January 11th 2009
Sunday Scan – 1/11/09
Great Moments In Black African Nationalism
O
h, for the good old days when white colonials ran a pretty good show in Africa! What a mess the black leaders plutocrats have made of Africa. Here’s the latest:
HARARE, Zimbabwe (CNN) — Zimbabwe’s central bank will introduce a $50 billion note — enough to buy just two loaves of bread — as a way of fighting cash shortages amid spiraling inflation.
The country’s acting finance minister, Patrick Chinamasa, made the announcement in a government gazette released Saturday.
Although Chinamasa did not give the date on which the $50 billion and new $20 billion notes would come into circulation, an official at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe said the notes would be distributed to all banks by the end of Monday.
And all the world’s horses and all the world’s men can’t get Robert Mugabe out. If the United Nations were indeed united for the good of the people, he would have been out long ago, but it’s really the United Despots, and a majority of delegates are afraid that if Mugabe goes, they’ll soon follow.
h/t: What Bubba Knows
You’re Getting Colder … Colder
H
ere’s the money paragraph in the news release from Worldwatch Institute’s news release on its State of the World Report:
The evidence from observations of the past 150 years or so leads to some profound conclusions. For instance, 11 of the last 12 years are among the 12 warmest years ever recorded in terms of global surface temperature.
And here is another assessment of the temperatures of our happy little planet:
2008 ranked 15th coldest of the thirty years of records for the University of Alabama MSU based lower tropospheric temperatures (right in the middle of the pack). It was the coldest year since 2000. It continues the downtrend of the last 7 years. This compares with the Hadley Center data which (together with the equally alarmist WMO) claims 2008 will rank 10th warmest since 1850. (159 years!). How can an “average year” in one data base appear be a “top 6%” warmest year in another?
Well the global data bases of NOAA GHCN, NASA GISS and Hadley CRUT3v are all contaminated by urbanization, major station dropout, missing data, bad siting, instruments with known warm biases being introduced without adjustment and black box and man made adjustments designed to maximize warming (Steve McIntyre found more urban areas had their temperatures adjusted up then down). Also ocean temperatures are an issue with a change in the methods of measurement and incomplete coverage. Hadley uses their own merchant ship data and that covers some heavily travelled routes but has no coverage of the vast southern oceans (the oceans cover 70% of the world’s surface).
If the Warmies can’t even bother themselves to acknowledge that they are relying on dirty data for the most pivotal of all the measurements in the global warming debate, why should we accept anything they say?
Meanwhile, with admission that Pravda hardly has a history of objective journalism, we have this report from Russia’s climate scientists:
The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years.
Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years. …
The graph of the Vostok ice core data shows that the Ice Age maximums and the warm interglacials occur within a regular cyclic pattern, the graph-line of which is similar to the rhythm of a heartbeat on an electrocardiogram tracing. The Vostok data graph also shows that changes in global CO2 levels lag behind global temperature changes by about eight hundred years. What that indicates is that global temperatures precede or cause global CO2 changes, and not the reverse. In other words, increasing atmospheric CO2 is not causing global temperature to rise; instead the natural cyclic increase in global temperature is causing global CO2 to rise. (h/t Pat Dollard)
Leftists and environmentalists have been wrong at every turn, and I fully expect them to be wrong on global warming as well.
God Works In Strange Ways
W
ell, of course God works in strange ways! Only someone foolish enough to think that they understand God would expect Him not to work in ways we don’t always understand – like this, for example:
ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A convicted sex offender won a $500,000 Alaska raffle that was a fundraiser for a nonprofit organization that helps victims of sexual abuse.
Alec Ahsoak of Anchorage, 53, came forward Saturday to collect his prize.
The state sex offender registry lists Ahsoak as convicted of two counts of sexual abuse of a minor in 1993 and one count in 2000.
The raffle drawing was Friday night.
State law says all games of chance must benefit a charity. The designated beneficiary for the half-million dollar raffle was Standing Together Against Rape, or STAR.
Ahsoak says he plans to use the money to buy a home and to improve his life. He tells KTUU-TV he will donate $100,000 to STAR. (FOX)
A horrible, embarrassing mistake you say? Hardly! It’s more like a miracle.
First, consider Standing Together Against Rape. They hoped to raise a little money and get a little publicity from their auction, but with Ahsoak drawing the winning ticket, they now have national publicity. I certainly wouldn’t have been aware of them and linked to their Web site if some upstanding citizen had won.
Then, consider Ahsoak. He had been living in relative anonymity until he had the mixed fortune of winning $500,000 and, in effect, letting the world know that the has twice been convicted of sexual assaulting a minor. This serves a dual purpose: Everyone knows they have to be careful around him, which will protect many if he returns to his former ways, and he has been humbled by the knowledge that millions upon millions of people know of his crimes.
That might well be described as a classic 12-step bottom, and it very well will help keep Ashoak on the straight and narrow.
Of course, Ahsoak could be a complete jerk who sees it all as a terrifically funny cosmic justification of his cruel ways. Thanks to the strange ways of God’s gift of free will to us, he’s free to think that way. And I’m free to think more positively.
Qassam Count
I
‘ve been looking into ways to use new media – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in particular – for public affairs and community relations purposes, and it’s a bit of a struggle. There’s a ton of potential there, but it requires new ways of looking at old processes.
And then I came across Qassam Count on Facebook. A few days back, I started getting updates from various Facebook friends like this:
QassamCount: In the past 36 hours, 33 Hamas rockets hit Israel. 1 hit near a kindergarten in Ashdod city.
They link back to a Facebook page called Qassam Count, which you can see here (you’ll probably need to have a Facebook account to access it.) The brilliance of the concept is that it takes a Facebook staple – your status update, which Facebook members frequently update, causing Facebook to send that update status to all of that person’s Facebook friends – and uses it to promote a cause – here, that Israel is the victim and Hamas is a bunch of vicious thugs.
I can also invite my friends, either individually, or all of ‘em, to donate their status to Qassam Count. This is particularly sweet, because even if they don’t join, they’ll see the message and read about Qassams and Hamams.
Qassam Count lets Facebook members donate their update status to Qassam Count, and they’ll grab it either once a day or live – each time a Qassam is fired at Israel. And when I sign up, my friends, all 100 of ‘em, will see just how profoundly evil Hamas is. Here is the current measure of evil from the site:
Latest QassamCount Updates
10:36am: 8 Hamas rockets fired from Gaza hit Israel, including the cities of Ashdod and Ashkelon8:07pm: 18 more rockets hit Israel. So far today, Hamas fired 34 rockets from Gaza into Israel
12:26pm: 16 additional Hamas rockets hit Israel, injuring an infant in the town of Gedera
8:27am: 2 Hamas rockets hit Israel. In 2008, 3278 rockets and mortar shells hit Israel
Kind of shocking when you see it that way, eh? I’m signing up, and I’ve got a new appreciation of how new media can be used to influence public opinion.
Posted in Global warming, God, New Media, Sex crimes, Terrorism | 1 Comment » | |
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January 11th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Greetings:I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward, along with Bishop Tutu, to when next a white man is elected President of Zimbabwe and/or South Africa.