Inside the Asylum

I've had fun continuing to do my own searches through the hacked emails from the CRU global warming alarmism institute.
I found a few gems. For example, there's the occasion where Phil Jones writes in an email:

Think I've managed to persuade UEA to ignore all further FOIA requests if the people have anything to do with Climate Audit.

In other words, "I've managed to persuade the University of East Anglia to ignore all Freedom of Information Act requests from people who have anything to do with an organization that is asking inconvenient questions. I'd hazard a guess that this actually constitutes an illegal act, as I doubt very much that the FOI Act allows a university to ignore requests based on the identity of the person making the request. Whether the illegality is the responsibility of the university, of the person who persuaded them to behave illegally, or both, is a question of law. Later, there's another email from Phil Jones:

You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we've found a way around this.

Yeah, they're really acting like people with nothing to hide. Open scientific debate based upon the evidence. Hoorah!

I just scanned CNN's lead stories in both the "US" and "World" News sections, then I went to NBC News, then MSNBC, then Fox News, and ... well, I gave up at that point. What's the story that I've been searching for, and failing to find? Well, Xinhua (Chinese) news agency describes it as "high profile" ... but not as far as the US media is concerned anyway. What is it?

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh flew into the Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on Sunday afternoon, starting a high-profile visit to the United States. Before the trip, Singh said the issues he wants to discuss with the U.S. side are "global threats and challenges of our times," including terrorism, climate change and the economic downturn.

That's right. The leader of the world's second most populace nation (and soon to over take even China) comes to visit the US ... and none of the freakin' media considers this worthy of headline news? I didn't bother searching beyond the main news opening pages, but that's where a story like this belongs. I've got an idea for the MSM. How about some actual news content? Novel idea I know, but it might just work.

This has already been posted in numerous places, but I haven't laughed so hard in a long time as I did in the last minute or so of this Saturday Night Live skit. Enjoy.

They say a joke is funniest when it most closely resembles the truth.

A recent survey in Britain concludes:

Only 41 percent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third, or 32 percent, believe that the link is not yet proved; eight percent say it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 percent believe the world is not warming.

The leaks from the CRU could not have had any impact on this survey, because it happened too recently. Now that the global warmenists involved with the CRU have been exposed for the unscientific unobjective snake-oil merchants that they are, I somehow doubt that these figures are going to move in a direction that Greenpeace would approve of. Anyone care to bet against the likelihood that the figure for those "who blame environmentalist propaganda" is going to rise? Let's face it, even given the possibility that man made global warming really is a problem, are the interests of humanity really best served by concealing the data and trying to suppress opposing view points? Those with the strongest argument are usually least afraid of public debate. If they really believe in their cause, let them argue it without lies, without concealment, and with honest public debate. If they don't (and their conduct certainly gives the impression that even they don't believe their arguments will stand up to careful scrutiny), then let them resign in shame from their publicly funded positions. Since most of the public doesn't understand the science, they instead judge the issues using things they do understand ... and they understand the difference between the behavior of fraudsters, and those with a good case. The warmenist "scientists" are harming the very cause they claim to believe in. That makes them either enemies of mother Gaia, or con men, or both.

Recently Instapundit linked to an article in which the author discussed just exactly how habitable is the earth. The author argued:

to a space probe searching for somewhere that our kind of life can thrive, a truly random sampling of the Earth's surface (distributed over both time and area) would probably result in the conclusion that the planet is uninhabitable

Following on from that, I now see a new article over at Science News that argues that:

stars that are just right to support life might be dimmer and longer-lived than the sun... The “Goldilocks stars” with just the right conditions might be K-type stars, or orange dwarfs, Guinan says. These stars put out less near-ultraviolet energy than sunlike stars, are less likely to flare up than M dwarf stars, and have a habitable zone far enough away that planets in that zone are unlikely to be tidally locked. K-type stars also live five to six times longer than the sun, giving life more time to develop, Guinan’s team reasons. They’re also more common than suns, making up about 15 percent of the stars in the galaxy.

