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Current or Currently Old Issues:
Michael Hudson: What do you mean “failure”? Your perspective is from the bottom looking up. But the financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down? The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10 percent now own 85 percent of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90 percent been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.
You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards, it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-02-08 10:45:19 CST |
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Allow me to paraphrase:
Premeditated murder by the state is OK because cops can shoot fleeing suspects at the scene of a crime and some nutbar statute in Florida says it's OK under not-so-extenuating circumstances. Also, we've been doing it routinely since 2002 for over half a century, so, um, it's totally cool. Even George W. did it! And often as not, it's ironic. Here is a ticking time bomb false scenario coupled to a false dichotomy, plus some exposition, so shut up.
I think that was the point, anyway. Such as whatever.
update: Oh, and now it's constitutional, too. Amazing.
Contra yglesias, when congress wants to they can impose all the restrictions they want with regard to the executive's conduct of foreign policy.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-02-05 01:01:00 CST |
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Curiously, this FOX Business report on the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America (MICA)'s efforts back in 2005 to get regulators to do their jobs and respond to some of the financial abuses feeding the housing bubble pretty much demolishes the transparently false narrative spun (once they stopped spinning that there was no housing bubble) by FOX News about how it was all the fault of ACORN and the GSEs. What happened? Did Rupert accidentally hire some reporters this time?
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-02-03 13:54:15 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2010-01-29 12:52:50 CST |
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you have a lot of different paths forward, all alike:
Press Sec. Gibbs' description of the administration's plan for passing a healthcare bill makes it sound like they're playing games.
I'm suddenly reminded of this classic.
It rather sounds like Obama just nixed the idea of passing the Senate bill through the House to get around this latest sexy inconvenience. He's very good at cutting off the exits while he's still lost in the maze. It's not 11-dimensional chess, it's just sokoban!
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-01-20 20:14:27 CST |
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The cosmo spread of the senator from MA is totally killing me. The man who will be the death of a healthcare bill that changes not-a-fucking-thing anyway (You're covered now! Oh dear, you seem to have had an accident! Oh dear, your coverage is being rescinded over this typo in your paperwork! We're so sorry for the inconvenience, but we still get to do that! *cha-ching*) is completely uncommon among the whores on capitol hill in that he really looks the part.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-01-20 01:00:40 CST |
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Lieutenant Commander Jeffrey Gordon probably wasn't aware he was describing his own organization when he said that:
"These guys were fanatics like the Nazis, Hitlerites, or the Ku Klux Klan, the people they tried at Nuremberg."
Lucky for them there won't be any trial, let alone justice, or half-assed apologies issued through some other chump press officer. They'll probably get presidential medals of freedom, at this rate. Not so lucky for the deceased, or the many still in gitmo awaiting their show trials or further untimely acts of asymmetrical warfare.
Al-Zahrani was a brigadier general in the Saudi police. He dismissed the Pentagon’s claims, as well as the investigation that supported them. Yasser, he said, was a young man who loved to play soccer and didn’t care for politics. The Pentagon claimed that Yasser’s frontline battle experience came from his having been a cook in a Taliban camp. Al-Zahrani said that this was preposterous: “A cook? Yasser couldn’t even make a sandwich!”
“Yasser wasn’t guilty of anything.” Al-Zahrani said. “He knew that. He firmly believed he would be heading home soon. Why would he commit suicide?” The evidence supports this argument. Hyperbolic U.S. government statements at the time of Yasser Al-Zahrani’s death masked the fact that his case had been reviewed and that he was, in fact, on a list of prisoners to be sent home. I had shown Al-Zahrani the letter that the government says was Yasser’s suicide note and asked him whether he recognized his son’s handwriting. He had never seen the note before, he answered, and no U.S. official had ever asked him about it. After studying the note carefully, he said, “This is a forgery.”
Also returned to Saudi Arabia was the body of Mani Al-Utaybi. Orphaned in youth, Mani grew up in his uncle’s home in the small town of Dawadmi. I spoke to one of the many cousins who shared that home, Faris Al-Utaybi. Mani, said Faris, had gone to Baluchistan—a rural, tribal area that straddles Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan—to do humanitarian work, and someone there had sold him to the Americans for $5,000. He said that Mani was a peaceful man who would harm no one. Indeed, U.S. authorities had decided to release Al-Utaybi and return him to Saudi Arabia. When he died, he was just a few weeks shy of his transfer.
