This story is from last week but it didn't seem very sexy then. I linked with a "hey read this" sort of link. Seems sexier now.

A few posts back, I showed how nearly 85% of the reported warming in the US over the last century is actually due to adjustments and added fudge-factors by scientists rather than actual measured higher temperatures. I want to discuss some further analysis Steve McIntyre has done on these adjustments, but first I want to offer a brief analogy.

LetÂ’s say you had two compasses to help you find north, but the compasses are reading incorrectly. After some investigation, you find that one of the compasses is located next to a strong magnet, which you have good reason to believe is strongly biasing that compassÂ’s readings. In response, would you

Average the results of the two compasses and use this mean to guide you, or
Ignore the output of the poorly sited compass and rely solely on the other unbiased compass?

Most of us would quite rationally choose #2. However, Steve McIntyre shows us a situation involving two temperature stations in the USHCN network in which government researchers apparently have gone with solution #1. Here is the situation:

He compares the USHCN station at the Grand Canyon (which appears to be a good rural setting) with the Tucson USHCN station I documented here, located in a parking lot in the center of a rapidly growing million person city.

Unsurprisingly, the Tucson data shows lots of warming and the Grand Canyon data shows none. So how might you correct Tucson and the Grand Canyon data, assuming they should be seeing about the same amount of warming? Would you
average them, effectively adjusting the two temperature readings towards each other, or would you assume the Grand Canyon data is cleaner with fewer biases and adjust Tucson only? Is there anyone who would not choose the second option, as with the compasses?

The GISS data set, created by the Goddard Center of NASA, takes the USHCN data set and somehow uses nearby stations to correct for anomalous stations. I say somehow, because, incredibly, these government scientists, whose research is funded by taxpayers and is being used to make major policy decisions, refuse to release their algorithms or methodology details publicly. They keep it all secret! Their adjustments are a big black box that none of us are allowed to look into (and remember, these adjustments account for the vast majority of reported warming in the last century).

Result? Shock of shock, the "homogenized" numbers show warming.

Emphasis in original for a change. Graphs and more analysis at the link.

Remember, there is no scientific standard, no protocol, for determining when stations will be homogenized or not. It's "judgment." Feel. Guessin'.

Trained Credentialed Scientists

Because not just anybody can almost randomly decide to average some numbers together.

(Hat-tip to Jeff Goldstein, this being his slogan, or thereabouts.)

Posted by: Ace at 10:28 AM | Comments (95)
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I thought the fears of a single payer system were only to be found within the tiny brains of those awful Tea Party people. Who knew it also included the editorial board of The Washington Post?

Presumably, the expanded Medicare program would pay Medicare rates to providers, raising the question of the spillover effects on a health-care system already stressed by a dramatic expansion of Medicaid. Will providers cut costs -- or will they shift them to private insurers, driving up premiums? Will they stop taking Medicare patients or go to Congress demanding higher rates? Once 55-year-olds are in, they are not likely to be kicked out, and the pressure will be on to expand the program to make more people eligible. The irony of this late-breaking Medicare proposal is that it could be a bigger step toward a single-payer system than the milquetoast public option plans rejected by Senate moderates as too disruptive of the private market.

Irony, Terrifying. Tomato, Toemahto.

Somewhat ominously Nancy Pelosi is now walking back from her earlier rhetoric about a public option being a necessary condition for getting a bill out of the House.

In yet another sign that the writing is on the wall for the public option, Nancy Pelosi repeatedly refused to say today that a bill without one could not pass the House, backing away from a marker sheÂ’d laid down in the past.

Asked directly at a presser about the current Senate bill lacking the public option, and her previous claims that the bill couldnÂ’t pass the House without one, Pelosi sidestepped the question. She claimed sheÂ’d always said that it was her belief that the public option is the best way to achieve affordability and availability, and that leaders were prepared to listen to anyone with better ideas.

Suddenly killing the public option maybe a Pyrrhic victory. If the left thinks they can get the camel's nose under the single payer tent, they'll drop everything to do it.

And why wouldn't they? If history teaches us anything it's that entitlement programs only get bigger over the years, not smaller.

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Huma) is an outspoken proponent of a single payer plan and he's thrilled with Reid's idea. He seems to think it's much more than a nose we are looking at.