I guess that means that there chances of finding life around another star are higher than previously thought? After all, if our planet and sun are not the ideal locations to support life, but they nevertheless do, then it seems reasonable to infer that it isn't as hard for life to emerge and thrive as previously thought. Relating to this is yet another new study that moves us a significant step closer to understanding how RNA (the probable precursor to DNA) could come to be formed from the building blocks of life.

A key question in the origin of biological molecules like RNA and DNA is how they first came together billions of years ago from simple precursors. Now, in a study appearing in this week's Journal of Biological Chemistry, researchers in Italy have reconstructed one of the earliest evolutionary steps yet: generating long chains of RNA from individual subunits using nothing but warm water.

This of course leads us back to the Fermi Paradox. If life is out there, why isn't it all over the sky? The proverbial aliens should have colonized the galaxy by now. The latest issue of National Geographic has a fascinating story called Worlds Apart but unfortunately the online version doesn't seem to have the most interesting illustration. It's called Searching Space, and it shows the scale of our current feeble attempts to identify planets around other stars. The picture shows most of the Milky Way, and (to scale) a tiny box representing 400 light years with Earth at the center, which represents the area where most planets have been discovered. It also shows the scale of the new Kepler satellite's extended search of up to 6000 light years, which still looks very small on the scale of things. I guess you could say that we live out in the countryside, and we've been standing on our front porch looking around, wondering why we can't see any other people. Now we've bought a pair of binoculars, and we've just begun to have a more thorough look. I don't think we could say we've even yet reached the point (in this metaphor) where we can even be bothered to climb up on the roof to get a better view. I think it might be a little early to say we looked, and there's no one out there.

Thanks to Lentz for pointing out this Polar Bear video. It's from "Planestupid.com" who appear to be a bunch of typical global warming scare-mongers trying to tell us that plane travel is bad (even as they jet off to Copenhagen to try to generate more money-making hysteria) ... but they've produced a priceless gem that really just goes to show that the people who made the video are indeed just plain stupid.

As one person commented over at Youtube,

So if the planet warms itself more it will rain polar bears? Sweet! I want me a rug and a polar bear jacket!

Yep, apparently polar bears will fall from the sky and crush your car if you fly in a plane. Personally I blame the the PBSG (Polar Bear Specialist Group). I kid you not ... there really is such a group, and they meet on a regular basis despite all of the plane travel involved.

The 15th meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG), hosted by the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, was held at the Greenland Representation in Copenhagen Denmark , June 29-July 3, 2009. The Polar Bear Specialist Group is composed of researchers and managers representing each of the five circumpolar nations that signed the International Agreement for the Conservation of Polar Bears of 1973. Since the late 1960s, the members of PBSG have met every 3 to 5 years

At their last meeting there were 21 specialists present. If that's an average, and they've met 15 times, they've managed to kill 315 polar bears so far. Or something. Actually, if they could arrange to meet in some starving area of Africa, they could solve world hunger. I imagine all of that bear meat would save a good many villagers in times of drought.
[Update] Here are a bunch more funny bear youtube clips. Enjoy.

Posted without further comment.

New Zealand men are among the most attractive in the world, but Kiwi women are among the world's ugliest.

That's according to a controversial website that allows only beautiful people to join.

Fewer than one in five New Zealand women (17 percent) have been accepted as members on beautifulpeople.com, but one in three (33 percent) Kiwi men successfully joined.

Yep, Chavez has defended Carlos the Jackal as a revolutionary fighter.

“I defend him. I don’t care what they say tomorrow in Europe.”

Well, what do you expect of Obama's buddy?

