Iraq Speech to VFW- Echo of JFK

I know, I have been among the missing in action. I apologize, but my free time was taken up the the Simpsons, Transformers, and Bournes. I was reminded that I had a blog when Irene sent me the link to President Bush's recent speech. Below is a paragraph to whet your interest.

While I have to bang my head sometimes for want of information from the White House and for the stilted stuff that finally issues from the press office, I have been a fan or reading Bush's speeches and watching C-SPAN and know that his good stuff never, I mean never, makes it to air. No, not even on FOX. Something to do with a nation of people with ten-second attention spans.

Sometime ago, I reviewed his energy plan/speech given in a biodiesel plant, but you never saw that on air either. It is a good plan and only now are parts of it being passed. You never see critics attack Bush's grasp of economics, business, and energy because, I would submit, they would not want to bring attention to his mastery of these matters. Just bark something about Halliburton for effect.

Anyway, for the Iraq speech, click on the title. I still wish there would be more detail, though, say by way of white papers (no that is not racist.) After the section below, I quote John Kennedy who explained what we are doing some 45 years ago. Like Kennedy said, we do these things because they are hard. BUSH:

...Now, I know some people doubt the universal appeal of liberty, or worry that the Middle East isn't ready for it. Others believe that America's presence is destabilizing, and that if the United States would just leave a place like Iraq those who kill our troops or target civilians would no longer threaten us. Today I'm going to address these arguments. I'm going to describe why helping the young democracies of the Middle East stand up to violent Islamic extremists is the only realistic path to a safer world for the American people. I'm going to try to provide some historical perspective to show there is a precedent for the hard and necessary work we're doing, and why I have such confidence in the fact we'll be successful...

JFK was a bit more old-fashioned in his rhetoric because people still read and could follow bunches of paragraphs in a row. When you read his Inauguration speech, excerpt below, and his Berlin speech, as well as recall his use of tax cuts to spur the economy, consider whether JFK could be a 2007 Democrat. EXCERPT:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.	4
This much we pledge—and more.	5
To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United, there is little we cannot do in a host of cooperative ventures. Divided, there is little we can do—for we dare not meet a powerful challenge at odds and split asunder.	6
To those new States whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom—and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.	7
To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.	8
To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge—to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress—to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this .. neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.

1922: Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.

Thanks to Irene for this good one:

Marcus Aurelius: The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

The Washington Times:

Before Gore

D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing Page 2 headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post: "Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt."

The 1922 article, obtained by Inside the Beltway, goes on to mention "great masses of ice have now been replaced by moraines of earth and stones," and "at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared."

"This was one of several such articles I have found at the Library of Congress for the 1920s and 1930s," says Mr. Lockwood. "I had read of the just-released NASA estimates, that four of the 10 hottest years in the U.S. were actually in the 1930s, with 1934 the hottest of all."

Worth pondering

Reacting yesterday to word that certain European governments and officials are suddenly trying to abandon their costly "global warming" policies, Royal Astronomical Society fellow Benny Peiser, of the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University in Great Britain, recalls the teachings of [one of my favorite emperors - Gene] Marcus Aurelius:

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

"Math" Errors in Global "Science"

Some time ago, I reviewed how the "hockey stick" graph of Mr. Mann, which is the Rosetta Stone of Global Warming, had had been found wanting (a nice try, was how one put it).

Below, I have added part of a "Technology" web article (an MIT publication.) The MIT article concerns a "bombshell" and "incredible error" found by McIntyre and McKitrick. Mann's program would take random numbers having no trend and print out a hockey stick, supposedly

I was reminded of this older discussion, yes the errors have been known for years Mr. Gore, by the recent Ross McIntyre's blog recount of a NASA GISS' admission of of "mathematical error" regarding how temperatures have been misreported because of mathematical errors. Funny how errors always fall in the same direction. Also, the errors reporting bias toward warming seem to be computer errors, a scientist's equivalent of "the dog ate it."

As you may have read recently, since 1880, five of the ten warmest years in North America were in the 1920s and 1930s. The warmest recorded year was 1934.

