Thankful Thursday

Christmas eve edition! Today I am thankful for/that:

1. The new hoopty handles real nice in the snow.

What are you thankful for?

Surviving the In-Laws

I know lots of you are packing up the kids and heading over the river and through the woods to grandma's. When you get there or while you're on the way take a listen to this. Grandmas and grandpas out there it would be a good idea for you lot to take a listen too. Here's to a harmonious family Christmas.

"What Do You Want from Me?"
Surviving the In-Laws
Psychologist Has Answers
Love. Compatibility. Money. Attraction. These are what lovers consider when they decide to tie the knot. In-laws are usually the last thing on their minds. Yet, dealing with your significant other's family can be an everlasting quest…and it can be a factor that helps determine the duration of the marriage.

British psychologist Terri Apter has found herself scrambling to deal with some of the very situations she counsels others about. She talks with host Mike Cuthbert about how she maintains a healthy relationship with her in-laws, and what she suggests to others.

She’s conducted a study on various in-law relationships, and she collects stories about them– some of which she shares at a Web site, and many of which she has compiled in her latest book "What Do You Want From Me?: Learning to Get Along with In-Laws."

Thankful Thursday

Better late than never. This week I am thankful for/that:

1. My warm new leak free winter boots.


2. My super warm duvet, don't even need any blankets with that bad boy.


3. That lovely furnace that keeps churning out all of that warm air (we or course going to ignore the heating bill for the moment).


4. Ethan's conversations with Santa as relayed by his spec ed teacher today. Apparently Santa has his cell phone number (no he doesn't really have a phone) and has promised him a special surprise for the invaluable service that Ethan has rendered to him.


5. The Christmas surprise that Sophia made for me that I'm not allowed to see yet but she couldn't resist informing me of its existence.


6. A good night's sleep.


7. Friends to laugh/cry with as necessary.


8. Second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh chances etc.

What are you thankful for?

Freedom for all!

Hilarious commentary (to me anyway) from Tim Blair on the race politics of climategate:

Robert James Taylor of the National Black News Journal:

Blacks should not join the global warming battle or accept new taxes or restrictions on their lives until the truth about global warming is actually known.

I dream of a day when this freedom is also granted to whites.

More from the Taylor article:

The CRU is the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia near Norwich, England. The CRU is populated by British and American scientists who more than any other group in the world has been responsible for the computer models and measurements upon which the bulk of global warming predictions are based. Indeed, President Obama was in Copenhagen this week pushing an anti-global warming agenda based largely on CRU data.

There is just one problem: Global warming has actually stopped. Yes, the planet’s mean temperature did rise for at least 30 consecutive years but somewhere around the year 2000 the warming essentially stopped and as of yet has not started up again. This is a fact which the pro-global warming American media seldom, if ever, reports.

But it is widely known in the scientific community. The prestigious Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the German city of Kiel is among the scientific institutes to have confirmed the lull (or stop) in planet warming. Top Leibniz Institute meteorologist Mojib Latif says flatly, “… the warming is taking a break. There can be no argument about that. We have to face that fact.”

Even the scientists at CRU knew that global warming had stopped. Take note of this CRU email: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty we can’t.”

And from Blair's comments section thus far:

...we know what is true for Black Americans is true for all Americans, and true for all in the Western and wider world. In the real world a Black message will resonate with some more than an inclusive national or universal message. The more voices for economic prosperity and against eco de-development based on junk science, the better.

and

Blacks against climate change deception - works for me. We’re all black now.

and

As African conservatives have been known to have said when confronted by environmentalism: you need to be rich and white before you can afford to be green.

Yeah, pretty much. Kind of puts race based pleas to pursue climate change mitigation strategies in a different light if the people who are supposed to be helped are saying, "Um, no thank you."

As a side note I'm glad that all of the "little" developing countries are digging their heels and obstructing "progress" in Copenhagen right. Not matter what they may claim their motives to be they may be the best hope to save the rest of us from the schemes being cooked up in Copenhagen.

Thankful Thursday

Today I am thankful for/that:

1. Yesterday was Wednesday and today is Thursday and I did not forget to go to dance class as I thought when I woke up at 1:20AM this morning.


2. The gleeful squeals of children making tracks in the snow.


3. Central heating.


4. No cavities for the kids during their latest dentist appointments.


5. Friends.


6. Freedom.


7. Baby Pierce version 5.0 due out in June 2010. Plus so little morning sickness that I was tempted to ask doc if he hadn't been mistaken.

What are you thankful for?

Thankful Thursday

Today I am thankful for/that:

1. The joy of the children over Christmas.


2. Reminders from the children about the true meaning of Christmas. It's nice to know that they've been paying attention.


3. Bedtime quiet.


4. Laughter.


5. Friendship.

What are you thankful for?

Tracking Scientists Behaving Badly

I'm starting to feel like one of those gawkers who turn out to see how bad the three car pile up is. Anyway, Pajamas Media has put together a climategate database for you to peruse and comment on at your leisure.

Here are a couple of interesting reads, Global warming consensus: garbage in, garbage out and Climategate and Scientific Journal Chicanery

Reading the comments section of just about any article on global warming climate change policy is particularly amusing these days since the articles almost universally ignore the unfolding climategate scandal but it keeps cropping up in the comments sections of these articles.

This story amusingly tries to make the argument that CRU scientists and their contacts trying to keep papers that have differing conclusions from their own from being published was actually an attempt to protect the public from "junk" science, Stolen E-Mails Raise Questions On Climate Research. In this case "junk" science being anything that contradicts the "consensus" on global warming climate change.

