Pierce County Sheriff's spokesman says they were targeted in an ambush at a coffee shop.

Troyer told The News Tribune in Tacoma that the officers were sitting in the coffee shop with their computers when the shooter came in Sunday morning.

He says investigators believe the officers were targeted, and it was not a robbery.

Troyer tells the newspaper "it was just a flat out ambush."

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 09:11 AM | Comments (451)
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Bunch of meh games except for tomorrow night's showdown in NOLA.

The Steelers & Ravens would have been a good one but Big Ben is out, so it's lost some luster. more...

Posted by: DrewM at 08:47 AM | Comments (110)
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I don't know about you but I'm starting to miss some of that old fashion Dumb Power right about now.

IranÂ’s Government today announced plans to build ten new uranium enrichment plants and said work would start within two months.

Each site will be the size of the existing Natanz plant with the aim of producing between 250-300 tonnes of uranium a year.

IRNA, IranÂ’s state news agency, says the Government ordered the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to begin construction of five uranium enrichment sites that have already been studied and propose five other sites for future construction.

Iran's actions came after the IAEA voted to condemn to Iran's nuclear program and called for a halt to it's program. *

Seems they might as well have spiked that vote. On the other hand Vienna, home to the IAEA, is lovely this time of year and I'm sure many diplomats have Christmas shopping to do, so they'll probably at least hold a meeting in the next few weeks. I highly recommend the market at the Rathauspark.

I don't know about you but I'm starting to get the idea Iran wants nuclear weapons more than a chance to, "take its rightful place in the community of nations", which is what Obama keeps insisting they really should want.

Then again, the creases in my pants aren't always immaculate, so what do I know?

*I changed that paragraph because the IAEA had already voted it's resolution. Sorry, I've been out of the loop for a few days. Still, Vienna is lovely this time of year.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:14 AM | Comments (52)
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Hey, this bag is empty, where did that kitteh run off to?

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years...

I've stated elsewhere, that we (the world) if its serious about pissing a few trillion bucks down a rathole over this AGW thing, needs to take out an insurance policy against doing that foolishly. I'm willing to spend a couple of billion dollars recollecting and reconstructing this "lost data" from scratch to make sure I'm not cratering the world economy for no reason.

Another billion or two in the context of possibly pissing away trillions is pretty cheap term insurance. Copenhagen should have only one outcome if the public is to get a warm fuzzy there is real science going on here -- resolve to darken the skies with planes full of data collection teams and resolve to get comprehensive raw data analyzed and regenerated within the next 6 months.

Here's your chance Barak -- let the public know you're serious about verifiable science. more...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 07:25 AM | Comments (167)
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This does not apply to existing minarets (there are only four in all of Switzerland). It blocks the building of new ones.

Supporters of a ban argued minarets are a symbol of an Islamic claim to power.

"The Islamic religion is intolerant, but we do not want to limit freedom of religion, we want to outlaw the political symbol," says Ulrich Schlüer, a member of the rightwing Swiss People's party and one of the leading promoters of the anti-minaret initiative.

The group says it is time to act now before Christian values are undermined and violence flares in Muslim ghettoes as in neighbouring European states.

Supporters claim there is public concern about the growing Muslim community in Switzerland, radical imams, the role of women, as well as head scarves and other dress codes.

Immigrants
The number of Muslim immigrants has increased to about 350,000 (up to 4.5 per cent of the Swiss population) since the 1990s. Most of them came from the former Yugoslavia and Turkey and are considered moderates.

There are an estimated 160 mosques and prayer rooms in Switzerland, mainly in disused factories and warehouses. Only four of them have a minaret, including the mosques in Geneva and Zurich.

In the wake of heated debates at a local level about requests to build more minarets, members of the People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union collected enough signatures to force a nationwide vote.

Apparently the Swiss are not so neutral about plopping a towering symbol of Islamic authority in their picturesque Alpine landscape.

Oh, no indeed. The anti-minaret propaganda is rather in-your-face.

