instead of the traditional "innocent by reason of insanity." The distinction is more than semantic: when the defendant is defined as innocent he still has "rights" and can't be properly and fully restrained.

This proposal results directly from the Phillip Paul escape last summer. Paul, who had killed an old lady on the commands of his delusional voices, was "innocent by insanity", thus entitled to go on field trips. After careful planning (including sexual bribes to a male guard) he escaped during one of these field trips. Gov Gregoire was correctly enraged by this fiasco, and (totally unlike the Federal response to fiascos) she actually fired the people responsible. Later she introduced new regulations for the state insane asylums, and now she wants to change the basic law.

DAMNED GOOD governance by a DAMNED GOOD governor. I very rarely admire or respect leaders, but I confess to absolutely admiring Gregoire. She has the same "lioness" quality as Maggie Thatcher: the ferocious mother ready to claw and bite through all obstacles to protect the people of her state.
 
  Aggressive

Today the government in DC responds instantly, "aggressively" and militarily to the disaster in Haiti.

Last year the government in DC responded slowly, delicately and grudgingly to two successful attacks (Little Rock and Fort Hood) and one attempted attack (Abdul bin Underpants) on the people of the mainland.

We notice these things. Of course it doesn't matter if we notice these things, because we are not the People Who Count.


Update: Gang leader Al Sharpton just described my attitude as "despicable". Fine. I'm proud to be called "despicable" by a gangster.

Later: Oh, now I understand. Roughly 300K Haitian emigres live in Florida. Florida is the state that decides Presidential elections, the only state where votes actually count. And that's why Haitians are People Who Matter. Plain old electoral engineering.
 
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
  City Dump, take 2

The idea of "biochar" has come up again, this time in WUWT.

Polistra handled this before (May 2008) so I'll just reprint the original entry:

=====================================================================

From the latest paper edition of New Superstitionist:
In a recent paper in the journal Carbon Balance and Management, Ning Zeng [at University of Maryland] calculated that if we buried half of the wood that grows each year, in such a way that it didn't decay, enough CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere to offset all our fossil-fuel emissions. It wouldn't be easy, but Zeng believes it could be done. .... Zeng's proposal is to thin forests regularly and to bury excess wood, forestry waste and even trees that have been grown specifically to be buried, in trenches between the remaining trees. To prevent the wood from decomposing, which would release carbon, it would need to be buried deep enough to avoid being broken down by soil fauna and fungi, or STORED ABOVE GROUND IN WATERTIGHT SHELTERS.

... Burying wood sounds like a lot of trouble for a small gain, but Zeng insists that unlike simple growing, this is a long-lasting and perhaps permanent carbon sink. He estimates that offsetting all the world's current emissions would be achievable with a WORKFORCE OF ONE MILLION PEOPLE, substantially fewer than those already employed in the forestry industry in the US alone. Even so, to offset all our emissions, most of the world's forests would have to run a wood burial scheme.

I can't even allow myself to comment on this; if I let myself start thinking about this, I'd end up ripping the city to shreds with a shovel.

The article goes on to introduce a surprisingly sane and ordinary idea, but without even realizing it's sane and ordinary.

Another approach to carbon burial has a much longer history. More than 500 years ago Amazonian people were creating almost pure carbon by smoldering their domestic waste and letting it work its way into the soil. This 'black earth' remains to this day. Such char can be created when organic matter is heated in the absence of air to around 350 degrees C, the kinds of temperatures reached in the Amazonian waste piles. The lack of air means the organic matter does not combust but most constituents other than carbon are driven off as gases or liquids.

Hmm. I understand that you enviro-commies are incapable of respecting an old idea unless it originates from your fellow human-sacrificing savages, but this particular idea was also common in non-savage areas of the earth. It was called the City Dump. It worked quite well until you enviro-commies required us to stop burning, and then required us to enclose it in plastic shields to prevent the carbon from working its way into the soil. I remember taking junk to the Manhattan city dump (which was not far from the Mill) and watching the yards-deep smoldering process. It was impressive.

Hmm again. Could the current rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 have started around the same time that City Dumps were required to stop burning and stop leaching?

=============

Yikes! The online version of the article is quite different from the paper version that I read. It turns out that Zeng was STARTING from the exact premise that I came around to at the end! He was wondering whether the rise in American CO2 started when we stopped burning landfills!

