The Cult of Climate

A few years ago a boffin passing himself off as a scientist, well he did attend courses and was matriculated a few times so technically is a scientist, by the name of Mann rolled out a noteworthy graph.  It even got put into the IPCC report on climate change.  What a wonderful graph it was for it was the one true sign that Man was causing the globe's temperatures to rise. It was called the Hockey Stick.

When other scientists clamored and did beseech of Dr. Mann to release his data and models so they could replicate what he had discovered, a most curious thing happen, Dr. Mann locked the data up and refused to share.  Which caused much vexation and litigation until the sacred instruments of divination were pried from Dr. Mann's jealous grasp.

And like peering under the flooring where the Pythia held audience in Delphi, a most curious thing or two emerged from the liberated instruments that birthed the Hockey Stick.  Namely that any data fed into Dr. Mann's wondrous algorithms always produced the famous Hockey Stick.  Another disquieting fact that snuck out was how tiny the crucial data set was that built the House of the Hockey Stick, no more than a dozen trees in one tiny spot of Siberia it was revealed.

But unlike a true scientist welcoming other scientists ' papers that showed his original premise was terribly flawed, Dr. Mann has acted more like an Inquisitor being questioned on matters of faith by Copernicus.   He has roundly and volubly denounced all who have proven the errors of his beloved Hockey Stick in terms that would have endeared him to Torquemada whilst causing a minor daemon or two to blush.  He attacks not their scientific work but their lack of faith in Climate Change.  He carelessly tosses out the word 'denier' and threatens punitive actions against those he labels such.

For you see dear reader in truth Mann is not a scientist but a high priest of a false religion.

1903

On December 17th, 1903 the first powered controlled flight by a heavier than air craft took place.  The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, had built a revolutionary machine based on a long process of experimentation and testing.

On this day at Kill Devil Hill North Carolina their Wright Flyer made a series of four flights.  The first one was a mere 12 seconds and 120ft.  It would have been enough for the record books, but the brothers flew their plane three more times.  The longest flight being 59 seconds and 852ft.

The original Wright Flyer now resides in a place of honor at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

A Righteous Response

It did not take long for the Roman Catholic Church to respond to President Obama’s magnanimous, in his mind, compromise on his health care diktat.  In fact the rebuke was read from many pulpits this past weekend across the land.  And the rebukes keep coming out.  Today Rep. Issa in the US House is asking about it.

There is one grave problem with this compromise.  Yes it sounds like Obama has deftly threaded a needle to satisfy various constituencies.  The brutal truth is he has tried to deflect the gravity of the sin he is trying to force on people of faith. 

In the original version of his diktat, Catholic hospitals would be forced to provide birth control pills, condoms, vasectomies, hysterectomies, and pills like RU-486.  All of these items are anathema to Catholics of faith because they transform the act of bringing life and hope into this world into something purely made of lust and creating sterility in its wake.  Hence for any Catholic institution to comply, they would be committing a sin of commission.

The new version transforms this sin into one of omission.  According to Obama the Catholic hospitals no longer have to knowingly pay for all the above ‘vital’ medical requirements, instead the underwriters of the insurance policies would pay for them at zero cost.  The sin is still happening but now someone else is doing the sinful deed as Catholic institution are supposed to look the other way.

As for Obama’s tissue thin lie that the insurance companies will pay for all these items without charging Catholic institutions.  Does he think we are all morons?  It seems he does and those who have gone back into the Obama fold prove he can sucker some people all the time.  The fact of the matter is the people or institutions will pay premiums on their insurance policies.  It will be from these premiums that all those counter-life items will be paid for since insurance companies are not charities.  So we find ourselves back again committing a sin of omission, we are supposed to just look the other way while evil occurs.

So what Caeser Obama offers is just a difference of poisons.  One is overt and the other more subtle, both are still deadly to the soul.  We need to keep standing up and saying no to this administration.  When Obama is forced to blink and back away from all this, we must not rest.  We must keep up the pressure and roll back in its entirety the abomination Obama and others call ‘affordable’ health care.  This health care program allows four states and many friends of Obama to be exempt from.  While Democrats have been abusing the Commerce Clause, they have also abused the Equal Protection Clause.  These abuses and usurpations of power must be stopped least the tree of Liberty is renewed with the blood of patriots.  Most importantly we must do this before our collective soul is irredeemably blotted by these evil actions.

Post script – Obama pretends he knows Scripture.  So do the ‘religious’ who support him.  But I find it hard to credit their knowledge and faith when they so willingly serve a worldly master called socialism.  They will engage in many amazing feats of verbal gymnastics to dress up their aberrations as most holy writ.  As Obama proved when he replaced individuals performing acts of charity with a secular government acting as the arbitrator of who will get charity.  These are false prophets who shall wear millstones about their necks.

