Putin wants missile defense details

Barack Obama wants an arms control deal with Russia. Russia's Prime Minister Vladimir Putin wants details about our missile defense systems before any deal moves forward:

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia will build new weapons to offset the planned U.S. missile defense and urged Washington to share detailed data about its missile shield under a new arms control deal.

The hell of this is that Obama has already kow-towed to Moscow and scrapped the planned missile defense system deployment in eastern Europe, but in his eagerness to appease bad guys throughout the world, he'll probably agree.

Redefining racism

I've observed an emerging theme on the Left which says, in effect, that unless you wield power, you can't be accused of racism, the implication being that you have to be an establishment white male in order to be a racist. Just Google racism+prejudice+power and you'll see what I mean, but here's a sample:

Thus, from a macro perspective, only Whites as [a] group can be labeled as racist in society, for the socioeconomic system is structured in their favor.

Just for the record, here's what the dictionary says about the word:

rac⋅ism [rey-siz-uhm]
–noun
1. a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human races determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to rule others.
2. a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
3. hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

I guess in broad terms, the second definition meets the power prerequisite, but it's really referring to institutional racism and not individual racism, so the argument that one must wield power in order to be a racist still doesn't hold water.

The real danger in this thinking is that according to this bit of multi-culti Leftist doctrine, a crazy white guy living in his mom's basement who decides to go out and torch a black church can't be a racist because he lacks power. The notion that he holds power just because he's white is, in itself, racist.

Gadget review: Garmin nüvi 765T

As a long-time frequent traveler, I'm also a long-time automotive GPS user. The first one I had was a Garmin iQue, which was a Palm OS-based unit. It served me well for several years, but when Garmin introduced the nüvi line right about the time my iQue was starting to give out, I got myself a nüvi 350, which I reviewed here.

The 350 was a great device and served me well for over three years, but about mid-way through that period, the power switch started acting up and I had to send it to Garmin for repair. Garmin's service in this regard, by the way, is superb. The power switch on the 350 is a pressure switch and this problem cropped up again a few months ago, at which time I decided it was time to retire the unit and upgrade. A few weeks ago, my nüvi 765T arrived and a few minor quibbles aside, I couldn't be happier.

As one would expect, the 765T provides everything the 350 did, and then some. When I got the 350, I thought I'd never use the built-in MP3 player, but quickly found I couldn't live without it (see the 350 review linked above to see why), so of course I made sure this model included that feature (not all models in the nüvi line do). What this one offers that the 350 didn't (and that I'll actually use):

• Wide (4.3") screen
• Traffic alerts with re-routing
• Bluetooth support for cell phone

First, the bigger screen. Just like TVs, bigger is better, especially with my aging eyes. 'Nuff said.

As for the traffic alerts, I'm not completely sold on this yet. During a drive to Raleigh, NC a few weeks ago (my first trip with this unit), it threw an alert for heavy traffic on I-85 near Henderson, NC. Having been through the area before, I know that it's traffic-prone, so I took the suggested reroute, which was a pleasant (and fast) enough ride. On the return trip, it threw the alert near the same area, but showed that the area I was driving through was heavy traffic and yet it was moving fine. I suspected that the traffic update service (which is broadcast on the FM band to the unit) was sending outdated traffic info. So clearly, this isn't a problem with the nüvi 765T, but rather the traffic service provider.

The Bluetooth feature - like the MP3 player in the nüvi 350 - was something I didn't figure I'd use since I already have a Bluetooth headset. But after trying it once, I find myself using it any time I'm in the car for any length of time. When you place or receive a call, the MP3 player pauses playback and mutes any turn announcements. Audio playback and turn announcements automatically resume when you end the call. As an added plus, the nüvi imports the call history log and the phone's address book. At least with my Blackberry...I haven't tried it yet with any other phones.

The 765T also provides an icon on the screen to let you know in which direction your next turn will be, something the 350 lacked. This is very useful and something I'd seen in other older units such as the Tom Tom and it always mildly annoyed me that the 350 lacked it.

Another nice thing about the newer GPS units is the absence of a flip-up antenna. I never had a problem with the antenna on the nüvi 350, but they are subject to breakage. An external antenna jack is provided for increased satellite reception.

One thing the 350 had that the 765T doesn't is a "bug" on the screen indicating north. I didn't think that was such a big deal, but I want it back! It seems that's something that Garmin could add through a simple software update.

One last thing...like my old nüvi 350, the 765T came with a suction cup windshield mount. I hate those things, and in fact, they're illegal in California. I long ago got a Garmin "beanbag" mount, which is a weighted mount that simply sits on the dash. It's well worth the few bucks and doesn't leave nasty marks on the windshield.

Note: I receive no compensation or promotional considerations for any gadgets I review here. Who would pay me for this drivel, anyway?