But if that's the case, why go through all that weird crap about a million workers growing forests for the sole purpose of cutting them down and storing them forever in above-ground watertight shelters? Why not just suggest burning the City Dumps again, perhaps with better precautions to insure airless smoldering? It's still crazy.


=====================================================================
end reprint.
 
  Why not do it honestly?

Chris Mathews made the point that Haiti is effectively a sort of US protectorate; we've taken on the absurd, pointless and unrewarded task of helping its people through repeated disasters without ever fixing their government that leaves them hopelessly vulnerable to all those disasters.

The only time we intervened recently was to insure the "election" of Aristide, who (as a Haitian commentator stated candidly this morning) was a worse ruler than Papa Doc.

Why don't we make it an honest colony? Take it over officially, send competent people to build a real government, and get something in return. Mine its resources, build sugar cane plantations, drill in Haiti's offshore oil territory, get our cheap labor in Haiti instead of China. Do the full nine yards of old-fashioned British colonial rule. Both sides would benefit greatly. (I'll bet General Goddamn Honoré could do for Haiti what General MacArthur did for Japan.)

And if any other country complains about the arrangement, send a hundred megatons of thermonuclear discipline down their fucking Commie throat.
 
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
  Lord, I hope he's right.........



Gerald Celente has been right many times, when nearly everyone else was wrong.

Let's pray he's right about this trend as well ....


 
  They never, never, never, never learn

SEATTLE — Decades ago, poor children became known as “disadvantaged” to soften the stigma of poverty. Then they were “at-risk.” Now, a Washington lawmaker wants to replace those euphemisms with a new one, “at hope.”

Democratic State Sen. Rosa Franklin says negative labels are hurting kids’ chances for success and she’s not a bit concerned that people will be confused by her proposed rewrite of the 54 places in state law where words like “at risk” and “disadvantaged” are used.


Each year the educationists move to a new set of euphemisms because the kids mysteriously managed to understand the previous set of euphemisms.

Kids always know who's poor and rich, who's smart and dumb. Piling on euphemisms only makes life easier for bullies because the teachers, unable to talk plain English, lose their credibility as leaders.

And that's the real point, of course: not to confuse the kids, but to destroy authority.

But really now, "at hope"? This one is so silly that even academics won't be able to say it with a straight face.
 
Monday, January 11, 2010
  Useful Idiot XVI

Every now and then Pope Benedict shows oh-so-brief signs of true moral leadership and sense, then he flops back into the warm septic tank of standard hippie-dippie shit.

At the start of his term, for one brief shining moment he opposed Jihad, then he followed Francis of Assisi into abject surrender.

His latest New Year message has the same frustrating mix.
He noted that humanity in this new year "continues to be marked by the dramatic crisis of the global economy and consequently a serious and widespread social instability."

The "deeper causes" of this situation "are to be found in a current self-centered and materialistic way of thinking which fails to acknowledge the limitations inherent in every creature."

So far so good, except that the blame doesn't belong to "every creature." Those of us who try to live frugally and legally are helpless when the materialistic forces steal our ability to earn a living.

Then he makes a good point about the Soviet Bloc:
"I will offer an example ... from the recent history of Europe. Twenty years ago, after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the materialistic and atheistic regimes which had for several decades dominated a part of this continent, was it not easy to assess the great harm which an economic system lacking any reference to the truth about man had done not only to the dignity and freedom of individuals and peoples, but to nature itself, by polluting soil, water and air? The denial of God distorts the freedom of the human person, yet it also devastates creation.

"It follows that the protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need, but much more to a moral need, in as much as nature expresses a plan of love and truth which is prior to us and which comes from God."

Okay, I know nothing about love and truth, but I'll go along with the existence of a Creator who made a plan.

Now he veers off track entirely:
Because of this, he shares the "growing concern" caused by "economic and political resistance to combatting the degradation of the environment."

Dammit, man, there is NO resistance in the West to combatting real pollution. Western countries have been trying to control real pollution for 50 years, and have driven the levels of real pollution down to a point of diminishing returns. You're obviously talking about carbon, which is a valuable part of the life cycle, not a pollutant. And there is a small nascent resistance, not nearly strong enough yet, to the efforts by the SAME GREEDY BASTARDS to drive even more people into poverty for the sake of a new Wall Street bubble called a Carbon Market.