Then, there is the IPCC warming bias errors
where the IPCC anonymous "scientists" forgot to use "real world" data:

The global average surface temperature trend in the 2007 SPM (see Figure SPM-3 top in HYPERLINK "http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf" the IPCC SPM) continues to show warming, but as has been summarized in

Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey, D. Niyogi, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai, Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S. Foster, J. Steinweg-Woods, R. Boyles, S. Fall, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007: HYPERLINK "http://climatesci.colorado.edu/publications/R-321.pdf" Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends. J. Geophys. Res. in press,
there is a significant warm bias in the construction of a global average surface temperature trend.

What these observations mean is that the statement in the IPCC SPM that there is a positive radiative forcing of 1.6 [0.6 to 2.4] Watts per meter squared in 2005 (when this was not true based on real data) is a particularly egregious error.

Rather than relying solely on model based estimates to calculate a global radiative forcing, the authors of the IPCC Report should have also used real world data for the assessment of the net radiative forcing.

A claim that a time period of several years is too short to assess the radiative heating is spurious as long as the sampling of the ocean heat content is sufficiently dense. As discussed in

Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: HYPERLINK "http://blue.atmos.colostate.edu/publications/pdf/R-247.pdf" Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335,

“A snapshot at any time documents the accumulated heat content and its change since the last assessment. Unlike temperature, at some specific level of the ocean, land, or the atmosphere, in which there is a time lag in its response to radiative forcing, there are no time lags associated with heat changes.”

The IPCC finding that the total 2005 net anthropogenic radiative forcing has a best estimate of +1.6 Watts per meter squared and that the total 2005 net radiative forcing has a best estimate of +1.72 Watts per meter squared is inconsistent with the observed changes in upper ocean heat content.

The omission of a discussion of the conflict between real world observations and the model estimates of radiative forcing is a serious error in the IPCC SPM.

GLOBAL WARMING BOMBSHELL

A prime piece of evidence linking human activity to climate change turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics.

By Richard Muller

Progress in science is sometimes made by great discoveries. But science also advances when we learn that something we believed to be true isnt. When solving a jigsaw puzzle, the solution can sometimes be stymied by the fact that a wrong piece has been wedged in a key place.

In the scientific and political debate over global warming, the latest wrong piece may be the hockey stick, the famous plot (shown below), published by University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann and colleagues. This plot purports to show that we are now experiencing the warmest climate in a millennium, and that the earth, after remaining cool for centuries during the medieval era, suddenly began to heat up about 100 years ago--just at the time that the burning of coal and oil led to an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

I talked about this at length in my December 2003 column. Unfortunately, discussion of this plot has been so polluted by political and activist frenzy that it is hard to dig into it to reach the science. My earlier column was largely a plea to let science proceed unmolested. Unfortunately, the very importance of the issue has made careful science difficult to pursue.

But now a shock: Canadian scientists Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that was used to produce the hockey stick. In his original publications of the stick, Mann purported to use a standard method known as principal component analysis, or PCA, to find the dominant features in a set of more than 70 different climate records.

But it wasnt so. McIntyre and McKitrick obtained part of the program that Mann used, and they found serious problems. Not only does the program not do conventional PCA, but it handles data normalization in a way that can only be described as mistaken.

Now comes the real shocker. This improper normalization procedure tends to emphasize any data that do have the hockey stick shape, and to suppress all data that do not. To demonstrate this effect, McIntyre and McKitrick created some meaningless test data that had, on average, no trends. This method of generating random data is called Monte Carlo analysis, after the famous casino, and it is widely used in statistical analysis to test procedures. When McIntyre and McKitrick fed these random data into the Mann procedure, out popped a hockey stick shape!

That discovery hit me like a bombshell, and I suspect it is having the same effect on many others. Suddenly the hockey stick, the poster-child of the global warming community, turns out to be an artifact of poor mathematics. How could it happen? What is going on? Let me digress into a short technical discussion of how this incredible error took place....

Now, for something completely different

How about some news you probably haven't heard. I know, if it bleeds it leads, but there is other news to consider. Especially, to balance out the crazy stuff.

Above, Iaqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki (bottom 5th R, as if you couldn't tell) poses for a group picture with the Iraqi soccer team, who won the AFC Asian Cup soccer tournament, after their return to Iraq August 3, 2007.


Holland Says NO To Magic Mushrooms

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - The famously liberal Netherlands has been swinging toward the right, cracking down on immigration, religious freedoms [I think this means Muslim ideas of religion like obliterating infidels] and the freewheeling red light district. The next possible target? Magic mushrooms.

