Barrel Strength

The scientist who proposed the Gaia theory of the planet as a single organism is unimpressed by the goals of  “climate change” activists, according to an interview with the BBC. Professor James Lovelock is especially critical of the scientists and politicians who claim current climate models can reliably predict future conditions.

Click here for a page with video clips; full audio can be accessed here.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-fox-cnn-msnbc-ratings-2010-1

It seems that people like conservative political entertainment television more than the left would like us to.

Having failed in His pledge to close the Guantanomo Bay detention facility within a year in office, The One is now greeted by polling numbers showing that independent voters are giving up on the whole closure proposition:

“Just Democrats still think that Guantanamo should be closed, but Independents have completely changed – from an even split in January 2009 to three-quarters who want to keep the facility open today,” says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

Yet more proof that the swing vote is steadily cluing in to the fallibility of the presumptive God-President.

The cat is all right. The BC environment minister probably never will be.

In the guise of his Whitehall counterpart, as shown in “Yes, Prime Minister”:

Problems with playback? Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kbDE8WCiIk

At least this one gets the comeuppance he richly deserves.

Perchance to dream.

Unfortunately, this article is probably a plant. But it will make you laugh.

http://www.thefoxnation.com/global-warming/2010/03/29/global-warming-activist-freezes-death-antarctica

Global Warming Activist Freezes to Death in Antarctica
Famed global warming activist James Schneider and a journalist friend were both found frozen to death on Saturday, about 90 miles from South Pole Station, by the pilot of a ski plane practicing emergency evacuation procedures.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing”, recounted the pilot, Jimmy Dolittle. “There were two snowmobiles with cargo sleds, a tent, and a bright orange rope that had been laid out on the ice, forming the words, ‘HELP-COLD’.”
 
One friend of Prof. Schneider told ecoEnquirer that he had been planning a trip to an ice sheet to film the devastation brought on by global warming. His wife, Linda, said that she had heard him discussing the trip with his environmental activist friends, but she assumed that he was talking about the Greenland ice sheet, a much smaller ice sheet than Antarctica.

See the Baptist interpretation.

See also ironic interpretation.

For a fuller report of the original article, see this.

Robert Fowler’s address to the Liberal Party suggests that something has profoundly changed for the better in Canadian politics. The Conservatives are in charge of foreign policy, and we aren’t playing even-handedly between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East. To Robert Fowler, this is a disaster. To the rest of us, it is another example of how Canada is shifting fundamentally for the better, away from moral equivalence between good and evil.

Fowler said both major parties have been enticed by the allure of political gains within the Jewish community. He said it is a strategy that leads to an unproductive support for Israel and undermines Canada’s reputation as a trusted mediator in the Middle East.

 ”The scramble to lock up the Jewish vote in Canada meant selling out our widely admired and long-established reputation for fairness and justice,” Fowler said.

 ”As the globe has become smaller and meaner, Canadian governments have turned inward and adopted me-first stances across the international agenda,” he said.

 ”Canada’s reputation and proud international traditions have been diminished as a result.”

“A proud international tradition” of standing impartial as between Israel and Muslim aggression. That reminds me of George Jonas’ comment about how the cops now stand impartial between mobs trying to shut down conservatives and the conservative speakers, like they would stand impartial between a robbery in progress and the victim.

“The only group exhibiting Canadian-style restraint was the police. They cast a calm eye on the pandemonium, took a balanced view and chose no sides between people trying to exercise their rights and bullies trying to prevent them. Resisting any temptation to enforce the law, Ottawa’s finest exemplified Canada’s definition of moral leadership by observing neutrality between lawful and lawless.”

The news this past week has been replete with evidence of every form of spiritual rot in academe: Coulter at the University of Ottawa, and the 16 profs at the University of Saskabush who protested the scholarships for the children of those servicemen killed in the course of duty. But the rot in the Liberal party goes unnoticed, because it has been with us for so long. Robert Fowler is one of those Liberal top civil servants whose services we are now living without, and may it continue.

Thirteen years after the first federal election where the Internet came into play, Michael Ignatieff claims to have revolutionized the practice of politics with computers:

Michael Ignatieff says a new way of governing is being invented this weekend at the Liberal thinkers’ conference.

[...]

“You’ve got to be made of stone not to be touched by this, and moved by and excited by the democratic possibilities that we just opened up this weekend,” he said, pointing to the bank of computers in the main conference hall.

