Temprature Data In US Corrupted?

It pains me to link to Fox News, but they had an interesting article in regard to the location of thermometers in the United States which are used to obtain information in regard to climate changes:

The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) uses this massive network of sensors to determine daily highs and lows at the 1,219 weather stations in its Historical Climatology Network (HCN). The network has existed since 1892, but only in the last decade has it come under intense scrutiny to determine whether the figures it measures can be trusted.

For the past three years, a group of zealous laymen has visited and photographed nearly every one of the weather stations to determine whether they have been placed properly. And what they found is a stunning disregard for the government's own rules: 90 percent of the sensors are too close to potential sources of heat to pass muster, including some very odd sources indeed:

• A sensor in Redding, Calif., is housed in a box that also contains a halogen light bulb, which could emit warmth directly onto the gauge.

• A sensor in Hanksville, Utah, sits directly atop a gravestone, which is not only macabre but also soaks up the sun's heat and radiates it back to the thermometer at night.

• A sensor in Marysville, Calif., sits in a parking lot at a fire station right next to an air conditioner exhaust, a cell phone tower and a barbecue grill.

• A sensor in Tahoe City, Calif., sits near a paved tennis court and is right next to a "burn barrel" that incinerates garbage.

• A sensor in Hopkinsville, Ky., is sheltered from the wind by an adjoining house and sits above an asphalt driveway.

• Dozens of sensors are located at airports and sewage treatment plants, which produce "heat islands" from their sprawling seas of asphalt and heavy emissions.

"So far we've surveyed 1,062 of them," said Anthony Watts, a meteorologist who began the tracking effort in 2007. "We found that 90 percent of them don't meet [the government's] old, simple rule called the '100-foot rule' for keeping thermometers 100 feet or more from biasing influence. Ninety percent of them failed that, and we've got documentation."

Any comment?

Southern Avenger: Ron Paul's Conservative Foreign Policy

Listen

Is Dawkins Dumb on Evolution?

I'm not a creationist. Though I'm not I'm an evolutionist either; I don't know enough about genetics. It seems like a better theory than that of Mary giving a virgin birth, but that just makes it a better theory, not the truth. Thankfully, living my daily life, I do not need to make decisions about these things to be happy and productive. That I at least think about them is enough for me.

In the following video, Dawkins is asked a very intelligent question, he gets stumped, stops the recording, starts it back up and provides a response that does not answer the question.



I'm going to ask a question for anyone to answer for me: If evolution is a process that is always occurring, would we not be able to see it happen right now? Would we not see the information increase in the genome somewhere? At some level? If it happened before, why could it not happen right now? What would have triggered it before that might not be triggering it right now? Have we seen this and Dawkins just didn't know about it? Is it the wrong question?

Dawkins' eventual response was very unsatisfactory.

Matt Stone & Trey Parker On Making Fun Of Liberals

From an interview with The Huffington Post:

They have certainly mocked conservative groups and people on their show, but they tend to skewer liberals more often. Why? "Ripping on Republicans is not that fun for us only because everyone else does it," Matt explained. "It's so much more fun for us to rip on liberals only because nobody else does it, and not because we think liberals are worse than Republicans but, just because..."

"..it's like fresh snow. I mean how're you gonna rip on Sarah Palin in a new way?" Trey pointed out.

"I think sometimes we do gravitate towards things other people haven't done and a lot of times that makes us gravitate away from ripping on Republicans cause it's just done very well by a ton of people. It's hard to compete with Jon Stewart, etc -- those guys are brilliant."

There Will Be A Revolution

Pomplamoose - I Don't Wanna Miss A Thing

Ron Paul on Assassinations

Fox News Spins Overtime Re: Paul Wins CPAC Straw Poll

Teapartiers Display Diversity In Face of Olbermann

Is Darwin Wrong?

Is Charles Darwin wrong?

Its not really something I've thought much about since I was 16, at a time when I gave such topics more attention than I do today.

The answer is simple though. Of course Charles Darwin is wrong. The man died in 1882. Do we really think that the end-all, be-all theory of where we came from and how we developed over thousands of years would end with Darwin? It would be amazing if he wasn't proven wrong many times over in the future as knowledge in regard to the genetics of all life grows by leaps and bounds and the context from which we look at our development evolves as well.

This is not to say Darwin doesn't deserve a ton of credit for the foot work he put into toward developing the foundation of genetics research and our understanding of how life develops. He not only deserves credit for the footwork he put into his research, but he was also able to provide a society whose core beliefs are simply supported by stories handed down from one generation to another with a rational and scientific alternative explanation to the questions of where we came. He gave science a voice within our society in answering some of our most basic, in depth, and important questions about life, and the significance of that cannot be overstated.