And here Comrade Benny is firmly on the side of the greedy bastards.
"The issue is all the more important in that the very future of some nations is at stake, particularly some island states," he said.

Sheer nonsense, pure Maurice Strong toxic bullshit.

Shame on you, Comrade Benedict. Shame, shame, shame, shame, shame. You're an excellent scholar with a firm sense of logic and analysis, and you goddamn well ought to know better than to blindly follow this genocidal wolfpack of gangsters, Nazis and Communists.
 
  The swine flu conspiracy revealed

From Britain's Daily Mail:

Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, accused the makers of flu drugs and vaccines of influencing the World Health Organisation's decision to declare a pandemic.

This led to the pharmaceutical firms ensuring 'enormous gains', while countries, including the UK, 'squandered' their meagre health budgets, with millions being vaccinated against a relatively mild disease.

He said: 'We have had a mild flu - and a false pandemic.' ... the seeds of the scare were sown five years ago, when it was feared the much more lethal bird flu virus would mutate into a human form.

Told you so, you fucking fools.

Dr Wodarg said: 'The governments have sealed contracts with vaccine producers where they secure orders in advance and take upon themselves almost all the responsibility.

'In this way the producers of vaccines are sure of enormous gains without having any financial risks.

'So they just wait, until WHO says "pandemic" and activate the contracts.'

Told you so, you fucking fools.
 
Sunday, January 10, 2010
  Light skin, etc

There's something really odd about Reid's comment that occupies the entire news cycle today.

Reid said that Obama has an advantage because he's light skinned and doesn't speak with a Negro dialect. Advantage over whom? The only other black American who ran seriously for President was Jesse Jackson.



As you can see in this picture, both have the same skin color. Jackson's dialect is mainly Jamaican, not the standard American black dialect by any means. Neither man has typical Negroid (West African) facial features.

Several black members of Congress are more classically West African in looks and coloration ... eg Elijah Cummings of Maryland, who would be a far better President than any recent candidate of either race ... but I doubt that Reid was thinking of them.

Simplest explanation: Harry Reid is weird.

= = = = =

After more thinking, I've pinned it down. Like most of our elites, Reid never observes actual reality. His mental picture of American blacks is based on an old image, perhaps from 1940's movies.

At that time most American blacks were really black. Since then a lot of mixing has occurred, so we have a lot more "mutts" on both sides, a more varied spectrum of colors. This is a good thing biologically; mixtures are healthier and stronger than purebreds. But it clearly never penetrated Reid's cranium.

Reminds me of a commonly-held weird theory about homosexuality from the same era. The long-time New Yorker editor Harold Ross (a very similar character with a very similar name!) had many homosexuals on his staff, which is no surprise considering the makeup of the New York literary community. When somebody asked Ross how he handled the situation, he said "No, no, we don't have anybody like that around here. Amorphodites have both kinds of sex organs. I'd certainly recognize somebody like that!"
 
  Couching Tiger, hidden Buddhist?

The silly controversy about Brit Hume's evangelical advice to Tiger Woods reveals more about our Communist masters than it does about Hume.

Apparently Hume said that Woods should convert from Buddhism to Christianity, in order to get "redemption and forgiveness". First of all, it's obvious that "redemption and forgiveness", whatever the hell that means, is precisely the OPPOSITE of what Woods needs. Like any black athlete, he has been receiving "redemption and forgiveness" all his life. He has been on the very tippy-top of the status totem pole from birth. And that's exactly why he's misbehaving now. What he needed, much earlier in life, was a good spanking by reality. It's probably too late now.

Nobody's saying that, of course, because it's true, and truth is prohibited.

The discussion only reveals the natural mindset of the Communists who control our media: that the First Amendment prohibits Brit Hume from evangelizing on television. This is wildly illogical nonsense in a dozen ways, but it's certainly how our dear Commie masters think. And it also reveals a more subtle fact: that Buddhism (or various New-Agey mixtures of halfway Buddhist thought) has been the Established Religion of Hollywood for a long time. The Planet Goddess Gaia is the latest incarnation (heh) of this New-Agey stuff, but it's been pretty much the same crap since the days of D.W. Griffith and Lillian Gish. So Hume's criticism of Buddhism strikes home for these folks.
 
Saturday, January 09, 2010
  What was the decade for?

[I'm a week late joining this discussion, but think the idea is worth recording for my own memory if nothing else....]

What was the Big Theme of the previous decade?