I look forward to exploring this strange new world of online conferencing and content distribution which Ignatieff has delivered unto our Luddite body politic. Meanwhile he will no doubt be preoccupied with having the tires on his Quadricycle revulcanized and its fuel bunkers restocked with petroleum distillate.

An apparent falling-out with Iggy after falling in with the Islamists. And as with all such dhimmis, the result is predictable.

at least when it comes to destroying the US-UK “Special Relationship” that has been a linchpin of freedom for Western democracies. While the British Commons committee report cites policies during the Iraq war that strained the relationship (many of which are still practised by The One’s administration), it was drafted in the aftermath of Obama’s profoundly rude treatment of Gordon Brown and His tendency to treat Europe more as a speech backdrop than as allies. Contrast His eagerness to show off TOTUS in Berlin with His concessions to Moscow on missile defence.

And His reward for this? Getting the diplomatic equivalent of a wedgie from the Russians over the START treaty, among others. Who could have foreseen the image of an American president being held over a toilet bowl by global thugs like Putin and Ahmedinejad for a swirlie, to be followed by the theft of his lunch money?

While Mark Steyn tackles the facts of Frum’s departure from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in his inimitable style, I wish to look at the longer record of Frum’s writings and how they have shaped his political fate.

Many have weighed in with his prior service to conservative thought. While the depth and quality of his earlier work is praiseworthy, it has no bearing on his more recent behaviour. From his book “Comeback” to his blog at FrumForum.com, he had been advocating a vision of the Republican Party that is not winning over a wave of converts. Frankly, somewhere between the poles of Glenn Beck and an Americanized Big Blue Machine the GOP can find a persuasive electoral platform. But it is not going to be solely on Frum’s terms and this is clearly disturbing him, as seen in the pattern of vituperation cited by Steyn.

No matter how prize an intellect one may possess, it is for nought if you cannot maintain a place at the table. By that I refer to the common experiences we have had in social dining. Occasionally we have witnessed guests who have surrendered their graces and made themselves quite dispensable. In the realm of politics the prime example would be Joe Clark, a man who has never accepted defeat with genuine lasting grace. In his mind, his appearance at the Liberals’ “eminent thinkers” conference this weekend is meant to be a stinging blow to the party circles that rejected him. To the rest of us it is just appalling bad manners exhibited by someone who has fallen in the esteem of most reasonable people.

I hope that Frum uses his time-out from AEI to get a clearer bead on what role he can play in conservative politics. Otherwise I fear that he will become an American Joe Clark. And I do not wish that fate upon anyone.

I was present at the Ann Coulter demo at the University of Ottawa.

She had spoken earlier to a small gathering at the Rideau Club, on behalf of the International Free Press Society, which was formed in the wake of the Mohammed cartoons in Jyllans-Posten. I consider Ann Coulter as an effective political entertainer, a brilliant rhetorician, a razor mind, and part of the great over-amplified American political shouting match.  I suspect I would tire of her by the end of a dinner party, not because she is wrong or that I disagree with her about much, but because her relentlessness would become tedious. As Oscar Wilde said: “In matters of society, it is not a matter of being right or wrong, but of being charming or tedious”.

The lecture was set to take place in Marion Hall, whose entry is off a lobby on the first floor of some non-descript building on the University of Ottawa campus. Several thousand people were lined up to see her, most of whom seemed to be orderly. The media were interviewing many people in the line-up. The lobby in front of the lecture room was filled to the brim with people seeking to get in, most of them friendly to Coulter. Having paid to see her at the Rideau Club, I walked to the head of the line, past the table in front of the auditorium doors, where those who had paid in advance had their names written down. The auditorium was filling slowly, as people ’s names were checked off lists. When the hall was half filled someone pulled the fire alarm, to the annoyance of all. After that point no one else was let in to the auditorium. I overheard the police tell the young security guard that the hall was going to be cleared, but nothing of that sort happened. This would have been about 6:45 pm.

I chatted with various people in the audience (conservatives, cameramen, security personnel) and then went back up to the top of the auditorium and peeked out the door. By this time the militants had seized the left hand side of the entry hall and were demanding to be let in, without payment of course. When I say demanding, they were shouting en bloc, waving fists and behaving as an organized mob would.  I saw a friend in the crowd on the friendly side of the crowd and got him into the auditorium. The crowd of people, some hostile, some friendly to Coulter, was as thick as anything that could be found on the Tokyo subway.

