Roman Polanski

I don’t get it. He drugs and rapes a 13 year old girl, flees the country and he still has defenders:

European cultural figures, political leaders and show-business personalities rose up in Polanski's defense, insisting that the film director be released because his original criminal charge dates from a 1977 incident. They portrayed the determination of Los Angeles judicial authorities to bring him to trial so many years later as vindictive and a stain on U.S. democracy.

Sarkozy's office made no comment but the spokesman for his governing coalition, Frederic Lefevre, said it was "shocking" to think how Los Angeles authorities seem to have waited so long before putting the international mandate in motion and then moving to make the arrest in such a "spectacular" way. Lefevre's deputy, Dominique Paille, added that it was also shocking to see a country regarded as an example of democracy fail to observe a statute of limitations for such crimes. *

Someone bring this piece of shit to justice.

* Just to clarify, there is not statue of limitation for a class-X felony, and raping a child is a class-X felonoy.

New Rule

New Rule

New Rule, if Bill Maher says something stupid again, Sarah Palin gets to shoot him from a helicopter.

It’s a pity, I used to like Maher when he was on ABC. Its almost as if the toxically liberal environment of HBO has pushed him so far to the left he looks like an undereducated Noam Chomsky.

When facts fail make them up

With the Dear Leader’s upcoming push for unilateral nuclear disarmament, the “reality based community” seems to be focusing on battlefield preparation to pave the way for our hobbling.

Case in point is self proclaimed “communitarian” and GWU professor Amitai Etzioni.

Writing in Time, Jonathan Tepperman lays out the case that Obama should embrace nuclear weapons because they have kept the work relatively peaceful the past 60 years citing the absence of direct armed conflict between nuclear powers. To which the distinguished professor Etzioni remarks:

Soon, it became clear that there is no research--let alone compelling research--to support this forehead-slapping claim, only Mr. Tepperman's simplistic conclusions ...... However, Mr. Tepperman fully reveals the depths of his "research" when he writes, "There's never been a nuclear, or even a nonnuclear, war between two states that posses them." I guess he has never heard about India and Pakistan.

I hope Etzioni isn’t a history professor because Pakistan and India haven’t had a shooting war since 1971, three years before India tested its first bomb in 1974 and a decade before Pakistan had its first bomb*.

But what are silly little things like facts for the “reality based community”.

Brought to you by the NEA

Nothing says take me seriously more than a gaggle of liberal Hollywood millionaires telling me I am not doing my part to pay for the uninsured:



Truly fine comedy is the ability to subtly poke fun at a larger truth, not take a ham handed swipe at an easy target. But considering that Obama has bought off the pharmaceutical industry and all those greedy executives, perhaps Ferrell has struck comedic gold.

Who would have figured that this group would be capable of such nuanced political satire.

Daniel Ellsberg – another lefty who never has to say he’s sorry.

One of the reasons I love listening to my local NPR affiliate is because every so often they trot out some long forgotten iconic lefty dinosaur and serenade them with love and beatifications.

WNYC’s On the Media resurrected the decrepit anti-Vietnam hero Daniel Ellsberg this weekend to lecture us on the hopelessness of Afghanistan and why we have to surrender there as well .... just praying that some “courageous” DOD functionary will leak the goods to seal Afghanistan’s fate.

For those of who don’t know the whole story, Ellsberg’s claim to fame is that in 1971 he leaked a top secret Rand Corporation assessment of the war in Vietnam to the Washington Post and NY Times. He was later tried on charges relating to espionage but the case ended in a mistrial, due in part to revelations that his shrinks office had been broken into by Nixon’s plumbers.

Ellsberg has spend the past 35 years milking his 15 minutes of fame for all its worth. While a minor player in the Vietnam saga, he portrays himself as one of the vanguard members in the anti-war effort, without whom we’d still be fighting there today. That’s not unusual. Some people who get accustomed to the limelight are unwilling to go quietly into the night and do whatever they have to stay in front of the cameras. They become comfortable with the narrative they construct about themselves and repeat it so often they come to believe it. Think of Lauren Conrad. But the public grows tired of hearing the same story time after time so Ellsberg had to get creative with his message and his audience.

