I question the accuracy of this tool

Just one of those things you have to try, like emu burgers at Sunfest.
Since the embed code for the graphic includes a link [removed] to a site offering usurious loans, and a hotlink [also removed] for the image, it is a form of spam, isn't it? But just too tasty to pass by. Would they even bother to check reading level, whatever is meant by that. If The Volokh Conspiracy is junior-high level and Rand Simberg is high-school level; and bloggers at those sites are smarter than I am (they are, you know); then maybe I ought to try writing a bit differently?

What? And compromise my artistic integrity? They don't pay me enough for that!

Update: Further research on this at The Periodic Table.

More on biofuels

Glenn Reynolds, linking to George Monbiot at the Grauniad, says "BIOFUELS are now officially evil." Monbiot (rhymes with moonbat), a leader among the global warmingists, has been writing to this effect about biofuels for a while. A few months, anyway. Which shows that a stopped clock, and so on.

Now Jerry Pournelle's readers enter the fray. Dr. Pournelle says, "We don't need the ethanol in the first place. Better we produce gallons and gallons and make every Senator and Member of Congress drink two quarts a day of absolute alcohol diluted however they like. They couldn't do worse, could they?"

Sounds like a plan.

It's starting to get confusing: since pollution cools the Earth, the Greens ought to be in favor of burning more stuff, but they don't want to burn stuff, since that liberates carbon, making more CO2, which warms the Earth, which is bad; but pollution is bad, and so is drilling for oil, which results in burning stuff, which would cool the Earth, which would alleviate Global Warming™, which would be good, except for the pollution, which defiles Mother Gaia. Maybe I'll try to diagram this. Not right now. It's important (isn't it?) to avoid the Fallen Angels scenario.

By the way, I'm seriously tired of seeing Walt Kelly's line "We have met the enemy, and he is us" used about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with littering! Pogo the possum was talking about littering! Tires in the creek, and that sort of thing. Dammit. Carelessness, not evil or subversion.

Here previously: Biofuel problems, Progress on biofuels, Ethanol scam at Rolling Stone.

Baghdad church re-opened

This has to be good.

Glenn Reynolds has a roundup of reactions.

Potted history of climate alarmism

Sure it's a word. If you can have alarmists, you gotta have alarmism. It's in the Telegraph: The deceit behind global warming.

If you want something done right

… don't let your opponents do it. J.R. Dunn at The American Thinker, The 'Torture' Fraud of the Left:

It's no news that the Bush Administration has done a horrible job of selling itself and its policies. Bush, being a Texan, evidently believes that accomplishments speak for themselves. But the great world, unfortunately, is not Texas. If you don't create your own narrative, lay down your own version of events, someone else is going to do it for you. And you probably will not like the results.

The Administration has been getting kicked around by the media since election day in 2000. All the slick PR people are Democrats, it seems. Or as Simon says in a comment at Althouse,

The reason that the anti-war side is winning the propaganda war (or if you'd rather use a term with less pejorative connotations, "war of words" is because this administration has systematically failed to make the case for what we're doing in Iraq, why it's important we're there, how we're going to move forwards, and what the consequences of surrender would be. The current administration has failed, over and over again, even the most basic communications competency, and in a democracy, that's a fatal flaw, because when you're doing something important and the people turn against you, ceteris paribus, in due course they're going to reassert themselves and shut it down. If we now yank troops out, it won't be because of the myriad failings in the conduct of the war itself, it'll be because the administration has failed to carry the public.

Thanks for the Dunn piece to Gagdad Bob, who says, among much else,"There is no sanctimonious moral scold like leftist moral scold -- for example, you are the moral equivalent of Hitler if you don't believe in Al Gore's weather hysteria." Both linked posts are worth a RTWT. And see It's cold on Presidents' Day, here in February.

What song the lightning sang

Commenter Bill Higgins at Making Light mentions a new musical instrument, the Zeusaphone.

If you found that interesting, do click through to the Youtube page, where there is some information on the instrument and its builder, Steve Ward.

Oh dear. This would be tough on the roadies, if you wanted one for your band. Here's a duet on "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy." This double coil has a more mellow tone.

