The battle over climate change is a David vs. Goliath fight according to Marc Morano, Director of Communications at CFACT, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and editor of their website Climate Depot.

But who is who in this pitched battle? It's not who you think if you just listened to the media.

“One fossil fuel donation [by a natural gas company] to the major environmental group, the Sierra Club, exceeded all the donations to probably of all the top global warming skeptic organizations you can ever name, in one donation. That’s how well funded the environmental left is.”

In addition to that we talk about what it's like to do battle with people who continually move the goal posts while insisting that the "science is settled", how "climate change" became the explanation to everything and the ways some Republicans have helped advance Al Gore's pet cause.

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For more on all of this follow Marc on Twitter.

Posted by: DrewM at 02:27 PM | Comments (178)
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At the last minute, I decided to follow a real White Whale of a race: the gubernatorial contest in the Land of Lincoln.

Incumbent Democrat Governor Pat Quinn is vulnerable, but he was vulnerable four years ago: there's always Chicago to contend with. Still, if the Rs end up with a clear winner and stock up on zombie-fighting supplies, they might yet win this mansion back.

Results for Republican Primaries, Gubernatorial and Senate (it would be nice if a different sacrificial lamb faces Durbin this year), below. more...

Posted by: CAC at 03:53 PM | Comments (286)
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Before the cute stuff, here's some news. Oklahoma is suing Obama and the EPA for what seems to be some kind of scam going on to deem federal lands off-limits to energy producers.

Here's what's going on: An environmental lobbying group sues the government, claiming that this or that energy project would endanger a protected species. The government quickly settles, agreeing to put those lands off-limits for production.

Here's what Oklahoma seems to be hinting at: It's a fix. The Administration is settling because it wants to put these lands off-limits, and lacks the Congressional authority to do so. So they concede a case they could easily win and get a piece of paper, the settlement now part of the law (a contract the US has entered into to settle a lawsuit), that says the lands are off-limits.

But this is more than just another green lawsuit. If Oklahoma and DEPA lose their suit, it could have a devastating impact on the U.S. energy boom, halting exploration and drilling on huge tracts of energy-rich land.

In their suit, Oklahoma and the DEPA seek "declaratory and injunctive relief for violations of the ESA." The relief is intended to overturn designation of dozens of species added to the threatened or endangered list through the "sue and settle" process.

...

Under the Obama administration, the feds have entered into a consent agreement with the environmentalists to rush forward a judgment on an unprecedented number of species. A 2012 Chamber of Commerce study found record numbers of such "sue and settle" cases under Obama.

The issue has taken on new urgency. Under a March 31 sue-and-settle deadline, Fish and Wildlife is expected to rule that a handful of additional species are endangered — including the lesser prairie chicken.

Mickey Kaus writes that Democrats are having trouble overturning an Affirmative Action-limiting constitutional amendment in California, because Asians (largely Democratic) don't like being discriminated against based on their race.

France says it might cancel that deal to deliver two advanced helicopter-carrying assault ships to Russia. Of course, this being France, they have to be dicks about it.

"If Putin continues doing what he is doing we could envisage cancelling the sales," Fabius told TF1 television on Tuesday. "This would be part of a third level of sanctions. For the moment we are at the second level.

"But we will ask others, and I'm thinking namely the British, to do the same with the assets of the Russian oligarchs in London. Sanctions have to be shouldered by everyone."

Apparently there are a fair number of Russian billionaires who either live in London, or live there part time, or who have a lot of money held in London. Russian dissident and chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov has called for hitting these men financially, in hopes that they would in turn pressure Putin to behave.

Thanks to their unfettered access to Western markets, Mr. Putin and his gang have exploited Western engagement with Russia in a way that the Soviet Union's leaders never dreamed of. But this also means that they are vulnerable in a way the Soviets were not. If the West punishes Russia with sanctions and a trade war, that might be effective eventually, but it would also be cruel to the 140 million Russians who live under Mr. Putin's rule. And it would be unnecessary. Instead, sanction the 140 oligarchs who would dump Mr. Putin in the trash tomorrow if he cannot protect their assets abroad. Target their visas, their mansions and IPOs in London, their yachts and Swiss bank accounts. Use banks, not tanks.

Eh, that sounds good to me too. So maybe the French aren't off-base.

Instapundit links an article about how women cooperate with each other-- not quite as well as advertised.