He befriended Jim Jones, and spent time preaching the gospel of why America sucks at the People’s Temple a few short years before the bloodletting in Guyana. Ellsberg claimed that UN Ambassador Andrew Young told him that Martin Luther King jr had actually been assassinated by the FBI. So willing to sacrifice his reputation to get back into the limelight, Ellsberg actually wrote and signed an affidavit to this effect and submitted it to lawyer and crackpot extraordinaire Mark Lane (bosom buddy and legal consul to Jim Jones). He, along with hundreds of other useful idiots, signed a declaration calling for a investigation into the Soviet shoot down of Korean Airlines flight 007 after some shit head at The Nation Magazine alleged that the civilian airliner was actually a USAF reconnaissance flight and the passengers were sacrificed by Reagan to stoke anti-Soviet sentiment. Not to be out done, he also believes that “hardliners” within the Chairmen of the Joint Chief’s along with the CIA had JFK killed.

More recently Ellsberg has tried to maintain his relevance by hopping on board the 9/11 truth movement and by calling on “patriots” in the DOD to reveal any information about a potential military strike on Iran.

Ellsburg self righteous desperation to remain relevant has led him down a path that would assure, if he were a conservative, that no self respecting person would have anything to do with him … most definitely not one of the beautiful people over at NPR. The shameful allegations, relationships and outright lies, bordering on blood libel, should have guaranteed his relegation to the darker corners of American political life.

But like so many on the left who swim the waters of dark conspiracy, being a good left means never having to say you are sorry.

More on Pelosi

Evidently Pelosi's flashback referred to the murder of Harvey Milk and George Moscone by Dan White which just so happened to coincide with some anti-gay protests.

"I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco," Pelosi said, suddenly speaking quietly. "This kind of rhetoric was very frightening" and created a climate in which violence took place, she said.

Former San Francisco Supervisor Dan White was convicted of the 1978 murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay rights activist. Other gay rights activists and others at the time saw a link between the assassinations and the violent debate over gay rights that had preceded them for years.

Funny think is Dan White (a democrat) killed Moscone and Milk not over the issue of anyone’s sexuality or politics, he killed them because Moscone wouldn’t reappoint White to a commission he once headed and when White lobbied Moscone for it Milk chimed in and objected as well.

Kind of takes the wind of the sails of that bullshit comparison when you know the fuller story.

Ocean Acidification = More Junk Science

As part of the multi pronged deluge of the public, one of the less often repeated, but more dramatic prognostications from the global warming .... err I mean "climate change" crowd is that the oceans are becoming too acidic and that will kill all the pretty coral life in the oceans.

Example:

The bleaching of coral, higher temperatures as well as ocean acidification, triggered by industrial carbon dioxide dissolving in sea water, contribute to the destruction marine habitats globally.

The chemistry is simple enough: more CO2 in the atmosphere means more CO2 dissolved in the oceans turning into carbonic acid and making oceans acidic. However like most areas where science and politics cross histrionics tends to rule the day

According to Wikipedia the PH of the ocean in the 1700’s was 8.179. How they know this or can even estimate it to three fucking significant digits is beyond me, especial y when one considers that the concept of PH was only developed around 100 years ago. At any rate, they now say that the PH of the ocean is 8.104. So, in 300 years the PH of all the world’s oceans, on average, has dropped by .075 basis points and that this drop is responsible for the destruction of the oceans corals. I realize PH is a logarithmic function ..... but come on people! 75 thousandths of a basis point?

Are coral and other shelled critters so sensitive to PH, that a drop of 75 thousandths of a basis point responsible for the current distress of the worlds corals reefs?

Fertilizers runoff, industrial pollution, sewage, over fishing …. yes, but a of 75 thousandths drop in PH driven by higher CO2?

It should be laughable if so many “serious” people didn’t try and jam it down our throats.

It’s a sales job, clever marketing much like Carl Sagan’s nuclear winter, and has all the hallmarks of junk science: suspect models that cant be verified, apocalyptic conclusions, and suspect inferences from historic data.

Pelosi to America's Lumpen: UNCLE!

Botox Nancy has sown the wind, and she shall now reap the whirlwind:

A usually steely House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday began to tear up when, in responding to a question about the tone of the national debate, she recalled the politically charged violence that tore through her hometown of San Francisco in the late 1970s.

At her weekly news conference, Pelosi (D-Calif.) was asked if she was concerned about whether the debate over healthcare and the role of the federal government — much of it wrapped in escalating anti-government rhetoric — could lead to acts of violence.