"Expanding Medicare is an unvarnished, complete victory for people like me," said Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y. "It's the mother of all public options. We've taken something people know and expanded it. ... Never mind the camel's nose, we've got his head and neck under the tent."

It looks like the hope is that Joe Lieberman isn't going to pedantic about this "public option" thing. His opposition was based on the budget busting nature of a public option. As the Washington Post lays out, this is way more expensive than any co-op or government administered plan.

Help us JoeMentum...you are our only hope!

Added: This is actually a pretty neat piece of political judo. The "public option" in its various forms was always a step back from the Medicare For All idea the left really wanted. It was clear that would never pass so they went to the "public option" formulation. Now that that has been made toxic, the Democrats say, "yeah, we're ditching the "public option" and introducing something new and exciting no one knows anything about..."Medicare for More". See? It's nothing like that damn "public option" you all hate!".

And lots of people nod and think, "Thank God we beat back "the public option!"

Yet we may get stuck with a plan that is to the left of the 'centrist' compromise and about 50% or more of the way back to the left's maximalist position.

Is there enough time to refocus people on what this plan really is and generate enough heat to kill it? It'll be hard if they shove it through before the holidays. No one is really paying attention now.

I doubt this was Reid's doing, it's too clever. Most likely it's Chuck Shumer's work (though it's nothing more than an uneducated guess). He's a bit of a clown but a smart and shrewd one...the most dangerous kind.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:39 AM | Comments (64)
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How are states coping with the recession? They're beating more money out of you that's how.

29 states increased taxes and fees, and 33 will increase unemployment-insurance taxes (I noticed this the other day in our local rag, the average unemployment-insurance tax rate in Texas will almost double, to 1.83%, from 0.99% in 2010). And Texas has (so far) managed to hold up comparatively better than other areas of the country on employment.

Property tax increases, sales tax hikes, a boatload of increases to cover reduced expenditures. Because when times were good and revenues were up, they spent accordingly (i.e. more). They put off tough choices by grabbing up federal stimulus funds and are faced with the same problems only a year later.

Notice Geraghty's example on the Maryland "Millionaire" tax. At some point, a large number of the wealthy decided "screw this, I think I'll live somewhere else". Net revenue decline, $100 million. States that have painted a similar target on businesses might do themselves a little favor by running some numbers before pulling the trigger.

I'm quite sure the businesses have already done that arithmetic.

via twitter

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 08:24 AM | Comments (212)
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Apparently, the justices have previously used the more accurate terms "alien not lawfully present in the United States" or "illegal alien." But in her very first published decision as a Supreme Court justice, Sotomayor went with (PDF) the technically inaccurate but politically correct euphemism "undocumented immigrants."

The sloppy phrase "undocumented immigrant" is a blurry, inoffensive term. But it's generally meaningless in the context in which it is used. It doesn't mean what it says. It is both underinclusive and overbroad.

It's underinclusive for its purpose because it does not include the entire group of those we ordinarily think of as "illegal aliens." Right? That's the group that Justice Sotomayor and her fellow blurry-brained advocates want to reference when they say "illegal aliens." So they've got to at least cover that whole group.

"Undocumented immigrants" doesn't. Not for legal purposes. The group "illegal aliens" includes many aliens who come to the United States for non-immigrant purposes, but who then decide to stay either temporarily or for the longer term. These aren't "immigrants." Not in the legal sense. They may have entered on the usual B1/B2 "business or pleasure" visa. Or they may have entered on a student visa and then dropped out of school for a while or gone to a different school than the one they were authorized for.

Those admissions to the United States are not as "immigrants." For legal purposes, they are nonimmigrant aliens. Sotomayor and others are attempting to blur that distinction. They'd like it if people forgot that when that group entered the United States, they promised to leave. Sotomayor'd like them to get treatment under the laws for immigrants, not the laws for nonimmigrant status violators.

More than that, many status violators aren't immigrants even in the conversational sense. They actually intend to go back where they came from...just not quite yet. Student visa violators do that a lot (it used to be a good way to make some nice American cash before bugging out).

