Words of wisdom

The Other McCain said it. Believe it.

All along, the strongest evidence that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was a hoax was a simple fact: Liberals believed in it.

Adventures in Charcuterie: Blackstrap Molasses Country Ham

I'm doing a Southern-style country ham this year, which I started tonight.

The cure included kosher salt, Prague Powder #2 (salt with both nitrite and nitrate added), black strap molasses, brown sugar, dark rum, and a variety of spices. That turned into a thick, sticky mass that I smeared over my Berkshire ham. Now it's into the vegetable crisper for 2 weeks to cure.

UPDATE:

The same ham after curing and smoking.

They found the hockey stick!

I made a comment at Dad's blog on Saturday that although the leaked Climate Research Unit emails were pretty damning, the good stuff would come out when the climate experts started going through the computer files. Well, I was both right and wrong on that one.

Although some nuggets have been mined from the computer code, it wasn't the climatologists that found them. It is the computer programmers that hit the jackpot. Buried in over 350 comments at Watts Up With That? is this comment on some specific lines of code.

Tom_R (09:12:30) :

Thanks to debreuil (04:25:44) : and Spartacus (06:17:59) : for bringing this to our attention.

; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
;
;filter_cru,5.,/nan,tsin=yyy+yearlyadj,tslow=tslow
;oplot,timey,tslow,thick=5,color=20

This may be the real smoking gun. It appears that Briffa just made up numbers to add to the dendro measurements to give the result he wanted. These were not weights, but temperature values added to the raw measurements, see the ‘yyy+yearlyadj’ in the code. Not only did he add temperature to eliminate the post-1960 decline (the ‘trick’), but subtracted it from measurements around the 1930s to eliminate the warm period there.

In words that even old biddies and young girls just going through first menses can understand, this computer program adds up to 2.6 degrees Celsius to temperatures starting in the 1970's and continuing until 2000 to give the appearance of GLOBAL WARMING! That's over 4 degrees Fahrenheit, and is a huge "fudge factor" (their word, not mine) made to show a false correlation of rising global temperature to rising carbon dioxide levels.

No wonder the Warmists would never share their data or computer correlations with the skeptics. They were made up. And it only took four days for some custodians, WalMart employees and laborers to prove it.

12/4/09 UPDATE:

The Climategate blogosphere catches up with Headless. Today at WUWT.

Groupthink at University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit?

In light of the release of emails showing the inner workings of the leaders of climate alarmist cabal, my post regarding groupthink and global warming from last year deserves a fresh look.

Change the name from Al Gore to Phil Jones and I nailed the target about 100% with my year old post.

I previously presented the Eight Main Symptoms of Groupthink. Here I note some real life examples of those symptoms to show how groupthink can affect public policy.

1. Illusion of Invulnerability: Members ignore obvious deficiencies (their climate models don’t work), take extreme positions (a 20 foot rise in sea level), and are overly confident in their position (the IPCC’s steadfast position in the face of a cooling planet).

2. Collective Rationalization: Members discredit and explain away any positions contrary to group thinking (only deniers and flat-earthers (and now daughter rapists) disagree with them).

3. Illusion of Morality: Members believe their decisions are morally correct, ignoring the ethical consequences of their decisions (the solution is worse than the problem: Cap & Trade will kill global economy with the poor hit hardest; ethanol = starvation; and other much worse consequences of these tunnel vision solutions to follow).

4. Excessive Stereotyping: The group constructs negative stereotypes of rivals outside the group (GW deniers are the house n-words of Big Oil).

5. Pressure for Conformity: Members pressure any in the group who express arguments against the group's stereotypes, illusions, or commitments, viewing such opposition as disloyalty (conflicting voices are not invited to climate change conferences and cannot get their research funded or published).

6. Self-Censorship: Members withhold their dissenting views and counter-arguments (the Medieval warm period was washed from the “hockey-stick” data set).

7. Illusion of Unanimity: Members perceive falsely that everyone agrees with the group's decision; silence is seen as consent (Al Gore says the scientific consensus is unanimous, never mind those 31,000 deniers).

8. Mindguards: Some members appoint themselves to the role of protecting the group from adverse information that might threaten group complacency (Al Gore defines this characteristic).

Flashing Siren Alert: Conspiracy to fake global warming exposed

Someone has hacked into the data files from the UK's Hadley Climate Research Unit and posted some damning files on a Russian FTP site. Emails included in the files demonstrate a conspiracy to doctor data to show evidence of global warming where it doesn't exist.

Good comments threads are here and here.

DEVELOPING

Quick, someone tell Barack about the 13th amendment

What self-respecting African-American would ...

Nevermind, this is okay if you are a royal subject of Kenya.

NY-23 - Did Scozzafava receive Hoffman's votes?

The numbers behind this report on NY-23 vote totals at the Campaign Spot are even more unlikely than Jim Geraghty suggests.

Unless Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman got exactly zero votes in the town of Fenner (Owens got 157, Scozzafava got 248), and at one polling place in the town of Hamilton (Owens got 75, Scozzafava got 79), and at one polling place in the town of Sullivan (Owens got 173, Scozzafava got 251), the initial vote totals look rather hinky.

Outside of the three districts that Geraghty highlights as having odd results, Dede Scozzafava best showing was just 38 votes. If fact, her average votes received outside of these 3 outlier districts was only 12 votes. It is more likely that Scozzafava received zero votes in each of these districts, than Hoffman being shut out.