It was apparent to me that if the police and security had made any determined attempt whatever to keep order, and to arrest the troublemakers, the speech would have gone ahead.  It is also apparent to me that if Coulter and her bodyguard had wished to get in, they could not have done so from the front entrance  against the wish of the anti-Coulterites, without severe risk of personal violence, though they might have slipped in the back door of the auditorium.

My impression was that the interests of both the leftie protesters and of Miss Coulter for political theatre were served. They succeeded in preventing her from speaking; she got millions of publicity, and only Allan Rock’s University was embarrassed, if at all, by its pusillanimity. But then Allan Rock, Chancellor of the University, was the man who brought us the long-gun registry. The man who cannot be embarrassed by a multi-million dollar failed gun registry cannot be embarrassed by his employee, the twee Provost Mr.  Houle, the idiocy of his students asking for a “safe” environment, safe from any conservative thought whatever.

In an earlier article your correspondent noted that the “Social Security program is projected to be in deficit by 2016″, based on Congressional Budget Office projections.  Now it seems that that threshold has been crossed.  This  news report states that Social Security is already in red.

The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security.

This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

This might explain another anomaly in the fixed income markets that was reported by WSJ today.

Something troubling has occurred in the market for default protection on the debt of the world’s biggest borrower.

As the folks at Standard Poor’s Valuation and Risk Strategies division noted in a research note Monday, the difference between the spread on U.S. sovereign credit default swaps and an equivalent benchmark for AAA-rated euro-zone sovereigns flipped into positive territory March 12. As U.S. CDS spreads expanded to their widest levels in two years, that cross-region gap blew out to 5.7 basis points last Friday before narrowing to 4.7 Tuesday.

Wider CDS spreads indicate that sellers of insurance against a particular issuer’s default are charging more for it. In effect, the positive U.S.-versus-euro zone spread means investors think the risk of a U.S. default–however remote–is greater than that on euro-denominated sovereign debt.

NYT editorial seem to be oblivious to all this.

We were, briefly, chilled when the credit rating agencies — Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s, and Fitch — warned that they might have to downgrade the triple-A debt of the United States if it failed to bring its budget deficit under control. Then we remembered it was not too long ago that these agencies were tripping over one another to bestow triple-A ratings on many of the incomprehensible financial confections the banks crafted out of mounds of dicey mortgages…

We also suspect the downgrade will never happen since downgrading the United States would probably require downgrading all the American banks — the agencies’ main clients.

Even if it did, it is hard to envisage that it would have a huge impact. Despite all the concern expressed by raters, Republicans and Wall Street talking heads, the yields on Treasury bonds are at their lowest levels in 30 or 40 years. Investors still seem to trust the Treasury more than they do the raters.

But then what would you expect from NYT editors, the oracles of the explored universe, who on January 13th, 1920 shared this insight regarding rockets and space exploration.

The full weight of scorn, however, was reserved for the lunar proposal: “after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its longer journey it will neither be accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. To claim that it would be is to deny a fundamental law of dynamics, and only Dr. Einstein and his chosen dozen, so few and fit, are licensed to do that.” It expressed disbelief that Professor Goddard actually “does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react” and even talked of “such things as intentional mistakes or oversights.” Goddard, the Times declared, apparently suggesting bad faith, “only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.”

Of course the only thing Dr. Goddard did was to build and launch the first liquid-fueled rocket, so it is understandable that his knowledge of rocketry was deficient, especially when compared to editors at NYT.  No report on what knowledge the editors of NYT might lack.

More hypocrisy from liberal shills for islamists:

According to the Washington Post this morning, there’s consternation again about a building plan in Jerusalem:  ”The United States had previously objected to the project, which would be built on the site of the Shepherd Hotel, the former home of the late Haj Amin Husseini, a former mufti, or Islamic law scholar, of Jerusalem.”

Haj Amin Husseini and new German BFF

Just your average “Islamic law scholar,” I guess.  Oh, and yes, this picture — as well as Husseini’s efforts to recruit Muslims for the Waffen-SS, as well as his efforts to slaughter Jews throughout Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — happened before there was any such “obstacle” as “settlements.”

Though feted in Germany, he was less of a hit in the rest of Europe:

In 1945, Yugoslavia sought to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for his role in recruiting 20,000 Muslim volunteers for the SS, who participated in the killing of Jews in Croatia and Hungary.

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Update:   From Macleans, “We came together because we’re angry about the fact that Ann Coulter’s views risked being exposed on our campus,” said University of Ottawa student Mike Fancie.  Who gave this clown and a wannabe Goebbels the authorization to act on behalf of others?