I'm linking it without having yet read it; I'm sure it's good.

Correction: I still haven't read it, and now I'm not sure at all it's good. As you can see below, I never bought this "Russians weren't behind it" spin, and now readers are chiming in one after the other to call "bullshit" and "Trutherish" on it.

Gee, sorry if I misled. Thought it would be good.

...

someone teases it:

upshot:
(1) looks like it may not have been the russians
(2) shouldn't we be more worried about the, uh, nuclear trigger
material smuggled into london?

Well,

1) Bullshit, and

2) Huh?

Guess I'd better start reading.

Posted by: Ace at 01:54 PM | Comments (19)
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Here's the teaser. The actual tapes feature nudity, "same-sex encounters."

Meh. Perfectly fine for a GGW tape. Just no Rachel "Domino" Ward in Sharkey's Machine.

Short-Eyes Alert: Some buzz she may actually be underage in that tape.

Posted by: Ace at 01:41 PM | Comments (25)
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Previously on Global Warming Mystery Theater: Can you solve The Mystery of the Missing Oceanic Heat?

On to the thrilling conclusion:

As a bonus, the corrected equations neatly model the "global warming" going on on Mars, too. Where I'm pretty sure everyone who has a car drives an electric-powered Prius, so it seems unlikely that human-produced CO2 (the Invisible Killer) could be the culprit.

New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible

Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.

That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center.

After studying it, Zágoni stopped calling global warming a crisis, and has instead focused on presenting the new theory to other climatologists. The data fit extremely well. "I fell in love," he stated at the International Climate Change Conference this week.

"Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations," Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.

How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution.

Miskolczi's story reads like a book. Looking at a series of differential equations for the greenhouse effect, he noticed the solution -- originally done in 1922 by Arthur Milne, but still used by climate researchers today -- ignored boundary conditions by assuming an "infinitely thick" atmosphere. Similar assumptions are common when solving differential equations; they simplify the calculations and often result in a result that still very closely matches reality. But not always.

So Miskolczi re-derived the solution, this time using the proper boundary conditions for an atmosphere that is not infinite. His result included a new term, which acts as a negative feedback to counter the positive forcing. At low levels, the new term means a small difference ... but as greenhouse gases rise, the negative feedback predominates, forcing values back down.

NASA refused to release the results. Miskolczi believes their motivation is simple. "Money", he tells DailyTech. Research that contradicts the view of an impending crisis jeopardizes funding, not only for his own atmosphere-monitoring project, but all climate-change research. Currently, funding for climate research tops $5 billion per year.

The super-awesome mega-computers running state-of-the-art perfectly-calibrated climate models assumed the earth's atmosphere was infinitely thick.

Infinitely thick.

Infinitely.

Thick.

Ummm... can I ask a question?

Are these super-awesome climate models sophisticated enough to include a Sun and a spherical earth, rather than a flat one? Just want to make sure y'all aren't simplifying any other conditions to help your models run more smoothly.

Oh, and in these super-awesome climate models... What color are the infinite skies on your made-up world?

Just wanted to know.

Thanks to JeffC.

Meanwhile, At MSNBC: Global Warming Hastens Arrival of Spring.

Um, this past year was the coldest in 100 years, guys. That "Global Coldening" seems to be continuing.

How y'all enjoying your early-arrival spring? Here, in the NYC area, I gotta tell ya, it's a blistering 42 degrees, which is about five degrees balmier than it was yesterday.

It's like the jungles of Colombia here. I swear to God, I feel like I'm Joan Wilder in Romancing the Stone.

Can you show me the way to Cartegena? I can pay you. I have money.

Thanks to Marky.

Posted by: Ace at 01:13 PM | Comments (66)
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Revelation from those schedules: She was there on the day Monica's blue gap dress got whitely marred.

Does this tell us anything of import?

Or is it just good for some sleazy chuckles from the typical low-rent sniggering morons?

The correct answer is "B."

And you're welcome.

Posted by: Ace at 12:35 PM | Comments (35)
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Link below the fold.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:24 PM | Comments (18)
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I held off on this. I'm glad I did.

