kenlacrosse

(John Hinderaker)

I have written many times about what I consider the worst scandal in the history of science: efforts by the curators of global temperature records to rewrite the past so as to produce an illusion of warming that is not reflected in the temperatures that have actually been recorded.

No Tricks Zone picks up the theme in a post titled “Adjusted ‘Unadjusted Data: NASA Uses The ‘Magic Wand Of Fudging’, Produces Warming Where There Never Was.”

It’s been long known that NASA GISS has been going through its historical temperature data archives and erasing old temperature measurements and replacing them with new, made up figures without any real legitimate reason.

This practice has led to the formation of new datasets called “adjusted” data, with the old datasets being called “V3 unadjusted”. The problem for global warming activists, however, was that when anyone looks at the old “V3 unadjusted” – i.e. untampered data – they often found a downward linear temperature trend. Such negative trends of course are an embarrassment for global warming alarmists, who have been claiming the planet is warming up rapidly.

So what to do? Well, it seems that NASA has decided to adjust its “V3 unadjusted datasets” and rename them as “V4 unadjusted”. That’s right, the adjusted data has become the new V4 “unadjusted” data.

You can’t make this stuff up.

You guessed it. The new V4 unadjusted data are now yielding warmed up trends, even at places where a cooling trend once existed.

This is how NASA uses its magic wand of fudging to turn past cooling into (fake) warming.

The post includes a number of examples, animated GIFs that show how the temperatures originally recorded in a given locale have been changed by NASA to create an alleged warming trend. Here is just one, Marquette, Michigan, from 1880 to 2018, where NASA has “turned a slightly cooling trend into a robust warming trend.”

Much more at the link. The bottom line is that surface temperature data have been hopelessly corrupted by partisans, and can’t be trusted to show temperature trends. The only data that are publicly available, transparent and reliable are the satellite readings that go back, as I recall, to 1979.

(John Hinderaker)

That comment about the 21st century liberal press could be made by a lot of people–like me, for example. But it is newsworthy because it was made by CBS News Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan, who ventured some uncensored comments in a podcast:

As Logan lamented that voter registration among journalists shows that the media is out of balance, she came with a metaphor to explain how she believes the press is tinged by sameness of opinion.

“Visually, anyone who’s ever been to Israel and been to the Wailing Wall has seen that the women have this tiny little spot in front of the wall to pray, and the rest of the wall is for the men. To me, that’s a great representation of the American media, is that in this tiny little corner where the women pray you’ve got Breitbart and Fox News and a few others, and from there on, you have CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever, right? All of them.

“And that’s a problem for me, because even if it was reversed, if it was vastly mostly on the right, that would also be a problem for me. My experience has been that the more opinions you have, the more ways that you look at everything in life.”

Logan also denounced the liberal leak culture that dominates outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post:

The discussion continued with Logan trashing news reports based on single, anonymous government sources, calling it an abandonment of journalistic standards.

“That’s not journalism, that’s horseshit,” Logan said. “Responsibility for fake news begins with us.”

It does indeed. Which is one reason why Logan’s realism about the American news landscape will not be a career enhancer.

Towards the end of the interview, Logan seemed to acknowledged that some will see her remarks as controversial, saying “this interview is professional suicide for me.”

Perhaps not suicide, but rather exile to the wilderness where, for example, Sharyl Attkisson resides. Attkisson is not, to my knowledge, a conservative. Nor is Logan, as far as I know. But Attkisson tried to tell the truth about the Obama administration, naively thinking that was her job as a journalist. And she was particularly unhappy when she became convinced (correctly, as far as I can tell) that the Obama administration hacked into her home computer. Has a single fellow journalist supported Attkisson in her effort to find out who invaded her computer? Not that I know of. For a journalist, the choices are: 1) be part of the left-wing team, or 2) be ostracized.

Welcome, Ms. Logan, to the wilderness. Where you may be cut off from left-wing society, but at least you can say what you really think.

S.G. CHEAH: I Am an Immigrant and this is Why America is Great. If all immigrants were like her, Democrats would be building a wall a mile high, and fronting it with Claymore mines.

(Scott Johnson)

Ammo Grrrll digs into the left’s DIRTY THESAURUS. She writes:

Peter Fonda, 78-year-old “baby” brother of 80-year-old Hanoi Jane, is still alive! I had no idea. Boy, it is getting harder and harder for these great feminist men and their #MeToo womyns to come up with ever more disgusting slang for lady bits, hurled as insults at conservative women. But “Gash”? Seriously? Wow. I can’t even think when I last heard that shocking word. But I know a hardened combat vet who says words I’ve never heard of, who would never even think of using it. He has a mother, sisters, a wife, women comrades and three daughters.

We also got a horrific little peek into the drug-addled fantasy life of this world-class Shakespearean actor. If the expression “rolling over in his grave” is accurate, Henry Fonda is probably now a new source of energy. Henry was a liberal, but best friends with Jimmy Stewart, who was a conservative. Haha! Remember those Quaint Olde Days? When people who disagreed politically did not call each other “Nazi” or “deplorable”?