Toto.

This was the decade when little dogs pulled back the curtains on all sorts of crooked Wizards, the decade when vigilantes punctured the balloons and bubbles of the pompous Professionals, showing the latter as complete miserable frauds, charlatans and criminals.

Like any good story, the Toto theme began with a bang, went on to develop details, and ended with a fine climax.

It began with 9/11, which was a dual example of Toto-ism. The 19 Arabs showed that a handful of men armed with pocket knives could defeat the military might of the "greatest power on Earth". All of the facilities we'd been building over the years, all the trillions of dollars that went into NORAD and radar and jets and so on, all for naught. And then one of the Arab weapons was stopped by counter-vigilantes, without any help at all from the government.

Through most of the decade, professional journalists were brought down by bloggers, professional scientists were corrected by amateur statisticians. Newspapers are deservedly dying, dishonestly earned reputations are in shreds.

The absurdity of federal immigration policy, cheerfully supported by both political parties for their own reasons, was exposed by the Minutemen who decided to do the job of patrolling the border honestly.

In 2008, the vast mortgage bubble was punctured by a few people demanding their money. These don't quite fit the pattern because they were very big dogs ... but they were certainly a handful of players, demonstrating that there were no "fundamentals" in the economy at all, let alone "sound fundamentals". We still don't know what really happened there; for some reason bloggers haven't been able to pull back the curtains on the Wall Street Mafia. So this is an unfinished puncture, and the Mafia continues to build new bubbles with the full collaboration of Goldman Sachs dba "US Government".

Early in 2009, infanticide specialist George Tiller was taken out by a vigilante, after killing thousands of kids, violating state and federal laws with no punishment for more than 30 years.

Finally, at the very end of 2009 we had the mass murder by Nidal Hasan and the near-repeat of 9/11 by Abdul bin Underpants (again stopped by a brave counter-vigilante), showing that the vast military power of this unfortunate land still hasn't learned one fucking thing. Or is still faithfully collaborating with the enemy, take your pick. Underbomber was such a blatant failure that even the professional "journalists" are starting to ask the right questions.

Best of all we had the whistle-blower in the British Climate Gang, who finally forced the professional "journalists" and the courts to pay attention to the largest crime in history. This has dropped under the radar for now, but under the surface legal actions are starting to grind: the Carbon Cult witch doctors are receiving court orders to hand over their records, and predatory lawyers are looking for more whistle-blowers so they can profit from a federal grant-fraud reward program. The latter, though distasteful, may be the most effective way to bring down this gang of megathieves and genocidists.
 
Friday, January 08, 2010
  Talk radio ads dropped?

Random and purely subjective observation.

At the start of 2010, the talk radio stations here in Spokane suddenly lost most of their advertising. Before that, the mix of real ads and PSAs varied from hour to hour, and (somewhat surprisingly) the Air America station had more real ads than the Rush station... but all had more paid ads than unpaid PSAs most of the time.

After Jan 1, about 90% of the advertising time on all four AM talk stations is unpaid PSAs. If this is a real business decision, not some kind of temporary contract dispute, it doesn't bode well for the continued existence of the talk format here.

= = = = =

Update 1/15: Seems to have returned to previous levels. Must have been an artifact of year-based contracts or something.
 
Thursday, January 07, 2010
  It isn't logical, dammit.

One thing is surprising: the CIA types like Brennan and Negroponte don't grasp the basic idea of police work.

Journalists (to their credit!) keep hitting the CIA types with one question: "You talk about noise in the system, you talk about connecting the dots, but in this case you had the terrorist's own father speaking directly to a CIA agent. He gave the CIA the son's name and passport number. That's not noise, that doesn't require any connection." And the CIA types sort of yawn condescendingly, as if the journalist isn't qualified to ask such eyes-only classified questions.

If their mindset can't tell the difference between a direct reliable report and a statistical model, their mindset is totally fucked.

I can certainly understand how you'd miss a surprise attack with no available information, but I can't forgive missing a direct report.

Consider Kaczynski the Unabomber. He's superintelligent, superparanoid, knows exactly how the System ensnares us, took absolutely unique steps to live entirely outside the System for many years. And it worked for many years. The FBI admitted that they might never have caught him, except that his own brother finally tipped them off. At that point they had a name and a biography, so they were able to find Kaczynski quickly.

That's logical. The current mess isn't.
 