This blurring of the lines is a cancer for legal purposes. Judges rely on precedent to guide them in many circumstances. And now the highest court in the land is casually dropping vague euphemisms, apt for quotation and further metastization in the hands of lawyers and judges and advocates all over the country.

So it's underinclusive. But it's also overbroad. Because many of those we think of as "illegal aliens" are not actually "undocumented." Like I just wrote, many of them entered with temporary, non-immigrant visas which they later violated. They have documentation. It's just not documentation giving them lawful status. It's not like these folks are unknown. Or have no birth certificates or IDs or passports. They do.

They are in "unlawful status", as it were. But most recognize that calling them "unlawful aliens" is as inaccurate as calling them "undocumented aliens" because it carries a vastly more criminal connotation than the term "illegal aliens."

Illegal immigration advocates don't like the term "illegal alien" because (they say) "No person is illegal!" Well, whatever.

We're not talking about aliens' existence and they know it. We're talking about status. That's doubly true for the courts, which really don't care to waste time on your philosophical discussion about the whether or not people living in shadows really exist and just want to know whether aliens have entered the United States legally.

If you want to get down to it, the most correct term under the relevant law (the Immigration and Nationality Act) is "alien not lawfully present in the United States." But that's a bitch of a mouthful, so "illegal alien" is better for most purposes. It avoids the negative connotations of "unlawful alien" while capturing the entire relevant group: all aliens who are here illegally.

Extra: alexthechick says that I should mention that this case isn't an immigration case. She's right; it's a rules lawyer-ish discussion of interlocutory appeals in which the underlying case involves illegal immigrants. Justice Sotomayor's mention of undocumented immigrants is used only to describe the background.

Knowing that, the first use of the fuzzy term "undocumented immigrants" in a Supreme Court decision is noteworthy. As we have written about on, oh, several hundred occassions: words matter.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:34 AM | Comments (216)
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:23 AM | Comments (77)
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The science is settled; your contract extension? Maybe not so much.

Britain's Met Office has embarked on an urgent exercise to bolster the reputation of climate-change science after the furor over leaked e-mails, referred to as "Climate-gate."

More than 1,700 scientists have agreed to sign a statement defending the "professional integrity" of global warming research. They were responding to a round-robin request from the Met Office, which has spent four days collecting signatures. The initiative is a sign of how worried it is that e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia are fueling skepticism about man-made global warming at a critical moment in talks on carbon emissions.

One scientist said that he felt under pressure to sign the circular or risk losing work. The Met Office admitted that many of the signatories did not work on climate change.

...

One scientist told The Times of London he felt pressure to sign. "The Met Office is a major employer of scientists and has long had a policy of only appointing and working with those who subscribe to their views on man-made global warming," he said.

In related news, "science" has finally solved the longstanding riddle of gravity. A group of scientists attempted to circulate a petition stating that gravity was particular in nature, but they only garnered 520 signatures. Another group of scientists started a counter-petition stating that gravity was a wave-like energy, and this petition attracted over 2,200 signatures, many of them even from the field of physics.

So it was settled: Gravity is an energy, 2200 - 520.

Next up: Alchemy. Maybe we can transmute lead to gold. The pro-alchemist forces are backed with a $5,000,000 ad campaign from Spielberg's SKG Studio, so looking good!

Finally, science I can actually begin covering on this blog. We can post polls, press releases, spin, appearances on Hardball... finally a science that is stupid enough for me to understand, and which bends to public opinion.

Thanks to Robert_Paulsen.

Posted by: Ace at 03:06 AM | Comments (111)
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Two choices: You can either read Watts Up With That for the full article, or the Volokh Conspiracy for a slightly edited version. Both are pretty long. Both are worth reading.

To do a quickie recap (though really: the full things are worth reading): We keep being assured that quackery at CRU is no big deal because these data are confirmed by "every" other "independent" study.

Well. The thing is, there are only three main records of observed (real-measure) temperature: CRU, GISS (Godard Institute for Space Studies, at NASA -- Hansen's creature) and GHCN, (Global Historical Climate Network, at the NOAA).

Problem one: Both GISS and CRU get their raw data from the GHCN. So, right out of the box, these "independent" measurements which supposedly confirm each other are not looking very independent at all.

