Blogging has been light

Mostly because I have been doing a lot of "heavy lifting." Ain't she adorable?



And she's already a little Tiger fan!

It seems Barack Obama may be reconsidering his positions on closing Gitmo and coercive interrogation.

Having achieved an election victory, Obama’s supporters are now asking themselves the same questions they’ve been reluctant to consider until now. For example, were Gitmo detainees moved from Cuba to the United States, where would they be held? What if some escaped? If tried and acquitted in regular courts, would they be free to stay on American soil? If they were deported to their home countries, would they not face far worse treatment than anything they have faced in Guantanamo? To such questions, it turns out, there are no easy answers.

Things aren't so cut and dried when Obama actually has to take responsibility for his policy proposals.

Hottest October Ever Recorded

Goddard Institute of Space Science declared October to be the hottest ever. In fact, it was just as hot as September. Heck, October actually was September.

The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

If they use July's figures for January, I bet they can make it look even hotter! Sadly, this isn't the first time the clowns at GISS have been caught in some questionable "science."

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Suddenly, on the very first day after the election, the New York Times is concerned about his experience and capabilities:

On the shoulders of a 47-year-old first-term senator, with the power of inspiration yet no real executive experience, now falls the responsibility of prosecuting two wars, protecting the nation from terrorist threat and stitching back together a shredded economy. [...]

What kind of decision maker and leader Mr. Obama will be remains unclear even to many of his supporters.

It would have been nice if The Times had voiced some of these doubts prior to the election.

Congratulations, President-Elect Obama

Well said, from Bill Whittle:

Your victory was historic. My hope is that it will lift your spirits from the traumatic eight years they have endured, and restore to you the conviction that this is, and was, and always will be your country as well as ours. I hope that, over time, you may come to see in this great victory a reminder that the cards are not and were not hopelessly stacked against you, and that you simply did what we conservatives did four and eight years ago — make a better case to the American people.

To our liberal and Democratic opponents: This day is yours. Indeed, the next four years are yours. Starting soon, I will begin again to argue as best I can against many of the policies and philosophies that President-Elect Obama represents. I hope you will keep in mind that I do so not out of personal animosity towards him or his supporters, but only towards the ideals he espouses and that only because in my studies of history and human nature I have found many of them to be unsound.

When he is inaugurated, President Obama will be my president. He cannot be otherwise. I will disagree with him at just about every turn, in all likelihood, and that is my right and duty as an American. However, in an emergency he will have my unqualified support, and I will always wish him wisdom and hope that he may do what is best for this great country of ours. I do not wish — I do not ever wish — to see my country suffer so that I may gain political leverage. If at this same time four years from now, President Obama has acted in such a way as to make us safer, and more prosperous and free, it will be my greatest pleasure to admit I was wrong about the man. I look forward to that day. I hope to see it come to pass.

Regardless of all of that, we have together achieved something noble and magnificent. We have, after a long and hazardous journey, taken the final step in erasing the one real stain on our nation’s history. That war is not over, but it is won. And we may all take a great deal of pride in that.

Here's an interesting interview with British documentary maker Martin Durkin. He can't seem to find much evidence to support man-made global warming.

The climate has always changed. Climate change is nothing new. The question of whether we are having anything to do about it, of course, rests on the CO2 question. [...]

Temperature has risen, slightly, falteringly and gradually for about 150 years or so (even ‘warmer’ scientists can’t claim that this started because of us). The period before this rise has long been known as a ‘Little Ice Age’, from which we are evidently making a welcome recovery. We only started pumping out CO2 properly in the postwar boom, but what did temperatures do? In the postwar period they fell, till about the mid-70s. Then they went up again (just like they did at the beginning of the 20th Century, and then for the past ten years they’ve more or less flat-lined, decreasing slightly. Where is the evidence that humans are changing the climate? This is nothing but prejudice. It is not serious science.

Doesn't Durkin know Al Gore "settled" this science long ago? Durkin also has some ideas as to what motivates many in the "green community"

It is transparently obvious that the greens sit squarely in the tradition of Romanticism. Like the romantics, they hate industry, love nature, idealise peasant life, they think capitalism is wicked, they think people in modern society lead depraved shallow lives and have forgotten the true value of things, they don’t like cars or supermarkets or lots of proles taking cheap long-haul holidays, etc, etc. [...]

Romanticism is in essence anti-Capitalist. Not in the sense of traditional Marxism. The Marxists wanted to go forwards not backwards. They wanted to build bigger factories than the capitalists, not folksy medieval craft workshops. No. Romanticism was a kind of reactionary anti-capitalism. And it was the ideology and aesthetic worldview of those people who lost most, or gained least from capitalism. I think it’s the same today. In Europe, the toffs (Prince Charles and his gang) are green because they have lost their position in society. The intellectuals – teachers, lecturers, scientists are green because they don’t have the status they used to. (Not long ago, a professor would have been someone important, had a big house, maids etc). These days, plumbers make more money.


It’s not easy to explain this properly in a few lines, but this I think is the real basis for all those anti-modern green prejudices.

I had always equated the green movement with Marxism, but Durkin's analysis makes some sense. Read the whole interview, it's very compelling.

Poop Sandwiches

So one of our dogs has developed this nasty poop-eating habit. With four of them providing the source, she has no shortage of poops upon which to dine.

Laurel has faced and defeated this before, but it requires daily pills for all four dogs, at the rate of one pill per ten pounds of canine. That would put us in the neighborhood of 25 pricey pills to be distributed per day, which would be a ridiculous investment to solve what is essentially an aesthetic rather than health problem (at least for the dogs).

Apparently, the pills come with the following promotional message: "Makes feces unpalatable." Which begs the question:

Precisely what flavor does one add to dog shit to make it "unpalatable"??