Crazy Al takes his Taft impression to Singapore, the land where conviction on a charge of committing an "outrage of modesty" is a caning offense, and unintentionally makes a true statement in his increasingly shrill defense of the indefensible.

My Way News - Gore: Polluters Manipulate Climate Info

Al is quoted as saying, "They're trying to manipulate opinion and they are taking us for fools." I agree as long as the "they" he refers to is the climate change alarmist group, and the "us" are the rest of us who simply live our lives and notice that short term weather models are laughably wrong every day.

As for examples of manipulation of the data, there's this, this indictment of the quality of measurement data in many cases, this on the hurricane count flap, and this summary of presentations by scientists who apparently didn't get the memo that the debate is over.

The argument that scientific consensus means that the facts are in and the debate is over for climate change is laughable if you focus on what science and the scientific method actually mean.

The definition of the scientific method at Wikipedia contains the following: "Among other facets shared by the various fields of inquiry is the conviction that the process must be objective to reduce a biased interpretation of the results. Another basic expectation is to document, archive and share all data and methodology so it is available for careful scrutiny by other scientists, thereby allowing other researchers the opportunity to verify results by attempting to reproduce them. This practice, called "full disclosure", also allows statistical measures of the reliability of these data to be established."

We have seen attempts to keep data and methods away from skeptics on numerous occasions. Who's afraid of legitimate inquiry that would either confirm or question their work? Politicians--scientists with a policy or other non-scientific axe to grind.

More inconvenient research reported in ScienceDaily: Synchronized Chaos: Mechanisms For Major Climate Shifts

Excerpt:

"In the mid-1970s, a climate shift cooled sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific Ocean and warmed the coast of western North America, bringing long-range changes to the northern hemisphere.

After this climate shift waned, an era of frequent El Ninos and rising global temperatures began.
Understanding the mechanisms driving such climate variability is difficult because unraveling causal connections that lead to chaotic climate behavior is complicated.

To simplify this, Tsonis et al. investigate the collective behavior of known climate cycles such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the El Nino/Southern Oscillation, and the North Pacific Oscillation.

By studying the last 100 years of these cycles' patterns, they find that the systems synchronized several times.

Further, in cases where the synchronous state was followed by an increase in the coupling strength among the cycles, the synchronous state was destroyed. Then. a new climate state emerged, associated with global temperature changes and El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability.

The authors show that this mechanism explains all global temperature tendency changes and El Nino variability in the 20th century. "

Brendan Miniter writes in OpinionJournal's DE GUSTIBUS column about a great American's quest to help protect his fellow soldiers fighting Islamofascism. Click to read, "On His Armor: A refugee to our shores finds a way to protect our soldiers."

The great Instapundit.com catches the UK Guardian engaging in a bit of time travel when it associates the Bush Administration with CIA interrogation and torture policy established in...1998.

As they say, you can't make this stuff up.

Hat tip to the OpFor blog for the link to this photo from the USAF Academy site. The caption, "An Air Force Cadet encounters mud. This will, in all likelihood, never occur again." is, in a word, perfect.

Aim High.

Congratulations to the the Iraqi team, improbable winners of the Asian Cup.

Here are two excerpts from the Reuters article:

"Iraq were forced to train and play their qualifiers in neutral countries and their coach, Brazilian coach Jorvan Vieira, who said he planned to quit after the match, only had two months to mould a team that included Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurdish players."

and

"FIFA President Sepp Blatter, who was at the Gelora Bung National Stadium for the final, said Iraq's achievement had inspired millions and was proof of sport's unique power to unite people in the most desperate circumstances."

As the man says, read the whole thing: Iraq defy odds to complete Asian Cup fairytale Sports Reuters

The President gave an excellent speech on the situation in Iraq and the characteristics of the enemy that we are fighting there. An excellent analysis coupled with the text of the speech is posted here: The Belmont Club: The Charleston AFB Speech

I haven't posted to this blog since last February--just too much to do lately. My Google Reader links blog is updated numerous times daily. The five most recent posts in my links blog appear in the left hand column of this page.

In "Trial in Error," Victoria Toensing "indicts others who were not indicted by a grand jury, but could have been.

Now that the "Libby trial about process not outing an agent" is over, what will the media write about the outcome? Libby would seem to be the loser either way due to the massive costs of his defense.

In "Against the grain: Some scientists deny global warming exists," Astrophysicist Nir Shariv describes his passage from man-made climate change believer to his present opinion. He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. "In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."

The article continues: Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

Two takes on the politicization of science here and here.

Indiana Jones 4 will be filmed in 2007, and hit the screen in May 2008. Harrison Ford, 64, says that he is still fit enough to play the character.

I certainly hope that this movie is not the flop that the three Star Wars "prequels" were. The Indiana Jones sagas are terrific movies. I will definitely watch any of them should I happen to catch them on TV at virtually any time.

One of the great mass murderers of the twentieth century has paid the ultimate price for his crimes against humanity. Saddam Hussein was executed by the Iraqi government after a trial that by all credible accounts was much fairer than any that took place under his regime.

Reactions of all sorts are coming in. Many Iraqis, including Iraqi-Americans, are rejoicing. Extra security and higher alert status are in place to guard against Sunni/Baathist violence from any "Saddam dead-enders", or those who would use his death as a pretext for violence.

There has been an apparent car bombing at an airport parking garage in Madrid, Spain. As I type this at 1:02 AM Pacific time, CNN International reported the bombing, but did not report any claim of responsibility. It could have been done by Basque separatists, or another terrorist group.

The hope, slim though it may be, is that Saddam's death will remove some of the initiative for Sunnis to oppose peaceful progress in Iraq. The coming days will tell whether those hopes were pipe dreams or whether they may come to fruition someday.

Traditionally, the MSM and some in the blogosphere write about the biggest stories of the year and make predictions for the next. Wretchard writes a must-read treatise on "The Blogosphere at War" that is much more useful than the former.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Lileks points to two interesting posts. I'm not sure I believe that the dots connect in the first, but the second makes a great deal of sense.

Michael Hirschorn's article for the The Atlantic Online, entitled "Get Me Rewrite! A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age," does an excellent job of framing the problems that printed newspapers face and proposing an interesting direction that could save and even expand their presence in the digital age.

Even more reasons for the bad guys to fear the Warthog: now with extra prickle.

On the one hand, it's encouraging to read that the US intelligence community is considering using Wiki and blog technology and techniques to improve the quality and speed of its analysis. On the other hand, it's discouraging that it hasn't already been a well established practice.

The full research paper is available here.

Betsy Newmark takes a pitch in her wheelhouse and belts it out of the park. The fact that she nails the Seattle school system by calling it "despicable" adds extra distance to the homer.

American Thinker asks, "What Islamic Science and Philosophy?"