Who farted?

Hitler farted!

Hillary! finds GWB's analogies "faulty and offensive"

Her whole statement:

“George Bush’s faulty and offensive historical analogies aren’t going to end the war in Iraq, make America safer or bring our troops home. Americans are tired of the President’s efforts to play politics with national security and practice the politics of division.

“When I am President I will end the war in Iraq and bring our troops home safely.”

That's a lot to ask of a few analogies. But which analogies were those, you ask? She might have been more specific. Mark Hemingway thinks it was the ones in which he compared Osama bin Laden to Lenin and Hitler. From the speech:

We must take the words of the enemy seriously. The terrorists have stated their objectives. They intend to build a totalitarian Islamic empire -- encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In pursuit of their imperial aims, these extremists say there can be no compromise or dialog with those they call infidels -- a category that includes America, the world's free nation [sic], Jews, and all Muslims who reject their extreme vision of Islam. They reject the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the free world. Again, hear the words of Osama bin Laden last year: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

History teaches that underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, the world ignored the words of Lenin, as he laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia -- and the world paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war.

In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews -- and the world paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives and treasure.

Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. And the question is: Will we listen? America and our coalition partners are listening. We have made our choice. We take the words of the enemy seriously. Over the past six years, we have captured or killed hundreds of terrorists. We have disrupted their finances. We have prevented new attacks before they could be carried out. We removed regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq that had supported terrorists and threatened our citizens, and in so doing, liberated 50 million people from the clutches of tyranny.

I'm baffled trying to sort this out. Certainly those two were greater villains, in the sense that they killed greater numbers, so is she taking Osama's side, suggesting that the President is being mean to bin Laden by comparing him to those two? Or were Lenin and Hitler the ones being unfairly maligned?

These are the questions that Hemingway was wondering about when he asked the leaders of the Communist Party USA and American Nazi Party if they felt offended by the President's analogies.

So if you’re keeping score, Hillary Clinton finds Bush’s historical analogy, comparing Osama Bin Laden to Hitler and Lenin, wrong and offensive. She is joined by the Communist Party USA, who also find the analogy offensive — apparently because Lenin didn’t do anything wrong. The American Nazi Party is, frankly, flattered by the comparison — which it gleefully extends to George Washington for reasons only a mental health professional knows. And everybody involved hates George W. Bush.

Somehow I doubt these are the ideological compatriots Clinton was seeking out when she suggested that the President’s analogy was “faulty and offensive.” But if the American Nazi Party and Communist Party USA are not the company in which Clinton wishes to place herself, then what did she mean? I, for one, would be grateful for some clarification about exactly how evil the Senator regards Osama Bin Laden — if he’s not fairly mentioned in the same breath as Hitler and Lenin.

Otherwise, I might suggest that the Senator’s Clintonian parsing has gotten out of hand. Or have we really reached a point at which it depends on what your definition of “megalomaniacal threat to Western civilization” is?

Later in the speech, though, the President makes a couple more historical analogies. Maybe this passage is what she found faulty and offensive:

We can have confidence in this cause because we have seen the power of liberty to transform nations and secure peace before. Here at the Heritage Foundation, you understand this better than most. During the Cold War, there were loud voices in Washington who argued for accommodation of the Soviet Union -- because they believed the watchword of our policy should be "stability." At Heritage, you knew that when it came to the Soviet Union, the watchword of our policy should be "freedom."

Together with a great President named Ronald Reagan, you championed a policy of rolling back communism oppression and bringing freedom to nations enslaved by communist tyranny. And by taking the side of dissidents, who helped millions across the world throw off the shackles of communism, you helped build the free and peaceful societies that are the true sources of stability and peace in the world.

And now we're at the start of a new century, and the same debate is once again unfolding -- this time regarding my policy in the Middle East. Once again, voices in Washington are arguing that the watchword of the policy should be "stability." And once again they're wrong. In Kabul, in Baghdad, in Beirut, and other cities across the broader Middle East, brave men and women are risking their lives every day for the same freedoms we enjoy. And like the citizens of Prague and Warsaw and Budapest in the century gone by, they are looking to the United States to stand up for them, speak out for them, and champion their cause. And we are doing just that.