“The question we wanted to examine was: Do men or women cooperate differently with members of their own sex?” Wrangham said. “The conventional wisdom is that women cooperate more easily, but when you look at how armies or sports teams function, there is evidence that men are better at cooperating in some ways.”

...

“There is even evidence that these differences exist in 6-month-olds — but you can see it with the naked eye by about 5 or 6 years old, where boys form these large, loose groups, and girls tend to pair off into more intense, close friendships.”

What makes the differences particularly provocative, Benenson said, is that chimpanzees organize their relationships in nearly identical ways.

“Chimpanzee males usually have another individual they’re very close with, and they may constantly battle for dominance, but they also have a larger, loose group of allies,” Benenson said. “When it comes to defeating other groups, everybody bands together. I would argue that females don’t have that biological inclination, and they don’t have the practice.”

Apparently women cooperate well when they both have the same official rank (e.g., both are tenured professors, or both are senior research directors). When they don't share the same hierarchal rank, they're not as good at cooperation.

I imagine this is at least partly due to how boys are socialized, which is largely around team sports. There's less of an idea of an "official rank." The guy who plays the best gets, unofficially, the top rank, gets invited to be team captain, but that comes from performance.

@doreenhdixon and Neidermeyer's Bossy Horse send this: the world's largest James Bond car collection is now on sale for an asking price of... $33 million.

Dude, you could buy an Aston Martin DB5 and literally add the ejector seat, armor plating, and machine guns for $33 million. Why buy a prop when you can build out the actual car, if you want?

Oh, and if you were thinking, "Hey, I'll just FOIA the White House to get documents proving they're engaged in unilateral assertions of power for political purposes:" You lose, my friend. Because they've already thought of that, and have unilaterally rewritten the FOIA law to protect politically sensitive documents.

It's Sunshine Week, so perhaps some enterprising White House reporter will ask press secretary Jay Carney why President Obama rewrote the Freedom of Information Act without telling the rest of America.

The rewrite came in an April 15, 2009, memo from then-White House Counsel Greg Craig instructing the executive branch to let White House officials review any documents sought by FOIA requestors that involved "White House equities."

That phrase is nowhere to be found in the FOIA, yet the Obama White House effectively amended the law to create a new exception to justify keeping public documents locked away from the public.

If you remember, when the White House and State were cooking their Benghazi story, the State Department insisted that any reference to prior signals about terrorism should be deleted, in order to "protect the equities" of the State Department.

Thanks to @laurww for that. That seems big. If I hadn't already done this open thread, I'd make it a main post.

Okay, and now the cute stuff. Cats and squirrels. Much cuter than maybe you were expecting.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 03:19 PM | Comments (215)
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All things bracket, since @MikeTalley73 aka Wunderkraut was kind enough to set it up. If you're feeling it, go here and have at it.

If you're like me and not really feeling it, that's ok. You can sit over here and get drunk with the rest of us grumps.

(but seriously Mike thanks).

Name: Ace of Spades
ID: 168245
Password: scandi

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 02:00 PM | Comments (187)
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We are well and truly in the very best of hands.

In late February, a report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that obesity rates among children aged 2 to 5 had declined by 40 to 43 percent in the past eight years, a dramatic and encouraging finding. But researchers are now saying that the good news may have been a statistical mistake.

...

The CDCÂ’s study relied on a set of government-collected data thatÂ’s considered highly reliable, but wasnÂ’t ideal for this comparison: The study looked at over 9,000 Americans, but just 871 were between 2 and 5, and just a small proportion of them are obese. The margin of error, in fact, was wide enough that itÂ’s statistically possible there was no decrease at all.

This Reuters article explains why there's doubt:

If the news last month that the prevalence of obesity among American preschoolers had plunged 43 percent in a decade sounded too good to be true, that's because it probably was, researchers say.

...

In fact, based on the researchers' own data, the obesity rate may have even risen rather than declined.

"You need to have a healthy degree of skepticism about the validity of this finding," said Dr. Lee Kaplan, director of the weight center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

...

In some research 871 would be considered a large number. But when the obesity rate is fairly low, having a sample of a few hundred makes it easier for errors to creep in through random chance.

"In small samples like this, you are going to have chance fluctuations," said epidemiologist Geoffrey Kabat of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

...