Mann's comments (previous post) about only trusting arguments published in peer-reviewed studies are put into their proper context by yet more revelations pouring out of the leaked data from CRU. There's a clear pattern of "fixing" the peer-reviews, by attacking publications and editors that dare to allow skeptics to have a voice. There's also evidence of ensuring that critical papers go to reviewers who could be "relied upon" to give the "right" feedback to it. Yes, the fix is in.
Let's take a look at a sample (use the link in the last post to find the full versions for yourself. No more MSM gate-keepers to keep you away from the real data, and now (finally) no more global warming charlatans masquerading as scientists hiding their data and biases:

Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research... Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
Reaction to McIntyre's 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper's editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460) [Note to readers - Saiers was subsequently ousted]
Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)
Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)
Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)
Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)
Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)
Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306)

That's the great thing about the internet. We no longer have to depend on the gate-keepers to decide what information we're going to be told. Instead, you can go here and search through the hacked emails etc. yourself. So I had a go with a few key word searches. I found an email exchange between journalist Robert Matthews, the science correspondent with The Sunday Telegraph, and Professor Michael E. Mann. Matthews' email is polite and reasonable.

I'm putting together a piece on global warming, and I'll be making reference to your paper in Geophysical Research Letters with Prof Jones on "Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia"...

He describes some criticisms that were made about the paper (including an internet link), and then asks

I'd be very interested to include your rebuttals to these arguments in the piece I'm doing. I must admit to being confused by why proxy data should be compared to instrumental data for the last part of the data-set. Shouldn't the comparison be a consistent one throughout ? With many thanks for your patience with this.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn't it? So, let's look at Professor Mann's response:

An objective reading of our manuscript would readily reveal that the comments you refer to are scurrilous. These comments have not been made by scientists in the peer-reviewed literature, but rather, on a website that, according to published accounts, is run by individuals sponsored by ExxonMobile corportation, hardly an objective source of information.

It's typical warmenist nonsense, and not at all the response of a scientist interested in objectivity. This part of the email starts with an attack without any attempt to actual establish anything ("it's obvious I'm right and people who attack me are idiots" doesn't classify as a reasoned response). Then there's a typical attack based on authority ("the criticism wasn't made by a cardinal of the church, and is therefore not worth considering") and goes on to another typical tactic, to belittle the criticism based on the fact that it is associated with oil money. ("The critics are funded by demons, and therefore we don't need to address their specific points.") Mann continues:

Owing to pressures on my time, I will not be able to respond to any further inquiries from you. Given your extremely poor past record of reporting on climate change issues, however, I will leave you with some final words. Professional journalists I am used to dealing with do not rely upon un-peer-reviewed claims off internet sites for their sources of information. They rely instead on peer-reviewed scientific research, and mainstream, rather than fringe, scientific opinion.

You're bad, you're unprofessional, and I'm not going to speak with you anymore. Nah nah nah. Not listening. Maybe if you started listening only to people who agree with me you might be worth talking to, but as long as you consort with heathens, get lost.

Yes. I do agree with Professor Michael E. Mann on one major point. It's not a good idea to trust people who show that they are not objective about things. Let's have a look at his website at Penn State. You'll see rapidly that all his work and funding depend on a belief in anthropogenic global warming. In short, without it, he'd be out of a job. Oh yeah ... he's also the guy behind the infamous and now thoroughly debunked hockey stick graph that Al Gore relied on for his movie. The graph that could only recently be proven to be nonsense because of determined efforts to keep the original data set hidden from critical inspection. Once that data finally did become available, it was shown that the hockey stick was created by cherry-picking the data to get the desired result. Oh yes ... I do agree with Professor Mann. Don't trust non-objective sources. As another British journalist wrote,

We “Global Warming Deniers” are often accused of ignoring the weight of scientific opinion. Well if the “science” on which they base their theories is as shoddy as Mann’s Hockey Stick, is it any wonder we think they’re talking cobblers?

Oh look ... a whole bunch of new hidden data has just been made public. To borrow Mann's term, I wonder how much more global warming alarmism is going to be shown to be scurrilous.

This story is all over the web now. The University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, or CRU, is one of the most influential climate research organisations in the world, having produced the datasets that many other researchers rely on for their own research. Their research has been under fire for a decade or more with client change critics requesting access to their raw data and the methods used to produce the published data sets. To date the CRU has successfully stonewalled and refused to satisfy these requests.