The death of a 17-year-old French girl, who jumped from a building after eating psychedelic mushrooms while on a school visit, has ignited a campaign to ban the fungi — sold legally at so-called "smartshops" as long as they're fresh....

The Last Jews In Baghdad

Conditions Worsening For Baghdad's Last 8 Jews, But Do They Want To Leave?

They number only eight, but they are the remnant of a community 2,700 years old — the last Jews left in modern Baghdad.

An Anglican clergyman who watches over the tiny Jewish group says they are increasingly desperate and want to leave Iraq for the Netherlands. But Israeli, Dutch and Jewish officials dispute claims by the Rev. Andrew White that the Jews want to leave. ...

Russian hostages freed in Nigeria

Six Russians kidnapped by gunmen more than two months ago from an aluminium firm in southern Nigeria have been freed, government officials say.

The four men and two women are reportedly in good health.

They were seized on 3 June in the south-eastern town of Ikot Abasi, and their Nigerian driver was shot dead.

Kidnappings - more often of oil workers - have become a common occurrence in the south of Nigeria. Victims tend to be released after a ransom is paid....

Team finds largest exoplanet yet

The planet has a large radius but a low density

An international team of astronomers has discovered the largest known planet orbiting another star.

The "transiting" planet - meaning one that passes in front of its parent star as seen from Earth - is about 70% larger than Jupiter.

But the presumed "gas giant" has a much lower mass than Jupiter - the biggest planet in our Solar System - making it of extremely low density.

Remember "The Thing?" Warming climate may give life to frozen germs

BEIJING, Aug. 7 (Xinhuanet) -- Earth's warming climate may bring germs frozen for millions of years in glaciers back to life, potentially increasing the speed of the evolution of microbes, recent research reveals.

Antarctica's Dry Valley of the Transantarctic Mountains are home to the oldest known ice on Earth. Researchers melted five block of ice cut from glaciers there to find entombed microbes 100,000 to 8 million years old.

To avoid contamination of the ice with modern germs that would confuse results, the scientists took elaborate precautions, soaking the blocks in ethanol as an antiseptic and melting away the outer inches of ice using sterile water to decontaminate them.

The researchers discovered microbes in all the ice, more in the young than in the old. They also grew them out in the lab.

"The young stuff grew really fast," said Rutgers University marine microbiologist Kay Bidle, doubling in number "every couple of days." Until now, scientists didn't know whether such ancient, frozen life could be revived, he added.

[There you go. There is too much going on, isn't there? Let me go see how the Yankees did.]

Maize sucré

I keep hearing that Brazilians all seem to be driving around with ethanol cars. This is a mass delusion fostered in the U.S. by dopes.
No, Brazil has been weaned from gasoline. Indeed, it is an oil producing country with big plans to attract more investment to pull up some that bubblin' crude.

I did a little homework and picked off from a Yale site:

As Brazil Fills Up on Ethanol, It Weans Off Energy Imports

David Luhnow

Geraldo Samor

The Wall Street Journal, 16 January 2006

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- After nearly three decades of work, Brazil has succeeded where much of the industrialized world has failed: It has developed a cost-effective alternative to gasoline. Along with new offshore oil discoveries, that's a big reason Brazil expects to become energy independent this year.

To see how, take a look at Gildo Ferreira, a 39-year-old real-estate executive, who pulled his VW Fox into a filling station one recent afternoon. Instead of reaching for the gasoline, he spent $29 to fill up his car on ethanol made from sugar cane, an option that's available at 29,000 gas stations from Rio to the Amazon. A comparable tank of gasoline would have cost him $36. "It's cheaper and it's made here in Brazil," Mr. Ferreira says of ethanol. If the price of oil stays at current levels, he can expect to save about $350 a year.

[Saving at the Pump]

At current prices, Brazil can make ethanol for about $1 a gallon, according to the World Bank. That compares with the international price of gasoline of about $1.50 a gallon. Even though ethanol gets less mileage than gasoline, in Brazil it's still cheaper per mile driven. As a result, ethanol now accounts for as much as 20% of Brazil's transport fuel market. The country's use of gasoline has actually declined since the late 1970s. The use of alternative fuels in the rest of the world is a scant 1%.

The critical thing to note is ethanol is "as much as 20% of Brazil's transport fuel market." That is great, but not to be confused with 100%.

But, wait, there is more. Brazil is a major oil producer.