Each takes the "raw data" and adjusts it. Now, in some cases, some adjustment is needed. If a station used to be in a field but is now surrounded by asphalt, its temperature needs to be adjusted down. (Though, as critics have pointed out-- they never adjust down as much as they should.) If a station had to be moved, and it was moved up a hill, where temperatures are lower, the temperature needs to be adjusted up to reflect that. (Though, critics note: Very often it is adjusted much higher than necessary.)

And what other sorts of adjustments are being done on the real, raw actual numbers?

Oh my. Plenty.

The adjustments, you know, that they never specify, "hiding behind IPR" claims (intellectual property rights), inventing other spurious reasons for refusal, citing non-disclosure agreements, deleting emails, "losing" data, etc.

I'm not going to drag this out. Below, in blue: The actual real raw real completely measured in physical reality temperatures for Darwin, in Northern Australia. Did I mention these are the real temperatures?

In red: The temperature as "adjusted," in a process called "homogenization," which seems to be some bullshitty form of averaging Darwin's readings with readings from other stations. Why do this? I don't know, but I know it's not science -- you can't spell homogenization without "homo."

Behold-- your global warming at Darwin station:

The black line represents the adjustments -- that is, the scale of adjustments necessary to the blue line to get to the red line. As you can see, the black line is.... tall. And steep. And... pretty much fake.

Willis Eschenbeck writes:

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around. And the adjustment is an odd shape, with the adjustment first going stepwise, then climbing roughly to stop at 2.4C.

Okay, now it's going to get slightly arcane -- and I'm going to be kind of guessing here, because I'm not sure what this guy is saying. But I think this is it.

These guys do a process called "homogenization," right? What that means is they cast about for nearby stations, then average those, and then compare the average of nearby stations to the station in question, and, if they feel like it (if they think it "needs" it), they adjust the numbers of the target station to be closer to the average of the other, nearby stations.

Ehhh... I'm already sort of bothered that they doing that, and deciding when to adjust based on pure judgment. There is no actual science here -- this is judgment. If a station looks like it's a bit of an outlier, that it deviates from the trends of nearby stations, they adjust. But note that is a guess; they are guessing it's an outlier, a wildcard, and needs to be "massaged" closer to nearby stations.

You can also see they're doing a lot of massaging. Note that the mere adjustments they did in the above chart were far bigger than the actual increase in temperature. (In fact, there was no increase in actual temperature, except for the adjustments.)

Let's face it: There is a lot of human judgment going on here, and we have a strong suspicion about which direction that human judgment is taking us in. Colder long ago, hotter now.

Okay, so here is the next chart, which is worse. I am a bit baffled as to precisely what this chart is; but I think (best guess!) this is one of the three station records that together make up the chart above. The chart above is three real station records, averaged together, and then "homogenized" with stations from further away.

This is a single station that makes up that record (I think). Notice the outright huge adjudgments:

Wow. The actual record shows a decline overall, with lower temperatures now than 100 years ago, but the slightest little uptick near the end. The "adjusted" numbers now show higher temperatures now than ever before, with a huge increase at the end -- as the chart notes, there is now a six full degree C increase over a century, all thanks to "adjustments."

All thanks to adjustments.

Back to Eschenbeck:

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? TheyÂ’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right Â… but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? WhatÂ’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

So once again, I’m left with an unsolved mystery. How and why did the GHCN “adjust” Darwin’s historical temperature to show radical warming? Why did they adjust it stepwise? Do Phil Jones and the CRU folks use the “adjusted” or the raw GHCN dataset? My guess is the adjusted one since it shows warming, but of course we still don’t know … because despite all of this, the CRU still hasn’t released the list of data that they actually use, just the station list.

Another odd fact, the GHCN adjusted Station 1 to match Darwin ZeroÂ’s strange adjustment, but they left Station 2 (which covers much of the same period, and as per Fig. 5 is in excellent agreement with Station Zero and Station 1) totally untouched. They only homogenized two of the three. Then they averaged them.

That way, you get an average that looks kinda real, I guess, it “hides the decline”.

Oh, and for what itÂ’s worth, care to know the way that GISS deals with this problem? Well, they only use the Darwin data after 1963, a fine way of neatly avoiding the question Â… and also a fine way to throw away all of the inconveniently colder data prior to 1941. ItÂ’s likely a better choice than the GHCN monstrosity, but itÂ’s a hard one to justify.