The 13.9 percent obesity rate among preschoolers reported for 2003-2004 had a large enough margin of error that the actual rate could range between 10.8 percent and 17.6 percent, the CDC authors acknowledged. The 8.4 percent rate in 2011-2012 reported could range from 5.9 percent and 11.6 percent.

There are no other studies suggesting what this study claims. A WIC study (with 200,000 kids in it) found a small downward decrease in obesity rates, but nothing like 43%.

As I mentioned yesterday, the scientists involved in finding gravitational waves actually discovered, they thought, evidence of the waves three years ago. They spent the last three years amassing more evidence, and checking their math.

The video here shows one of the researchers coming to a scientist's house to inform him they'd determined the evidence had been proven to be very statistically sound. "5-sigma, 0.2 r," the researcher tells the scientist, which means nothing to me, but it means a lot to the scientist.

We have nowhere near this kind of rigor in the so-called "soft sciences," obviously. People just crank out study after study. Tiny, shaky findings of correlation are trumpeted as being very meaningful.

It's really pretty embarrassing.

A 43% drop in preschool obesity, with no other data supporting such a thing, and no plausible mechanism explaining such a sharp drop, shouldn't really have been reported.

Posted by: Ace at 01:23 PM | Comments (284)
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I guess.

"I think we’re in for a tsunami-type election in 2014,” Priebus said.”My belief is, it’s going to be a very big win, especially at the U.S. Senate level, and we may add some seats in congressional races. But I need to and we need to at the RNC make sure that we can capture the positives and the benefits we’ve been able to provide in 2014 and build on that to have success in 2016, which is a very different type of election.”

He was bullish on the Senate...

“I’m just guessing here, but I think among youth and women, we’re gonna see the greatest increase in 2014 because of, No. 1, Obamacare,” Priebus said. “It’s very, very, very personal among women losing your doctor, getting your insurance canceled.”

As he has argued before, he continued: “Then young people, Obamacare is intentionally designed to screw young people over. Actuaries sat down, decided, let’s just screw over everyone 35 and younger. That’s what they did.”

This is interesting: The Democrats' only strong candidate for Pennsylvania 6 has just abruptly bailed out of the race.

It really does seem like yesterday that the DCCC was blasting out memos touting Parrish as such a strong candidate and telling the media that he was the “only one the DCCC is talking to.”

The DCCC even sent Nancy Pelosi up to Philadelphia to fundraise for Parrish.

Now it looks like the Florida-13 fallout has left Pelosi and the DCCC with a two-time double digit loser to challenge strong Republican candidate Ryan Costello in the PA-06 open seat.

The NRCC speculates that this is because of the FL-13 loss.

Incredible: Scott Walker just announced a billion dollar surplus and $500 million plus in tax relief.

So what's his Democratic opponent, Mary Burke, do?

Well, she wants you to know she's tough on government spending too, and is really interested in keeping the books balanced.

So she's got some cuts in mind: She wants to eliminate the income tax deduction for paying for private school for your kids.

See, that's just money flowing out of the government doors. Time to get tough on spending, unlike that Scott Walker.

"I think that these were new entitlement programs basically and we have to make tough budget decisions," Burke told reporters after an hourlong appearance at a luncheon sponsored by WisPolitics.

Burke, a member of the Madison School Board, added, "We have to do budget decisions that are going to grow the economy, that are going to impact us positively, and I think those were two new expenditures, frankly, that did neither."

During the luncheon, Burke mentioned the two programs when asked to identify savings that could be made in the overall state budget.

See, she wants to make some "tough" decisions on the budget.

It's just that they happen to involve taking money from taxpayers in order to deliver it to government employees.

Posted by: Ace at 12:12 PM | Comments (437)
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Great.

Oh, by the way:

Sometimes I'm an idiot. You knew that. But lately I've been seeing "Simferopol" in the news and I've been assuming it's one of those "let's change a city's name to reflect actual pronunciation" things, like Peking becoming Beijing, or Bombay becoming Mumbai.

So I thought Simferopol was just Sevastapol.

It's not. They're near each other, but Simferopol is a different city, more inland than Sevastapol, and is the capital of the Crimean region.

Lately I might have written "Sevastapol" when news reports said "Simferopol."

Romney... has written an op-ed on all of this called "The Price of Failed Leadership."

Why, across the world, are America's hands so tied?