The Hard Call in 2011

Yesterday I wrote about the impeding health crisis that is festering inside the Occupy Atlanta and Occupy Wall Street camps. As the day went on, I could not leave alone what I wrote and its implications. And my sense of deja vu kicked in as I remembered I had wrote a post on pandemics.

In 2008 I wrote The Hard Call. In it I discussed pandemics in fiction and reality in relation to new guidelines that were being formulated on who to save in case the whole world was struck by something akin to the Spanish Influenza outbreak. Since I wrote that post, the original news article link has vanished so I found another one that reports the same information. The guidelines boil down to trying to save the people most needed to rebuild a civilization. People over 85 would be out of luck which promoted some civil rights lawyers to get annoyed.

Tuberculosis and Norovirus are airborne diseases. Both cities in question are dense urban areas. Alarm bells are going off in my head. First because of the facts I just listed. Secondly because both cities are major airline hubs so infected people could get on planes and carry their illness to cities as yet untouched. We have been worried about H1N1 leveling the world, it frightens me to think of these Occupy protestors as two-legged versions of the rats who brought the Black Death to Europe. But that possibility exists.

I earnestly hope the people in New York City, Atlanta, CDC, FEMA, DHS, and the White House are podering this possibility. And that they are doing things to correct it before a pandemic erupts and the hard call has to be made on who lives.

An Ill Star'd Event?

2001: A Space Odyssey

I am waiting for someone to try and spin this as part of the breathtaking mythology that is springing up around the death of Osama bin Laden. It seems six of the eight planets in this solar system are roughly in a line that is visible from Earth right now, above the rising Sun. All we need now is for someone to have reported a comet above Islamabad this past weekend. Then we would have an astrological picture perfect event.

For those who are awaiting a similar grand alignment in 2012 to help usher in the much hyped Mayan end of the world in December, 2012. No such luck for you, there will be no such alignment at all in the year 2012.

Scientific Touchstones

For the NASA scientists embroiled with their arsenic based life-form plus the likes Mann and his hockey stick graph, perhaps a return to the basics might be in order. So here is a quote that seems timeless and applicable now.

"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing."
- Dr. Thomas H. Huxley, President of the Royal Society.

Here is another quote from Huxley, " The foundation of morality is to have done , once and for all, with lying."

Back To The Past

On 22 April, 2010 from Cape Canaveral FL, the United States Air Force launched the X-37B unmanned space plane atop an Atlas booster. The mission has been cloaked in secrecy even as the ship orbits the Earth with its cargo doors open. If you read all the possible uses for the X-37 in this article, one has to think of a previous USAF project that was cancelled. The X-37 is being lauded for possibly ushering in the era of quick response time launches. To surprise someone and gather intelligence before the target is aware. How strange this all sounds and how refreshing until one thinks on that previous USAF program. What is this program? It was called the X-20 Dynamic-Soaring program. It would be launched from atop a Titan booster or even a Saturn I into low earth orbit. And it would carry out reconnaissance missions or even hypersonic bombing missions from the edge of the atmosphere. Save omitting the bombing capability and the pilot, is the X-37 really all that removed from the X-20? It's as if Apollo and the Space Shuttle never happened and the USAF is back into building the MOL with the X-20 ferrying the astronauts to it. Or the USAF being able to strike from the edge of space anyone who threatens the security of the United States. Or giving NASA that rescue capability it so desperately needed for Columbia.

I will leave you with some videos, one of David Jensen and Gregory Peck in the Martin Caiden based movie Marooned in which the X-RV, a relative of the X-20, is launched to rescue Ironman One trapped in orbit. Caiden's novel was originally written in 1964 long before the Apollo One fire. Others gives one a behind the scenes look at building the X-20 and what a mission would have looked like if it had been built.

The X-RV launches in the eye of a hurricane from the movie Marooned.

The X-20 carries out a spy mission.

What is the X-20 Part 1 - Official USAF film.

Building the X-20 Part 1 - Official USAF film.

Throwing NASA Away

The rumored Obama budget for NASA calls for a future heavy lift rocket to get people and material into space. Once again Obama gets things wrong. NASA and the USAF have a heavy-lift rocket for getting material into orbit; it is called the Titan IV rocket which grew out of the Titan ICBM that was also used to launch the Gemini space capsules into Earth orbit. NASA has a new man-rated rocket currently in development, it is called the Ares rocket. They have already spent $9 billion in tax dollars to create Ares. How far has NASA gotten in building Ares? They had a successful test launch at Kennedy Space Center on October 28, 2009. That is how close Ares is to being mission capable.

