The Problem with Firing the Prosecutors

I don't know how long I can stand the media anymore. I get sick at looking at all this coverage about the firing of the 8 attorneys. It's just mind-boggling, I can't understand it. So people, you mentally disabled losers at NY Times, CNN, CBS, LA Times and so on: US attorneys are named by the President, they are employee of the federal government, and they can be fired at will! Bill Clinton fired ALL 95 US Attorneys in 1993 (the reason? one attorney was investigating a crook, good friend of the Clintons) ! So the only 2 problems I see here are:

1. Why only 8?
2. Why so late, in the 6th year of his presidency??

The US attorneys have been a disgrace since Bush took over the White House. THEY SHOULD ALL GO!

Is 300 a Conservative Movie? No. Illiberal? Yes

There were some discussions about whether the new movie 300 is an attack on Bush's militarism? Or is it in support of it? So why do every war movie have to have a political message? Maybe it's just a simple historical movie with awesome CG graphics. The answer to "Is it a conservative movie"? is a simple NO. Why? Because if it were, it couldn't have been made in Hollywood. But what it is for sure, it's an illiberal movie. Our friends at Libertas clearly explained why it is illiberal: 300 is about bravery, freedom, honor, and country. These are universal themes. But universal themes that will offend liberals because they’re not defended in a PC fashion. Liberals believe bravery is being brave enough to kiss despot hiney in the corrupt UN. Liberals believe freedom is porn in school libraries. Liberals believe honor is leaking national security secrets to the New York Times. Liberals believe ”country” is about everybodys counry but ours, so it’s okay to give mass murderers autographed basketballs and ask them to dance. The men in 300 believe they are good, their families are good, their country is good, and worth dying and fighting for. Now, that is not a conservative value. But it is an illiberal one.

Now the best take on 300 that I found is the article on National Review. David Kahane hits a lot of right notes about the movie. Among them: When, early in the film, a sneering Persian emissary insults King Leonidas’s wife, threatens the kingdom, and rages about blasphemy, the king kicks him down a bottomless well. And yet nobody in Sparta asks, “Why do they hate us?” and seeks to find common ground with the Persians on their doorstep. The Spartans mock the god-king Xerxes (whose traveling throne resembles a particularly louche Brazilian gay-pride carnival float), mow down his armored “immortal” holy warriors and generally give their last full measure to defend Greek civilization against superstition and tyranny. Where are the liberal Spartan voices raised in protest against this blatant homophobia, xenophobia, and racism?

After seeing the movie, I found out it has a lot of other anti-liberal themes. Mocking the metrosexual fags, like Mr. Kahane said, is one of them. Going to a pre-emptive war to face the enemy away from home is another one. Reminds me of a team sports principle, that offense is the best defense. But aside from this, it was a great movie, and anybody who liked Lord of the Rings, Gladiator or even Kill Bill should like it.

Again on the "net neutrality" nonsense

There was an interesting article in NRO today about the Net-Neutrality Nonsense. With Dems in power, we could have expected the rebirth of this socialist idea, which is clearly against free markets and technological development. But you know, Dems are back in Congress, and there main economical philosophy is to regulate everything that moves. As Dena battle says in her closing remarks: If you want the Internet to both grow and grow faster, leave it to the private sector. If you want to keep it equal and equally slow, bring in the government to regulate it.

To save the planet, we must defeat the climate models

And again, the climate models tried to destroy us. Fortunately, Earth responded back and crushed their (always wrong) predictions.
In a new report, Antarctic temperatures disagreed with climate model predictions.
It's something that Earth has been doing for a long time... don't forget that the IPCC reports are primarily based on a model which overestimated the warming over the past 2 decades by 300%.

Regarding the latest global warming scare, nobody said it better than Czech president Vaclav Klaus. A few excerpts from his recent interview, which received a lot less coverage (almost non-existent) than the political IPCC summary:
Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses.
Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing. Look: you represent the economic media so I expect a certain economical erudition from you. For example, we know that there exists a huge correlation between the care we give to the environment on one side and the wealth and technological prowess on the other side. It's clear that the poorer the society is, the more brutally it behaves with respect to Nature, and vice versa.

Fighting the Church of Global Panic

Two articles today in National Review are trying to calm down the global warming panic.

First, in The Church of Global Panic, Rich Lowry points out that the much-hyped IPCC report is actually less grim than the prior version from 2001. For example, the worst estimate for the effect of the CO2 over this century, was 3.5 C in the 2001 report. Now it is down to 3 C. Also, the report more than halved its high-end best estimate of the rise in sea level by 2100 from 3 feet to just 17 inches.” In his scare-documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore posited a catastrophic sea-level rise of more than 20 feet (feet, not inches). Again, these are not observations, they are just computer models. For now, it's not the climate that's gonna kill us, but the computers. And don't forget, the favorite computer model is one that overestimated the temperature increase over the last 20 years by 300%!

No one knows how to create a reliable model of the planet’s climate, and inconvenient anomalies muddy the story line of the warming zealots. From 1940 to 1975, the global temperature fell even as CO2 emission rose. Since 2001, global temperatures have only gone up a statistically insignificant 0.03 degrees Celsius. And in recent years, the oceans have actually gotten cooler.

