A post on the evil and mendacity of al Qaeda isn't exactly breaking new ground but it is kind of interesting that they seem to find the need to go a little kinder and gentler. Naturally the trot out the former American and current Dead Man Walking, Adam Gadahn.

"We express our condolences to the families of the Muslim men, women and children killed in these criminal acts," he said in the video. "And we ask Allah to have mercy on those killed and accept them as shohadaa (martyrs)."

"We also express the same in regard to the unintended Muslim victims of the mujahedeen's operations against the crusaders and their allies and puppets, and to the countless faceless and nameless Muslim victims of the murderous crusades" in Afghanistan, Pakistan's Waziristan regions and Swat Valley, and elsewhere, he said.

It is a rare example of al Qaeda offering condolences to the families of those killed in the group's own attacks.

Yeah, these brave, brave defenders of the faith are real sorry about all the 'unintended Muslim victims'. Sure they are. Perhaps Gadahn's next video could talk about al Qaeda's educational program. Right now it seems a little weak.

Between January 2006 and December 2008, 1,153 education-related attacks or threats were reported in Afghanistan, according to CARE. Such attacks have been on the rise since 2005. Last year, the number of incidents almost tripled to 670.

CARE has been working in Afghanistan since 1961 and implements education projects in 10 provinces to build community and government capacity for schooling.

Arson is the most frequent form of attack -- school buildings and tents razed to the ground. But schools have had rocket-propelled grenades lobbed into their compounds and this year, the United Nations documented 16 incidents of bombings on school premises.

Scores of Afghans, including young students, have died in such attacks.

Only 20 percent of Afghanistan's schools are for girls, but they suffered 40 percent of the attacks, an indication that much of the violence is gender-based, Kassenberg said.

"Stop teaching and running the girls' school. Otherwise you will be slaughtered." That was the message sent to a headmaster in Logar, just south of Kabul, when masked gunmen yanked him from his house one evening and beat him up.

Hopefully this idiotic bit of PR outreach by Murder, Inc. is a sign of their growing unpopularity in Afghanistan. Remember, it was the barbaric actions of the foreign fighters that helped turn the Sunnis in Anbar against AQI.

Oh and please tell me there's a Hellfire with this bastard's name on it and that it will be delivered soon. It would make a nice Christmas gift for everyone.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:15 AM | Comments (45)
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If half an onion is black with rot, it is a rotten onion. A man is good, or he is evil.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:20 AM | Comments (196)
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Hubris

President Barack Obama, in an interview that aired Sunday, gave himself "a good solid B-plus" grade for his first year in office.

Speaking with fellow Chicagoan Oprah Winfrey, the president claimed progress on economic and international fronts....

...More than 35 million low-income Americans (16 million households) received federal Food Stamp/SNAP benefits in June 2009, an increase over the 13 million households that received assistance in June 2008. Congress allocated $54 billion for the program in 2009, up from $39 billion last year, to cover the growing number of eligible families...

...Two states — Wyoming and California — had fewer than 50 percent of those eligible enrolled to receive food stamps. Many of the states that struggled were among the most populous, including New York, where 61 percent of eligible citizens participated; Florida, where 57 percent participated; and Texas, where 55 percent were enrolled...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 08:39 PM | Comments (520)
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Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! Last chance to get your Sunday ONT right here!

WWII Planes + The Fast and the Furious = War Birds
Apparently it's an upcoming movie about an underground sub-culture of historical re-enactors who stage real-life aerial combat. You can watch the trailer here. It'll probably be stupid yet I'm still interested.

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:00 PM | Comments (871)
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(I bogarted the headlines with this post by accident. I'll try to get that cleaned up.)

Climate Depot's Mark Morano continues to do amazing work on the Climate Gate scandal.

He has a tremendous grasp of the relevant studies, players & data, and demonstrates his mastery of the topic and of public relations in the following debate (under the fold) he has with Professor Matt Maslin, one of the Climate specialists who has been a primary driver of AGW alarmism in Europe.

This is terrific stuff, and you should check out Morano's transcript which includes links to all the points he made.