Salah Al-Salami was seized in March 2002, when Pakistani authorities raided a residence in Karachi believed to have been used as a safe house by Abu Zubaydah and took into custody all who were living there at the time. A Yemeni, Al-Salami had quit his job and moved to Pakistan with only $400 in his pocket. The U.S. suspicions against him rested almost entirely on the fact that he had taken lodgings, with other students, in a boarding house that terrorists might at one point have used. There was no direct evidence linking him either to Al Qaeda or to the Taliban. On August 22, 2008, the Washington Post quoted from a previously secret review of his case: “There is no credible information to suggest [Al-Salami] received terrorist related training or is a member of the Al Qaeda network.” All that stood in the way of Al-Salami’s release from Guantánamo were difficult diplomatic relations between the United States and Yemen.
It's kind of funny when Al-Zahrani says that "There was evidence of torture on the upper torso, and on the palms of his hand. There were needle marks on his right arm and on his left arm. I am a law enforcement professional. I know what to look for when examining a body." As a brigadier general in the Saudi police he no doubt knows how to do that to a body.
Murdered, for all we know and among many others, in US custody. The fucking fried chicken and lemon fish was delicious, so we knew perfectly well it couldn't have been suicide.
Yee haw.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-01-19 19:23:11 CST |
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It's heartwarming to watch all these people who've organized or supported coup after coup after coup in Haiti explain to me how Haiti's story is so sad and tragic on top of this latest sad and tragic act of nature, and won't I please give them money so they can give that money to Haiti.
Paul Farmer's Partners in Health probably needs money even when there isn't a massive earthquake shaking peoples' wallets.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-01-15 17:59:33 CST |
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what'd i miss:
So a dude lit his leg on fire and stunk up a plane, or something? Surely we can come together as a nation and discover some reason to panic, hearts uflutter, and shortly begin bombing unrelated third parties over this.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-26 14:06:54 CST |
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multiple choice:
(a) "a straight-laced bureau whose job is to ground congressional fantasy in budgetary reality" and which "is biased toward the certain and the real and the measurable", OR (b) an agency whose "authority is belied by the highly speculative nature of its work," which is "keeper of the nation’s budgetary myths" and plagued by a "woeful record."
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-24 23:23:19 CST |
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line item taxes:
Obey and Levin had the right idea with that war surtax for the whatever we think we're doing in Afghanistan, but it didn't go far enough. We should really just be funding the entire Pentagon apparatus with a surtax that shows up on your paystub for a unified war budget. Everybody can see that big payment to the unified entitlement budget, FICA, and listen to their talk radio and get angry about paying welfare to the people who paid for their free educations so they could go be rats in the post-industrial maze and win those paystubs, but they wouldn't be so irrationally pre-occupied with it when they saw most of the rest being blown on a bloated system of national defense that is still fucking our troops in the goatass from over half a dozen wars ago.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-15 19:28:55 CST |
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Time's Man of the Year, 1951:
Over in TNR Abbas Milani makes this strangely common mistake:
Even as ardent a proponent of Pax Americana as Henry Luce felt comfortable making [1950s Iranian PM we overthrew in a CIA backed coup, etc] Time’s “Man of the Year.”
I don't know why this is always swung around like it was some sort of compliment. I've seen Stephen Kinzer, among others, make like it was high praise. But the article explaining his selection was paranoid, condescending, and not a little unkind to the guy, concluding that Mossadegh would inevitably hand Iran over to the commies. Time might as well have been begging for somebody to overthrow him. Maybe it did, I couldn't stomach all of it.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-09 20:15:11 CST |
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we're in good hands:
Today on NPR some envirowacko explained to me how if we restrict greenhouse emissions it will lead to more consumer choice at the gaspump, so we don't have to send our money to the Iranians. Then the econtard she was arguing with explained how we don't buy it from the Iranians but from Canada. So there you go: save the human race's environment with jingoism, save us from the envirowackos by rejecting everything you ever learned about global markets. Supply? Demand? Fuck it, it's who you know and where you buy it.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-08 21:43:14 CST |
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Barney Frank: "the big banks have no influence":
really!