A few days ago someone hacked into one of their servers, copied a large quantity of data, including e-mail, and then dumped 61MB onto the web. The e-mails are damning.

So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics.

On October 28th, I did a post about the controversy in Egypt surrounding Lebanese hottie Haife Wehbe's use of the term "Nubian monkey" in one of her songs. Now, much later, the western MSM notices the story. Not bad ... only three and a half weeks behind the times. And they expect people to pay to read their "news"? My post was considerably better than the news story too, including a Youtube clip of the actual song. Seriously ... sell all your shares in newspapers now while they're still worth something.

For years we've heard complaints about the trade imbalance with China, and yet more complaints recently about cheap Chinese exports, with Obama repeatedly and without exception doing the bidding of his union backers. That's why I found this story rather interesting:

The United States has accused China of restricting exports of "numerous raw materials critical to U.S. manufactures and workers," thus violating WTO rules. The materials at issue include coke, bauxite, fluorspar, magnesium, silicon metal and zinc. The EU joined the United States in filing WTO complaints on the matter in June, and they were later joined by Mexico.

In response, China said that it

"consistently respects and abides by the WTO rules and its own commitments."

Behind closed doors, the Chinese leadership is probably saying, "make up your freakin' minds! Stupid foreigners."

I'm amazed I haven't heard more about this. Well, actually I'm not amazed. Would you really expect the MSM to report a catastrophic cock-up by the Obama regime that is causing major problems in Pakistan? A few days ago, the New Yorker reported:

current and former officials said in interviews in Washington and Pakistan that his Administration has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military. These would allow specially trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis.

First off, we're starting to see a bit of pay-back to the Obama regime. Bush had to put up with constant leaks undermining his policy objectives, and now Obama gets to discover that it works both ways. Or (and this is more worrying) Obama regime officials weren't deliberately trying to harm Obama, and were just openly discussing highly freakin' sensitive information for release in the media. It's not like it might make any difference to the situation in Pakistan after all... like, just say for example, undermining the Pakistani government...

Sharp differences between Pakistani leaders over safeguarding the country's nuclear arsenal are placing increasing pressure on the embattled administration of President Asif Ali Zardari.

It's not as if the Pakistani's will care about Obama saying he has grave concerns about the country's nuclear security.

General Tariq Majid, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee, said the claims were "absurd and plain mischievous"

Oh. Well, at least it's not like we have evil Republicans in charge who would favor the military over the civilian government.

In just over a year, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, the army chief, has eclipsed Zardari and he is now Washington's point man on the Pakistani side

OK. Well, at least there don't seem to be any signs that it's weakening US influence in the country.

The military establishment has seized the moment to hand over a list of names to Zardari of people it believes should be immediately replaced. At the top of the list is the ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, whom the army has always regarded as a foe for being too close to the American administration. Minister of the Interior Rahman Malik is second in line. Although he has been credited with helping destroy the financial arteries of militants, he is regarded as too close to Western intelligence agencies and he often bypasses the military establishment in anti-terror operations.

It's called "smart diplomacy" apparently.

I posted an entry about this story from a very popular Chinese magazine a while back. It basically makes the point that even in China they know that American media is in the tank for the Democrats.

It's one of the posts I'm most proud of, and I was disappointed it didn't attract more attention at the time. I thought of it again today because of a story linked by Instapundit that Asian voters (in this case South Asians) seem to be trending Republican. As I commented in that earlier post,

If you just sit down with an average Chinese person and explain the core differences in economic policy between the Democrats and the Republicans, 99% of the Chinese will vote Republican every time. I remember a Chinese guy I knew in Australia. He said that when he first became an Australian citizen he voted for the Labor Party, because (much like the Democrats in USA) they have the image of being immigrant friendly, and not a "white man's" club. After he was in Australia a bit longer, and was running his own little one-man company, he starting voting for the Liberal Party (the more conservative option), and says he can't imagine what he was thinking voting Labor.