  Usual crap

We were supposed to be surprised by something in Sultan Obama's news conference this aft. Nope. Same old junk. "I take responsibility" is meaningless. An executive actually takes responsibility for an error by firing all the underlings who made the error, then resigning himself. Words like "The buck stops here" are just talking responsibility, not taking responsibility.

= = = = =

Parliamentary systems are more functional because the opposition can demand the resignation of the prime minister; if he doesn't resign the opposition calls a Vote of No Confidence. The opposition always has a PM and cabinet ready for the switch. So the country gets fresh leadership immediately. Though the American system nominally has the option of impeachment, it's vestigial and meaningless because the unwanted president is replaced by his own chosen VP, not by the opposition. This guarantees total paralysis and collapse.


= = = = =

Obama says: "Here at home, we will strengthen our defenses, but we will not succumb to a siege mentality that sacrifices the open society and liberties and values that we cherish as Americans, because great and proud nations don't hunker down and hide behind walls of suspicion and mistrust."

Well, he's exactly right, in a narrowly semantic way. We will not sacrifice the "open society and liberties and values" because those were gone a long time ago. Nothing left to sacrifice.
 
Wednesday, January 06, 2010
  Fake anger

Obama is acting angry about the "intelligence failures". Will anything change?

No. Anger doesn't bother bureaucracies, and Obama knows this.

Bureaucracies only change when you fire their ass. En masse.

Obama hasn't fired any en masse asses or even single asses.

Worse, he has ordered John "No Smoking Gun" Brennan and Janet "The System Worked" Napolitano to investigate the problem.

When the two people who should have been INSTANTLY fired are instead told to cover up their errors (which is the sole purpose of any government investigation) ... well, you don't need the Law of Inferred Intent to understand what's going on. Sultan Obama has signaled with perfect clarity that the current situation is exactly what he wants: maximal vulnerability and harassment of the proletarians, maximal freedom of action for his Mohammedan allies.

= = = = =

Sidenote: As the great Scheuer pointed out in a CNN interview on Sunday, John "No Smoking Gun" Brennan has been in charge of collaboration for a long time. It was Brennan who decided not to kill Sheikh Osama in 1998 when we had him literally in our gunsights:
BORGER: And -- and before you leave this morning, I have to ask you, finally, about the CIA deaths this week. You, of course, spent 20 years at the CIA.

SCHEUER: Yes.

BORGER: And you know what a great loss this is for the -- for the agency.

BORGER: How does this affect both morale and strategy as the agency expands its role?

SCHEUER: Well, I think it hurts morale to a certain extent, naturally, because of the deaths, but it hurts morale even more because one of the officers who got killed had arranged an operation in 1998 that would have killed or captured Osama bin Laden. And Mr. Brennan was instrumental in preventing that operation from occurring. Instead he said the Americans should trust the Saudis to take care of bin Laden.

So it's a painful-- it's a painful death, but more importantly it's a death that didn't need to occur had Mr. Clinton -- Mr. Brennan, George Tenet, and Mr. Berger had the courage to try to defend Americans.

 
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
  No.

And a bit later, some technocrat on Fox, talking about body scanners and such, says:

"Only science can build the better mousetrap. Only science can make us safer."

Ridiculous.

First, we don't have Science any more, we only have Fraud.

Second, science is useless against an enemy whose main weapon is psychological. As long as we let them get anywhere near us, they can find a way to defeat us. The solution is to eliminate them from the earth, not to continue crippling and consuming our own country in futile efforts to prevent our own people from using the enemy's previous methods.

Third, Polistra wishes to point out that Science has already solved the problem of terrorists using aircraft. There is a recent brilliant invention which makes nearly all air travel completely unnecessary!



This new device, called the Tele-Phone, was invented by a Mr. Bell in Philadelphia. It enables people to speak and hear, indeed to carry on complete conversations, with other people in distant places. When you use this new Tele-Phone, you don't need to travel in order to speak with others!!!

Polistra hopes to spread the word about this fresh development, so that others may figure out how to avoid air travel.

I'm serious about this. We really don't need 90% of air travel, and we specifically don't need any travelers at all from primitive places where Allah reigns. Until we can take care of our own people, we don't need any foreigners at all.
 
  Yes.

K.T. McFarland, on Fox just now, diagnosed our Phony War On Terror perfectly:

We're treating citizens like terrorists and terrorists like citizens.

