OK. This is a foofy little satire about President Obama being compared to Mr. Spock by columnist for the New York Times Maureen Dowd. Turns out, as I watched it, I realized this is a clever essay that correctly argues that Mr. Spock is not the person that should be in the captain’s seat.

The Dowd Conundrum

OK, so I saw this little gem this morning that is being plastered all over Israel. It sort of sums up my feelings as to President Obama’s foreign policy to date.

To be fair, I don’t think President Obama… well, *I hope*… President Obama is fully against letting Iran and North Korea have nuclear weapons. But it is naive for him to think that he can negotiate his way out of Iran and N. Korea out of their nuclear programs. He can’t even convince half of America he is competent, and most of that half just disagrees with his ideology. So what makes him think he can convince two groups of people that hate America to stop, especially without leverage?

Since he has taken office, both Iran and North Korea have accelerated their progams and both are affirmatively testing what Obama will do about it. Let’s face it, the UN isn’t going to do anything unless the U.S. makes a stink. North Korea has launched long range missiles and performed a second underground nuclear test… and what have we done about it??? Nothing. Even our condemnation of the acts is weak.

As I said, I don’t think President Obama wants Iran and North Korea to have nucs, but his lack of doing anything about it is getting really close to impliedly rubber stamping their nuclear weapons programs.

The headline:

Iran’s Ahmadinejad rejects Western nuclear proposal.

The text:

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday rejected a Western proposal for it to “freeze” its nuclear work in return for no new sanctions and ruled out any talks with major powers on the issue.

The comments by the conservative president, who is seeking a second term in a June 12 election, are likely to further disappoint the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama, which is seeking to engage Iran diplomatically.

Did anybody with a brain, for even a nanosecond, really believe that the Iran problem was going to be solved diplomatically? These guys have been playing a complex PR game now for years, and we somehow expected that to change because Barak Obama was elected?

Iran will come to the bargaining table when they have the nuclear missile in their pocket and pointed at Israel. Then they will make their demands. And why wouldn’t they? Who wants to come to the bargaining table knowing they have the weak position? It is better to negotiate when you are doing so from a position of strength.

The Iran problem must be addressed. And now. We simply cannot allow crazies to have nucs for our own personal safety. We need to shut down Iran’s nuclear program. Economic sanctions might work, but we have to be serious about it. Alternately, a few well place bombs might do the trick.

Oh, and if you want a compelling reason why even a single nuclear warhead attached to a missile is a problem. Read about electromagnetic pulses — which could be the most devestating threat to the United States.

This from Politico:

Obama will argue that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques such as waterboarding are not the most effective, undermine the rule of law, alienate the U.S. in the world, serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America.

The president will say that while the nation must ensure that its security measures and our justice system are ready to address the threats of the 21st century, the Obama administration will uphold America’s laws and its values that are the reason we have become the strongest nation in the world and persisted through crises that have threatened our core.

Obama will say that the paramount responsibility of any president is to keep the American people safe. That is what he thinks about every morning when he wakes up and every night when he goes to sleep. The president believes with every fiber of his being that we cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values. (emphasis added.)

During the election, I heard a pro-Obama lawyer in my office accuse a pro-McCain lawyer in the office that the only reason he wouldn’t vote for Obama is fear (presumabably fear of a black person as president). That sort of attitude seems pretty prevalent, even now.

Pro-Obama supporters are right in a sense. I do fear the Obama administration. Not because President Obama is black. But because of what Obama does. He may have flourishing rhetoric and he is a gifted politician, but as George Will points out in the article quoted below, what scares me about Obama is the “tinctiture of lawlessness” we are seeing from the Obama-run federal government.

Will points out:

Anyway, the Obama administration, judging by its cavalier disregard of contracts between Chrysler and some of the lenders it sought money from, thinks contracts are written on water. The administration proposes that Chrysler’s secured creditors get 28 cents per dollar on the $7 billion owed to them but that the United Auto Workers union get 43 cents per dollar on its $11 billion in claims — and 55 percent of the company. This, even though the secured creditors’ contracts supposedly guaranteed them better standing than the union.