A large part of the answer is our leader's terrible timing. In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options. In foreign affairs as in life, there is, as Shakespeare had it, "a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries."

...

Able leaders anticipate events, prepare for them, and act in time to shape them. My career in business and politics has exposed me to scores of people in leadership positions, only a few of whom actually have these qualities. Some simply cannot envision the future and are thus unpleasantly surprised when it arrives. Some simply hope for the best. Others succumb to analysis paralysis, weighing trends and forecasts and choices beyond the time of opportunity.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton traveled the world in pursuit of their promise to reset relations and to build friendships across the globe. Their failure has been painfully evident: It is hard to name even a single country that has more respect and admiration for America today than when President Obama took office, and now Russia is in Ukraine. Part of their failure, I submit, is due to their failure to act when action was possible, and needed.

Eh. This is an easy analysis to make for anyone criticizing any president: You allege, vaguely, that things might have gone better had you been in charge. You're proclaiming your relative competency versus your opponent's relative incompetency, and as this is all counter-factual, it's impossible to disprove.

Obama, by the way, constantly did this to Bush (well, he did it to McCain, pretending that McCain was in fact George W. Bush), just saying "Hey, we're smarter, if we were in charge you wouldn't even have had to confront these difficult choices."

The argument is easy and a bit vague, so I don't put a lot of stock into it.

But given that Obama did the same thing, I do enjoy that the same tactic is being used against him.

Posted by: Ace at 10:52 AM | Comments (551)
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This is a terribly damaging disclosure, and it will only get worse, once Snowden reveals which country was bugged, or that country figures it out for itself.

Certainly this would be considered a crown jewel of intelligence work; it's now entirely undone. The targets know about it, and we're on the edge of a diplomatic shitstorm of end-times proportions.

Snowden seems to believe that the United States is simply not permitted an intelligence service at all. Any intelligence service would, of course, ferret out a target nation's secrets; that's the whole point of it. But Snowden seems to believe that foreign nationals and foreign governments have a right to privacy that we are not permitted to breach.

America once shuttered its codebreaking offices, back in 1929. Explaining the decision, former Secretary of State Henry Stimson would later write in his memoirs the notoriously naïve principle: "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

And here we go again.

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

...

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.” Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.

The Washington Post is withholding details that could give away which country was targeted, but 1) apparently Snowden is revealing it anyway, and 2) come on, we're talking about ten possible target countries. They can guess that they were omnibugged, or that they might be the next one to be omnibugged.

I've mentioned this before, but the intelligence agencies often pay corporations to develop spy tech for them. Much of the cutting edge stuff cannot be made in government labs; you need someone like Kodak to make a truly micro-camera or micro-battery for you.

At some point, the fruits of this government-funded engineering show up on the private market. Kodak may sit on a breakthrough tiny battery for six or eight years, to give the government spies the benefit of their coup, but at some point, they're going to want to put that on the market.

My point is that whatever was done here seems to involve data compression. The notion of capturing and storing so much data would have been pure science-fiction just ten years ago.

But we've gotten used to some of these science-fiction conveniences. Ten years ago, it was impossible to pipe high-definition movies to people on demand. Now it's not only commonplace, but it's entirely unremarkable. No one really pauses to consider how incredible it is that they can tell their phone to download the entire film Gravity in hi-def and not only can they do so, but they can actually watch the movie within seconds of pushing the button.

Anyway, point is, I'm thinking that some of these incredible strides in data compression might just have been partly funded by the NSA.

More: My guess for the targeted country is North Korea. It's a basket case that needs watching, and it's small and impoverished -- I imagine that phone traffic is pretty small, and what traffic it has will be disproportionately made up of military and civilian elites. People worth listening to.

Also: Person of Interest. One of the creators, Jonathan Nolan I think, observed that when they started the show, they assumed the premise was sci-fi and fantasy, mostly. But as the years have gone by, they've realized more and more that it's not sci-fi, not even near-term sci-fi. It's going on right now.

The remaining sci-fi premise (as opposed to a premise that is actually real) of Person of Interest is artificial intelligence.

I'm beginning to wonder about that. I'm starting to wonder if in ten years we're going to find out, "Oh yeah, we had the first AI in 2012."

Posted by: Ace at 09:45 AM | Comments (523)
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From VA Viper, who has more, including a gallery of some of the Museum's best (worst) pieces, and the backstory on the first piece the Museum collected.