At what point does old science simply become today's religion though? People that lived 3000 years ago based their theories of we came from (their religion) on what they knew at the time. At that point people had big questions and a very limited amount of knowledge to answer those questions. Religion became as scientific as it could get. Much in the same way, Darwin's knowledge of genetics during his day was extremely narrow compared to a geneticist of today. Darwin explained our origins as best he could with the limited amount of knowledge he had. And now, just like religious zealots of yesterday cling to the science of days before, Darwin zealots cling to their own religion.

Science is the quest for truth and to discover that truth it is always healthy to remain skeptical of the current dogma which prevails in any field, especially those we know the least about. A new book has recently been published, written by Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Jerry Fodor entitled What Darwin Got Wrong. It has been attacked viciously by pro-Darwin nuts who have been scared by their own ignorance of a slight chance that with a rejection of Darwin comes an onslaught of Creationism. They're wrong. Questioning Darwin is healthy if our own knowledge of our origins will ever progress.

You can read an interview of Jerry Fodor at Salon.com. What he says about Darwin and why Darwin is wrong seems very logical and I would think deserves serious consideration for any of us searching for the truth.

The Southern Avenger: Ron Paul's People

The Strong European Economy

US To Engage In War With Iran, No Matter What

Them Texans

The Absurdity Of The Epic Beard Man

***WARNING: VIOLENCE AND OBSCENE LANGUAGE IN THE FOLLOWING VIDEOS***

These are neither political nor economical videos. Just something I discovered this morning that I have found very interesting. A man who has been given the title "Epic Beard Man" gets in a fight with a younger black individual on the bus in Oakland, California. Epic Beard Man doesn't have it all quite together, but in the first 24 hours after this video was uploaded onto YouTube on Feb. 16th, it received 1 million views and in the past several days has spawned various remakes and multiple meme's (Epic Beard Man, Amber Lamps, Bring M&Ms, Thomas Bruso). You can find an indepth analysis of this phenomenon at KnowYourMeme.com.

I don't really have much commentary on what happened in this video beside my instinctual human interest in watching two individuals fight. Is it civilized? No. But its provokes interest the same way a car crash does.

Again, the video is gruesome and has a lot of strong language:



Here's an interview with Epic Beard Man after the fact; the man is obviously not quite all there:

Ron Paul @ CPAC

I apologize for the drunken lady at the beginning...

What The Paulites Have Done For The Republican Party

2 years ago, this guy would've gotten a standing ovation for bashing GOPride (A group of Republican homosexuals).

Thankfully, the audience were full of Paulites and members of Young Americans For Liberty who properly understand individual liberty and booed the douche-bag off-stage.



Just so you know, Jeff Frazee, the man called out toward the end of this nonsense, is the founder of Young Americans For Liberty. Young Americans for Liberty is a student-run organization, with over 183 active and forming chapters in American colleges and high schools and over 15,000 members. They focus on educating their peers about various topics including libertarian values and emphasizing the role of the Constitution in the American government.

Southern Avenger: 911 Truths

Biggest Douche in the Galaxy: Professor Phil Jones

Professor Phil Jones is the scientist at the center of the "climate-gate" scandal. Whether it is really a scandal or not, I'm not here to argue. But apparently this guy is the fella who has collated all of the data that provides support for the "hockey-stick" graph climate change activists cling to as evidence we need a global regime to rule over our CO2 emissions.

You can read a fantastic article about this douche-bag at the dailymail.co.uk.

Apparently this data has been "lost" or "misplaced" or "not organized". Apparently, the professor's record keeping is "not as good as it should be" and he has trouble "keeping track" of the data. The guy who's job it is to keep all of the data that supports the graph through which fuels most of the climate change activists around the world isn't even organized enough to confidently provide this data to the world to be independently scrutinized and investigated.

But don't you worry little climate change ikeman's, Jones has "denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made." I guess his word will be good enough.

Of course Jones goes on to admit to the following eye-opening revelations:

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

I think this provides more support to my theory about what is going on with our climate: we really just have no clue what is happening. Hypothesis are made to fit agendas; poor evidence is used to fit these hypothesis; false claims about the climate are being made all over the place; key evidence can't be provided to the public; other swings in temperature can be somehow linked 100% to other natural phenomenon, but this particular recent swing has be 100% the cause of CO2; noone can say the medieval warming period didn't exist, but they do anyway without, once again, credible evidence.

I found this the other day. Its a guide for man-made climate change skeptics.

Foreign Demand for Treasury Securities Falls

Foreign demand for US Treasuries fell by largest amount on record in December. Read about it here:

The government said Tuesday that foreign demand for U.S. Treasury securities fell by the largest amount on record in December with China reducing its holdings by $34.2 billion.