But President Obama, in his proposed budget for NASA, does not call for the $3 billion a year extra NASA will need to finish Ares and to field the Orion capsule that will take human beings back to the Moon. Instead NASA will get about $1 billion extra, told to focus on near-Earth science missions to study the discredited hunch of global warming, hope Russia will rent Soyuz missions to the space station, and pray private industry will step up and build a space taxi.

Yet another example of how President Obama and his administration are good at squandering tax money. $787 billion stimulus. $40 billion to GM. $300 million sent to Hamas in Gaza. What is throwing away another $9 billion as Democrats raise the debt ceiling to a height that can only be reached by Orion? Obviously squat even as they put into the unemployment column thousands of highly skilled people who once worked at NASA and its contractors.



Ares test launch October 28, 2009. KSC, Cape Canaveral, FL.

AGW disciples - International Scoflaws

As East Anglia CRU moves to release their temperature data in an attempt to reclaim some small measure of integrity, one overriding thing needs to be considered. As people digging into the released code have discovered, some poor programmer named Harry at the CRU has tried to duplicate previous results and met with failure. So the chances of this released data ever supporting the CRU's published results are slim to none. Which means every published report that incorporated any CRU data is now at a minimum suspect and at worse worthless.

This leads back to the Heidelberg Appeal which was issued back in 1992 during the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro. In this document, scientists appealed to all the people running the Earth Summit to use scientific methods in efforts to address any attempt to manage the environment. To date, 72 Nobel Prize winners can be counted among the 4,000+ signatories. Nobel winners in Medicine and Physics seem to dominate. As opposed to Al Gore and his Peace Prize who acts as the leader of the global warming/climate change brigade.

What also emerged from the Earth Summit was the Rio Declaration that had 27 Principles. It seems Mann, Hanson, and the CRU crew have been using Principle 15 to push their agenda.
In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.
But at the same time by their steadfast refusal to release their data and code they are in violation of Principle 10 of the same declaration. Environmental issues are best handled with participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level. At the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities... East Anglia CRU, NASA, NOAA, and others involved in this debacle can be considered public authorities since they receive governmental funding which affects public policy and everyone's standard of living. By denying individuals like McIntyre the appropriate access, they, being Mann et al, are repudiating Principle 10.

Finally lets look at Al Gore and how his carbon offset business fits within the Rio Declaration framework. This is germane since Al Gore has been the most visible supporter of global warming legislation while marketing the concept of a poor country selling its excess carbon credits to a developed county like the United Kingdom. Lets look at Principle 16 shall we? National authorities should endeavour to promote the internalization of environmental costs and the use of economic instruments, taking into account the approach that the polluter should, in principle, bear the cost of pollution, with due regard to the public interest and without distorting international trade and investment. Seems Al Gore and his business might be violating the spirit at least of this principle to make some dollars.

Ladies and gentlemen of the world, I must ask a simple question. When the big name people who push a certain approach are shown to be liars and charlatans, what should be done? The peddlers of this charade need to be repudiated. As for their ideas, these ideas must be classified as fallacy until reproducible results carried out in an open manner shows these ideas to have merit. Millions for defense, not one cent for AGW.

Fools Rush In Where Scientists Warily Tread

I remember reading a collection of science fiction short stories at my aunt’s house as a child visiting one summer. My uncle had passed away by this time and both were WWII AAF veterans with a house in Florida. I think the author was Leigh Brackett, but it has been so many years and she got rid of the books since so that I cannot attest to such. But this one story has stuck with me, more so than Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring ever has. The story was called The Gone Dogs.

This was a future world where humans had made contact with aliens who have shared technology with Earth. Suddenly a disease erupts that is wiping out all domesticated dogs and this sends the people into a panic. After frantic efforts to save some dogs in a remote robotic controlled super kennel, the truth is learned as to what caused this plague. A rancher, using his alien supplied gene-splicer, decided to wipe out the coyote. Alas his coding was not up to snuff and his pet virus jumped to dogs with human beings as carriers. The last dogs on Earth die when a woman, deranged with grief over the death of her dog, breaks the quarantine and infects the last of Earth’s dogs.

Pretty scary stuff packed into a story that is now 40+ years old, back when people were just teasing out the first bits of information about DNA and genes. In fact it is far more frightening than some later literature written by Michael Crichton. One does not need a Tyrannosaurus-Rex sized warning to realize amateurs playing with recombining DNA is something to be avoided.

I should amend the above statement with a caveat; people with a healthy dose of common sense would avoid doing such. But people in this story from the Associated Press seem to be missing that needed dosage.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.
In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

Needless to say, I am very much concerned. Even if their project is successful there is the problem of this living creation not mutating into something lethal. And what of their failures, are they following proper procedures like incinerating them at a very high temperature or are they merely pouring them down the drain and hoping its all good?

What a ‘brave’ new world these people are ushering in. The world will not end with a bang, but with a whimper or even a bio-engineered sniffle.