Expand the welfare state? No way! Impose higher taxes on people who work harder? No way! Let government take over more aspects of society? No way! As a Chinese woman said to me about Obama's program ... "oh, we tried that. It doesn't work." I posted about that one as well:

Dr Xu Xaonian, economics professor at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, lambasted [Australian Prime Minister] Mr Rudd's essay [that criticized capitalism] ... Dr Xu maintained it was not time to resurrect Keynesianism, as proposed by Mr Rudd in the essay. "Instead, it's time to announce Keynesianism's failure, time to announce the emperor Lord Keynes has no clothes," he said... "He wants to use expansionary financial policies to pull the economy out of recession. Instead, it will only add a fresh failure to the Keynesian list, while piling up votes, in the meantime, for the social democrats."

Newspapers across the world are struggling financially as alternate media eliminates their gate-keeper status. Once upon a time, the MSM (main stream media) controlled what is news, but those days are gone. It's been quite a revelation to see the stories come out that they had tried to suppress, like Edward's affair and love-child, and more recently the ACORN scandals. Yep, newspapers are struggling with declining readership and sinking profits (or more likely growing losses.) So how do they respond?

NEWSPAPER publishers have given the first indication of how they plan to charge people for reading news online with one of the world's best-known newspapers, The Times of London, to offer an ''all-you-can-eat'' package to readers. By the northern hemisphere spring, web users will have access to the newspaper's website as part of their general subscription fee or pay a fee to download as many stories as they like during a 24-hour period, the editor of The Times revealed.

Yep, that'll certainly stem the tide and make more people read their newspapers. After all, nothing makes readers flock to your website more than making people pay to read it.

Obama has declared that USA will be out of Afghanistan by the time he leaves office. That means they only have to hang on for another three years, and they can declare victory. (Even with my unbounded cynicism, I don't think the American people are quite dumb enough to elect this guy again.)

I'm not saying that I think USA necessarily should remain in Afghanistan that long, or indeed whether they even should still be there now. I think that's an open question, because no one seems to quite know why they're there. Without a definable goal, how can you move towards it, or know when it's accomplished? However, to come out and say something like this does nothing other than give heart to the enemy, and undermine the people USA supports. Even if that is his plan, he shouldn't have declared it. In fact, if you really are planning to pull out in such a short time, then you ramp up the rhetoric about long term commitment and deploy a lot more troops. Smart diplomacy... yeah, some of that would be nice.

There's a report out, trumpeted across the media, that claims

More than 49 million Americans -- one in seven -- struggled to get enough to eat in 2008

Of course it's all politics, and there's no actual hunger.

While Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said programs such as food stamps softened the impact of an economic recession, anti-hunger groups pointed to the huge increase from the preceding year when 36.2 million people had trouble getting enough food and a third of them occasionally went hungry. "The survey suggested that things could be much worse but for the fact that we have extensive food assistance programs," Vilsack told reporters. "This is a great opportunity to put a spotlight on this problem."

It's all about the wonders of government. Without government, even more people would be hungry. Thank your government. The major food problem in USA is not hunger ... it's freakin' obesity. Just look around you ... there's no doubt at all that the poor people are more likely to suffer from obesity than the wealthy. I remember when I first got to this country and was amazed at how cheap is fast food (and bad alcohol). I thought, "this is the best country in the world to be a wino!" There's no hunger epidemic in the United States, except by some very unusual definition of the word "hunger". When obesity disappears as a problem in the poor sectors of USA, then you'll know there's a hunger problem. This is so obviously bunk that I'm amazed anyone is taking it seriously. As the Asylum's Dr Strangelove once said (I think he may have been quoting?):

Most of the world's problems could be solved with five minutes thought. But thinking is difficult, and five minutes is a long time.

In this case, I think it would take more like five seconds to know this study is political fiction. Yet look in the media and you'll see how many journalists and politicians could even get their brain into gear for those few seconds.