It's pretty funny, and the curator of Bad Art has a good sense of humor. (When asked if the first piece collected by the museum is "priceless," she agrees it is, but then quickly adds that if anyone offers her a million dollars for it, she's selling it.)

Of course, it's going to occur to most people: How is this crap any worse than half of the crap hanging in art galleries?

Via The Corner, which is actually heavy on strange art collections today.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:02 AM | Comments (199)
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The Flight Management Computer sits on a pedestal between the captain and copilot, so it could be accessed by either. Or by someone with pre-flight access to the computer.

The change may have been made with as little as seven or eight keystrokes of typing into the Flight Management Computer, simply substituting a new, more westerly waypoint for the original, scheduled one. Waypoints have a five character code; I guess the additional characters would be to indicate a new waypoint, and to hit enter.

The fact that the turn away from Beijing was programmed into the computer has reinforced the belief of investigators — first voiced by Malaysian officials — that the plane was deliberately diverted and that foul play was involved. It has also increased their focus on the plane’s captain and first officer.

The Malaysians, by the way, have officially retracted that previous report (already largely debunked) that the ACARS system was turned off before the copilot's last words over the radio.

The new timeline seems to be this:

1:07 am: Last ACARS ping

1:19 am: "All right, good night" communication from cockpit

1:37 am: Scheduled ACARS ping which never happened, because the system had been shut off. ACARS then was shut off sometime between 1:07 am and 1:37 am, and investigators can't pin it down any more than that (for now).

Flight 370Â’s Flight Management System reported its status to the Acars, which in turn transmitted information back to a maintenance base, according to an American official. This shows that the reprogramming happened before the Acars stopped working. The Acars ceased to function about the same time that oral radio contact was lost and the airplaneÂ’s transponder also stopped, fueling suspicions that foul play was involved in the planeÂ’s disappearance.

I sort of understand that but note that previously, evidence that these systems had been turned off at different times fueled suspicion that the plane's flightpath was deliberately altered; the new theory is that the fact that all these systems went out at the same time is evidence of deliberate action.

It seems whether they were turned off at the same time or different times, we're taking that as evidence of foul play. I suspect foul play myself, but it's a bit illogical to take exactly-opposite evidence as proving the same thing.

In an effort to determine whether the pilot had practiced taking down the plane, the authorities have reassembled the simulator for experts to examine.

Have I missed something? Was there a previous report the flight simulator had been disassembled? If not, what's that "reassembled" doing in there? Or do they just mean investigators disassembled it to remove it from the pilot's house? (It was a sizable thing, with three computer screens to simulate the view from the cockpit.)

As far as Thailand's spotting of a UFO: If that was flight 370, that would indicate a northwest trajectory for the plane, toward (Ed Morrissey says) India and the Central Asian Republics.

I suppose it would also indicate Pakistan as possible endpoint.

Given that Thailand detected this UFO on the night the plane went missing, there are questions why it took them 10 days to say something. It seems no one wants to admit the capabilities of their radars. Understandable, I guess, but what's the point of military radar if you can't use it to track down a plane possibly hijacked by terrorists?

What the Hell Did I Just Watch? Yesterday Ronan Farrow had on Lester Holt to play show and tell with a flight simulator. Holt owns one, and calls himself a "frustrated pilot" (I think he means wannabe pilot), and Farrow had him on to show the audience just what a flight simulator is.

I suppose the basics of this are useful enough-- there may be some small number of people who don't know what a flight simulator is, or may imagine that the only flight simulators are those huge, acceleration-simulating multimillion dollar things that pros use to train.

But it's very awkward and strange to watch Farrow ask some dumb questions about what is, basically, an elaborate and difficult videogame available for virtually any computer.

Oh: Farrow keeps asking Holt if it's "suspicious" that a pilot should own a flight simulator.

This is not a dumb question, but it is a stupid question to ask Holt. Holt is not an expert or a pilot capable of offering an opinion on this question. He's just a reporter who owns a flight simulator, period.

Farrow is asking a guy with no good way to know the answer the same question, multiple times.

Whether or not it's unusual for a pilot to own a flight simulator, or to be an enthusiast for flight simulators, is a good question, if you ask an actual commercial pilot.

Posted by: Ace at 08:05 AM | Comments (354)
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