Peter Fonda (or peter-fondler?) proudly and openly Tweeted his wish for a naked woman in stocks for random passersby to whip and poke at. Charmed, I’m sure. Oh, not done yet? And an adolescent Barron Trump locked in with pedophiles. Hey, genius, one of the main reasons why children ARE separated from adults in prison is precisely to prevent their being locked up with pedophiles.

Has creepy Peter Fonda done ANYTHING since Easy Rider? I hated that movie when I was a very young left-wing Democrat. In the unlikely event I ever watch it again, this time I will cheer for the Louisiana “rednecks” who shoot his drug dealing character.

Here’s a couple of fun facts you might not be aware of about Easy Rider (besides the fact that they used real drugs in the movie): Actor Rip Torn was supposed to be in the film originally, but in a production meeting in New York with Dennis Hopper, Torn, a Texan, was offended by Hopper’s bigoted remarks about Southern rednecks. He withdrew from the project. Furthermore, in a scene in a Louisiana restaurant where they used real locals, the people were TOLD that the characters played by Hopper and Fonda had raped and killed a local girl. The vitriol unleashed in the scene was, at least in part, a legitimate reaction to that misinformation rather than bigotry. But back to the present.

I understand Fonda has some new “indie” movie coming out. I can’t wait to see the feminists knitting new “gash” hats to parade around preventing people from seeing it. Right? Right?

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I said that Mr. AG is constantly saying that “There is no bottom” to the antics of these unhinged leftists? He knows this; I know this; and yet we both go around with constant deer in headlights faces – like rich, vain women who have recently had “work” done – at each new travesty. I guess we either have a long learning curve, or way too much faith in our fellow man.

We keep expecting that some responsible adult Democrat – Joe Biden? Amy Klobuchar? Obama himself? — will step up and say, “OK, kids, dial it down. Not only is calling a woman ‘c*nt’ and ‘gash’ completely over-the-top unacceptable, but it’s going to blow up in our faces.”

Where are the grownups? The worst offenders among them are at least in their 40s and 50s and many are in their 60s and 70s. As Archie Bunker used to say: “Good Night, Nurse!”

Are there NO Democrats who are embarrassed by their spokes-cretins? When Robert De Niro taxed his tiny brain to come up with his fetching “F*ck Trump!” line, was there not a single theatre patron who would stay seated like a dignified, civilized adult, instead of jumping up like a functionary in an ill-fitting suit at a speech by Stalin? What kind of message would it have sent had there been no applause at all? It wouldn’t have even taken boos to make the point, but just stunned silence. A presenter at a major televised awards show said “F*ck” the sitting President of the United States. Twice. And got a standing ovation. Let that sink in.

Remember when South Carolina congressman Joe Wilson rudely, if accurately, interrupted President Obama’s State of the Union Address by yelling “You lie!”? OMG, the Wrath of Khan fell upon him. Mind-reading sensation Maureen Dowd “heard” the yuge no-no word “Boy” after “You lie.” Charges of “raaaacism” were trumpeted across the land. No obscenity. No crude mention of Michelle’s lady bits. Just rudeness. He was reprimanded by Congress and then overwhelmingly re-elected. By the way, I did not think it was either appropriate or good manners. And I easily disliked Obama as much as anyone dislikes Trump. But I am both sane and a courteous adult.

Ah, but that was in 2009. A virtual lifetime ago, politically. It is 2018, half-way through the year toward 2019. Now the naughty boy late-show hosts — Lord, how far we’ve fallen from Johnny Carson – and the small gaggle of crude, talentless women comics, are sent scurrying to their Dirty Thesauruses for new, ground-breaking territory every day.

I think tw*t and sn*tch are still available, kids. But they both are kind of “friendly” words, not really as reprehensible as the ones already taken. Have you thought of decapitation porn? Oh, wait, that’s been done, too. Have you thought of acting like a mature, civilized adult?

Naaaah. Where’s the money, attention, and insanely-lucrative series or comedy special in that? Look up the net worth of all of these obscene deranged clowns. It boggles the mind. Excuse me, now I have to get out my Urban Dictionary to see what combination of ugly words I can string together to get rich. Got my eye on an HBO Special called “F**k, f**k, f**k, you F**king F**kers!” (Hope I don’t get sued for plagiarizing Keith Olbermann). I won’t settle for a penny less than $50 million. With wit like that, I think I have a good shot! I’ll take all my regular commenters out for dinner at The Bigoted Red Hen. (“Reservation for 500, please, in the armed section…”) We will order the Surf ‘N Turf, use the restrooms, forget to flush, and leave. Good for the goose; good for the Red Hen.

(Scott Johnson)

We are awash in the spirit of the mob and mob violence. It feels something like the defining feature of the present moment. The true home of such mob violence is on the left and embodied, for example in the forces of Antifa. These forces have been abetted and indulged by authorities on the left. We need to plant a flag of principled resistance.

The spirit of the mob permeates cable news on CNN and MSNBC with its nonstop antiTrump hysteria. It can be seen, for example, in the sympathetic treatment accorded Antifa by Chuck Todd in a recent segment of his MTP Daily show on MSNBC. See the NewsBuster report “Really Chuck? MSNBC’s Todd aids in promotion of Antifa violence.”

Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address of 1838 addressed the threat of the mob to the perpetuation of our political institutions. Everything about Lincoln’s speech feels of the present moment.

Lincoln prescribed the inculcation of reverence for the Constitution and the laws to counter the lawlessness of the mob. While not the answer to our present discontents, we cannot find the answer without it. To resist the spirit of the mob we yearn for leadership to advocate and insist on adherence to the Constitution and the laws.

(Scott Johnson)

On July 9, 1858, Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas gave a campaign speech to a raucous throng from the balcony of the Tremont Hotel in Chicago. Abraham Lincoln was in the audience as Douglas prepared to speak. Douglas graciously invited Lincoln to join him on the balcony to listen to the speech.

In his speech Douglas sounded the themes of the momentous campaign that Lincoln and Douglas waged that summer and fall for Douglas’s Senate seat. Douglas paid tribute to Lincoln as a “kind, amiable, and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and an honorable opponent,” but took issue with Lincoln’s June 16 speech to the Illinois Republican convention that had named him its candidate for Douglas’s seat. In that speech Lincoln had famously asserted that the nation could not exist “half slave and half free.” According to Douglas, Lincoln’s assertion belied the “diversity” in domestic institutions that was “the great safeguard of our liberties.” Then as now, “diversity” was a shibboleth hiding an evil institution that could not be defended on its own terms.

Douglas responded to Lincoln’s condemnation of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision — a condemnation that was the centerpiece of Lincoln’s convention speech. “I am free to say to you,” Douglas said, “that in my opinion this government of ours is founded on the white basis. It was made by the white man, for the benefit of the white man, to be administered by white men, in such manner as they should determine.”

Lincoln invited Douglas’s audience to return the next evening for his reply to Douglas’s speech. Lincoln’s speech of July 10, 1858, is one of his many great speeches, but in one respect it is uniquely great. It concludes with an explanation of the meaning of this day to Americans with matchless eloquence and insight in words that remain as relevant now as then.

Now, it happens that we meet together once every year, sometime about the 4th of July, for some reason or other. These 4th of July gatherings I suppose have their uses. If you will indulge me, I will state what I suppose to be some of them.

We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty—or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country,—with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men,—we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves—we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men—descended by blood from our ancestors—among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian—men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration [loud and long continued applause], and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world. [Applause.]

Now, sirs, for the purpose of squaring things with this idea of “don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down” [Douglas’s “popular sovereignty” position on the extension of slavery to the territories], for sustaining the Dred Scott decision [A voice—“Hit him again”], for holding that the Declaration of Independence did not mean anything at all, we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying that the people of America are equal to the people of England. According to his construction, you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent, and I hold if that course of argumentation that is made for the purpose of convincing the public mind that we should not care about this, should be granted, it does not stop with the negro. I should like to know if taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle and making exceptions to it where will it stop. If one man says it does not mean a negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man? If that declaration is not the truth, let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold as to do it! [Voices—“me” “no one,” &c.] If it is not true let us tear it out! [cries of “no, no,”] let us stick to it then [cheers], let us stand firmly by it then. [Applause.]

Thank you, Mr. Lincoln. Let us stick to it then. Let us stand firmly by it then. (Posted annually on July 4 since 2004.)

Learning how to plan — especially if you’re new to organizing your time — can be a frustrating experience. And for some individuals, the reason could be their brains.

As a time management coach, I’ve seen some incredibly intelligent people struggle to plan. For example, very creative people who think in pictures can initially have a difficult time translating their conceptual ideas into practical actions that then find a space on their calendars. They need someone to guide them step-by-step on how to go through this process. Or some individuals who do an amazing job on identifying and executing on their top priority can falter when it comes to tracking and completing other tasks concurrently, including managing others.

In reading the book Thriving in Mind: The Natural Key to Sustainable Neurofitness by Dr. Katherine Benziger, I came to understand the scientific basis for what I had observed in my clients — that some people’s brains are naturally wired for maintaining order, while others’ aren’t.

It all comes down to brain science. Those with natural brain dominance in the back-left part of the brain are most comfortable making linear plans and following them. These individuals typically don’t have a need for my coaching help and often don’t understand why others struggle. But those with brain dominance in a different quadrant of their brain will find planning much harder. That’s because the neurochemistry of their brain causes them to use 100 times the energy to think in “planning” mode as someone whose natural dominance is back left.

You and Your Team Series

Resilience

PRIORITIES: UN health agency spends more on travel than on AIDS and malaria combined.

According to the Associated Press, the WHO routinely has spent about $200 million a year on travel expenses—more than what it spends to fight AIDS and hepatitis ($70.5 million), tuberculosis ($59 million), and malaria ($61 million) combined.

At a time when the cash-strapped health agency is pleading for more money to fund its responses to health crises worldwide, it has struggled to get its travel costs under control. Senior officials have complained internally that U.N. staffers break new rules that were introduced to try to curb its expansive travel spending, booking perks like business class airplane tickets and rooms in five-star hotels with few consequences.