Because today, Andrew Sullivan calls anyone who didn't sprout a second erection over Obama's speech a racist:

Funny []how there is always a sinister explanation when people don't share Andrew Sullivan's enthusiasm of the year: "To read the Corner today was to be reminded that some are immune to the grace and hope and civility that Reagan summoned at his best; the anger and bitterness is so palpably fueled by fear and racism it really does mark a moment of revelation to me." I thought it was a dishonest and evasive speech with a few very good moments. Is that allowed?

Count Brian Ross of ABCNews, noting the evasions and admissions of previous lies by Obama, and Mickey Kaus, painstakingly dissecting the evasions, rhetorical cons, dissemblings and dubious equivalencies in Obama's speech, as fellow racists.

Now, the headline calls Andrew Sullivan a racist. Not that he's tossing the slur "racist" around lightly, though of course he's doing that; Sullivan is a shallow, glib thinker at best, as deep as the sheen on a glossy magazine, and has made a career of disguising this fundamental unseriousness and lack of studiousness (to say nothing of candor and integrity) by simply ramping up his emotional excesses and finding clever-ish new slurs to toss at people; I, for example, am a "foaming Caesarist," which is a cutesy insult and one I wouldn't mind using, I suppose, were I more pretentious. But it does not establish his seriousness as a thinker or writer that he writes endlessly of "heart-ache" and "nausea" and "disgust" and "sickness-inducing vileness" and all the rest of his hypercharged girlishly overemotive palette of put-downs, all the time maintaining he's a pretty cool customer who views the world through eyes so coldly rational they positively glint with intellectual ice.

I don't mind invective in discourse, of course. But then, I'm not the preening peacock that Andrew Sullivan is, forever chiding writers for lacking "civility" while freely indulging in playground taunts with only a glib, cheap reference to stuff he dimly remembers from university to disguise the fundamental childishness of his basic form of argumentation-by-insult.

So now we turn to the headline: "Andrew Sullivan: Racist."

I do mean that: Andrew Sullivan is a racist, or, at the very least, a writer, or perhaps a typist, let us say, who is an endless font of apologism on behalf of racists, so long as he harbors a political crush on the particular racist of the day.

Let's just dwell on the racism itself and not on Wright's unhinged conspiracy-mongering. We all know that the somewhat addlepated Mr. Sullivan has a weakness for conspiracy theories which help unite his manifold enemies into one large Sinister Syndicate of Sinfulness. So just the racism then, and not the enthusiasm for Truther-style wheels-within-wheels conspiracies.

We shall also not delve deeply into his invitation to neoconfederates, Jew-haters, and Truthers to read his blog and join him in his quixotic effort to make Ron Paul, racist Southern revanchist, the standard-bearer for the Party of Lincoln. His traffic was hurting, and he knew he needed fresh eyeballs. He had alienated everyone on the left and everyone on the right; so of course the only readers remaining were the bitter resentful cranks who fit comfortably into neither pole, but instead made up their own singular extreme.

So if extending the hand of friendship to Truthers, Jewthers, and Kuthers would help him pay for his extravagantly costly Golden Bandwidth needs, well, fine with me. We cannot afford to lose such an important voice merely due to the difficulty of coming up with $120,000 to pay for his servers.

It is not at all surprising that Andrew Sullivan, confronted with his hero Obama's 20 year courtship of a vile racist, would so excitedly declare:

Alas, I cannot give a more considered response right now as I have to get on the road. But I do want to say that this searing, nuanced, gut-wrenching, loyal, and deeply, deeply Christian speech is the most honest speech on race in America in my adult lifetime. It is a speech we have all been waiting for for a generation. Its ability to embrace both the legitimate fears and resentments of whites and the understandable anger and dashed hopes of many blacks was, in my view, unique in recent American history.

And it was a reflection of faith - deep, hopeful, transcending faith in the promises of the Gospels. And it was about America - its unique promise, its historic purpose, and our duty to take up the burden to perfect this union - today, in our time, in our way.

Ah, a pretty -- but evasive and fundamentally dishonest -- speech is enough to correct a 20 year history of courting racists? But Andrew Sullivan's always been a rather cheap date for those men who strike his fancy.

We've seen this before. And not very long ago, either.