One of the things that jumped out of me, aside from his declaration that any who disagreed with him was unintelligent, was Maslin's assertion that he'd been having this debate for 20 years.

Checking out his bio, it becomes evident that 20 years spans his entire professional life, and includes his collegiate career.

I don't doubt his assertion in the least. It is because of this that he is so determined to ignore all contrary data, and to lash out at any who threatens his viewpoint.

This is a man whose entire life is dedicated to enshrining in the public consciousness a preconcieved notion that is suddenly and quite dramtically developing significant fundamental flaws, not the least of which is the inconvenient weather outside the windows.

-Whose bio boasts that he has recieved over £22 million in grants over the past 20 years.

-Whose eventual legacy is dependent upon the institutionalization of Global policy proscripting certain behaviors in accordance with his beliefs.

This is a man who, whether he acknowledges it or not, has become wed to a belief system that is utterly dependent upon a carefully managed and massaged set of precepts. I would find it remarkable for any average person to simply step back from that faith and objectively reassess his beliefs.

Unfortunately, this isn't an average person. His arguments carry the weight of his stature as a scientist, and fulfilling that scientific role requires he do just that: Examine challenges to his theories and beliefs, and adjust them as the data demands.

That he does not now even acknowledge that there are valid scientific arguments against his dogma does not demonstrate that he is any less of a man.

It simply reveals that he is no longer a scientist. And he seems to have a lot of company in heretofore influential positions.

(video of debate under the fold) more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 01:34 PM | Comments (113)
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Byron York digs into the latest Pew poll on religion and faith and finds some interesting stats:

"Conservatives and Republicans report fewer experiences than liberals or Democrats communicating with the dead, seeing ghosts and consulting fortunetellers or psychics," the Pew study says. For example, 21 percent of Republicans report that they have been in touch with someone who is dead, while 36 percent of Democrats say they have done so. Eleven percent of Republicans say they have seen a ghost, while 21 percent of Democrats say so. And nine percent of Republicans say they have consulted a fortuneteller, while 22 percent of Democrats have.

There's more. Seventeen percent of Republicans say they believe in reincarnation, while 30 percent of Democrats do. Fourteen percent of Republicans say they believe in astrology, while 31 percent of Democrats do. Fifteen percent of Republicans say they view yoga as a spiritual practice, while 31 percent of Democrats do. Seventeen percent of Republicans say they believe in spiritual energy, while 30 percent of Democrats do.

There are some areas in which the two partisan groups are similar. When Pew asked respondents whether they have had a religious or mystical experience, 50 percent of Republicans said yes, as did 50 percent of Democrats.

So twice as many Democrats as Republicans say they've seen a ghost, believe in astrology, think yoga is a "spiritual practice" (whatever that means), and believe in "spiritual energy" (is that like ectoplasm?).

I suspect that for many people, quasi-religious things like yoga, astrology, and spiritual energy take the place of, well, actual religious things. Those magnetic beads are worn to say, "Hey, I believe in something, see. And they're, like, totally cool too."

That's the usual excuse, right. "Oh, I'm not religious. [shudder] I'm spiritual." It's the new-agey way of distancing oneself from that old hidebound religion of Mom and Dad. These folks are way too hip for that, but not genuine enough to entirely cut themselves loose. They'll cling to something vaguely religious-sounding instead.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 01:28 PM | Comments (181)
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And not just digests; there is little question about whose side they're on here.

And this may be completely unfair, but when they suggest the science is far from settled, I can't help but hear them saying "The science is far from settled, boy."

I would quote this but the real meat of it is, like, the entire first two thirds of the article, and I'm having trouble seeing how I can "excerpt" this properly within the bounds of fair use.

How about I just say read the whole thing?

Here's a lengthy excerpt, but my real suggestion is just to read the thing, and take a gander at the charts, where the Warmists attempted to quite literally "hide the decline" by covering/masking the tree-ring data showing plunging temperatures with other trend lines, so you simply could not see the tree-ring line, and they could claim, "Oh dear, oh dear, of course that green line was included, but darnitall, it just seems to have been printed behind some other lines. Sorry."