“We don’t trust people to do the right thing when it comes to travel,” Nick Jeffreys, WHO’s director of finance, said during a September 2015 in-house seminar on accountability — a video of which was obtained by the AP.

Despite WHO’s numerous travel regulations, Jeffreys said staffers “can sometimes manipulate a little bit their travel.” The agency couldn’t be sure people on its payroll always booked the cheapest fares or that their travel was even warranted, he said.

“People don’t always know what the right thing to do is,” Jeffreys said.

People don’t know what to do? Here’s a hint: If you work for global nonprofit you probably shouldn’t be flying first class or spending $1,008 per night on a hotel suite that has marble bathrooms and a dining room that seats eight. That’s what the AP says Dr. Margaret Chan, director-general of the WHO, did earlier this month while in Guinea to join the country’s president in celebrating the world’s first Ebola vaccine. Chan alone spent more than $370,000 in travel in 2014—and she wasn’t even the WHO executive with the highest travel expenses for the year.

The United Nations is a slush fund for politicians and bureaucrats too untalented or unliked to hold office in their own countries.

At its developer conference I/O 2017 this week, Google also shared an update on its fast-loading Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The company says that over 900,000 domains on the web have enabled AMP, and over two billion pages now load faster because of it. Taking things forward, Google says AMP access from Google Search is now twice as fast. From a report: Google first unveiled the open source AMP Project in October 2015. Since then, the company has been working hard to add new features and push AMP across not just its own products, but the larger web. Google Search only launched AMP support out of developer preview in September 2016. Eight months later, Google has already cut the time it takes to render content in half. The company explains that this is possible due to several key optimizations made to the Google AMP Cache. These include server-side rendering of AMP components and reducing bandwidth usage from images by 50 percent without affecting the perceived quality. Also helpful was the Brotli compression algorithm, which made it possible to reduce document size by an additional 10 percent in supported browsers (even Edge uses it). Google open-sourced Brotli in September 2015 and considers it a successor to the Zopfli algorithm.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(John Hinderaker)

ESPN is mostly losing money because people are turning away from cable television and the company paid far too much for the rights to various sports. But it hasn’t helped that ESPN has become a constant source of left-wing commentary.

I don’t know what it is about sportswriters, but when they allow their politics to show, they are nearly always left-wing. It’s an odd phenomenon. Certainly you can’t say the same about the average sports fan. So politically, there is a wide gulf between ESPN’s on-air personalities and the majority of their audience. Did someone at ESPN make a conscious decision to brand itself as left-wing? If so, it was a very dumb decision.

Our friends at Grabien have compiled this montage that shows just a few of the many instances when ESPN commentators wore their leftism on their sleeves. If ESPN is going broke, it can’t happen too soon:

PAUL ADDS: I wrote about ESPN’s financial woes here. I wrote about its leftism, which probably has something to do with its financial woes, here and here.

To answer John’s question, it’s likely that someone at ESPN did make a conscious decision to become overtly left-wing. That someone is its president, John Skipper.

Clay Travis, a close observer of ESPN, has written:

ESPN is trying desperately to stay relevant as ratings collapse and subscribers flee. The decision? [Become] MSESPN, the home for far left wing politics and sports! Only, it’s not working.

My (less informed) view is different. Given the irrationality, from a business perspective, of moving leftward, I suspect that Skipper did it because that’s where he wanted ESPN to be, not because he thought it would help his company. He wouldn’t be the first television executive to behave this way.

As for why so many sportswriters and commentators are hack leftists, think of them as regular journalists with an inferiority complex. Most American journalists and pundits are leftists, so it shouldn’t be surprising that this is also the case in sports journalism.

I suspect, moreover, that many (obviously, not all) sports journalists feel inferior to regular journalists because they are covering games, not politics or policy. This sense of inferiority may drive them to mimic, sometimes in exaggerated form, the leftism of regular journalists.

For an analogy, consider college English departments. Professors at high-end schools may impose their left-wing sensibilities on the literature they teach, but they are likely to do so with sophistication, insight, and nuance. At lesser institutions, professors will tend to impose the leftism, but maybe not with the same level of sophistication, insight, and nuance.

Finally, let’s note how well sports lends itself to talking about race. It’s much easier and more satisfying for reporters to dwell on that subject, from a left-liberal perspective, than to offer serious analysis of a particular game or team. Anyway, we now have the analytics industry to provide that service.

ESPN’s Skipper reportedly loves to talk about race. The Washington Post’s adoring profile tells us he enjoys late night “high level sophisticated conversations about American literature, Faulkner’s place in it, [and] the influence of alcohol and race. . . .” His preoccupation (with race, not Faulkner — I’m not sure about alcohol) has filtered through ESPN.

Amazon Web Services details what caused a roughly four-hour service disruption at its Northern Virginia site.

Forrester has seen unprecedented adoption of Hadoop in the last three years. We estimate that firms will spend $800 million in Hadoop software and related services in 2017. Not surprisingly, Hadoop vendors have capitalized on this -- Cloudera, Hortonworks, and MapR have gone from a "Who?" to "household" brands in the same period of time.