In the first three quarters of 2009, financial-industry interests have spent $344 million on lobbying efforts, putting them on pace to break all records, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That’s just for lobbyists’ and lawyers’ salaries, junkets, and dinners, and doesn’t include political donations and issue ads. Even more impressive is the lobbying strategy that money is buying. According to insiders and industry e-mails obtained by NEWSWEEK, the banks have sought to stay in the background and put their corporate customers—a who’s who of American business, including Apple, Whirlpool, and John Deere—out in front of the campaign. “This is an orchestrated, well-funded effort by the banks to manipulate our legislation and leave no fingerprints,” says a congressional staffer involved in drafting the legislation. The staffer, who would speak only on condition of anonymity, passed on to NEWSWEEK nine pages of proposed changes in the legislation intended to protect trading from open scrutiny—all of it on paper without a letterhead—that she says came from Goldman Sachs. Samuel Robinson, a spokesman for Goldman, says “it’s not our document” but adds that Goldman has “an active and appropriate involvement in the process of government” and supports “sensible reform.”
It's a shame that they have no influence, it sounds like Goldman Sachs is just trying to do the right thing.
That reminds me, you should watch Lowell Bergman's report on how the banks have been doing just that.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-06 21:30:56 CST |
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we banned leaded fuels and lead-based paints because this isn't exactly rocket science:
It'd be really nice if - when the papers cover increased rates of particularly nasty health conditions in Iraq and point a finger at US DU munitions - they would not confuse the issue of depleted uranium's (low, per the "depleted") radioactivity and the well established and trivial fact that it is - like many heavy metals - cytotoxic and clastogenic, and getting it into your food chain or otherwise exposing the human organism to it isn't going to do a body any good.
Also, that story needs a big "AGAIN" tagged to the end of it's headlne.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-05 16:17:51 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-04 16:01:32 CST |
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Did the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035? Maybe it'd help to actually read what they'd referenced:
Over on Roger Peikle Sr.'s blog there's a triumphant gotchya about how the IPCC misquoted some paper, moving the impending doom of the Himalayan glaciers ahead 300 years, the post was picked up by Jonah Goldberg and is presently snowballing into an orgasm of stupidity across the intertubes:
Where did this number 2035 (the year when glaciers could vanish) come from?
According to Prof Graham Cogley (Trent University, Ontario), a short article on the future of glaciers by a Russian scientist (Kotlyakov, V.M., 1996, The future of glaciers under the expected climate warming, 61-66, in Kotlyakov, V.M., ed., 1996, Variations of Snow and Ice in the Past and at Present on a Global and Regional Scale, Technical Documents in Hydrology, 1. UNESCO, Paris (IHP-IV Project H-4.1). 78p estimates 2350 as the year for disappearance of glaciers, but the IPCC authors misread 2350 as 2035 in the Official IPCC documents, WGII 2007 p. 493!
So we have a raging debate about impending glacier melt-down because of sloppiness of some IPCC authors!
First, why the fuck ask Cogley? The fucking footnote is right there on page 493. Go look at the IPCC document, WGII 2007 p. 493, where it says,
Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other
part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate
continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035
and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at
the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present
500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).
Well, that doesn't look much like a reference to Kotlyakov, 1996. Maybe WWF, 2005 references Kotlyakov, 1996? WWF (WorldWildlife Fund), 2005:An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and
subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China.WorldWildlife Fund, Nepal Programme,
79 pp., which says:
As discussed in the thematic introduction to this regional status review, there is particular concern at the alarming rate of retreat of Himalayan glaciers. In 1999, a report by the Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology (WGHG) of the International Commission for Snow and Ice (ICSI) stated: "glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world
and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high". Direct observation of a select few snout positions out of the thousands of Himalayan glaciers indicate that they have been in a general state of decline over, at least, the past 150 years.
Maybe the WWF misquoted the ISCI '99 report? Obviously they're not quoting Kotlyakov's 1996 paper from the same group, since nothing in that quote resembles anything in K'96. Who is Nature and Science, 4(4), 2006, Anthwal, et al, Retreat of Himalayan Glaciers repeating, for that matter?