It is apparent that Scozzafava was credited for Doug Hoffman's votes in these three districts, possibly combined with her own. A conservative estimate of Hoffman's vote totals for Districts Fenner-1, Hamilton-3, and Sullivan-2 is 542 (578 minus (3 times 12)). But it is very likely Hoffman received the full 578 here.

This reduces Bill Owens' newly revised lead of 3,026 to only 2,484 votes with 10,200 absentee ballots to be counted.

If these Oswego County zero vote discrepancies cannot be reconciled, Doug Hoffman deserves to have a complete re-vote for this House seat.

Hat tip - Trog

War stories

In wishing some of my coworkers a happy Veteran's Day, I heard some interesting stories of their service.

The story that stood out was from a fellow who was an Army medic during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He said he was on a troop ship off the coast of Cuba during the crisis and was even loaded into a landing craft. The landing craft circled offshore for hours awaiting orders to land during the negotiations. He was very relieved to return to his troop ship because the big Red Cross on his truck made a really good target.

When the crisis abated his unit went to Puerto Rico. While there, they conducted target practice using the NATO ammo that they were issued for the invasion. He said no one could hit the targets. Their 500 yard shots only went about 400 yards. Had the Cold War gone hot in Cuba, the U.S. Army would have been wiped out. There was supposed to be an investigation into the ammo, but he never heard the results.

BTW - Several of these gentleman are in their 60's. There are no 50 year old retirees in the real world. They are called 'taxpayers.'

P.C.D.S.

It can by now come as no surprise that the Fort Hood massacre yielded an instant flow of exculpatory media meditations on the stresses that must have weighed on the killer who mowed down 13 Americans and wounded 29 others. Still, the intense drive to wrap this clear case in a fog of mystery is eminently worthy of notice.

The tide of pronouncements and ruminations pointing to every cause for this event other than the one obvious to everyone in the rational world continues apace. Commentators, reporters, psychologists and, indeed, army spokesmen continue to warn portentously, "We don't yet know the motive for the shootings."

What a puzzle this piece of vacuity must be to audiences hearing it, some, no doubt, with outrage. To those not terrorized by fear of offending Muslim sensitivities, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's motive was instantly clear: It was an act of terrorism by a man with a record of expressing virulent, anti-American, pro-jihadist sentiments. All were conspicuous signs of danger his Army superiors chose to ignore.

What is hard to ignore, now, is the growing derangement on all matters involving terrorism and Muslim sensitivities. Its chief symptoms: a palpitating fear of discomfiting facts and a willingness to discard those facts and embrace the richest possible variety of ludicrous theories as to the motives behind an act of Islamic terrorism. All this we have seen before but never in such naked form. The days following the Fort Hood rampage have told us more than we want to know, perhaps, about the depth and reach of this epidemic.

Dorothy Rabinowitz got my attention by putting denial of Hasan's terrorist motives in terms of a psychological condition. This condition deserves a name. Political Correctness Derangement Syndrome continues to be fatal.

WELCOME TO OBAMACARE!

Meet Dr. Hasan, your new government physician.

Missing the point, again

Oh my!

A new test conducted for Consumer Reports magazine found bisphenol A leaching into food from nearly all cans, including those marked "BPA-free" and "organic."

The magazine's tests found that levels of the chemical in many of the cans were comparable to those found to cause cell damage and behavioral effects in animal studies.

The results, which are to be published Tuesday in the magazine's December issue, echo those found last year in tests conducted by the Journal Sentinel.

So according to this report, unsafe levels of BPA are in virtually everything we eat. But humans show none of the adverse effects found in lab animals. I think I am safe to conclude that the BPA lab tests are non-relevant to humans.

Like Churchill wearing a swastika

Stephen and Andrew Hayes provide a chronology of the 2008 Favre retirement story. Much of this has been forgotten, but the facts show that Favre was intent on joining the Vikings even before he "retired" in March 2008.

On March 3, 2008, the Packers held a press conference announcing Favre’s retirement. His final season had been a successful one. The Packers went 13–3 and made it to the NFC Championship game. And though Favre had thrown a bad interception to lose that game, he had played like a quarterback a decade younger than his 37 years.

Within weeks, though, Favre changed his mind. When he told the Packers that he wanted to unretire, the organization welcomed him back and made arrangements to have one more season with their Hall of Fame quarterback. Then, just days later, Favre changed his mind again. He was done. That was it. No question. Career over.

Favre had done this before. At the end of each of his final three seasons in Green Bay, Favre had mused publicly about retirement, setting off nearly full-time media speculation about his future and the future of the franchise. But this time felt different. While he and his agent, Bus Cook, repeatedly assured reporters that he’d get around to it at some point, he refused to make it official by filing his papers with the NFL.

...

Then in early July, as the season approached, Favre tried to return to the Packers again. This time, however, the Packers hesitated. They were understandably worried that he wasn’t serious about coming back and, having named Rodgers the starting quarterback, were concerned about the damage that would be done to the team if they acceded to the demands of their former star.

So the Packers turned him down. Favre wasn’t happy. At first, he demanded his release. Sports Illustrated NFL writer Peter King, a frequent recipient of scoops from Favre, reported that Favre’s first choice was Minnesota. Wisconsin media outlets reported that Favre had already approached the Vikings.

It is pretty clear that Favre had no loyalty to the Packers, even after their near NFC Championship in 2008. He saw riding Adrian Peterson to the Super Bowl was his last, best chance to get there.