But like any good run, times change. And the major force exerting pressure on Hadoop is the cloud. In a recent report, The Cloudy Future Of Hadoop, Mike Gualtieri and I examine the impact the cloud is having on Hadoop. Here are a few highlights:

● Firms want to use more public cloud for big data, and Hadoop seems like a natural fit. We cover the reasons in the report, but the match seems made in heaven. Until you look deeper . . .

● Hadoop wasn't designed for the cloud, so vendors are scurrying to make it relevant. In the words of one insider, "Had we really understood cloud, we would not have designed Hadoop the way we did." As a result, all the Hadoop vendors have strategies, and very different ones, to make Hadoop relevant in the cloud, where object stores and abstract "services" rule.

● Cloud vendors are hiding or replacing Hadoop all together. AWS Athena lets you do SQL queries against big data without worrying about server instances. It's a trend in "serverless" offerings. Google Cloud Functions are another example. DataBricks uses Spark directly against S3. IBM's platform uses Spark against CloverSafe. See the pattern?

Read more

Can unbelievers summon up the devil? Before answering the question, let’s digress.

For many years, the Third World has functioned as the sump of toxic Western ideas. Ideas too dangerous for any sane person to actually try were boldly exported there. Years ago, a Bavarian friend remarked that the most destructive German export of all time was Karl Marx; far more catastrophic in effect than that perennial rival for ideological malpractice, Adolf Hitler.

There’s something to this. Marx’s disciples like Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, and the Kim family have between them killed many more people than perished at the hands of Adolf. Yet after each catastrophe, the intellectuals would go back to the drawing board and try again with the highest hopes, since the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and South America seemed perpetually ready to be sacrificed on the altar of “scientific” socialism.

One of the characteristics of Leftism is that it always works best for the “masses.” The Vanguard are somehow always exempted from its strictures, as they have important work to do. Individuals who sincerely decry “carbon footprints” see nothing wrong in flying by private jet to denounce the use of fossil fuels. The bigger the private jet, the more credible the environmentalist.

Marxism is full of schemes that are beautiful at a distance, but only at a distance. Four years ago the Daily Mail noted how Chinese industrial areas were poisoned in the process of producing “clean” wind turbines for the First World:

On the outskirts of one of China’s most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of bubbling toxic waste covered in black dust. He remembers it as fields of wheat and corn.

…

Vast fortunes are being amassed here in Inner Mongolia; the region has more than 90 per cent of the world’s legal reserves of rare earth metals, and specifically neodymium, the element needed to make the magnets in the most striking of green energy producers, wind turbines.

…

The reality is that, as Britain flaunts its environmental credentials by speckling its coastlines and unspoiled moors and mountains with thousands of wind turbines, it is contributing to a vast man-made lake of poison in northern China. This is the deadly and sinister side of the massively profitable rare-earths industry that the “green” companies profiting from the demand for wind turbines would prefer you knew nothing about.

Vast fields of waste were generated so a delighted environmentalist could watch a windmill go round and round.  Regrettable, but it was the spectacle that mattered, like those electric cars charged from power plants burning coal.  You saw the car and forgot the coal.

Somewhat better known than rare-earth pollution is the irony of ship-breaking industries. The West sends old ships to be recycled to the Third World mud flats, where swarms of impoverished laborers take them apart with hacksaw and cutting torch:

Ship breaking allows the materials from the ship, especially steel, to be recycled and made into new products. This lowers the demand for mined iron ore and reduces energy use in the steel-making process. Equipment on board the vessel can also be reused. While ship breaking is, in theory, sustainable, there are concerns about the use of poorer countries without stringent environmental legislation. It is also considered one of the world’s most dangerous industries and very labour-intensive.

In 2012, roughly 1,250 ocean ships were broken down, and their average age is 26 years. In 2013, Asia made up 92% of the tonnage of vessels demolished, out of a world total of 29,052,000 tonnes. India, Bangladesh, China, and Pakistan have the highest market share and are global centres of ship breaking, with Alang being the largest boat “graveyard” in the world.

Some Pedro, Kwame, or Abdul ultimately picks up the pieces. But we don’t see him and he never says nothing unless he’s dancing at some cultural festival. “Guantanamera! Umgowa! Umgowa!” From countries destroyed by coca production to support cool drug habits, to populations decimated by malaria because of the Western phobia for DDT, to countries doomed to live under hideous but fashionable totalitarianisms in order to keep alive the adolescent student fantasy of some upper-class drone, the Marxist feast needs low-paid waiters to clean up after its dreams.

The poster-couple for this kind of vicarious idealism are probably Kendall and Gwendolyn Myers, who were as close to American aristocracy as it was possible to get.

The New York Times characterizes Chuck Hagel’s departure as “the first cabinet-level casualty of the collapse of President Obama’s Democratic majority in the Senate and the struggles of his national security team to respond to an onslaught of global crises.” The article hints at an underlying conflict over policy and over Hagel’s “problems articulating his thoughts — or administration policy — in an effective manner”.

