January 25th 2009
Sunday Scan - January 25, ‘09
Lawfare
I
‘ve been doing a bit of Facebook “wallfare” over Guantamo with liberal blogger Dan Chmielewski. He knee-jerks on the subject, seeing Gitmo as a blight on America’s honor, without giving much more thought to the consequences of closing it other than disputing the recent report that 61 detainees released from Gitmo have been identified to be back at work trying to advance jihadism. Dan probably wouldn’t agree with this assessment of Gitmo, from a post on Civilian Irregular:
Our Nation is at war, and JTF-Guantanamo serves as an integral component of OPERATION Enduring Freedom. We are the model organization for safe and humane enemy combatant detention operations, and for the collection and dissemination of strategic intelligence supporting the Global War on Terror. We operate under the watchful gaze of the Nation and the world. We are a strategic asset operated by a highly trained and patriotic team of military and civilian professionals, dedicated to supporting our Nation’s interests in the Global War on Terror.
The post goes on to describe two reasons for keeping detainees at Gitmo. The first is gaining intelligence, which we all can understand and which has been written about ad nauseum from all sides of the political spectrum. The other is lawism, a new term for me.
If it weren’t for lawfare we could execute them when their intelligence value has been exhausted. Lawfare, according to Colonel Charles Dunlap,
describes a method of warfare where law is used as a means of realizing a military objective. There are many dimensions to lawfare, but the one ever more frequently embraced by U.S. opponents is a cynical manipulation of the rule of law and the humanitarian values it represents. Rather than seeking battlefield victories, per se, challengers try to destroy the will to fight by undermining the public support that is indispensable when democracies like the U.S. conduct military interventions.”
We are struggling to find a way to combat lawfare without either providing terrorists with information they should not have, or stepping on the rights of American citizens. We don’t have the solution, and we shouldn’t be forced to close Gitmo because of political deadlines until we have a viable lawfare strategy - and a strategy to keep ourselves safe from the damage these vicious animals can foist on us.
Hold Off On That “Antarctic Warming” Glee, Al
T
he great icy continent of Antarctica has been a cold thorn in the side of Warmies ever since Al Gore fired up the hysteria engines with An Inconvenient Truth. Al had to lie about Antarctica, showing pictures of ice “calving” off the Antarctic Peninsula - the one place on the continent that was warming. The rest was getting colder and packing on ice cover.
Or so we thought. Now, suddenly, a study’s come out that declares penguin-land is warming up from shore to frozen shore. BBC was typical of the glee exhibited by Warmie-friendly media - complete with the accompanying photo showing an Antarctica that appears red-hot:
The continent of Antarctica is warming up in step with the rest of the world, according to a new analysis.
Scientists say data from satellites and weather stations indicate a warming of about 0.6C over the last 50 years.
Writing in the journal Nature, they say the trend is “difficult to explain” without the effect of rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere.
So should we skeptics fold up our tents and start sending fan letters to James Hansen? No, no, no. As always, never believe a Warmie claim without looking at the slime under the rocks. Christopher Booker, writing in the UK Telegraph, has:
The problem with Antarctica, though, is that has so few weather stations. So what the computer had been programmed to do, by a formula not yet revealed, was to estimate the data those missing weather stations would have come up with if they had existed. In other words, while confirming that the satellite data have indeed shown the Antarctic as cooling since 1979, the study relied ultimately on pure guesswork, to show that in the past 50 years the continent has warmed - by just one degree Fahrenheit.
One of the first to express astonishment was Dr Kenneth Trenberth, a senior scientist with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a convinced believer in global warming, who wryly observed “it is hard to make data where none exists”. A disbelieving Ross Hayes, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for Nasa, sent Professor Steig a caustic email ending: “with statistics you can make numbers go to any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.”
But it was also noticed that among the members of Steig’s team was Michael Mann, author of the “hockey stick”, the most celebrated of all attempts by the warmists to rewrite the scientific evidence to promote their cause. The greatest of all embarrassments for the believers in man-made global warming was the well-established fact that the world was significantly warmer in the Middle Ages than it is now. “We must get rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period,” as one contributor to the IPCC famously said in an unguarded moment. It was Dr Mann who duly obliged by getting his computer-model to produce a graph shaped like hockey stick, eliminating the mediaeval warming and showing recent temperatures curving up to an unprecedented high.
Warmies talk about us only having a few years to turn back global warming or face TEOTWAWKI. More realistically, we have only a few years to stop this scam or face an economic meltdown that will make the events of the last year seem like Playskool economics.