…

The Economist says the administration has “ridden roughshod over [creditors'] legitimate claims over the [automobile companies'] assets. . . . Bankruptcies involve dividing a shrunken pie. But not all claims are equal: some lenders provide cheaper funds to firms in return for a more secure claim over the assets should things go wrong. They rank above other stakeholders, including shareholders and employees. This principle is now being trashed.” Tom Lauria, a lawyer representing hedge fund people trashed by the president as the cause of Chrysler’s bankruptcy, asked that his clients’ names not be published for fear of violence threatened in e-mails to them.

Yes, I am scared. I am scared of high taxes and wealth redistribution. I am scared of increasing Federal power dictated by elitists on the coasts and non-reflective of traditional American values. I am scared of what high taxes will do with our economy in terms of incentive and ingenuity. On the incentive point, I am scared that America will lose its economic influence in the world, which is part of what secures our comfortable lifestyle and provides for the peaceful defense (for the most part). I am scared that the whim of the president and his friends (and make no mistake, if you are not a friend of Obama you are deemed an enemy, citizen or not) dictate to businesses what they must do, how they must act, and the metes and bounds of contracts already entered into, even when contrary what was agreed–all this by people who have never sat in a corporate board room, let alone been to a corporate board room.

Yes. I am scared. Not of Obama’s skin, but of what Obama is doing.

I am ending my subscription to National Geographic this year because of the magazine’s insistence on shoving global warming down my throat.

Today’s article about global cooling by National Geographic Online caught my attention:

A prolonged lull in solar activity has astrophysicists glued to their telescopes waiting to see what the sun will do next—and how Earth’s climate might respond.

The sun is the least active it’s been in decades and the dimmest in a hundred years. The lull is causing some scientists to recall the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850.

The coldest period of the Little Ice Age, between 1645 and 1715, has been linked to a deep dip in solar storms known as the Maunder Minimum.

During that time, access to Greenland was largely cut off by ice, and canals in Holland routinely froze solid. Glaciers in the Alps engulfed whole villages, and sea ice increased so much that no open water flowed around Iceland in the year 1695.

To summarize, the first part of this article explains how the Little Ice Age corresponds to a lack of solar activity. Then this:

But researchers are on guard against their concerns about a new cold snap being misinterpreted.

“[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward,” said Mike Lockwood, a solar terrestrial physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. []

He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call “preemptive denial” of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.

Even if the current solar lull is the beginning of a prolonged quiet, the scientists say, the star’s effects on climate will pale in contrast with the influence of human-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2).

“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal, whereas the decline in solar output is a few hundredths of one percent down,” Lockwood said. “I think that helps keep it in perspective.” (emphasis added.)

Since when do real scientists form “preemptive” conclusions? The scientific model requires hypothesis, followed by experimentation to confirm or deny the hypothesis. Moreover, a hypothesis is only good until a single a single counterexample is found, at which time a new hypothesis is formed to account for the new observation.

For example, in the 17th century Newton proposed a set of laws of physics termed, appropriately, Newtonian Physics. The laws were based on observation. However, Einstein’s work disproved the Newtonian laws. Turns out, Newtonian Physics are a reasonable approximation for low speed mechanical systems. At high speed (i.e., approaching the speed of light), Newton Physics break down and do not behave as Newton’s model predicts. Einstein revised the Newtonian hypothesis and suggested that the Newtonian model needed to account for relativity. In the face of conflicting evidence, Einstein revised the hypothesis.

Compare that to these so-called researchers. In the face of conflicting evidence, they are standing by the old model and preemptively coming up with reasons (not experimental results) to support the old hypothesis. Is that how we conduct science now? This activity is referred to as data mining by honest researchers. Data mining starts with the conclusion and builds evidence to support it (real science works the opposite direction). In so doing, a data miner typically throws out data that doesn’t support the conclusion or rationalizes why the data understates or overstates their desired position.