It is true that, in Watson’s phrase, in the autumn of 1999 Jones and his colleagues were trying to ‘tweak’ a diagram. But it wasn’t just any old diagram.

It was the chart displayed on the first page of the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ of the 2001 IPCC report - the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph that has been endlessly reproduced in everything from newspapers to primary-school textbooks ever since, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a dizzying, almost vertical rise in the late 20th Century.

There could be no simpler or more dramatic representation of global warming, and if the origin of worldwide concern over climate change could be traced to a single image, it would be the hockey stick.

Drawing a diagram such as this is far from straightforward.

Gabriel Fahrenheit did not invent the mercury thermometer until 1724, so scientists who want to reconstruct earlier climate history have to use ‘proxy data’ - measurements derived from records such as ice cores, tree-rings and growing season dates.

However, different proxies give very different results.

For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.

Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD - yet the Earth still warmed.

Some tree-ring data eliminates the medieval warmth altogether, while others reflect it. In September 1999, JonesÂ’s IPCC colleague Michael Mann of Penn State University in America - who is now also the subject of an official investigation --was working with Jones on the hockey stick. As they debated which data to use, they discussed a long tree-ring analysis carried out by Keith Briffa.

Briffa knew exactly why they wanted it, writing in an email on September 22: ‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.’ But his conscience was troubled. ‘In reality the situation is not quite so simple - I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.’

Another British scientist - Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre - wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.

Over the next few days, Briffa, Jones, Folland and Mann emailed each other furiously. Mann was fearful that if Briffa’s trees made the IPCC diagram, ‘the sceptics [would] have a field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith [in them] - I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!’

Finally, Briffa changed the way he computed his data and submitted a revised version. This brought his work into line for earlier centuries, and ‘cooled’ them significantly. But alas, it created another, potentially even more serious, problem.

According to his tree rings, the period since 1960 had not seen a steep rise in temperature, as actual temperature readings showed - but a large and steady decline, so calling into question the accuracy of the earlier data derived from tree rings.

This is the context in which, seven

weeks later, Jones presented his ‘trick’ - as simple as it was deceptive.

All he had to do was cut off BriffaÂ’s inconvenient data at the point where the decline started, in 1961, and replace it with actual temperature readings, which showed an increase.

On the hockey stick graph, his line is abruptly terminated - but the end of the line is obscured by the other lines.

‘Any scientist ought to know that you just can’t mix and match proxy and actual data,’ said Philip Stott, emeritus professor of biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

‘They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what he did.’

Since Warmergate-broke, some of the CRU’s supporters have claimed that Jones and his colleagues made a ‘full disclosure’ of what they did to Briffa’s data in order to produce the hockey stick.

But as McIntyre points out, ‘contrary to claims by various climate scientists, the IPCC Third Assessment Report did not disclose the deletion of the post-1960 values’.

On the final diagram, the cut off was simply concealed by the other lines.

By 2007, when the IPCC produced its fourth report, McIntyre had become aware of the manipulation of the Briffa data and Briffa himself, as shown at the start of this article, continued to have serious qualms.

McIntyre by now was an IPCC ‘reviewer’ and he urged the IPCC not to delete the post-1961 data in its 2007 graph. ‘They refused,’ he said, ‘stating this would be “inappropriate”.’

I guessed at that point earlier -- that the "hide the decline" problem came in the first instance from attempting to reduce the importance of certain proxies proving a Medieval Warm Period, and when that "adjustment" was made, it made the current era (the last fifty years around) completely screwey as regards predicted (retroactively) temperatures.

I had that sense because I know a poll analyst who always runs into this problem -- play wack-a-mole with one screwed-up demographic that's giving you fits and you create two other problems -- and that person isn't even deliberately trying to fudge results or get to a pre-determined conclusions.

So, yes, you can get rid of this troublesome Medieval Warm Period, but only by imposing an algorithm that causes tree-rings to completely go 180 degrees in the opposite direction from observed modern temperature readings.