The reductions in holdings, if they continue, could force the government to make higher interest payments at a time that it is running record federal deficits.

The Treasury Department reported that foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities fell by $53 billion in December, surpassing the previous record of a $44.5 billion drop in April 2009.

The big drop in China's holdings meant that it lost the top spot in terms of foreign ownership of U.S. Treasuries, dropping to second place behind Japan.

Japan also reduced its holdings of U.S. Treasuries, cutting them by $11.5 billion to $768.8 billion in December, but that amount was still more than China's December total of $755.4 billion.

Southern Avenger: Terrorism, Liberal and Conservative

Southern Avenger: Slandering Secession

Ron Paul on Rachel Maddow

How to Fix Health Care: Lasik Surgery For The Medical Debate

The Southern Avenger: Sarah Palin's Bad Tea

Maddow: Is The Tea Party Movement Trying To Get Rid Of Ron Paul?

"Come home, Danny. There won’t be protests at the airport."

John Ibbitson of the Globe and Mail had an interesting piece on the lack of populism in Canada while asking the question, will Canada have its own Tea Party Movement?

My answer is a big NO. My own perception is that, while I'm sure historically there have been significant instances of Canadians protesting their government, its not something that is ingrained within our culture. It is a characteristic that will always mark a difference between us and our neighbors south of the border; anyone paying attention could easily acknowledged this. Our government was founded on the principles of "peace, order and good government"; the United States government was founded on the perception that there is no such thing as a good government. This is a perception that has strong roots in American culture and every once in awhile shows its head.

We are currently living through one of those moments; hopefully it will not end up with more people like the torture-supporting Scott Brown being elected. The largest problem with the teabaggers is there perception on foreign policy and their ignorance in regard to civil liberties; they could just as easily usher in full on fascism as Obama and his banker buddies.

Here's an excerpt of Ibbitson's piece:

Canada and the United States are remarkably similar countries — so similar, that no one else on earth can tell the two of us apart, unless this Austrian or that Sri Lankan has an ear so well attuned to English that she can distinguish Newfoundland from Missouri accents.

Yet politically, we are solitudes. Americans are perpetually in full-throated reaction to the status quo. Their grassroots abhorrence of the war in Iraq, the mismanagement of Katrina and the other follies of the Bush administration helped get Barack Obama elected President of the United States.

Now it would seem that an equally large, though very different, assembly of Americans is rallying in reaction to Mr. Obama’s statist interventions in the economy, his hopes to reform health care, his government’s projected deficits.

This is no confection whipped up by Fox News. Massachusetts elected a Republican senator last month in reaction to the excesses of Obamanation.

The Misesian Vision

Quote - Hayek

“The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”

F A Hayek
The Fatal Conceit

'Climategate': Cooking Data in UK Since 1990?

Keynesian Predictions vs. American History

The EU Says Jump, Sweden Says No. . .well, okay, I guess.

The fascist European Union issued a "directive" entitled the "Data Retention Directive" in 2006 requiring telecoms to store information about their customers' emails and telephone calls. Apparently the United States government isn't the only government in the west with a complete disrespect for an individual right to privacy.

The Swedish government has yet to pass legislation to enforce the EU's directive (I really hate that word).

Now this is where it gets really funny. In April of 2009, the EU decided to file suit against Sweden IN ITS OWN COURT (the European Court of Justice) for not passing legislation supporting the "directive". I wonder how the EU would punish a government that attempts to pass this type of legislation and fails (which is possible, because most of these countries are still kind of democracies even though they have essentially handed their sovereignty over to the EU).

The assumption of impartiality in the courts was funny enough, but there's a bit of a kicker. The obvious outcome of such a suit filed by the EU in its own court is that the court will demand Sweden's democratic government to pass legislation supporting the directive. It took the court a complete 9 MONTHS to publish their obvious decision.

Even when attempting to execute their fascist agenda, governments can't even do that effectively and efficiently.

The sad and depressing part is Sweden's response to the EU. The Swedish government conceded they would pass legislation supporting this "directive" on April 1st. I guess the Swedish people don't have a choice per a court in Luxembourg.

You can read about this in The Local: Sweden's News In English.

Prepare For The Worst

This is a 1 hour video of Ron Paul speaking at a Mises Institute conference The Failure of the Keynesian State in Houston, Texas last month. I've watched speeches from various Mises conferences like this over the past few years; the crowd in this one has to be the largest yet.

Southern Avenger - Denmark Vesey Was a Terrorist

The Student Movement to End the War On Drugs

India Nuts-Up and Defies IPCC. BRAVO!