We are standing with those who yearn for the liberty -- who yearn for liberty in the Middle East, because we understand that the desire for freedom is universal, written by the Almighty into the hearts of every man, woman and child on this Earth.

We are standing with those who yearn for liberty in the Middle East, because we know that the terrorists fear freedom even more than they fear our firepower. They know that given a choice, no one will choose to live under their dark ideology of violence and death.

We're standing with those who yearn for liberty in the Middle East, because we know that when free societies take root in that part of the world, they will yield the peace we all desire. See, the only way the terrorists can recruit operatives and suicide bombers is by feeding on the hopelessness of societies mired in despair. And by bringing freedom to these societies, we replace hatred with hope, and this will help us to marginalize the extremists and eliminate the conditions that feed radicalism, and make the American people more secure.

The lessons of the past have taught us that liberty is transformative. And I believe 50 years from now an American President will be speaking to Heritage and say, thank God that generation that wrote the first chapter in the 21st century understood the power of freedom to bring the peace we want.

Could it be that what is "faulty and offensive" is the comparison of the Cold War and the rolling back of Communism to the current war and the rolling back of what exactly? Terrorism? Totalitarianism? Islamo-fascism? Many of the Democrats seem to think there is no war; from the middle of the speech:

I know that when I discuss the war on terror, some here in Washington, D.C. dismiss it as political rhetoric -- an attempt to scare people into votes. Given the nature of the enemy and the words of its leaders, politicians who deny that we are at war are either being disingenuous or naive. Either way, it is dangerous for our country. We are at war -- and we cannot win this war by wishing it away or pretending it does not exist.

Unfortunately, on too many issues, some in Congress are behaving as if America is not at war.

The analogy would be faulty if there were no enemy, and offensive if Hillary! regarded herself as being depicted on the wrong side in the struggle between the "stability" and the "freedom" factions, or if she regarded the depiction of the accomodationists, the "stability" faction, as being in the wrong, as demeaning.

The enemy is not Islam per se, nor any particular nation, which makes the enemy exceedingly difficult to define. Difficult to find, too; they hide among civilians and use them as shields as a matter of policy. The President's opponents, seeking advantage wherever they can, would like the public to confuse difficulty with impossibility, and then, the undefinable with the nonexistent.

Should those opponents achieve the power they seek, they will have to choose. They can continue to defend Western civilization in whatever way they can, though the word "war" will by denied them by their own choosing. Or they can continue in their current path, denying the existence of an enemy, as we lose an embassy here, a warship there, airplanes, buildings, who knows what. This war has been going on over a thousand years. It warms, it cools, it continues. Some of the quiet spells have lasted over a century. But the first overseas enemies the US faced and defeated were the Barbary Pirates, 200 years ago. [The XYZ Affair fighting was closer to home, off our shores and in the Caribbean.] That was the first US battle in the war that we are fighting now. "Shores of Tripoli," as you remember. Which makes Bush the inheritor of the mantle of Jefferson. How about that!

To get back to Hillary!'s statement for a minute: she finds the President's analogies "faulty and offensive," but does not tell us what their faults are, or in what way they offend. She goes on to say that the analogies will not accomplish the goals of ending the war, making America safer, of bringing the troops home. If the analogies had been less faulty, less offensive, would they have been able to do those things? Oh come on, they're analogies, mere words. They don't have the strength to accomplish anything. Although one sees this kind of magical thinking on the Left often enough: good intentions count more than actual deeds, words have power to make a difference in the physical world.

She goes on to say that when (not "if") she becomes President she will accomplish two of the three goals. She'll end the war and bring the troops home safely, but she won't make America safer. Seems about right: such a display of weakness would only lead to more aggressive attacks by our enemies. When Bill was President, it was an embassy here, a warship there, the first WTC bomb, and so forth; Democrats regard that period as a Golden Age. So there is a level of losses, some number of airplanes hijacked, some number of buildings blown up, and so on, that Hillary! and the Democrats find acceptable and would like to return to. That's a policy of being the victim of a war of attrition, and not responding. The sentence "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute!" comes to mind. The origin of that slogan is disputed. Still, it resonates with Kipling's

It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:—

“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”

Jizya, Danegeld, attrition, whatever. Do I ramble? A bit, a bit.