Injecting one falsehood into the alleged models causes another that cannot be eliminated from the models, but only hidden by simply snipping that portion of the modeling out altogether.

By the way, the supposed headline here is that the Russians admit the HARRY_READ_ME file did originate on one of their servers, but that they didn't leak it; that doesn't seem like real news to me. It's just a confirmation of something we already knew and a denial of something we're speculating about. Neither seems particularly remarkable.

McIntyre... wrote a blog-post that it seems much of this Daily Mail article is based on. So maybe read that too, or instead of.

Via Jim "The Preacher" Treacher.

Argument: Regarding Darwin Station's suspiciously-high homogenization adjustments: The Economist posted this dismissal, which at first sounds persuasive, until you read this rejoinder.

Disappearing Story: In case you thought you just saw a story appear and then vanish --

Sorry, I pulled this story. I was still drafting it -- it was something I was doodling around with it -- and accidentally posted it.

And in fact, posted it as I was trying to rewrite it and and figure out how to address a big fat error I had made, which invalidated the central point I was making. As it was a pure misfire, and it was up for literally one second, I'm gonna go ahead and keep it hidden. FWIW: I screwed up, read a chart completely wrong, went off on it, criticizing the Economist for reading the chart wrong while I was. I was trying to find a different error I could pin on them when I accidentally posted.

Posted by: Ace at 11:26 AM | Comments (89)
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And Claire McCaskill says she'll vote against anything that fails to bring down the deficit.

Lieberman continues talking like a man who's mind is made up.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) both said a Medicare "buy-in" option for those aged 55-64 was a deal breaker.

"I'm concerned that it's the forerunner of single payer, the ultimate single-payer plan, maybe even more directly than the public option," Nelson said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

Lieberman said Democrats should stop looking for a public option "compromise" and simply scrap the idea altogether.

"You've got to take out the Medicare buy-in. You've got to forget about the public option," he said.

If Democrats stick to relying primarily on the bill's subsidies, the legislation would pass easily and with bipartisan support, Lieberman argued.

Depends on the scale of the subsidies. This is a tremendously expensive thing, which is the primary reason it hasn't been done. (Other reasons: socialism doesn't work and socialized health care tends to be bad health care.)

I don't know what size subsidies he has in mind. I suppose if the Democrats went for that sort of thing, they might have their 60 votes -- maybe. They'd still be blowing up the deficit, without the cover of these fake "projected savings" to hide that fact.

Hopefully the liberals will resist all compromise and wind up with no bill at all. Edit: Although that seems doubtful; at some point, after proving to the netroots they tried and tried, they are going to want to sign the proverbial any-old-thing with the words "Health Care Reform" on the cover.

Via Hot Air's headlines.

Posted by: Ace at 11:15 AM | Comments (41)
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Riiiight, there's football on. I knew that.

Don't say I never gave ya nuthin.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 09:24 AM | Comments (136)
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Before yesterday the Approval Index had never been below -15. Yesterday it dropped to -16. Today he's at -19.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 23% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -19.

[...]

The 23% who Strongly Approve matches the lowest level of enthusiasm yet recorded. Just 41% of Democrats Strongly Approve while 69% of Republicans Strongly Disapprove. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, 21% Strongly Approve and 49% Strongly Disapprove.

[...]

Among those who consider fiscal policy issues the most important, just 1% Strongly Approve and 81% Strongly Disapprove.

The PresidentÂ’s Approval Index rating is -2 among voters under 30 and -29 among senior citizens. From an income perspective, the PresidentÂ’s ratings are weakest among those who earn $40,000 to $100,000 annually.

I'm trying to figure out what happened in the last four days to turn off so many more people. The major nets have had all Tiger all the time. The only thing I can think of is the vague connection folks have between the President and the imminent unpopular climate change talks in Copenhagen.

Is it a delayed reaction to the Afghanistan speech?

Is it just Obama fatigue?

Again, it's Slu's. Thanks to commenter YIKES!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 08:56 AM | Comments (152)
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