Posts by James Bremner
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but they make one thing obvious... paleoclimate exhibits a high degree of apparently chaotic variability, that we simply do not understand. If I was faced with an automation process that behaved like this my professional reaction would be "don't fuck with it".
Exactly. The idea that we understand how the earth's climate works to a high degree of certainty, and that we can predict it with certainty into the future is so obviously not correct. How many wrong climate predicitions do we need before we accept this?
And the idea that we should make dramatic policy decisions with huge consequences based on highly uncertain predicitions is just nuts.
Hopefully the world will get to this general understanding before too much damage has been done.
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the trusts were formed from the money of a conservative Christian oilman, and another Pew trust still offers scholarships for evangelical Christians.)
RB, by your normal logic, any trust formed by a holy Trinity of evil, such as conservative, Christian oilmen (how bad can you get!!) would automatically be discredited and anything they say must automatically be wrong.
What has changed?
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A couple more articles on GW that have appeared recently
The first one catalogues the temps of the last year which don't exactly scream GW.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071219/COMMENTARY/10575140
The comment about hurricanes is obviously of more interest to me as I live here on the Gulf coast. After the big K, according to the GW alarmists Katrina was supposed to presage more large storms due to GW, we were all going to get whacked by bigger storms more frequently. Even the Goracle put a satellite picture of Katrina on the cover of his Michael Moorish load of drivel, "The Inconvenient Truth". The only inconvenient truth for the GW alarmists is that we didn't have to evacuate for a hurricane once over the last 2 seasons. Most unusual.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20070624/EDITORIAL/106240002
The second one describes a study which correlates changes in temp to an apparently well known sun spot cycle.
There is more than enough doubt on the subject of GW to caution against rushing headlong into decisions and treaties etc. that would have such profoundly negative consequences.
Resorting to smearing reasonable people with reasonable questions as "deniers" is another red-light, not a sign of a strong position at all.
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Rather tends to support O'Sullivan's thesis on GW.
Er, how exactly?
The fact that there have recently been more articles in various newspapers that deal with some aspect(s) of GW hype shows some movement on the subject.
There isn't any doubt that the NYT leans liberal, and when they run an article that doesn't slavishly tow the liberal line on a given subject, that is something to note.
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Not a good sign for the "Global warming, we are all going to die!!" crowd when the NYT, of all publications, starts publishing articles skeptical of it.
I also see a "on one hand, and then on the other' rather balanced article on GW on Stuff.co.nz this morning.
Rather tends to support O'Sullivan's thesis on GW.
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While the Iranian regime, Iraq and the US are the big winners from the new NIE, the big losers are the Iranian people who will have to continue to suffer under a brutal regime that over the last 27 years has killed 4,000 people, solely because they were gay, amongst a litany of other brutal acts and oppression against Iranians.
After the fiascos of not just missing 9/11 and then the Iraqi wmd NIE estimates, but missing Pakistan and India's nuke bomb programs, you would hope that the CIA etc really got their act together for this NIE on Iran. I read that the latest NIE was the product of over 1,000 pieces of reporting and intelligence, not just one or several items of inteligence, so one lives in hope.
And..
"Fuck!!" (in Persian of course)
Iranians speak Farsi redneck...
I'm no expert on the topic, but at least according to Wikipedia you should check things out before you open your mouth. Particularly if you're going to be y'know, rude about it. Farsi and Persian seems to mean the same thing.
Cheers Kyle!!
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Maybe things aren't going so badly after all?
Tell that to all the dead people's families. In person. Make a tape, put it on You Tube. I'd really love to see it.
You really ought to be making a request to Al Qaeda and Moqti et al terrorists & insurgents etc. to make a video on You Tube to apologize for the all the homicide bombings and murder and mayhem that they inflicted on Iraqis over the last few years. They killed, deliberately, a hell of a lot more people, and are thus responsible for the displacement etc, than the MNF killed, and any civilians the MNF killed, were killed by accident. There is no moral relativity there at all.