What is the evidence that these researchers are missing? The article spells it out in a simple syllogism. First, the article points out the lack of solar activity over the last few years (see my prior post in support of this hypothesis). It is then pointed out that a solar minimum likely contributed to the Little Ice Age. The logical conclusion then, is that because low solar activity is observed now, then we should observe a period of cooling (which we are), supporting a reasonable hypothesis that the sun has a strong effect on global climate change.

Note, the so-called National Geographic researchers point out that the sun’s activity is only “a few hundredths of one percent down,”  compared with the doubling of CO2. They fail to mention that CO2 in our atmosphere makes up 0.0383% of the atmospheric gasses. Double that, and you get an astounding 0.0766% of our atmosphere, an increase of a few hundredths of one percent!

Notice that by framing the decrease in solar output in terms of “a few hundredths of one percent” and the purported increase in CO2 in terms of “double,” it seems as thought the CO2 phenomena is a more pronounced change, even though the relative amount of both the purported change of CO2 in the atmosphere and the change in solar output can be reduced to the same, meaningless pile of words that don’t say anything about anything unless they are placed in the proper context, together with other influencing variables.

To wit, these researchers should spend more time in the lab revising the global warming hypothesis and testing it, than arguing why the prior hypotheses are still valid in the face of evidence that appears to be providing the single counterexample to invalidate the old hypothesis.

Of course, the real motivation is money. Without money they can’t do science, and the money doesn’t flow freely to those who question the religion of global warming, especially now that it appears our Federal Government is pushing the pro-global warming agenda wholeheartedly. As I have said before, science and politics arewater and oil — if we are going to do science like this, let’s make up whatever scientific conclusions are politically expedient in the day and save the money that would otherwise be used to produce the data-mined results that support whatever preconceived conclusions that put the most money and influence into the pockets of the pols.

My Aunt Liz pointed mt to this New York Times article on the reaction to Susan Boyle. Of course, the NYT can’t have a single article without singing praise to our Commander-in-Chief. That aside, the article is interesting because it provides an explanation as to why we stereotype and make snap first impression judgments.

I contend, however, that the baser instincts that are alluded to in the article are the “animal” part of us. The goal, at least from a religious point of view, is to put the animal aside and become human (a saint). On the other hand, there is a certain sense about stereotypes — especially where it comes to fast recognition of danger.

When I have been introduced to people in the past, I usually end up most interested in friendship with the people that I initially am least “attracted to.” Not attracted in a boy-girl sense, but attracted in a this person looks funny or cool sense. I am attracted to the cool people, but have the most in common once I cut through the first impression with the people who have the most substance. That probably says something about me: I think I’m cool, but really I am just a garden variety dork.

I recently debated some guys on my biking forum (STR) regarding the merits of global warming. Unfortunately, I was moderated and my posts were deleted as being off topic. I will therefore post here where I cannot be moderated.

I recently found the article copied below. In the coming days, I would like to post a number of references that call into question man-made global warming.

To a point in the article, however, I assert that ten years is too short a time say whether global warming is or isn’t happening. Moreover, it is important to note that pre-2001 there is little dispute that global warming was occurring. But as those proponents of global warming don’t hesitate to use one hurricane, or even a really hot day to interject that it must be global warming, the rules of the argument have been framed: use of irrelevantly short periods for making your point is permitted.

It should also be noted that the critics of global warming do not dispute global warming per se, rather they dispute that global warming is due to man-made carbon emissions. A number of sources are suggesting that carbon emissions have almost nothing to do with global warming or cooling.

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

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Her answer may have cost runner-up Miss California the title of Ms. USA, but in my eyes, she is the big winner of the night.

Asked by openly gay judge Perez Hilton her stance on gay marriage, she answered man and woman only. Apparently (unconfirmed – just rumor on the interweb), he gave her a very low score for the answer.

The liberal blogs are having an ad hominem field day (i.e., business as normal).

I have to hand it to her. That was probably the hardest answer ever given in the Ms. USA pageant. Watching the video, you could just see the question register in her eyes — she must have know that the answer she gave wouldn’t be the popular or politically correct answer.

But it was the correct answer. Good for her.