There is one more historical analogy that might be offensive to someone: it's in that last paragraph,

I believe 50 years from now an American President will be speaking to Heritage and say, thank God that generation that wrote the first chapter in the 21st century understood the power of freedom to bring the peace we want.

Of course this is historical in a projective sense, it's history that has not happened yet. But to one who thought her party should have been writing that chapter, and would have written it differently—that could be offensive. "It should have been us that that future President was/will be praising! Not them!" Maybe that's the one.

Update: Interesting that Jay Tea at Wizbang! uses the Harper and Kipling quotes, in equally close proximity, on another topic. Great minds, you know.

College education, value of

Having a college education does not entitle you to anything. If you did it right, it makes you more capable of something. This Washington Post article, Fulfillment Elusive for Young Altruists In the Crowded Field of Public Interest, occasions some comment at Transterrestrial Musings and Althouse. Commenter M. Simon at Transterrestrial says, "I have one year of college and wound up as an aerospace engineer. How did that happen? The degree is not the ticket. You are the ticket."

The number of people going to college expanded enormously in the last century.
That's hard to read without gridlines. It's from PBS, based on the Statistical Abstract. Click to see it better. Per capita, more college graduates now than high school grads in 1940; more college grads now than high school and college grads put together for the first 160 years or so of this country's existence. This is the kind of quantitative change that is large enough to become a qualitative change. Or it would be, if high school were as tough now as it was then, and likewise college. A good education is still available; but so are diplomas and degrees for time served and tuition paid.

New Math, it's wonderful

Or not.

Publishers need new textbooks to sell, even in fields that have not changed. Professors of education need to publish new theories and methods. Children just need to learn arithmetic.

Found a while back at Jerry Pournelle's place.

Update, Nov. 28: Michelle Malkin and her commenters have plenty to say on this. The comments are particularly good, and they are not partisan. This is really not a partisan issue at all.

Victory parade in Ramadi, Iraq

Video of the parade, with drums, flowers, smiling children, at Perfunction. This can't be Bush-concocted propaganda, since it will never appear in the big newspapers or on broadcast TV, and after all, propaganda that isn't seen might as well not exist. Here's an article on the parade and related developments from the official Multi-National Force website.

Michelle Malkin has: AP reports: “Thousands Return to Safer Iraqi Capital.” Jules Crittenden has a roundup of British reports, including this:

Smoking hookah pipes and drinking beer, Sarmad Ali joked and gossiped long into the night with a group of friends in Baghdad – a luxury they could not enjoy a few months ago because of the violence.

Slightly tipsy, the young men piled into a minibus and drove to Palestine Street, until recently a no-go area after dark but now filled with traffic and pedestrians. They pulled up outside a recently opened late-night restaurant, which serves sheep’s head on bread, a favourite dish for Iraqi men after a few drinks.

Such hangouts, called pacha restaurants, closed after the 2003 invasion because people were too scared to go out late in the evening. “We were surprised to see a pacha restaurant open again,” said Mr Ali, a 28-year-old contractor. “It is a clear sign that things are getting back to normal.”

I wonder if you need a few drinks to eat that.

Defense contractor is a non-profit charity

Concurrent Technologies, just one of Rep. John Murtha's earmark-funded home district projects. From the Washington Post:

Concurrent Technologies began two decades ago doing metalworking research in Pennsylvania's struggling rust belt. In the years since, the Johnstown, Pa., company has become a federal contracting chameleon.

It is an intelligence adviser, an environmental consultant and a software engineering specialist. It has trained mine-detecting dogs and managed religion-based initiatives. It oversees construction projects, organizes conferences and studies ways to use hydrogen for fuel in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. Missile-defense research is part of its portfolio. So is the development of special armor for combat vehicles in Iraq and "solid waste technology" in Florida.

And it is a nonprofit charity.