Santa takes advantage of "Cash for Clunkers"

Santa jumped on the Cash for Clunkers program this past summer and traded in his aging and energy-inefficient sleigh and eight tiny reindeer for a C-17 Globemaster and three presumably average-sized aircrew.

More candidates like this, please

Allen West is running for Florida's 22nd Congressional District seat in 2010...we need more men and women like this.

Obama breaks silence on Tiger Woods story

After two weeks, President Barack Obama has offered his views on the story everyone's talking about; the Tiger Woods sex scandal. Following is a transcript:

Well, now, uh, I don't have all the facts, but clearly Elin acted stupidly. She let that young billionaire just run around all over the place. I mean...what the heck was she thinking?

Asked if he would intervene personally to resolve the situation, the president said:

Uh, sure, why not? Maybe a round of golf at Andrews AFB between the three of us...sort of a golf summit. Or, hey, Elin's Swedish, right? Maybe a lutefisk summit in the Rose Garden?

Stupid crap that bugs me

Just caught a teaser for the upcoming local news show in which the anchor said "Pakistan" with the Obama-approved pronunciation "PAH-kee-stahn", and it made my eyelid twitch. I know it's a running gag on the right, but it bugs me beyond all reason.

Presumably they pronounce it that way because that's how a Pakistani would pronounce it, yet you never hear Obama or any of the other assclowns pronounce Afghanistan the way someone from that region pronounces it. For that matter, you never hear one of them pronounce "Germany" as "DOYTCH-lahnd".

Fucking poseurs.

Local music break

I haven't had time for blogging due to travel the last two weeks, so I'm going to ease back into it with something requiring less effort than the usual fare.

One of my favorite local bands is Honor By August, and this might be my personal favorite of their many great songs. "Johnny (Pass Me Another One)" is a poignant, heart-felt song and never fails to please when they play it at their shows.

The video up top is more or less the "official" video for the song. Below is another take on the song recorded when Honor By August played last month at the Colonial Tavern here in Fredericksburg. First, a little about this video.

A friend of ours, Young Devereaux, sits in on sax with the band just about every time they play here, and he joined them for "Johnny" that evening, and I'd recorded the whole show on a digital audio recorder I have which is great for capturing live performances. About a week later, Young mentioned to me that someone had evidently videotaped the show and put the "Johnny" track up on YouTube, but that the audio quality was pretty bad. More as an academic exercise than anything else, I downloaded a copy of the YouTube clip using savevid.com to see if I could marry up my audio track with the video. The clip below is the result.

Senate Tora Bora report: A politically-timed hit piece

The Democrat-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee is set to release a report [PDF format] tomorrow on the failure to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001. The report aims to place blame for the failure directly on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and theater commander at the time, Gen. Tommy Franks. Indirectly, the clear intent is to implicate former President George Bush in the failure.

The report details events and command decisions made during the December 2001 battle at Tora Bora during which "...it was clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp" and criticizes the decision not to insert a massive force in the area to capture or kill bin Laden. I agree, to a large extent, with those criticisms, more for the psychological message killing or capturing Bin Laden would have sent than for the long-term strategic importance of doing so. I disagree completely with the reports conclusions of the consequences of that failure.

The final section of the report beginning on page 19, titled The Price of Failure claims that failing to close the book on bin Laden is the reason we're still in Afghanistan today.

Osama bin Laden’s demise would not have erased the worldwide threat from extremists. But the failure to kill or capture him has allowed bin Laden to exert a malign influence over events in the region and nearly 60 countries where his followers have established extremist groups. History shows that terrorist groups are invariably much stronger with their charismatic leaders than without them, and the ability of bin Laden and his terrorist organization to recover from the loss of their Afghan sanctuary reinforces the lesson.

Eight years after its expulsion from Afghanistan, Al Qaeda has reconstituted itself and bin Laden has survived to inspire a new generation of extremists who have adopted and adapted the Al Qaeda doctrine and are now capable of attacking from any number of places. The impact of this threat is greatest in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda’s continued presence and resources have emboldened domestic extremists waging an increasingly bloody insurrection that threatens the stability of the government and the region. Its training camps also have spawned new attacks outside the region—militants trained in Pakistan were tied to the July 2005 transit system bombings in London and several aborted plots elsewhere in Europe.

This is complete and utter hogwash. Islamist extremists of the Al Qaeda ilk don't need bin Laden to be alive in order to propagate their violent ideology within and outside their region. In fact, as much as I'd have liked to see bin Laden's head on a pike (and still would), I'll go so far as to say that bin Laden's current disposition is preferable to having him dead or in US custody.

There's no shortage of charismatic ideologues in the ranks of the Islamist jihad movement. A dead or captured bin Laden would clear the way for one of them to replace bin Laden, which hasn't happened yet. In death, bin Laden would be a martyr revered above his own idol, Sayyed Qutb, whose writings to this day inspires Islamist extremists all over the world long after his death in 1966.