After a few days of hemming and hawing and excusing and deflecting over the Ron Paul racist newsletters, Excitable Andy finally roused himself to actually condemn them:

It took a while to get through to their server but I was finally able to read Jamie Kirchick's review of the various newsletters sponsored by Ron Paul in the 1980s and 1990s. They are a repellent series of tracts, full of truly appalling bigotry.

...

I don't know enough about the arrangements behind these pamphlets to tell if this is a plausible defense or not. But there is a simple way to address this: Paul needs to say not only that he did not pen these excrescences, he needs to explain how his name was on them and disown them completely. I've supported Paul for what I believe are honorable reasons: his brave resistance to the enforced uniformity of opinion on the Iraq war, his defense of limited constitutional government, his libertarianism, his sincerity. If there is some other agenda lurking beneath all this, we deserve to know. It's up to Ron Paul now to clearly explain and disown these ugly, vile, despicable tracts from the past.

Tough stuff... or superficially so, at least, as coolly analytical Sullivan gamely attempts to relieve Ron Paul of any responsibility while simultaneously offering the pretense of the obligatory moral outrage. But note he does allow that Paul was at least "negligent" in permitting racist filth to go out under his byline -- and oh, by the way, pad his pockets -- for 10 or 15 years, eh?

Now, given that Andrew Sullivan has at least allowed that Paul was morally negligent here -- and perhaps even more (if it can be proven, and of course no offer of proof would ever satisfy Sullivan) -- one would expect him to be rather down on Ron Paul for a while. Whether it's negligence or more (psst-- it's "more," for those of you playing along at home), Sullivan brands all this "vile," "repellent," etc. You know the litany; Sullivan has his thesaurus permanently bookmarked right at the word "disgusted" and begins trotting out the synonyms when he's peeved. Or is pretending to be peeved.

So at the very least, this is as serious offense, and at the worst, Ron Paul is the conspircacy-mongering race-bating neoconfederate Jew-hating Bircheresque crank that more clear-eyed analysts long pegged him as.

One would imagine that Sullivan, having denounced Paul in let's-pretend-I'm-outraged-about-this language, would at least keep up the pretense of anti-racism righteous anger for a while.

He did.

For two days.

What did it take to cure Andrew Sullivan of all that heart-ache, shock, chagrin, revulsion, etc.? Why, it took a swell debate performance by Paul (by Sullivan's lights, at least) just 48 hours later.

And, yes, thank God for Ron Paul.

No one else, except McCain, copped to the GOP's rank betrayal of fiscal conservatism, limited government, prudent foreign policy and civil liberties. When he was asked to disown the 9/11 Truthers, he gave a revealing answer, and one that reflects on the newsletters issue. It just isn't in his nature to adopt other people's views, or to tell anyone else what to believe or what to say. He doesn't just believe in libertarianism; he lives it. This means that he doesn't have the instinct to police anyone else's views or actions within the law or the Constitution. I don't think it excuses his negligence in the past, but it does help me understand it better.

Tough, probing Paladin of Truth he, huh? A true Son of Orwell, eh? Paul's standard-issue goldbuggery at the debate was quite enough to not "excuse[] his negligence in the past" but to at least help Sullivan "understand it better."

And let's face it-- he meant it did, in fact, excuse his "negligence." "I'm not saying this excuses it, but, um, I'm a huge fan again and I couldn't be happier to say so!" is indeed excusing it.

From that burst of pretend outrage to understanding -- in two days. After ten minutes of Paul's whining cant at a dog-and-pony debate.

So it's hardly a shocker that Obama's 20 year history of courting a black supremacist hatemonger who accuses whites of deliberately murdering blacks with CIA-concocted AIDS and CIA-supplied crack is expunged, within a few days, by a cutesy speech that Sullivan happened to fancy.

And thus do I stake my claim that Sullivan, for all his unending, ineffable moral posturing, is simply not terribly concerned about racism at all. Oh, he'll make all the right noises about being "troubled' and "concerned" and so forth and suchlike; but at the end of the day, if you're in the good pages of his "Who's Hot/Who's Not" dreamjournal, in his Crush Diary but not his Slam Book, you can get away with a rather large quantity of racism, race-baiting, and courting and pandering to and aligning with fairly hardcore racists.