A quotation worthy of Mencken or Churchill.
 
  Climate vs Weather

Delingpole asks what's the difference between Climate and Weather? His answer is deliciously vulgar, in a British style that we American puritans have never quite mastered.


Polistra has a broader answer:

Climate is securitized weather.

How does securitizing work with mortgages? The actual brokers sell mortgages to big investment banks, who mix thousands of mortgages together into a bond, and apply special statistical methods to make the bond appear safer than it really is. Then the big banks conspire with rating agencies to give the bond a Triple-A rating. Then the big banks sell pieces of the bond to unwitting suckers.

And how does securitizing work with weather? The actual measuring stations feed their weather measurements to big data banks, who mix thousands of readings together into a climate, and apply special statistical methods to make the climate appear warmer than it really is. Then the big data banks conspire with the academic journals to give the climate a Peer-Reviewed rating. Then the big data banks sell pieces of the climate to governments in return for ever-increasing grant money.

And at the junction of the two, we have the Carbon Credit fraud, which is financial securitization based on the fraudulent numbers of the climate securitization. Criminal derivatives based on criminal derivatives, just what the Wall Street Mafia loves.
 
  No mystery

Via NRO, Mickey Kaus wonders why so much of the Beltway establishment is rallying to Janet "The System Worked" Napolitano. Many centrist columnists ... who would normally treat such stupidity with contempt no matter which party uttered it ... are stoutly defending Napolitano.

Hell, that's easy. Look at her close-clipped hair.

A quick Google of "Napolitano lesbian" shows hundreds of references, mainly from pro-homosexualist publications saying in effect "Yup, she's one of us".
 
  Endangered? Nope.

An important article by Willis Eschenbach, thoroughly and methodically debunking the idea that "habitat change" or "climate change" leads to extinction of species.

Eschenbach starts with the often quoted fantasy figure that "37% of all species might soon go extinct because of habitat reduction due to global warming" or E. O. Wilson's statement that "The number of species doomed [to extinction] each year is 27,000. Each day it is 74, and each hour 3."

He then looks at the real and known extinctions of mammals and birds over the last 400 years, which have been recorded with fair accuracy.

Plain fact: Over the last 400 years, which includes one significant cooling period and one significant warming period, exactly 61 mammal species have become extinct, and exactly 129 bird species.

How many of these resulted from habitat changes? One bird, which was already close to extinction. The "slender billed grackle" lived in one marsh in Mexico; when the marsh was drained to make farmland, the bird went extinct.

Except for this one grackle, all were killed by overhunting or disease, or were crowded out by other species that invaded the same niche.

Conclusion: It's certainly important to prevent overhunting and overfishing, but there is simply no such thing as extinction from climate change; and no such thing as extinction from habitat modification, unless the species is already too rare to preserve anyway.
 
Saturday, January 02, 2010
  More Martian insanity

Not again. Yes, again.

Fox's Comrade Greg Jarrett, reporting from Nigeria, is still SHOCKED SHOCKED SHOCKED that Abdul bin Underpants was a rich boy. He talks with several Nigerians who try to teach him rationality, try to tell him that poor folks in Nigeria (as elsewhere) don't have the spare mental energy to engage in ideological radicalism. They try to tell him that Mohammedans and Christians get along in a place like Nigeria because they're stuck together in a difficult situation.

[Later thought: Maybe we should all be listening more to Nigerians. Seems like they're doing something right!]

Comrade Jarrett turns it all upside down, as only a Goldmansachsian "journalist" can manage:

"Just another reminder that not all terror suspects are angry with the West because they believe they have no chance at a better life."

Where in the fuck does this absolute unearthly insanity come from? NOT ALL "terror suspects"? Have ANY "terror suspects" ever been angry at the West for that reason? Not one. That reason comes purely from the wild diseased imagination of Goldmansachsian elites.

In fact most "terror suspects" are angry because they are inadequate sons of successful fathers. This anger is turned against the West by jihadist preachers, who (as Mark Steyn points out) are mainly IN the West, in places like Dearborn and London. So, if we really want to slow down this particular movement, we should be bombing those mosques instead of fucking around in unrelated distant places like Afghanistan and Yemen.

Thus by simple logic, plus Polistra's Law of Inferred Intent:

1. We are not bombing or even closing mosques in the West, nor are we attempting to stop jihadis from infiltrating our Army, our CIA, and our airplanes.