In the last 25 years a second 0.3ºC warming pulse caused northern hemisphere temperatures to rise to unprecedented levels in the last 1,000 years, with the 1990s representing the warmest decade and 1998 the hottest year of the millennium. Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 is very high.
According to this the ICIS'99 quote can be attributed to Ajay K. Naithani et.al. of said working group, not Kotlyakov. The Independent and Christian Science Monitor reported on the same 1999 study at the time, here and
here. Syed Iqbal Hasnain, another author of the '99 report, was actually just quoted defending his own numbers a month ago in a skeptic's rag. Nobody's been misquoted, as the WWF was quoting a different report, as was the IPCC, so nobody typoed anything.
It does seem to be a popular prediction based off "current rates", whatever they were, and the warming - like the IPCC report does in fact mention - has caused increased precipitation during the winter which has contributed to some recovery/slowdown, but whatever:
Kotlyakov 96 isn't referenced directly in either the IPCC report or the WWF report or Anthwal et. al.. Furthermore its 2350 projection is premised on a temperature rise in Central Asia of 1.5C by 2350 (from their 1990 temperatures, at that), which on an offhand google search is more than a few degrees less than is expected by the end of this century by said IPCC. For that matter, K96 says:
There has been a dramatic shrinkage-----d late even at catastrophic rates—in the glaciation area of the Tien Shari Mountains and within Central Asia. This results in a growing intensity of deglaciation-derived runoff and in its volumetric increase. The increment maximum (relative to 1975) is to be attained by the year 21100 [sic, 2110, it's an OCR doc], with a 3.5- fold increase in the absolute volume of melt-derived runoff; this volume will be declining with subsequent warming. The scope of the glaciation area decrease is impressive indeed. Glaciers will remain only in the high mountain parts of Central Asia, in compact glaciation areas....
The degradation of the extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be apparent in rising ocean level already by the year 2050, and there will be a drastic rise of the ocean thereafter caused by the deglaciation-derived runoff. This period will last from 200 to 300 years. The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates—its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 km² by the year 2350. Glaciers will survive only in the mountains of inner Alaska, on some Arctic archipelagos, within Patagonian ice sheets, in the Karakoram Mountains, in the Himalayas, in some regions of Tibet and on the highest mountain peaks in the temperature latitudes.
Which, well, what the fuck, what's the difference? It still sounds like the sky is falling, even if a few hunks of ice are left loitering around on a mountaintop in Tibet.
I would like to thank Dr Madhav Khandekar for putting his expertise to work by expertly not bothering to glance at the in-line footnotes and inventing other footnotes out of thin air in order to swirl up a temptest in a teapot. Here I was worried I might actually have to start reading Peikle's website, as it wasn't immediately obvious that it would be a waste of my time. It took two visits.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-02 12:19:46 CST |
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you know what grows on shrubs?:
Barries.
update: Mein comandante didn't think this joke was funny at all, until I explained it to her. She was the one who commented that Obama's Afpakispeech sounded like any given Bush speech, minus the feminist rhetoric. Well, I agreed with that, and anyway much of the policy hasn't fallen far from the shrub. Right, President George Bush II the Seconder, a junior tree, was "Shrub", I had to explain, and a common nickname for Barack is "Barry" (link added, because she didn't believe that it was in fact common, eat that dictator of jokistan!)
Hence!
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-12-01 17:38:07 CST |
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the CRU hack demonstrates that the skeptics are hacks:
I don't remember any singular event that has done more to convince me that global warming skeptics are a bunch of illiterate and/or dishonest buffoons who are incapable of checking google before firing off FOIA requests. I mean, there was that movie they made that arbitrarily and without explanation carved off 20 years of the temperature record in a graph falsely labeled "1880 and 2000" in the process of replicating Stanley Jevons' unfinished work of blaming everything under the sun on sunpots, but whatever, the graphics department didn't get the memo.
The decline being hidden is the tree ring proxy data since 1960 because of the super-secret conspiracy on the part of climate scientists that you can read about on wikipedia. The instrumental record and tree rings from Europe correlate prior to 1960, and diverge after 1960 for some unclear reasons - acid rain? ozone? global dimming? they won't say! because they don't know yet! - so the eggheads don't use the tree ring data after 1960 when reconstructing historic temperature records from that proxy. It's shocking! Why won't anybody publish anything about it in the literature!?