The following is from the Telegraph.co.uk:

The Indian government's move is a significant snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.
In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his glacial melting claims. In Autumn, its environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing in the face of global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed challenges like these as based on “voodoo science”, but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further.

He announced the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world’s ‘third ice cap’, and an ‘Indian IPCC’ to use ‘climate science’ to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

“There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn’t do the original research which is one of the weaknesses … they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

My favourite line is definitely when the Indian environment minister Mr Jairam Ramesh said, "There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism."

Too Late to Apologize: A Declaration

The Sovereign Debt Crisis

Quote - Jay Leno

"Here is a historical fact. It was on this day in 1690, the first paper money was printed up in the colony of Massachusetts. The pilgrims realized that when they ran out of money, they could just print more. Thus, the federal government was born."

Jay Leno, February 3rd, 2010.

Of course, he forgot to mention the reason Massachusetts decided to print their own currency. Was it for "liquidity"? No. Was it to allow the money supply increase as the economy grew? No...somehow before central banking, economies grew without paper money.

It was for war. It was the first time in western civilization a government dropped a commodity standard and moved to paper currency and it was done to fund war. Just like it was done during the war of 1812, the Civil War, World War I, and then for good during the 1930s, after which the West has been in a perpetual war with the brown people of the world (Japan, North Korea, Vietnam, Iran, activities in Central and South America, Cuba, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan), all financed by paper money. After the 1930s, the US dollar was still linked to gold for the purpose of major transactions between central banks, but even this link was destroyed in 1971 by President Nixon. Why? War. The United States was unable to pay its debts for Vietnam in gold, flipped the bird to the world (specifically the French) and has continued on till now printing dollars as if they're gold.

Massachusetts used the paper money to pay off militias to come up to the Maritimes and rob us.

If you're pro-paper currency, you're pro-war. The easiest way to abolish needless war is to abolish the printing press and fiat currency.

Who are the terrorists?

Hamas, or the majority of Israeli's next door seething for Palestinian blood?

Why You've Never Heard of The Depression of 1920

Sen. Susan Collins of Maine Is A Tool

Glenn Greenwald tears her apart for saying the Constitution of the United States only applies to American citizens:

Over the weekend, Sen. Susan Collins released a five-minute video in which she sounded as though she were possessed by the angriest, most unhinged version of Dick Cheney. Collins recklessly accused the Obama administration of putting us all in serious danger by failing to wage War against the Terrorists. Most of what she said was just standard right-wing boilerplate, but there was one claim in particular that deserves serious attention, as it has become one of the most pervasive myths in our political discourse: namely, that the U.S. Constitution protects only American citizens, and not any dreaded foreigners. Focusing on the DOJ's decision to charge the alleged attempted Christmas Day bomber with crimes, Mirandize him and provide him with counsel, Collins railed: "Once afforded the protection our Constitution guarantees American citizens, this foreign terrorist 'lawyered up' and stopped talking" (h/t). This notion that the protections of the Bill of Rights specifically and the Constitution generally apply only to the Government's treatment of American citizens is blatantly, undeniably false -- for multiple reasons -- yet this myth is growing, as a result of being centrally featured in "War on Terror" propaganda.

If Man-Made Global Warming Were A True Threat, Why All Of The Lies?

Here are the latest lies from the IPCC, as reported in the London Times. Apparently the IPCC reported in 2007 that even a slight change in rainfall would wipe out "swathes" of rain forests. This claim was of course backed by...nothing. Oh, and three weeks ago the IPCC claimed that man-made climate change would cause the Himalayan glaciers to melt by 2035, which was again, backed by...nothing. Finally, the IPCC recently also claimed man-made climate change was causing an increase in natural disasters, and this was backed by...absolutely nothing. At what point does the IPCC become irrelevant?

Here's a snippet of the story from the London Times:

A STARTLING report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

Danny Williams Flys to US for Heart Surgery

One can only imagine the reasons Mr. Williams did not obtain his heart surgery in a health care system ranked far higher than that of the US, his own.

From The Globe and Mail:

Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams is scheduled for heart surgery in the United States, a move that throws into question his province's and his nation's health-care system.

A source confirmed to The Globe and Mail late Monday that Mr. Williams has left St. John's for an undisclosed destination in the U.S. to have heart surgery later in the week.

The 59-year-old Conservative left Monday morning, spokeswoman Elizabeth Matthews said, without disclosing his location. While some of his critics were tight-lipped Monday night, the online public questioned his exodus – why the care he needed was not available in Canada, or whether he preferred treatment in the U.S.

His departure for a U.S. hospital is being met with both sympathy and anger as few details have emerged.