Hat-tip: Greenie Watch
Citi, B of A Both Spend $200K+ On Davos
S
truggling Citibank, recipient of $50 billion in bailout funds (a.k.a., your money) and of guarantees for risky assets amounting to $306 billion, is spending at least $200,000 sending executives to participate in the World Economic Forum in Davos, where seats go for about $50K each.
Not to be outdone, Bank of America, which has gotten $20 billion so far in bailouts and guarantees of $118 billion, is also sending four execs - at $50K a ticket.
The expenditures are on a par with AIG’s blow-out at the ritzy St. Regis Resort in Laguna Niguel, which garnered a lot of media attention. So far, no such attention here - I gleaned this from a couple paragraphs buried deep in an AP story on this year’s Davos event.
Once there, the execs won’t be rubbing elbows with Angelina Jolie, Sharon Stone and Bono, who have glittered-up previous Davos forums. In keeping with the times, the glitter factor in Davos is much lower this year; expected stars in attendance are Peter Gabriel, Jet Li and Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan.
Is $50K a seat worth it? Will the Citi and B of A execs come back with new knowledge to help their banks get back on their feet and repay us the money we loaned [?] them. Sure, there are sessions like “Update 2009: The Return to State Power,” which sure sounds timely - but if Davos were so valuable, wouldn’t’ they all have come home last year prepared for the economic crisis ahead?
“Black Hole Machine” Attempts Suicide
T
he Large Hadron Collider, more commonly known as the black hole machine, was going to destroy us all - at least according to the fears of some:
It is not possible to know what the outcome of the experiment will be, but even CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) scientists concede that there is a real possibility of creating destructive theoretical anomalies such as miniature black holes, strangelets and deSitter space transitions. These events have the potential to fundamentally alter matter and destroy our planet.
Well, the Euros just fired it up - and broke it, starting a German-French snit in the process. Those snits have caused a whole lot of trouble in the past, although not quite of the earth-destroying levels. Here’s the story:
The new director of Europe’s Big Bang machine signalled in an interview published Sunday that he will be more cautious than his predecessor, following a major breakdown that marred its multi-billion dollar launch.The giant atom-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), broke down only days after being switched on by CERN in September 2008, causing more than 30 million Swiss francs of repairs (20 million euros, 26 million dollars).
Rolf-Dieter Heuer, [the German] director-general of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, told the Swiss newspaper Sonntag that the bill could even reach 40 million Swiss francs.
Heuer, who succeeded Frenchman Robert Aymar at the beginning of this month, said the LHC will be double checked by outside experts before any attempt is made to switch the machine back on, probably in July.
“I want to be sure that everything works,” said Heuer of the six billion Swiss franc particle accelerator that runs through a 27-kilometre (17-mile) tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.
Was this just a big machines breaking in a big way … or was it an ominous sign … an omen sent from on high to save the planet?
Stay tuned. Meanwhile, go Large Hadron Collider, go! Exciting stuff! And for up-to-the-minute updates, check out the site Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the Earth yet?
Transparency-ing The GOP
H
ere’s an intersting item from the lobbyist blog K Street Cafe, “a blog where experts from a variety of backgrounds share new and novel ways technology, the Internet and social media are being used to shape public policies:”
President Barack Obama’s commitment to transparency and open government has resulted in a surprising response from conservatives — many of whom are trying to outdo the White House with their own efforts to engage the citizenry.
The top two leaders of House Republicans, Reps. John Boehner (Ohio) and Eric Cantor (Va.), have appealed directly to Americans as the first policy battle of Obama’s administration takes shape.
The week before Obama took office, Cantor held a hearing on Capitol Hill that featured four video questions from citizens about the economic stimulus. The hearing had a similar feel to the YouTube debates during the presidential primaries. Boehner, meanwhile, invited users to ask questions on Digg. Nearly 1,500 were submitted, and Boehner answered the top questions on CNN.
How did I find out about this? Facebook. Times are changing.
After more than a decade of painstaking work, the first beams were fired down the new accelerator in a blaze of publicity on September 10, 2008 only to break down due to a helium leak from its cooling system nine days later.
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Posted in Economic Policy, Global warming, Guantanamo, New Media, Politics & Policy, Republicans, Science, Terrorism | 2 Comments » | 
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January 26th, 2009 at 8:00 am
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January 25th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
They pulled the same trick with balloon temperature data as they’re doing with Antartic satellite data. The high-altitude warming of tropical latitudes is one of the key signatures common to the global warming computer models that indicate the warming is due to increased CO2 and not some other (i.e. natural) cause. Problem is, all the high altitude balloons, which would float through the area in question sending back temperature data, were telling us that the warming wasn’t there. So somebody came up with yet another computer model to show how the balloon thermometers could all be wrong and had somehow missed the warming that they just knew had to be there.
We need a new word for scientific mastrubation.