The president, who is expected to announce Mr. Hagel’s resignation in a Rose Garden appearance on Monday, made the decision to ask his defense secretary — the sole Republican on his national security team — to step down last Friday after a series of meetings over the past two weeks, senior administration officials said. … He raised the ire of the White House in August as the administration was ramping up its strategy to fight the Islamic State, directly contradicting the president, who months before had likened the Sunni militant group to a junior varsity basketball squad. Mr. Hagel, facing reporters in his now-familiar role next to General Dempsey, called the Islamic State an “imminent threat to every interest we have,” adding, “This is beyond anything that we’ve seen.” White House officials later said they viewed those comments as unhelpful, although the administration still appears to be struggling to define just how large is the threat posed by the Islamic State.

An unnamed source at NBC news leaves little doubt that Hagel was fired.

Senior defense officials confirmed to NBC News Monday that Hagel was forced to resign. The officials say the White House has lost confidence in Hagel to carry out his role at the Pentagon. According to one senior official, “He wasn’t up to the job.” Another senior administration official said that Hagel has been discussing a departure from the White House “for several weeks.” … Multiple sources also said that Hagel was originally brought to the job to wind down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but, as the fight against the Islamic State ramped up, he was not as well matched for the post. “Rather than winding down two wars, we’re winding up,” said one source close to Hagel and top Pentagon officials.

Of course that reversal of fortune may have been the result of the administration’s strategic choices rather than Hagel’s inability to extricate them out from under a truck whose props have been knocked off by White House blunders. The unplanned nature of Hagel’s departure is underscored by the fact that a search for his replacement is only now underway. The leading candidate according to the Washington Post is Michèle Flournoy, “the under secretary of defense for policy from February 2009 to February 2012, while Robert Gates and Leon Panetta ran the Pentagon. She said she need to rebalance her life when she stepped down, but has remained active in Washington. Flournoy is currently the chief executive officer at the Center for a New American Security, a non-partisan think tank that the Obama administration is believed to have relied upon in developing national security policy.” Another candidate mentioned by the Washington Post, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, lost no time saying he wasn’t interested in the SecDef job. Flournoy, according to the Washingtonian, “has been a fixture in the Democratic defense-policy firmament for two decades, steadily amassing prestige and respect for her expertise as a strategist.” The article, written in 2011, is a long background piece on Flournoy’s rise to a senior — but not the top — job in the DOD. Written before EP’s re-election campaign, Flournoy’s view on Iraq did not align exactly with EP’s in retrospect.

CNAS staked out a centrist position on Iraq during a time of extreme political polarization. The debate among lawmakers and the administration was coming down to two unpalatable choices: immediate withdrawal of US forces or an indefinite military presence in Iraq. Flournoy and one of the think tank’s resident scholars, Shawn Brimley, argued for an alternate strategy they dubbed “the three nos”: Don’t allow a regional war to emanate from Iraq, don’t let the country become a safe haven for al-Qaeda, and don’t allow a genocide to break out among religious factions. Liberals were disturbed that a think tank so clearly associated with Democrats would sell its presidential candidates a policy that required tens of thousands of troops to be in Iraq for an undefined period. But Flournoy’s March 2007 idea, laid out in a policy brief titled “Enduring US Interest in Iraq,” offered a way out of the country, albeit a slow one. More important, it provided Democrats with an olive branch to offer the military, a constituency up for grabs due to the Bush administration’s poor prosecution of the war but still nervous about precipitous withdrawal. Flournoy’s brief threaded the needle by treating substantial troop withdrawals as a given—a palliative to liberals that avoided the hotly debated question of whether the United States ought to disengage—and by arguing for a flexible timeline for an ultimate departure.

The strategic choices in 2011 were far more abundant than they are at the end of 2014. In 2011 there were still choices.  But now the crisis in the Ukraine, the unraveling Middle East, and the lack of success in Afghanistan have driven foreign policy to the point of collapse. Now there’s nothing but burned bridges behind and a broad, inviting path over a minefield ahead.  The administration is on the defensive everywhere. They have utterly lost the power of initiative. There is little prospect that Hagel’s successor can reverse the situation, nor stabilize the rot because the root cause of the administration’s problems lies at its very top.  That “new car smell” in the Defense Department will be of little avail. The man whose resignation could have made a difference was Chuck Hagel’s boss.

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Did you know that you can purchase some of these books and pamphlets by Richard Fernandez and share them with you friends? They will receive a link in their email and it will automatically give them access to a Kindle reader on their smartphone, computer or even as a web-readable document. The War of the Words for $3.99, Understanding the crisis of the early 21st century in terms of information corruption in the financial, security and political spheres Rebranding Christianity for $3.99, or why the truth shall make you free The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99, reflections on terrorism and the nuclear age Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99, why government should get small No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99. Fiction. A flight into peril, flashbacks to underground action. Storm Over the South China Sea $0.99, how China is restarting history in the Pacific Tip Jar or Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the Belmont Club

(Steven Hayward)

The Ring Of Fire books are a mixed bag. Sharecropped by many authors, ringmastered by Eric Flint, they range from plodding historical soap opera to sharp, clever entertainments full of crunchy geeky goodness for aficionados of military and technological history.