“I think we all have to take responsibility for our actions and our words. We are a free country and this balance between freedom and safety is one that we have to carefully balance,” Pelosi began.

Before anyone starts pissing and moaning along with Pelosi about this, lets all keep in mind that just a few weeks ago Pelosi was saying that my fellow town hall protesters were "carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare".

I guess all that botox has finally given her brain damage.

I am Jack’s persistent twitch.

he he!

Science Blogs

I have been spending a few months over at Scienceblogs and have been generally disappointed with the site and its content. After reading some truly first rate articles about … well, science and technology, I found that there exists a large portion of the website dedicated to political and philosophical discussions. It turns out that its not just “large” but appears to occupy a majority of the site’s content … at least based on my observations.

The philosophical topics tend to focus on the New Atheist’s attempt to argue a purely philosophical debate by interjecting “science”. That and by generally being pricks. No surprise there.

The political topics are the usual boilerplate statist/lefty arguments on nearly everything under the sun, but usually go something like this “OBAMA IS GOOD, OBAMA IS GREAT, WE SURRENDER OUR WILL TO HIM ON THIS DATE” and “FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BETTER”.

I think ever since Einstein (maybe Newton, who knows) used his celebrity to step from the scientific to the political realm (read Einstein’s asinine lectures on socialism for more on that), there has been a rush of mainly liberal and left wing scientists to follow suit. It is argued, by them at any rate, that since they are experts in X, Y and Z, that this expertise naturally lends itself to them being experts in policies impacted by X, Y and Z …. as well as every other letter in the alphabet. After all, they are flipping geniuses and who can argue with that?

It’s the notion that the celebrity scientist is an expert on anything the pontificate about and to question them is to reject the scientific method and rationality.

Take Carl Sagan for example.

Sagan was, by all accounts, an accomplished and intelligent man. He was a well respected authority on Astronomy but unfortunately he believed that his reputation on scientific issues should give him equal authority on scientific and moral matters and worse, he allowed his political biases to cloud his judgment of technical and scientific matters. Sagan’s work on “Nuclear Winter” is an example where he was willing to support a scientific theory because it supported his own political biases and not because it was good sound science.

Sagan didn’t actually develop the idea of Nuclear Winter”, it was initially hypothesized in the Soviet Union by Georgy Golitsyn in 1982 at a meeting of the Committee of Soviet Scientists in Defense of Peace, Against the Nuclear Threat. It should have been a flashing red light that a scientific conclusion like “a large nuclear exchange, even if completely one sided, would cause the earth’s climate to plummet 30 degrees C” would be coming out of the Soviet Union. Especially so given the committee’s Orwellian name. Couple this with recent relations that this was disinformation campaign run by the KGB and that one of Sagan’s team members, Soviet physicist Vladimir Alexandrov, disappeared in Madrid never to be seen again, and its painfully clear in retrospect that this was part of the larger Soviet influence campaign on the Nuclear Freeze movement.

Aside from the issue that there are indications that the KGB may have had a hand in shaping Sagan’s conclusions (unbeknownst to Sagan to be sure), “Nuclear Winter” was a sales job to further Sagan’s brand of politics and he hit the circuit to push it. Months before the release of any peer reviewed results Sagan lobbied the press and politicians very hard to sell this to the world.

As Michael Chriton said: “this is not the way science is done, it is the way products are sold”

After quite a bit of back and forth over Nuclear Winter in the 80’s Sagan saw his chance to demonstrate to the world the truthiness of his ideas. Near the end of the first Gulf War, Sagan along with toady Richard Turco predicted that the oil fires in Kuwait were spewing so much soot into the air that agriculture in SE Asia would be severely effected by it, so much that there would be frost in spring and summer in SE Asia and the effects globally would lead to a year without a summer*. Sagan debated Fred Singer (noted climate change skeptic) on Nightline during which he made several more dire predictions while Singer said that Sagan was acting like a hysterical Nancy and the soot would quickly settle out.

Needless to say Fred Singer was right and Sagan was wrong.

All of which leads me to conclude the following: Science and politics don’t mix well, regardless of who is doing the mixing. Let relevant scientific fields speak with authority within their relevant fields, and leave it to that.

*given Sagan’s notoriety, the specific nature of the predictions as well as how spectacularly bad they were, its amazing that there isnt a copy of this (for free) anywhere in the internet, so I have cut and pasted it here

9-11

Never forget, never forgive.