In the other article, Global Cooling Costs Too Much, Jonah Goldberg tries to weigh the benefits and liabilities of the warming weather. Earth got about 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer in the 20th century while it increased its GDP by 1,800 percent. How much of that 0.7 degrees can be laid at the feet of that 1,800 percent is unknowable, but let’s stipulate that all of the warming was the result of our prosperity and that this warming is in fact indisputably bad (which is hardly obvious). That’s still an amazing bargain. Life expectancies in the United States increased from about 47 years to about 77 years. Literacy, medicine, leisure and even, in many respects, the environment have improved mightily over the course of the 20th century, at least in the prosperous West. Given the option of getting another 1,800 percent richer in exchange for another 0.7 degrees warmer, I’d take the heat in a heartbeat, Mr. Goldberg says.

The costs are just too high for too little payoff. Even if the Kyoto Protocol were put into effect tomorrow — a total impossibility — we’d barely affect global warming. Especially considering that China alone plans on building an additional 2,200 coal plants by 2030. Oh, but because China (like India) is exempt from Kyoto as a developing country, the West will just have to reduce its own emissions even more. Also, ethanol requires almost as much energy to make as it provides, and the costs to the environment and the economy may be staggering.

Eco-Chondriacs: About the Global Warming Alarmists

Mark Steyn published an piece on the global warming alarmists in today's Chicago Sun Times, called What's so hot about fickle science?
Here are two paragraphs from his article, but I recommend you to read it in its entirety:

A thousand years ago, the Arctic was warmer than it is now. Circa 982, Erik the Red and a bunch of other Vikings landed in Greenland and thought, "Wow! This land really is green! Who knew?" So they started farming it, and were living it up for a couple of centuries. Then the Little Ice Age showed up, and they all died. A terrible warning to us all about "unsustainable development": If a few hundred Vikings doing a little light hunter-gathering can totally unbalance the environment, imagine the havoc John Edwards' new house must be wreaking.

If "global warming" is real and if man is responsible, why then do so many "experts" need to rely on obviously fraudulent data? The famous "hockey stick" graph showed the planet's climate history as basically one long bungalow with the Empire State Building tacked on the end. Completely false. In evaluating industrial impact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used GDP estimates based on exchange rates rather than purchasing power: As a result, they assume by the year 2100 that not only South Africans but also North Koreans will have a higher per capita income than Americans. That's why the climate-change computer models look scary. That's how "solid" the science is: It's predicated on the North Korean economy overtaking the United States.

Are climate "experts" really muffled by the White House?

Yesterday, a House Committee held a hearing on political interference into global warming, led by Henry Waxman (D, Calif.) As you probably heard from the media, it produced irrefutable evidence that the White House is censoring honest climate scientists. Let's see who the three star witnesses were: Francesca Griffo os UCS released the results of a questionnaire sent to 1,600 climate scientists at 7 federal agencies. Some 150 scientists — 58 percent of those responding — reported at least one incident of political interference with their work during the past 5 years. But only 19 percent of the 1,600 scientists responded to the questionnaire, which means the report draws inferences from a self-selected minority rather than from an unbiased sample. Then Drew Shindell of NASA, recounted what happened when he published a paper forecasting a warming trend in Antarctica. The Bush White House did not try to stop him from publishing the paper, nor did it try to stop NASA from putting out a press release on it. White House officials committed the crime of twice rejecting the titles he and the NASA press corps proposed for the press release, and eventually told them what title to use.

But the biggest testimony came from self-styled whistleblower Rick Piltz, who resigned in a huff from the US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) in March 2005. First of all, as Piltz acknowledged at the hearing, he is himself not a climatologist but a political scientist, and his job at the CCSP was to produce reports by editing the contributions of agency scientists. You can read everything about the hearing in Marlo Lewis' article Waxman’s Kyoto Strategy but here are a few things to be considered:

It is worth noting that the two CCSP reports cited by Piltz were not strictly speaking science studies but policy documents. For example, the latest edition of Our Changing Planet, says as part of its subtitle, “A Supplement to the President’s Fiscal Year 2004 and 2005 Budgets.” One would think that is exactly the sort of document the White House has a legitimate interest in reviewing before publishing and sending to the Hill. In one of the drafts, Phil Cooney of CEQ crossed out several lines predicting “reductions” in mountain glaciers and snow pack in “polar regions” and “serious impacts on native populations that rely on fishing and hunting.” His marginal note says the deleted material was “straying from research strategy into speculative findings/musings.” True or false? A team of researchers led by Curt Davis of the University of Missouri-Columbia found that Antarctica’s snow pack is thickening. Similarly, a team led by Ola Johannessen of the University of Bergen found that the interior of Greenland’s ice sheet is thickening. So in the case of these polar areas, the draft report’s prediction appears to be not only speculative but wrong. As for impacts on native peoples, there is evidence that Inuit culture flourished during previous periods when the Arctic was as warm as or warmer than it is today. In short, Cooney’s description of the deleted material as “speculative findings/musings” is correct.

Cooney also inserted in a draft of Our Changing Planet the word “extremely” before the word “difficult,” in this sentence: “The attribution of the causes of biological and ecological changes to climate change or variability is extremely difficult.” As proof, Virginia State Climatologist Patrick Michaels points out that in Arctic areas where it is warming, polar bear populations are increasing, and in areas where it is cooling, bear populations are declining.