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The new NIE on Iran represents an extraordinary change in international relations. I hope it is true, but intelligence is never to a "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard, it is always guesswork to a significant extent, so you never know what the truth really is.
According to the NIE, firstly the Iranians DID have a nuke bomb program which is a very significant finding, and secondly they stopped work on it in late 2003 for "cost benefit reasons". Interesting timing and reasons, don't you think?
Would part of their cost calculation be the real possibility that a certain Cowboy would actually go after them and their nuke bomb program? Why else would they stop work on the program in late 2003? Just maybe the looked west across the border and thought to themselves "Fuck!!" (in Persian of course)
So maybe the US killed 3 birds with one stone? Saddam's regime, then Libya's nuke program which Gadahfi coughed up in late 2003 and now Iran stopped work on their program in late 2003 as well?
So Iraq is going better, AQ in Iraq has had its head handed to it and it looks like North Korea has made a strategic decision to stop being a trouble making hermit kingdom and to rather stop causing trouble and engage with the outside world.
Maybe things aren't going so badly after all?
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What a great post. I am a bit late to the party, but nothing like starting the day with a good laugh and a flood of both fond and fraught memories.
My wife and I have a 2 year old who is such a delightful, beautiful child, that I find it hard to put into words how much I love the little fella. We have just found out that we have another one on the way so we are thrilled to bits about that.
Our most difficult time with John Sebastian was a series of ear infections that began at around 6 months that finally culminated in having tubes put in his ear drums. We had about 3 months of having an ear infection every other week. It was brutal for Daninka and me, but seeing John in such misery was just horrible. Poor little fella. As soon as the tubes went in it was like someone flicked a switch, no problems at all from then on. If our next one has the same problem, we are just going to insist on having tubes put in after the second infection.
We have been so fortunate with everything to do with John. The only out of the ordinary aspect was that when we evacuated from NOLA for Katrina, Daninka was 8 months pregnant, so after the storm we had the uncertainty of not knowing where we would be for the birth and whether we still had a house or jobs etc. (we found out after about 3 or 4 days that our house was fine and our companies were fine too).
The first place we evacuated to, Jackson MS got whacked pretty hard by the storm, so we had to move on and we had another day long car trip (very uncomfortable for Daninka at 8 months pregnant ) to go to Arlington, Texas and stay with a distant relative of mine, who was great. We quickly found a wonderful hospital and a great doctor very close by, so less than a week after we evacuated we were all sorted out, and could settle in and await the big day. Daninka was just amazing about the whole thing.
We finally all made it back home about 7 weeks after we left. I have this great photo of Daninka and John in an exhausted sleep on our bed, having just arrived after the 2 day trip home.
For me having John is both the greatest joy and the greatest responsibility. My life prior to having John seems so trivial by comparison. What did I do with my time? I got more sleep in the mornings, but so what? I wouldn’t trade a bit of it, ear infections, dirty diapers and all!!
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To describe the Lancet study as an outlier is too generous. It is so far out by itself that it is not funny.
I forget when it came out but if you divided the total by the number of months it came to a completely silly monthly death toll, which couldn't be corroborated with any other records. Like dead people for example.
If I remember correctly its methodology didn't stand up so well after all, peer reviewed or not (maybe the phrase peer review might be expanded to include "anti-war academic circle jerk, in this instance).
I recall two of the faults in the survey were that it only included larger streets, which were more likely to have experienced deaths from car bombs or fighting. For obvious reasons the surveyors didn’t feel like going down back alleys etc Also it relied on people saying whether their had been any deaths of which they knew, so many of the “yeses” could have been for the same person, or for reasons of human nature and the wish to be boastful etc.
Another data point is the Iraqi Health Ministry's number is in the 100k range.
The death toll is bloody terrible, I am not meaning to belittle it in any way, but let’s deal with reasonable numbers and acknowledge that most of the dead have been killed by insurgents and terrorists, not the MNF.
How many people would have been killed by Saddam if he was still in power? A lower number, but the country and its people have a chance of a decent future now, they had none whatsoever under Hussein.