2. Instead, we are making those infiltrations perfectly easy, by disarming, silencing, suing, publicly ridiculing, and strapping down all citizens who might be inclined to obstruct those infiltrations. Simultaneously we continue to fuck around in distant places.

3. All of this action is guaranteed to accelerate jihad, not slow it down.

4. Therefore, our government INTENDS to accelerate jihad.

5. Therefore, our government, under Bush and Obama, is Sheikh Osama's most effective suicide jihadi.
 
Friday, January 01, 2010
  Medvedev gets it right

From this year-end interview:

Interviewer: Mr. President, last week you visited Copenhagen where the entire world was discussing climate change. What did you think? Is the Earth getting colder or hotter?

Medvedev: I would have to be an expert in this area to answer your question, to say whether it is cooling down or warming up. In my opinion, this is not the most important thing, strange as it may seem, whether it’s cooling or warming, there are cyclic theories and really different viewpoints. What is important is how we respond.

Whether it is cooling or warming, we still have to change the planet’s ecology; we still have to develop energy-saving technologies and work on “green energy” and produce alternative types of fuel. This is absolutely obvious. And we have to work on energy efficiency. Frankly speaking, I am not satisfied with the outcome of the Copenhagen summit, it had an empty result. Unfortunately, we did not reach a deal and, putting it politely, this was not Russia’s fault.

Therefore, whether or not any new agreements get signed, we will still work on energy efficiency, developing modern energy, reducing power consumption by our economy and, as a result, reducing emissions into the atmosphere.

= = = = =

The question is sane and sensible, the answer is sane and sensible. Perfect, in fact.

Why can't we hear sanity from the media and leaders of Goldmansachsia (the country formerly known as America)?

Try to imagine the same question here.....

Interviewer: Mr. Obama, last week you visited Copenhagen where the entire world was discussing climate change. What did you think? Is the Earth getting colder or hotter?

Obama: Colder or hotter! Did you say COLDER or Hotter!!!!! Secret Service! Secret Service!!!!! I'm being attacked by a Neo-Nazi DENIER!!!!! Take him to Guantanamo now! In fact, keep Guantanamo open just for him, and bring Lynndie England back into the service just for him! You know what to do, so do it!

Of course, the question wouldn't be asked here in the first place. No Goldmansachsian journalist could imagine or pronounce the question. "Colder or hotter" is doubleplusunthink.
 
  Pronouncing 2010

One good thing about this number: it's finally forced people to revert to normal pronunciation of years.

In 2009 nearly everyone said Two Thousand And Nine. That was abnormal. (Admittedly, Twenty Nine would be impossibly ambiguous, but Twenty Oh Nine would have been clear.)

By comparison, very few people said 1909 as One Thousand Nine Hundred And Nine, or Nineteen Hundred And Nine; it was Nineteen Nine or Nineteen Oh Nine.

Now I'm hearing Twenty Ten, which is a return to normal usage.

= = = = =

Later thought: No, it really isn't a return to normal usage until the century drops entirely. This probably won't happen until we get a multi-syllable year, maybe next year. For some vaguely phonetic reason, it doesn't feel right to say only one syllable for a year. The Class of '10? For Sale Nice '10 Chevy? Doesn't work. Might work with '11, or might not start until '21.

Interesting illustration in one sentence: Phil Lebeau on CNBC, talking about prospects for the auto industry: "Twenty ten will certainly be better than two thousand nine." Natural transition without conscious thought.
 
  Avenged?

The CIA is saying that the attack on its Afghanistan base will be "avenged".

Huh? That's not proper Bushobama talk. You're supposed to say "The alleged individuals who were allegedly involved in this alleged situation may be brought to justice and afforded all appropriate rights, such as a paid staff of defense attorneys, a private taxpayer-funded branch of the ACLU, and the right to inform us about their Noble and Peaceful Religion, which the rest of us should follow instead of our primitive Christian superstitions."

The only difference between Bush and Obama on this front is that Obama says these things in comprehensible English.

But "avenged"? Why, that's a warlike word, entirely inappropriate and unbecoming for an official of Goldmansachsia (the country formerly known as America.)

Oh, now I get it. The secret police are People Who Count. Deaths of proletarians, such as soldiers at Fort Hood or civilians anywhere in Goldmansachsia, Do Not Count and thus don't need to be avenged.
 

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