Month: February 2008

The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama

The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama – New York Times
The Token Conservative on the NY Times Editorial page continues the Obama Coronation Chorus arising from the Media. Whatever the potency of his political skills and message, Mr. Obama is also riding a demographic wave. The authors of the new book “Millennial Makeover,” Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, point out that the so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the largest in American history, boomers included, and that roughly 40 percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One in five millennials has an immigrant parent. It’s this generation that is fueling the excitement and some of the record turnout of the Democratic primary campaign, and not just for Mr. Obama.

Even by the low standards of his party, Mr. McCain has underperformed at reaching millennials in the thriving culture where they live. His campaign’s effort to create a MySpace-like Web site flopped. His most-viewed appearances on YouTube are not viral videos extolling him or replaying his best speeches but are instead sendups of his most reckless foreign-policy improvisations — his threat to stay in Iraq for 100 years and his jokey warning (sung to the tune of the Beach Boys’ version of “Barbara Ann”) that he will bomb Iran. In the vast arena of the Internet he has been shrunk to Grumpy Old White Guy, the G.O.P. brand incarnate.

Record Breaking Winter

Kuldebreak i Vestgrønland
Minus 30 degrees Celsius. That’s how cold it’s been in large parts of western Greenland where the population has been bundling up in hats and scarves. At the same time, Denmark’s Meteorological Institute states that the ice between Canada and southwest Greenland right now has reached its greatest extent in 15 years.

‘Satellite pictures show that the ice expansion has extended farther south this year. In fact, it’s a bit past the Nuuk area. We have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south. On the eastern coast it hasn’t been colder than normal, but there has been a good amount of snow.’

James Broder posts pictures on his blog (like this one) of the biggest snow in Maui in 15 years.

The Sierras and Rockies are getting record snowpack.

China just had its worst blizzard in 50 years. Even the Middle East saw snow, with Jerusalem, Damascus, Amman and northern Saudi Arabia reporting the heaviest falls in years and below-zero temperatures. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan snow and freezing weather killed 120 people.

Fgures from the respected US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that almost all the “lost” ice has come back. Ice levels which had shrunk from 13million sq km in January 2007 to just four million in October, are almost back to their original levels. Figures show that there is nearly a third more ice in Antarctica than is usual for the time of year.

From “What’s Up with That” Blog

We’ve had anecdotal evidence of odd weather in the form of wire reports from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and China where record setting cold and snow has been felt with intensity not seen for 30-100 years, depending on the region.

. RSS, UAH, and GISS global temperature sets all show sharp drops in the last year. We are in an extended solar minimum, we have a shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to a cold state, and we are seeing arctic ice extents setting new records and rebounding from the summer melt.While weather is defined as such variability, the fact that so many things are in agreement on a global scale in such a short time span of one year should give us all pause for consideration.

Finally, there’s the massive La Nina said to be the driver of all this but may be a harbinger of a more permanent phase shift according to veteran forecaster Joe Bastardi.

Now to add to this, we have images and reports from NOAA and Rutgers University of large anomalies of snow cover extent for the northern hemisphere in January 2008. January 2008 had the largest areal Northern Hemisphere snow cover for the period of 1966-2008, just slightly larger than the previous largest anomaly of January, 1984.

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star

‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star | World news | The Observer
Get ready for a new furor from the Netherlands, where census figures show that Muslims will be the majority by 2015. How will the tolerant to-a-fault Dutch react? Geert Wilders has got nothing against Muslims. He just hates Islam. Or so he says. ‘Islam is not a religion, it’s an ideology,’ says Wilders, a lanky Roman Catholic right-winger, ‘the ideology of a retarded culture.’

Wilders has been immersing himself in the suras and verse of seventh-century Arabia. The outcome of his scholarship, a short film, has Holland in a panic. He is just putting the finishing touches to the 10-minute film, he says, and talking to four TV channels about screening it. The Dutch government is planning emergency evacuation of its nationals and diplomats from the Middle East should the Wilders film be shown. It is alarmed about the impact on Dutch business.