The very first comment on this story, Obama To Attend Copenhagen Climate Summit, is, "Hey NPR.. Where are the articles on the recent evidence that this climate thing is a HOAX??? Let's quit this lie.. TELL THE TRUTH, it's a scam!!"

This article manages not to mention climategate at all but commenters were more than happy to discuss it, Climate Change Bill Faces Delays In Senate.

The combination of studiously ignoring climategate and commenters trying to down play the significance of the climategate revelations looks rather, well, desperate. It's not going to go away just because they are ignoring it. The Tea Party movement sure didn't.

Climategate: Lawyer up!

In another chapter of the Scientists behaving Badly saga the rumblings of lawsuits and congressional probes over the information in leaked emails and files from CRU have begun (via Instapundit).

Competitive Enterprise Institute Sues NASA in Wake of Climategate Scandal

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute filed three Notices of Intent to File Suit against NASA and its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), for those bodies’ refusal — for nearly three years — to provide documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The information sought is directly relevant to the exploding “Climategate” scandal revealing document destruction, coordinated efforts in the U.S. and UK to avoid complying with both countries’ freedom of information laws, and apparent and widespread intent to defraud at the highest levels of international climate science bodies. Numerous informed commenters had alleged such behavior for years, all of which appears to be affirmed by leaked emails, computer code, and other data from the Climatic Research Unit of the UK’s East Anglia University.

Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails
Te first and last paragraphs:

A few days after leaked e-mail messages appeared on the Internet, the U.S. Congress may probe whether prominent scientists who are advocates of global warming theories misrepresented the truth about climate change.

The irony of this situation is that most of us expect science to be conducted in the open, without unpublished secret data, hidden agendas, and computer programs of dubious reliability. East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit might have avoided this snafu by publicly disclosing as much as possible at every step of the way.

Gee, yeah think?

Tim Blair also has these revealing tidbits:

Greeno supremo George Monbiot concedes:

It’s no use pretending this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign.

And,

The WSJ attempts to interview the CRU:

Some of those mentioned in the emails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all …

Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.

Whatever you want to believe about man-made global warming scientists playing around with their data to get the story they want rather than to shed light on what is true and then refusing to disclose their data (because they mucked around with it and any examination of their data would reveal their tampering) is indefensible. Trying to dictate the functioning of the entire world based on data that you know is corrupted is self centered egotistical madness.

They're Calling It Climategate Now

I like Scientists Behaving Badly much better than Climategate. We don't really need another X-gate. Although this "gate" is more like the original than some of the other "gates" that have been christened as such. Anyway, here's a round up of facts and opinion on the revelations in the hacked emails and data from University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most of these I picked up from Instapundit.

• Climate cuttings 33, summaries of some of what's in those hacked CRU files.


• Climategate, Coal Mine Deaths, Air Pollution and Coals assault on human health. I'm not sure I would agree with everything this blogger concludes about coal but this is certainly true, "The over reaching on the science and over aggressive tactics are now blowing up in face of the pro-global warming side."
  
  This from the comments section regarding claims about climate conditions in the earth's past also rings true, "How can you trust that these conditions even existed? Ice cores? Tree ring data? We now have no reason to believe any paleo climate data. Some 40 or 50 'scientists' have been cooking the books with the collusion of influential journalists. Until all that data has been independently audited, all those assertions are out the window for all but the most faithful."


• Viscount Monckton on Climategate: ‘They Are Criminals’
  

  This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.

  The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.



• Climategate: When Scientists Become Politicians
  

  Over thousands of years, at each step, the response of the scientists was to continually adjust and refine their theories to conform to the data, not the other way around. This is how science is done and how we developed the knowledge that has given us such tremendous and accelerating scientific and technological breakthroughs in the past century. It is occasionally reasonable to throw out a bad data point if it is in defiance of an otherwise satisfactory model fit, as long as everyone knows that you’ve done so and the rationale, but a deliberate and unrevealed fudging of results in an attempt to make the real world fit one’s preconceptions is beyond the scientific pale. Journal articles have been thrown out for it; PhD candidates have lost their degrees for it.
  

  Many in the climate change community have condemned what they call “skeptics,” often to the point of declaring them de facto criminals and assigning them to the same category as Holocaust deniers. They tell us that “the science is settled” and that we should shut up. But every scientist worthy of the name should be a skeptic. Every theory should be subject to challenge on a scientific basis. Every claim of a model’s validity should be accompanied by the complete model and data set that supposedly validated it, so that it can be replicated. That is how science works. It is how it advances. And when the science is supposedly “settled” and they refuse to do so, it’s not unreasonable to wonder why.

  Well, now we know.



• NYT Policy on Illegally Acquired Documents, "Hasn’t the Grey Lady published illegally obtained documents on national security and other matters in the past?" I must confess that I find the New York Times' reluctance to publish any of the leaked/hacked/whatever information snort worthy for exactly that reason.


• More on the NYT's selective squeamishness about handling leaked information, All The News That’s Fit To Bury


• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too: Even if the science was reliable (which it isn’t), we should not force the world’s poorest countries to cut carbon emissions
  

  Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.



• And the wheels of capitalism keep turning, WEAR THE DECLINE! Lots of links and updates with this one.

Althouse on Today's Obamacare Vote

"Democrats Clinch Vote on Health Debate."

In case you want to talk about it. I'll just be over here in a corner curled up in a little ball.

This is made all the more amusing to me, in a grim gallows humor kind of way, by the fact that she voted for President Obama. Lets see how much tighter we can cinch up those belts folks!