Behind the rise of Concurrent is Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee, who helped arrange funding to launch the organization in 1988. Murtha has since arranged millions of dollars more in directed congressional appropriations called earmarks. Now Concurrent has nearly $250 million in annual revenue and 1,500 employees.

It's a floor wax and a dessert topping! How do dey do dat?

Unlike many other big contractors, Concurrent pays no income tax on most of its revenue. Unlike nonprofit, federally funded research-and-development corporations, it is not chartered by the federal government.

According to Concurrent's chief financial officer, Edward J. Sheehan Jr., the Internal Revenue Service approved Concurrent as a charity because it "lessens the burden on governance" and helps "the federal government and American industry to perform more effectively through the use of emerging technologies."

Oh. ˙ǝsuǝs sǝʞɐɯ ʇɐɥʇ 'uǝɥʇ llǝʍ

Comments are interesting, for once, at the WaPo. From ThatPoliticalBlog, via Glenn Reynolds.

CBC video: Doomsday Called Off

I suppose the Canadians might be in favor of a bit of warming. Global Warming: Doomsday Called Off.

Happy birthday, Alfred Wegener

Back when I used to live in a university town, I would occasionally see a bumper sticker saying "Reunite Gondwanaland!" I wondered what the people with the "Free Tibet!" stickers made of that. Now, thanks to Luboš Motl, I find that it should have said "Reunite Pangaea!" Anyway, a happy (slightly belated) 127th to the pioneer of continental drift theory. The consensus was against him.

Click through for maps, a portrait, and real discussion (more than this pitiful stub of a post).

New climate video from Warren Meyer

Details at Coyote Blog.

IPCC scientists against Gore

A couple of items. From the WSJ:

My Nobel Moment
By JOHN R. CHRISTY
November 1, 2007; Page A19

I've had a lot of fun recently with my tiny (and unofficial) slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, though I was one of thousands of IPCC participants, I don't think I will add "0.0001 Nobel Laureate" to my resume.

The other half of the prize was awarded to former Vice President Al Gore, whose carbon footprint would stomp my neighborhood flat. But that's another story.

Both halves of the award honor promoting the message that Earth's temperature is rising due to human-based emissions of greenhouse gases. The Nobel committee praises Mr. Gore and the IPCC for alerting us to a potential catastrophe and for spurring us to a carbonless economy.

I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

[…] We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we've seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.

One of the challenges in studying global climate is keeping a global perspective, especially when much of the research focuses on data gathered from spots around the globe. Often observations from one region get more attention than equally valid data from another.

The recent CNN report "Planet in Peril," for instance, spent considerable time discussing shrinking Arctic sea ice cover. CNN did not note that winter sea ice around Antarctica last month set a record maximum (yes, maximum) for coverage since aerial measurements started.

Linked from Newsbusters and Eric Scheie, via Glenn Reynolds.

A Newsbusters commenter links to Lawrence Solomon at the Financial Post, writing about Dr. Vincent Gray:

IPCC too blinkered and corrupt to save
Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post
Published: Friday, October 26, 2007

Vincent Gray has begun a second career as a climate-change activist. His motivation springs from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body that combats global warming by advocating the reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Dr. Gray has worked relentlessly for the IPCC as an expert reviewer since the early 1990s.

But Dr. Gray isn't an activist in the cause of enforcing the Kyoto Protocol and realizing the other goals of the worldwide IPCC process. To the contrary, Dr. Gray's mission, in his new role as cofounder of The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, is to stop the IPCC from spreading climate-change propaganda that undermines the integrity of science.

"The whole process is a swindle," he states, in large part because the IPCC has a blinkered mandate that excludes natural causes of global warming.

" The Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 1992 defined 'climate change' as changes in climate caused by human interference with atmospheric composition," he explains. "The task of the IPCC, therefore, has been to accumulate evidence to support this belief that all changes in the climate are caused by human interference with the atmosphere. Studies of natural climate change have largely been used to claim that these are negligible compared with 'climate change.' "

Dr. Gray is one of the 2,000 to 2,500 top scientists from around the world whom the IPCC often cites as forming the basis of its findings. No one has been a more faithful reviewer than Dr. Gray over the years -- he has been an IPCC expert almost from the start, and perhaps its most prolific contributor, logging almost 1,900 comments on the IPCC's final draft of its most recent report alone.