‘We already have more than 6,000 mosques in Europe, which are not only a place to worship but also a symbol of radicalisation, some financed by extreme groups in Saudi Arabia or Iran,’ argued Filip Dewinter, leader of Belgium’s Flemish separatist party, the Vlaams Belang, who organised the Antwerp get-together. ‘Its minarets are six floors high, higher than the floodlights of the Feyenoord soccer stadium,’ he said of a new mosque being built in Rotterdam. ‘These kinds of symbols have to stop.’ Horror! The secular temple, our Colosseum, where our gladiators entertain us, is being overshadowed by a rising barbaric religious invasion.

Continue reading “‘I don’t hate Muslims. I hate Islam,’ says Holland’s rising political star”

America Loves To Be Dumber

Hand-wringing About American Culture – Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? – New York Times
But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map. Continue reading “America Loves To Be Dumber”

US Disaster Vulnerability Map

Map reveals US disaster hotspots – earth – 12 February 2008 – New Scientist Environment
The resulting indices of vulnerability, going back to 1960 and with a projection to 2010, show a slight decrease in vulnerability nationwide (see map, right). Among the regions where things have got worse are California and the Texas-Mexico border, probably because low-income immigrant populations have settled there.

New York City and San Francisco have the greatest potential for suffering. A highly urbanised population means injuries, fatalities and infrastructure losses would be large, says Cutter. You can see where Florida is now a model for other States. Thanks to EPIC for link. Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0710375105)

Would Obama Be Good for Business?

Is Obama Good for Business?
But Obama has also taken several steps that aren’t typical of his fellow liberal senators. He has stocked his Capitol Hill staff with employees whose résumés include McKinsey, the old Andersen Consulting, and other nonpartisan business advisory firms. He joined forces with conservatives on bills designed to improve ethics and transparency in Washington. He voted for a bill in 2005 that made life harder for trial lawyers—a traditional Democratic constituency—by allowing defendants to shift cases more easily to federal court, which can be less favorable to plaintiffs. And he pushed an outside-the-box proposal that would help Detroit automakers pay legacy health-care costs on the condition they reinvest the subsequent savings into hybrids and other fuel-efficient cars.

Some of the names that might fill in the org chart in an Obama Administration are also telling. Obama—whose own father was a Kenyan economist with a PhD from Harvard University—has cultivated a group of economic advisers. They’re generally careful technocrats, and are led by University of Chicago professor Austan Goolsbee. Among the others: Jeffrey Liebman and David Cutler of Harvard and Christina and David Romer of the University of California, Berkeley. Goolsbee has shown a preference for making economic initiatives easier to understand and use, an effort Obama calls “iPod government.”

Imminent Ice Age?

Where have all the sunspots gone? « Watts Up With That?
Given the current quietness of the sun and it’s magnetic field, combined with the late start to cycle 24 with even possibly a false start, it appears that the sun has slowed it’s internal dynamo to a similar level such as was seen during the Dalton Minimum. One of the things about the Dalton Minimum was that it started with a skipped solar cycle, which also coincided with a very long solar cycle 4 from 1784-1799. (The Dalton Minimum was a period of low solar activity, lasting from about 1790 to 1830 [1]. Like the Maunder Minimum and Sporer Minimum it coincided with a period of lower than average global temperatures. Low solar activity seems to be strongly correlated with global cooling.) One of the things about the Dalton Minimum was that it started with a skipped solar cycle, which also coincided with a very long solar cycle 4 from 1784-1799. The longer our current cycle 23 lasts before we see a true ramp up of cycle 24, the greater chance it seems then that cycle 24 will be a low one.

No wonder there is so much talk recently about global cooling. I certainly hope that’s wrong, because a Dalton type solar minimum would be very bad for our world economy and agriculture. NASA GISS published a release back in 2003 that agrees with the commonly accepted idea that long period trends in solar activity do affect our climate by changing the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI).

Some say it is no coincidence that 2008 has seen a drop in global temperature as indicated by several respected temperature indexes compared to 2007, and that our sun is also quiet and still not kick starting its internal magentic dynamo. Continue reading “Imminent Ice Age?”

Charting Roger Clemens

Analyzing Roger Clemens: A Step-by-Step Guide – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog
we turn to a more reliable metric — walks plus hits per inning pitched. This metric yields less “bounce,” and a more reliable pattern is revealed. Fitting a curve, we find that Clemens’ performance deteriorated for about a decade, then started to improve for the last decade of his career.

The turning point appears to be at around the age (36-37) in which the Mitchell report suggests he used performance-enhancing drugs.