And then there's the Climate Research thing, where editors stepped down after the publication of Soon & Baliunas 2003, that proves, um, what?
Secondly, scientists on several occasions discussed methods of subverting the scientific peer review process to ensure that skeptical papers had no access to publication. In 2003, Tom Wigley of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, complained that paleoclimatologist Hans von Storch was responsible for “the publication of crap science ‘in order to stimulate debate’” and that they “must get rid of von Storch” (1051190249) as an editor of the journal Climate Research (he indeed subsequently resigned).
An episode Hans von Storch described thusly:
After a conflict with the publisher Otto Kinne of Inter-Research I stepped down on 28, July 2003 as Editor-in-Chief of Climate Research; the reason was that I as newly appointed Editor-in-Chief wanted to make public that the publication of the Soon & Baliunas article was an error, and that the review process at Climate Research would be changed in order to avoid similar failures. The review process had utterly failed; important questions have not been asked, as was documented by a comment in EOS by Mann and several coauthors. (The problem is not whether the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than the 20th century, or if Mann's hockey stick is realistic; the problem is that the methodological basis for such a conclusion was simply not given.) It was not the first time that the process had failed, but it was the most severe case. However, my authority as Editor-in-Chief did obviously not cover the publication of an editorial spelling out the problem. The publisher declined the publication, and I cancelled my task as Editor-in-Chief immediately on 28 July 2003.
Clearly Storch was run out of town by the alarmist mobs. A paper by industry-funded researchers did not disclose "the methodological basis" for its conclusions and made it through some new review process. He sounds like Stephen McIntyre, sans the FOIA requests for their personal email archives and publicly available raw data sets. Demands for openness from private sector skeptics will be followed by gag orders from public sector skeptics.
No doubt further scouring of the hacked archives will also shockingly reveal that scientists are notoriously poor software developers due to the inelegant pragmas of the alarmist, chicken-little FORTRAN language.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-11-30 12:06:40 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-11-27 15:27:46 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-11-26 14:24:45 CST |
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To be fair to Peter Galbraith, I too had a financial stake that influenced my positions on the Iraq war: not spending trillions of dollars on an invasion of that country - to the extent we ever actually had any of the trillions of dollars it cost, which is to say, none - in order to make Peter Galbraith hundreds of millions of dollars richer.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-11-12 07:08:23 CST |
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our primary objective in Afghanistan is to capture toughness:
The one clear foreign policy goal Robert Kaplan evinces here would be better served by the POTUS doing some bench presses and showing off his massive pectorals in a glossy spread for Men's Health.
Really.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-10-13 09:55:40 CST |
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Obviously US outreach efforts to the Muslim-Arab audience in the middle east should be spearheaded by Israeli lobbyists from AIPAC, nobody dare question the wisdom of that, but a San Fran librul? That's insane.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-10-13 07:48:16 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-09-28 17:33:11 CST |
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what is the american enterprise institute planning to do about federal intervention between you and your dog?:
The more I think about it the more weird it is that author Alston Chase is an "adjunct scholar" at the American Enterprise Institute. Back in the day he was writing interesting tracts on ecology, and spent the 90s writing climatologists-can't-predict-the-weather stuff before shutting his trap after '97, when he became pre-occupied with snooping through the CIA's old MKULTRA blowback. But why would the current author of an apparently lovely book about the dogs we love be in the employ of the AEI? Is it the government's fault we love our dogs to a fault? I don't know if I want to know.
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-09-09 00:22:24 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-09-02 10:04:08 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-09-01 23:11:19 CST |
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:: posted by buermann @ 2009-09-01 21:57:41 CST |
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his predecessors had a track record of 189 years:
You'll just have to overlook the fact that his rounding of 7.25 years to a full 8 erases the memory of 9/11, or something:
DICK CHENEY: I guess the other thing that offends the hell out of me, frankly, Chris, is we had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda. The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, 'How did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time?'
:: posted by buermann @ 2009-08-31 14:36:29 CST |
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