When Flint’s name is on the book you can generally expect the good stuff. So it proves in the latest outing, 1636: Commander Cantrell in the West Indies, a fun ride that’s (among other things) an affectionate tribute to C.S. Forester’s Hornblower novels and age-of-sail adventure fiction in general. (Scrupulously I note that I’m personally friendly with Flint, but this is exactly because he’s good at writing books I like.)

It is 1636 in the shook-up timeline birthed by the town of Grantville’s translocation to the Thuringia of 1632. Eddie Cantrell is a former teenage D&D player from uptime who became a peg-legged hero of the Baltic War and then husband of the not-quite-princess Ann-Catherine of Denmark. Now the United States of Europe is sending him to the Caribbean with an expeditionary force, Flotilla X-Ray, to seize the island of Trinidad from the Spanish and harvest oil desperately needed by Grantville’s industry.

But it’s not a simple military mission. There are tensions among the factions in the allied fleet – the United States of Europe, the Danes, the Dutch, and a breakaway Spanish faction in the Netherlands. And the Wild Geese – exiled Irish mercenaries under the charismatic Earl Tyrconnell – have their own agenda. Cardinal Richelieu’s agents are maneuvering against the whole enterprise. And as the game opens, nobody in the fleet knows about the desperate, hidden Dutch refugee colony on Eustatia…

If the book has a fault, it’s that authors Flint and Gannon love their intricate wheels-within-wheels plotting and elaborate political intrigue a little bit too much. It’s fun to watch those gears turning for a while, but even readers who (like me) relish that sort of thing may find themselves getting impatient for stuff to start blowing up already by thirty chapters in.

No fear, we do get our rousing sea battles. With novel twists, because the mix of Grantville’s uptime technology with the native techniques of the 1600s takes tactics in some strange directions. I particularly chuckled at the descriptions of captive hot-air balloons being used as ship-launched observation platforms, a workable expedient never tried in our history. As usual, Flint (a former master machinist) writes with a keen sense of how applied technology works – and, too often, fails.

If some of the character developments and romantic pairings are maybe a little too easy to see coming, well, nobody reads fiction like this for psychological depth or surprise. It’s a solid installment in the ongoing series. Oh, and with pirates too. Arrr. I’ll read the next one.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Yes, the Obama SEC was colluding with banks on CDO prosecutions. “Now that this information is public, the SEC should apologize to all of us for its behavior, and promise not to collude with Wall Street again.” Er, at the very least.

FREEMAN DYSON: “Generally speaking, I’m much more of a conformist, but it happens I have strong views about climate because I think the majority is badly wrong, and you have to make sure if the majority is saying something that they’re not talking nonsense.”

IT’S CALLED, “LET’S SEE HOW MUCH I CAN GET AWAY WITH.” Roger Kimball: What Game Is Putin Playing?

A REVEALING LOOK INTO AN OFFICIAL WORLDVIEW: Los Angeles Cops Argue All Cars in L.A. Are Under Investigation.

Do you drive a car in the greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area? According to the L.A. Police Department and L.A. Sheriff’s Department, your car is part of a vast criminal investigation.

The agencies took a novel approach in the briefs they filed in EFF and the ACLU of Southern California’s California Public Records Act lawsuit seeking a week’s worth of Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) data. They have argued that “All [license plate] data is investigatory.” The fact that it may never be associated with a specific crime doesn’t matter.

This argument is completely counter to our criminal justice system, in which we assume law enforcement will not conduct an investigation unless there are some indicia of criminal activity. In fact, the Fourth Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution exactly to prevent law enforcement from conducting mass, suspicionless investigations under “general warrants” that targeted no specific person or place and never expired.

ALPR systems operate in just this way. The cameras are not triggered by any suspicion of criminal wrongdoing; instead, they automatically and indiscriminately photograph all license plates (and cars) that come into view. This happens without an officer targeting a specific vehicle and without any level of criminal suspicion. The ALPR system immediately extracts the key data from the image—the plate number and time, date and location where it was captured—and runs that data against various hotlists. At the instant the plate is photographed not even the computer system itself—let alone the officer in the squad car—knows whether the plate is linked to criminal activity.

Taken to an extreme, the agencies’ arguments would allow law enforcement to conduct around-the-clock surveillance on every aspect of our lives and store those records indefinitely on the off-chance they may aid in solving a crime at some previously undetermined date in the future.

Well, that’s the dream.

New EPA technology will add “something like a 70 to 80 percent increase on the wholesale price of electricity.”

I’ll remind you that Candidate Wiggleroom promised that under his plan, “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” He couldn’t get cap & trade, but he might just get carbon capture and sequestration technology.

I’ll also remind you that cheap energy allows the middle and lowers classes mobility — all kinds of mobility — traditionally enjoyed only by the rich and/or powerful.

Just remember that progressivism is essentially a feudal ideology, and everything they do becomes clear.

SARAH HOYT: To Fear A Painted Devil. “I’m still not sure why they turned on Heinlein, but I think it was his unwillingness to go along with the demonization of the US that had become fashionable, and the fact that if you read him very carefully you can’t help but notice the similarity between his totalitarian societies and some of what is going on. . . . The funny thing, though, is that they are not only completely ignorant about us, and so unaware of it that the dime never drops, but that these demonization cycles seem to be coming closer and closer and get more hysterical.”