Now, back to something I said would be interesting, and damn, I'm right again: The psychological journey from global warming cultist to global warming agnostic.

Megan McArdle, who is too nice and too establishment and too gosh-darn pro-science to doubt the integrity of these men who are scientists (and they have the laminates to prove it!), was previously seen poo-poohing this whole mess. And then she allowed, gee, maybe, who knows, maybe it would sort of be a good idea to be transparent about raw data and "adjustments" and so maybe other people could, I don't know, independently reproduce the findings?

Anyway, her. She's having a bit of a crisis of faith.

She offers this interesting story from Richard Feynman about how scientists trick themselves:

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.

We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease. But this long history of learning how not to fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

Pretty obvious, but still, interesting: Scientists do what biased journalists do. When a journalist doesn't like a story, he fact-checks it to death, because he doesn't believe a word of it, and eventually... doesn't publish anything, because it's been sitting around being fact-checked for three months and he's already been scooped by everyone anyway.

When he likes a story, and the story comports with his pre-existing sense of how the world works and who the heroes and who the villains in it are, well, let's say that fact-checking process doesn't take so very long, because the story already looks good and agrees with generally accepted liberal reality; in other words, the story is almost self-verifying. It proves its truthfulness by simply being such a beautiful expression of Truth.

And so in science: Wait, that number disagrees with our theory. That can't be right. Can we adjust it? Sure can -- and how! And now it looks right. We're done!

Megan McArdle's faith seems to have been shaken from "they wouldn't do this" to the much weaker position "they wouldn't do this... consciously."

That is the actual worrying question about CRU, and GISS, and the other scientists working on paleoclimate reconstruction: that they may all be calibrating their findings to each other. That when you get a number that looks like CRU, you don't look so hard to figure out whether it's incorrect as you do when you get a number that doesn't look like CRU--and maybe you adjust the numbers you have to look more like the other "known" datasets. There is always a way to find what you're expecting to find if you look hard enough.

She'll get there. She'll get there.

I don't mind if she's parodizing my position into firm belief they were deliberately faking numbers all along. As I've said in comments, I suspect it was much more like this Milliken thing, picking from any number of possible adjustments and statistical techniques the adjustments and techniques that got you closest to what you thought had to be the right number. Not so much deliberately falsifying stuff.

Well, not usually. Sometimes, sure. Gotta beat down those "denialists," by hook or by crook.

But I've long believed in this sort of fooling-yourself method of dishonesty. Look, let's say I ask you to either pull the plug on a brain dead invalid, or keep the brain dead invalid alive. I now ask you to go down to the library and/or church and do some serious study about what life really is, what are the limits of acceptable medical intervention, etc., etc.

Oh, and one thing: If you pull the plug -- your decision, but if you do -- I will give you one million dollars as a fee, to cover the hardship of making such a consequential and wrenching decision. Go study and make your decision.

You will probably study. And, unless you are a saint, you will come back with one answer: Pull the plug.

And not because you decided, muah-hah-hah-hah, that you just wanted the million dollar fee and you could give a crap about the ethics. No, unless you are a saint, I guarantee you will have done your studying, and done your thinking, and done your moral weighing, and at the end convinced yourself, fully and utterly, that pulling the plug is the right thing to do, damnit!

I could put you on a lie detector and I'm 99% sure you'd pass. You'd be telling the truth -- or your version of it.

People have this crazy way of usually deciding that what's generally best for the world and what's best for them, specifically coincide in the most sublime and wonderful ways!

What does proving global warming get you? Money, prestige, advancements, and not to be too vulgar about it -- sex. Let's face it, a hot shot scientist jetting off to Copenhagen to give Big Important Presentations is going to do well with the ladies. (Especially Copenhagen 's ladies of the night.)

What does undermining global warming get you? Let's see: No money, except for "funding from the oil lobbies," except as a PR move the oil companies are all funding the global warming alarmists too!, so, um, you don't get the money after all. You also don't get prestige -- we'll change the standards of peer-review before we allow you to get published -- and you also won't get promoted. In fact, you might just get fired, as a long-time BBC nature-science presenter was for refusing to go along with global warming.