He treats racism as merely a cudgel by which to smite his opponents. And yet for his political allies and sudden enthusiasms, he offers nothing but endless apologism.

Does merely not taking racism terribly seriously make one, in fact, an actual racist?

I don't know how I'd answer that question -- but I damn well know how Sullivan would answer it. At least as regards his political rivals.

And therefore, by Sullivan's own no-charge-too-low-or-too-unfair to make style of "civil discourse," Sullivan is, in fact, a racist, and a fan of racists, and an apologist for racism. So long as your racism helps the Party of Andrew, what's a little racial hatred between friends?

Graphic Credits: McGurk did that awesome "Welcome to Insanity" Daily Dementia parody.

Allah did Sullivan on the Cross, of course, plus the freak-out advisory. Though the latter was my idea. But Allah's execution.

Posted by: Ace at 10:31 AM | Comments (200)
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I am not generally one for bible quotes but I can’t imagine how else to sum this up other than…”Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”.

A Navy SEAL who sacrificed his life to save his comrades by throwing himself on top of a grenade will be posthumously awarded the nation's highest military honor.

Â…Monsoor was part of a sniper security team on Sept. 29, 2006, in Ramadi with three other SEALs and eight Iraqi soldiers, according to a Navy account. An insurgent fighter threw the grenade, which struck Monsoor in the chest before falling in front of him. Monsoor, according to the account, then threw himself on the grenade.

h/t to Captain Lex who has a round up of reactions to todayÂ’s 5th anniversary of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a link to his own remembrances of coming home after serving on an aircraft carrier during the war.

Posted by: DrewM at 10:21 AM | Comments (20)
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These are not just elements of the AoS Lifestyle, my friends, they are also the source for endless hours (well, minutes, but you can't have hours without minutes, can you?) of comedy entertainment.

These traits also provide the premise of one of my new favorite websites: Garfield Minus Garfield!, a website which is as it promises: Garfield comic strips without any hint of that obnoxious, free-loading, lasagna-loving, pain in the ass cat. In fact, all references to Garfield have been painstakingly removed, as if he had just fallen out of favor with the Politburo.

(Garfield is a commie, you know. So the comparison works.)

What are you left with then? A psychological study into the depths of one man's creepy psychoses.

I encourage all of you to visit this site. It's Garfield as you always wanted to see it.

Minus Garfield.

Posted by: Jack M. at 09:15 AM | Comments (27)
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Okay, of the two real news items I wanted to get to this is one of them.

Now I don't have to.

The left has being going apeshit over McCain's incredible "gaffe" in which he stated that Iran assists Al Qaeda terrorists.... thus displaying his complete ignorance of the actual facts , which are that, um.... Iran does indeed assist Al Qaeda terrorists.

Keith Olbermann had sooo much fun with McCain on this last night. McCain even got the "Worst Person in the World" prize. Keith Olbermann simply could not believe that a man running for president could get such a basic fact so completely, totally... um, absolutely correct.

Posted by: Ace at 09:06 AM | Comments (80)
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Remember when about 20 seconds after taking office on Monday the newly minted Governor of NY admitted to having an extramaterial affair? Everyone pretty much agreed it wasnÂ’t that big of a deal. It wasnÂ’t like he was paying for it or anything.

Then it turned out he had multiple affairs years ago, during a ‘rough patch’ in his marriage. Still, everyone said, no big deal.

Well, it actually may be something of deal after all.

An attractive Olympic gold-medalist says she had a close personal relationship with Gov. Paterson earlier this year - during which time she recorded a series of secret telephone conversations with him.

Track-and-field athlete Diane Dixon, of Brooklyn, also told The Post that she had received a private message yesterday morning from Paterson, asking if she was speaking with the media.

Dixon, 43, said Paterson, 53, was "mostly responsible" for getting her a badly needed job earlier this month with the city Department of Education in Crown Heights' District 17.

ItÂ’s unclear if the relationship was sexual (Paterson says no) and this woman seems a little flaky in her story but it will be enough to keep the story alive and people digging.

If it is true, at least Spitzer had the decency to pay out of his own pocket. Paterson may have been using the public payroll to bankroll his relationship.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:46 AM | Comments (30)
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