(John Hinderaker)

David Freddoso on ♡bamaCare!!!’s latest trouble — deadbeats:

We’re in mid-February now — well past any payment deadlines for the rush of people who enrolled before January 1 — and only about half of those who signed up for Obamacare plans in Washington State have paid their first month’s premium — which means only half of those are actually enrolled. (For the record, Washington uses the proper terminology for “enrollments,” but other states and the White House have been reporting sign-ups as if they were enrollments.)

If at first that seems like a possible outlier, here’s a similar story from Wisconsin:

MADISON (WKOW) — Wisconsin Deputy Insurance Commissioner Dan Schwartzer says only about half of the 40,752 state residents that signed up for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act have paid their premiums and are currently receiving coverage.

I didn’t expect this to be such a huge issue, but apparently it is. In addition to those two states with very low rates of payment — one using its own exchange, and the other using the federal exchange — the IBD piece also mentions Nevada. The Silver State had about 15,000 sign-ups, but only 66 percent paid

Is it still a death spiral if nobody pays?

Brilliant stuff from The Onion:

We got to talking about immigration, and I really wanted him to undermine his argument for stricter border controls by saying something disparaging of Latinos, but apparently his opinions are based entirely on national security issues instead of race—which is super irritating,” Hardwick said of Daniels, who reportedly describes himself as a “strong conservative” on fiscal issues but, annoyingly, exhibits no racial biases. “It would be so much easier if I could just write him off as a bigot, but as far as I can tell he harbors no resentment or disdain toward people of color. For God’s sake, we argued every issue from states’ rights to income disparity but nope, he didn’t say anything even tacitly racist. Not once.” Hardwick later concluded that her acquaintance’s opposition to most of President Obama’s policies meant he was probably “close enough” to count as a racist.

Pitch perfect satire.

ONE of the underlying issues that has troubled democracies from the start is the relationship between the majority and the minority. If democracy means merely "rule by the majority" then the minorities can suffer considerably; as, for example, in Northern Ireland where a Protestant majority discriminated against a Catholic minority for several decades. One can limit majority rights by a constitution or legal code, but this implies that the constitution framers (or judges) have the wisdom to set the boundaries correctly. Indeed, these "wise men" may not be disinterested parties; often they are drawn from the established elite. Furthermore, while constitutions can be set in stone, populations, social customs and technology do not.

The struggles of European democracies in the inter-war years were, in part, down to the difficulty of dealing with minorities within their borders; although Woodrow Wilson had promoted "self-determination", populations were not neatly divided enough to make the idea feasible. Indeed, as Margaret MacMillian points out in her excellent book "The Uses and Abuses of History", most people did not think of themselves in national terms until recently; as late as the 1950s, it was possible to find Sicilians who had never heard of Italy. The forced migrations of the 1940s made national populations more homogenous and may have made it easier for...Continue reading

VIDEO: “Work Is A Beautiful Thing:” Mike Rowe In An Ad For WalMart.

ABUSE OF POWER: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell: Hillary Wooed Big Donors at State Dept Events.

THE HILL: Tech industry fears shadow campaign to seize global control of Internet.

Fearing a power grab for control of the Internet, members of the tech industry are pleading with Congress to pay attention to the domain name expansion that is underway at a little-known nonprofit.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), led by its CEO Fadi Chehade, last year began rolling out thousands of alternatives to the traditional .com ending used by most websites. New endings using the Latin alphabet, such as .clothing and .singles, became available in January, and hundreds of others are on the way.

ICANN says it is focused on making the Internet more broadly available and has prioritized creating domain names in languages such as Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic.

But critics say the nonprofit betrayed broader ambitions last year when it endorsed a statement calling for the globalization of ICANN and other domain name technical work that is currently managed by the United States.

By signing the statement, Chehade put “a target on ICANN’s back,” said Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice.

“ICANN is not at the center of Internet governance,” said DelBianco, whose group represents companies such as Facebook, Yahoo and eBay.

The statement, which was issued with nine other Internet infrastructure organizations, suggested that the domain work of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) be handed over to ICANN. Those duties are now contracted out by the Commerce Department.

Some in the tech industry saw the statement as a direct challenge to the U.S. role in Internet governance, which is already being called into question after the revelations about global snooping at the National Security Agency (NSA).

More blowback.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: One Year Later, Unlocking Your Phone Is Still A Crime. “It was a clear case of crony capitalism on behalf of some of the largest companies with the largest lobbying shops in Washington, D.C. . . . The resulting public outcry, perhaps the largest online response since SOPA/PIPA, led the White House, FCC and Members of Congress to condemn the ruling by the Librarian of Congress and to support cellphone unlocking. One year later, despite an overwhelming consensus in favor of unlocking, unlocking your phone, without permission from your carrier, is still a crime. It’s difficult to find another issue that has such overwhelming and bipartisan support, and it’s difficult to understand why Congress still refuses to act.”