And sex? Well, I hope you'e already married, and furthermore, married to one of the minority of women who disbelieves in global warming. Because otherwise, you're going to have a Little Ice Age on the romance-front.

So I'm not exactly surprised that with a huge pile of incentives to prove global warming, and some nasty disincentives to try to disprove it, the "clear weight of the evidence" has fallen on one side.

So no, Megan, all these "crazies" who doubted this crap for years were not believing that there was always this deliberate determination to fudge data. (Although, as we see from the CRU letters, that does happen.) We tended to think it was usually more "subtle," as you put it, too.

But if you need that daylight between us -- if you need a psychological crutch that tells you I'm not like those crazies; I believe something different than them; maybe I'm halfway between the lunatic-but-correct crazies and the noble-but-wrong scientists -- fine, I'll be that for you.

I always thought they were twisting their black-waxed mustaches as they were deliberately cooking the books.

Now, you can disagree with me, and call me a crazy, as you stake out your own safe position that is far enough from mine to not be crazy but close enough to the truth to not be wrong.

I'll be that for ya. The guy you can point to and say "Well, I don't trust these guys any more, but I'm not a crazy like that guy."

Baby steps, baby steps.

Addendum: I think now there actually is an incentive to disprove or undermine global warming, and scientists are on notice that this is likely low-hanging fruit. In other words, there's much more incentive to try something when you have a pretty good idea it will be successful.

Posted by: Ace at 01:48 AM | Comments (195)
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Show me the money. And the trophy.

Are there other awards you can give me? I could meet with the King if he wants do declare me The Emperor of Awesome.

News outlets across the region are calling Obama arrogant for slashing some of the prize winners’ traditional duties from his schedule. “Everybody wants to visit the Peace Center except Obama,” sniped the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, amid reports the president would snub his own exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center. “A bit arrogant—a bit bad,” proclaimed another Aftenposten headline.

“It’s very sad,” said Nobel Peace Center Director Bente Erichsen of the news that Obama would skip the peace center exhibit. Prize winners traditionally open the exhibitions about their work that accompany the Nobel festivities. “I totally understand why the Norwegian public is upset. If I could get a few minutes with the president, I’d say, ‘To walk through the exhibition wouldn’t take long, and I’m sure you would love the show. You have no idea what you are missing.’”

Meanwhile, the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet is reporting that the president has declined an invitation to lunch with King Harald V, an event every prize winner from the Dalai Lama to Al Gore has attended. (The newspaper’s headline: “Obama disses lunch with King Harald.”)

...

The American president is acting like an elephant in a porcelain shop,” said Norwegian public-relations expert Rune Morck-Wergeland. “In Norwegian culture, it’s very important to keep an agreement. We’re religious about that, and Obama’s actions have been clumsy. You just don’t say no to an invitation from a European king. Maybe Obama’s advisers are not very educated about European culture, but he is coming off as rude, even if he doesn’t mean to.”

I've left Instapundit's snark back at the link.

Howard Stern wrote something like "I don't even breathe anymore unless I'm being paid."

I sort of see Obama doing something like that. Jaunting around the world to pick up awards and medals that celebrate his many accomplishments at doing nothing. "I don't show up unless there's a ribbon and a hunk of gold at the end of it."

Posted by: Ace at 12:30 AM | Comments (131)
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Happy hump day M&Ms! 3078 And now 1040! Let the healing and meta-commentary begin.

The 2010 German Farm Girl Calendar is Here!
So the Association of Young Bavarian Farmers is trying to make farming sexy again. And yes it does make you want to buy a milch cow and settle down on the farm. I believe you can order the calendar here.

Posted by: Open Blog at 06:00 PM | Comments (894)
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Actually, I hope this only goes for like 200. Hopefully this will make some sense, smooth over ruffled feathers, and end all the arguing.

Long story short, if you want to skip completely: Just include a working email address you check every once in a while in you off-color comments so I can privately address you if warranted.

This is like the longest thing I've ever written -- Good Lord, but I do go on and on -- but I think it's kind of good. I'd appreciate a full reading, at least if you were one of the people upset by yesterday's post. more...

Posted by: Ace at 01:30 PM | Comments (1842)
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