The political class is aghast at their countrymen. Who knew there were so many NASCAR fans in Switzerland?
Polls not long before the vote registered about 37 percent support for the measure, but that ballooned to 59 percent at the exit poll.

Tell me where you fall on this issue. I'm torn.

On one hand, it's an unambiguous message from ordinary folks to their political elite (and to muslims). They see Islamist aggression not far beyond their borders and they will not allow it to metastasize within their own nation.

On the other, it was a public vote on what is acceptable religious symbolism, which is dangerous and gives me the willies.

Posted by: LauraW at 05:39 AM | Comments (223)
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Of course, its all algorithms blah, blah, blah and they screen out offensive stuff ASAP blah, blah, blah. Trust the priesthood. Trust the priesthood. Trust the priesthood.

Curiously, no "explanation" is offered how an image search for "George Bush" has the second image showing Bush eating a kitten, or how the "related searches" feature "suggests" searching on "george bush monkey"

GoogleGate™ anyone? Right, the media will get right on that.

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 08:39 PM | Comments (158)
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Welcome to another edition of CatSaturday. It's been such a boring day that I decided to go ahead and put the ONT up early before the sub-morons got restless and started breaking blog furniture.

Super Cute Kitteh

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:00 PM | Comments (568)
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UPDATE: Now with improved tags!

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:24 AM | Comments (307)
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h/t Hussein the Plumber, Cato Institute's Michael Cannon estimates the cost of ObabamaCare to be 6.5 Trillion dollars.

He comes to this by dispensing with the largest of the gimmicks being employed to keep the true cost hidden:

Offsetting the spending:

“When all this new spending occurs” — i.e., from 2014 through 2023 — “this bill will cost $2.5 trillion over that ten-year period.”

And adding in the cost of individual mandates:

"When the bills force somebody to pay $10,000 to the government, the Congressional Budget Office treats that as a tax. When the government then hands that $10,000 to private insurers, the CBO counts that as government spending. But when the bills achieve the exact same outcome by forcing somebody to pay $10,000 directly to a private insurance company, it appears nowhere in the official CBO cost estimates — neither as federal revenues nor federal spending."

Slightly on-topic observation: I'm predicting huge profits for those specializing in Unicorn-horn/rectal impaction.

Posted by: Open Blog at 10:11 AM | Comments (54)
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Kate at Small Dead Animals notices a peculiar thing when searching Google for things like "climategate", "climate hack", or "climate emails".

It used to be, up until yesterday, when beginning to type those queries the drop-down helper would show the list of most searched items. Yahoo has a similar feature. Go ahead and try both in Yahoo and Google, and you'll see the difference.

UPDATE: Google now shows "climategate" in response to typing "clim". 10.6 million responses, and for some reason Google's algorithms lost it.

It's not censorship, per se. This isn't quite Google China again. It does demonstrate though the occasional petty and intolerant actions of those who claim to trade in the free flow of information.

If the AGW activists truly believed "the science was settled" (the mere utterance of which, one would think, precludes the statement from the Scientific realm forever), one strains to find a credible reason for massaging data, deleting or otherwise losing key measurements, or manipulating the peer-review process to exclude dissenting Scientific studies from gaining broad readership.

Andy Revkin notes the growing cracks in the IPCC's armor. (Apologies in advance for the NYT link.) At the moment, the goal of the MSM and the AGW proponents is to try to minimalize the damage by framing the issue as a tempest in a teapot; a quibble over esoterica in code or data that has no impact on the larger findings. At worst, they hope to limit this to a few inconsequential lapses by a few bad apples.

We know, based on the works of the likes of Steve McIntyre & Anthony Watts that it is in those esoteric details that large trends can be bent to the results the "Scientist" wishes to achieve.

We suspect that these "bad apples" represent the poisoned fruit from which many of the supporting studies by non-IPCC affiliated Climate Scientists derived data for their own purposes.

I expect those independent scientists whose work was based on the now highly questionable datasets provided by the IPCC "scientists" are feeling more than a little discomfort about their own results.

Posted by: Open Blog at 08:34 AM | Comments (223)
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