But Dr. Gray, who knows as much about the IPCC's review processes as anyone, has been troubled by what he sees as an appalling absence of scientific rigour in the IPCC's review process.

"Right from the beginning, I have had difficulty with this procedure. Penetrating questions often ended without any answer. Comments on the IPCC drafts were rejected without explanation, and attempts to pursue the matter were frustrated indefinitely.

"Over the years, as I have learned more about the data and procedures of the IPCC, I have found increasing opposition by them to providing explanations, until I have been forced to the conclusion that for significant parts of the work of the IPCC, the data collection and scientific methods employed are unsound. Resistance to all efforts to try and discuss or rectify these problems has convinced me that normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic, and was part of the organization from the very beginning."

Consensus? As Paul Reiter said to John Stossel, the IPCC is a political organization, not a scientific one.

The brighter side of global warming, part 2: Greenland

The NY Times had a piece on Sunday, Warming Revives Flora and Fauna in Greenland. Much interesting information, including this sentence:

When using the words “growing” in connection with Greenland in the same sentence, it is important to remember that although Greenland is the size of Europe, it has only nine conifer forests like Mr. Bjerge’s, all of them cultivated.

By Wednesday morning, another couple of paragraphs had been added to the article:

Correction: October 30, 2007

An article on Sunday about the effect of climate change in Greenland misstated its geographic size relative to Europe. It is about one-quarter as big, not the same size.

That would be the single easiest thing in the article to check. The Times' reputation for accuracy is further enhanced.

Also of interest in this article is the mention of the Medieval Optimum (though not by name; the warmingists do not like to discuss it) and the Little Ice Age:

Greenland, a self-governing province of Denmark, was settled by the pugilistic Viking Erik the Red in the 10th century, after his murderous ways got him ejected from Iceland. Legend has it that he called it Greenland as a way to entice others to join him, and, in fact, it was.

It was relatively green then, with forests and fertile soil, and the Vikings grew crops and raised sheep for hundreds of years. But temperatures dropped precipitously in the so-called Little Ice Age, which began in the 16th century, the Norse settlers died out and agriculture was no longer possible.

[Twirling moustache] Aha! So there has been variation in the past! [stops twirling] Will a correction appear for this, next? We wait to find out.

Brighter side, part 1.

Personal priorities

John Hawkins:

Let this thread over at the Daily Kos be a warning to you: life is bigger than politics. Yes, politics and ideology are important, but you shouldn't take things to such an extreme that you let it make you miserable or wreck your relationships with your friends or family.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin.

Update, over a year later: See? what happens? A thirty-some-years friendship, demolished, in public, on the Web. Over politics, and ego. This leading to this, and other bits of hostility, in the same thread. A whole lot of people would rather be right. (That's an SF link; the source of it is Henry Clay, who famously said that he would rather be right than President. He managed to be neither, but that's another story.) Maybe they'll make it up, now that the election's over.

Did you ever see a dune ...

… walking?

Christopher Walken for President?

Charles at LGF links to "Perhaps the greatest music video ever made." Perhaps, indeed. (Did you spot the Dune reference?) The comment thread is one music video recommendation after another. In the course of which I find that Christopher Walken has a campaign website, Christopher Walken for President 2008. It seems like a pretty laid-back campaign. At the CafePress shop for campaign stuff, the T-shirt slogan is "This country needs more cowbell;" the bumper sticker slogan is, "If you want me to be President, I'll do it!" Another T-shirt actually seems to take a position on an issue, "No more zoos!" I for one would hate to see all those animals put out of work. It's not easy getting a job as a lion in the Bronx if you can't connect at the zoo.

More news from the cancer front

From the New Scientist:

GM virus shrinks cancer tumours in humans

A virus carefully engineered to target cancer tumours has shown promising results in treating liver cancer in a small, early-stage clinical trial.

Some of the patients enrolled in the trial experienced a greater than 50% reduction in the size of their tumours over the course of the year long study, according to researchers. The virus used in the treatment works well, they say, because it can replicate and spread quickly within the tumours.