"Brazil is on its way to becoming one of the main international poles for the exploration and production of petroleum," the World Petroleum Council projected in April 2002. "According to data supplied by Brazil's National Oil Industry Organisation (Onip), over the coming ten years the domestic petroleum industry ought to take a significant share of the sector's international investments, or roughly US$ 100 billion, 85 per cent of which [is] to be applied in the oil segment."

Some of the green crowd cannot see the reality. Ethanol is helping and the economy is very much oil based. Indeed, the local oil production helps keep the gas prices down, which helps the farmers make sugar. Things are always more complicated than we want.

Word is that there is an energy problem, now, in Brazil which the country seems to be thinking is caused by a non-market approach to distributing resources, especially electricity.

To highlight how Brazil is not a sugar cane nation, Here is a BBC report from 2000, see photo above.

The state oil company in Brazil, Petrobras, says it has contained a massive oil spill that has polluted the southern Iguacu River.

On Sunday, four million litres of crude oil escaped from a burst pipeline into the river making it the biggest oil spill in 25 years.

A Petrobras statement said the spillage was brought under control by installing a number of floating barriers and other equipment at eight key points on the river....

One of Brazil's advantages in the creation of ethanol is the use of sugar as the carbohydrate base, a lower wage base, and not much interest in the environment. As some in the U.S. are finally coming to understand, there is no way corn can be an option, unless every farm acre in the U.S. is dedicated to car corn. Right now, it costs us $6.50 a gallon to make ethanol, thanks to taxpayer subsidies.

I guess the point is we need to stop making believe there is a magic bullet avilable somethwere else. We need to do the hard work. Sorry.

Bridge Observation

The bridge collapse got many politicians off their cots. Nothing like a disaster to bring out the best in the people and the true nature of politicians. Here is the quote of the year, so far:

``A bridge in America shouldn't just fall down,'' U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, said today at a news conference. ``We have to get to the bottom of this.''

Yes sir, there you go.

Senator Reid commented it was a "wake up call," then said it was Bush's fault because his administration's budget proposed $600,000,000 less than the Senate passed for infrastructure repair, a meaningless amount if the logic made any sense to begin with. Aside from that, the state has a $2 billion dollar surplus.

Rep. James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, blamed President George W. Bush's administration for shortchanging road and bridge repair in a highway funding bill two years ago. [Photo above]

Bush, he said, "failed to support a robust investment in surface transportation," adding the president insisted on only $2 billion a year for bridge reconstruction when lawmakers were pushing for $3 billion a year.

Yes, Bush did it. One of those Senator types also said the bridge collapsed because of the war in Iraq. I think the pretend logic was that we (whoever that is) are distracted by war. This gibberish sounds like Reid. Its not worth looking up.

President Bush's initial response to the tragedy, by the way, was that he would pray for the families of the victims.

Of note, the bridge is the responsibility of the state's Department of Transportation, just like New Orleans belongs to La. (Its a constitutional thing. If we had more activist judges we could have a real president who can just send troops in and occupy various states with bad bridges and walls.)

There is already an attempt to blame the GOP Governor for letting the Department's boss run the department. Keep in mind, as you follow the attack on the Governor, Minnesota is one of the very blue states and has been since before the bridge was built. One should look into who the contractor was on the bridge project in 1967.

I just heard about this Daily Kos blog, as the Democratic candidates are appearing at its conference to visit the Oracle on the Isle of Internet, and read this bizarre rambling

...It's not just bridges. As the American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Report Card 2005 points out, we're $1.6 trillion behind in infrastructure investment. That, by the way, is the amount of tax cuts Mister Bush tried to get passed in 2001, before he had the Global War on Terrorism™ with which to shape his legacy. Congress "compromised" and gave him only $1.35 trillion, tax cuts that writer Robert Freeman once labeled a "national form of insanity."

It is my suggestion to you, dear reader, to be sensitive to run-on thoughts where all manner of unrelated facts are stuffed in.

You will find the writer or speaker of such a jam-packed tirade to be mentally ill and, because people don't listen to their blather, they stuff as many discordant notions in a burst of words unfettered by a breath. Were there is no pause the listener can't react with a logical argument and disrupt the stream of consciousness.

If you try to react, you are dealing with five assumptions, presented as facts, none of which actually apply to the conclusion. If you actually attempt to converse, you are doomed.

Learn to avoid eye contact and back away, saying "Yeah, Yeah, Bush did it."

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