Scientists have suspected that viruses might help thwart tumours ever since 1912. In that year, an Italian gynaecology journal reported that a woman with advanced cervical cancer showed signs of increasing tumour shrinkage after receiving a rabies vaccination for a dog bite.

[…]

To overcome this challenge scientists such as David Kirn at Jennerex Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, California, US have tried to develop treatments based on the vaccinia or pox virus. This spreads more easily within cancer tumours than previously employed viruses thanks to a 'tail' composed of a protein called actin.

In the first step, Kirn's team deleted a gene from the vaccinia virus that made it unable to produce an enzyme called thymidine kinase. Without this enzyme, the virus cannot replicate and cause damage in normal, healthy tissue.

Cancerous cells, however, contain an abundance of thymidine kinase, making it easy for the modified vaccinia virus to multiply within tumours. And once the virus creates enough copies of itself it bursts the cancer cell where it resides.

Next, Kirns' group added a gene to the virus that made it produce a signalling molecule called cytokine, which attracts the body's immune cells towards tumours. The end result of this elaborate process of genetic engineering was a tumour-targeting vaccinia virus known as JX-594.

Hopeful signs all over. Europeans will not want this, I suppose, because of the genetic engineering involved.

Somewhere, over the rainbow

As Theo says, "a bit soppy but amazing."

That's Connie Talbot.

Spying for law enforcement?

At ThreatsWatch:

The Domestic Intelligence Imperative
Something is wrong when sharing requires breaking the law
By Michael Tanji

Driven to desperation by restrictive information sharing rules, and concerned about the terrorist threat to their homes and loved ones, at least five American intelligence officers established a domestic espionage ring. The target of their actions: the federal government. The beneficiary of their actions: Los Angeles. How has it come to this, that otherwise patriotic and loyal citizens feel compelled to work against their government in order to serve and protect their communities?

At TCS:

Patriot or Vigilante?

By Robert Haddick

Did a group of experienced military officers, comprised of intelligence analysts, Iraq war veterans, and reservists, some who are also police officers in Los Angeles, form their own "vigilance committee" to hunt down al Qaeda suspects operating inside the U.S.?

If true, what drove these men to risk their careers, their reputations, and their personal freedom to break strict laws on the handling of top-secret documents?

The military working with law enforcement to track down internal threats, sounds good, no? No? The "Gorelick wall" is still standing, and it is being enforced.

Lord Monckton takes on Gore's errors, again

It seems the Gore publicity office has reacted to the British judge who ruled that Gore's movie had 9 errors. From the opening of Lord Monckton's new piece:

Al Gore’s spokesman and “environment advisor,” Ms. Kalee Kreider, begins by saying that the film presented “thousands and thousands of facts.” It did not: just 2,000 “facts” in 93 minutes would have been one fact every three seconds. The film contained only a few dozen points, most of which will be seen to have been substantially inaccurate. The judge concentrated only on nine points which even the UK Government, to which Gore is a climate-change advisor, had to admit did not represent mainstream scientific opinion.

Ms. Kreider then states, incorrectly, that the judge himself had never used the term “errors.” In fact, the judge used the term “errors,” in inverted commas, throughout his judgment.

It does go on. Available from the Science and Public Policy Institute in html and pdf. The previous Monckton vs. Gore back-and-forth was the occasion of my first post here.

John Stossel on global warming, 10/19/07

The report from last Friday's 20-20. The kids are being frightened by having An Inconvenient Truth forced upon them by their teachers. How many neuroses will this lead to? At least the Russian bombs that frightened my generation were real. Anybody recognize the creep with the English accent who says, "We have Holocaust deniers, we have climate change deniers, and to be honest, I don't think there's a great deal of difference." at 6:55 in (1:11 remaining, if you see a countdown)?

A shorter written version at the ABC News site.

Update: Russell Seitz thinks that Tom Yulsman has called Stossel's "attempt to bluff on some bad bets in climate science." Yulsman's Prometheus site is sponsored by NOAA, which is heavily invested in the AGW "consensus." The way I read the post, it sounds like Yulsman is the one bluffing. "Flat-earthers?" Really? See what you think.