This report, timed to coincide with President Obama's unveiling of his long-delayed Afghanistan strategy, is nothing more than a politically-timed hit piece on the previous administration designed to give Obama cover with the political left, which opposes continued involvement in Afghanistan. Look for Obama to cite this report extensively when he gives his inevitable speech on his Afghanistan strategy.

Yes, Climategate DOES discredit climate research

The files and e-mail exchanges from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia are damning in several respects. What's readily apparent to anyone reading objectively is that CRU systematically engaged in a practice to stifle peer review of their work. This is a fact and not subject to dispute, and by itself ought to be sufficient to summarily dismiss any reports or recommendations coming from CRU.

Also readily apparent is advocacy for a specific outcome of their work. Take it away, AoSHQ:

> >From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx]
> >Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18
> >To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris
> >Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim
> >Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009
> >
> >
> > Tim, Chris,
> > I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting
> > till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
> > press release with Doug's paper that said something like -
> > half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on
> > record, 1998!
> > Still a way to go before 2014.
> >
> > I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying
> > where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal
> > scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.

Dammit...curse this global cooling! I want to wipe some "smug grins" off people's faces! Oh, and never mind the fact that 1998 was NOT the hottest year on record. That was 1934, but that hardly fits the anthropogenic global warming narrative. This reveals an emotional investment in a desired conclusion which is incompatible with objective, honest scientific inquiry.

As for CRU researchers deliberately manipulating data to fit their needs, it certainly appears that happened, but the evidence is - for now - less than conclusive. But what may be even worse than fudging the data is that...CRU evidently has no idea what their datasets represent.

First, a few things about that Fortran source code you've probably heard about. For the uninitiated, "source code" is the program code that a programmer actually types into a computer. It might look funny to someone who's not a programmer, but it's still readable by humans. The source code is then run through a compiler which converts the source code to machine-readable form for execution.

Fortran is a programming language whose name comes from "FORmula TRANslator". It's been around for a long time (I did a little bit of Fortran work in the mid-1980s back in my programming days when I had to do some complex life insurance rate calculations), and it's still commonly used by scientists in number-crunching applications. Unlike other programming languages, Fortran source code can be pretty cryptic, even to an experienced programmer. For this reason, it's common practice to extensively comment the source code (comments are ignored by the compiler) so that someone coming along later to make changes to the code can understand what the hell's going on. This is why the Fortran source code from CRU has those long-running comments sections. Like this one:

7. Removed 4-line header from a couple of .glo files and loaded them into Matlab. Reshaped to 360r x 720c and plotted; looks OK for global temp (anomalies) data. Deduce that .glo files, after the header, contain data taken row-by-row starting with the Northernmost, and presented as '8E12.4'. The grid is from -180 to +180 rather than 0 to 360. This should allow us to deduce the meaning of the co-ordinate pairs used to
describe each cell in a .grim file (we know the first number is the lon or column, the second the lat or row - but which way up are the latitudes? And where do the longitudes break? There is another problem: the values are anomalies, wheras the 'public' .grim files are actual values. So Tim's explanations (in _READ_ME.txt) are incorrect..

8. Had a hunt and found an identically-named temperature database file which did include normals lines at the start of every station. How handy - naming two different files with exactly the same name and relying on their location to differentiate! Aaarrgghh!! Re-ran anomdtb:

It doesn't take a programmer to read this and realize that the guy writing the code was faced with a bunch of climate data files, the structure of which was unknown. Picture opening up an Excel spreadsheet with column after column of numbers, and no column headers telling you what each column contains.

Think about all this as President Obama jets off to Copenhagen to discuss a global climate change treaty with other world leaders, and think about what Obama's climate czar, Carol Browner, had to say about the appalling evidence coming out of CRU:

Ms. Browner initially shrugged when asked about the e-mails, saying she didn't have a reaction. But when a reporter followed up, she said she will stick with the consensus of the 2,500 climate scientists on the International Panel on Climate Change who concluded global warming is happening and is most likely being pushed by human actions.

Wow. I'm sure glad that science is being returned to its rightful place in this administration.

Update: I can't believe I forgot to mention the conspiracy to circumvent FOIA requests.

Hot Air links. Thanks!

Retailers: "Won't you please help?"

Just an observation on this Black Friday in the midst of the depression recession recovery.

It hasn't always been the case that the news media obsessively covered the Christmas shopping season. I'm thinking maybe for the past 15-20 years or so. But in all that time, I don't think I ever heard someone say "Wow! We're selling crap like there's no tomorrow and we expect a record year!". Not once. Instead, every report is all doom and gloom with retailers seeing anything from "disappointing results" to "the worst Christmas retail season ever".

Now why do you think that might be?

Social climbers

If you've seen the story about White House party-crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi, you've probably already seen this picture of the couple with VP Joe Biden. It's usually the one that accompanies the story. But the overreaching Washington socialites have a joint Facebook page (how weird is that?) with many more pictures from their illicit night at the White House.


Not satisfied to be seen schmoozing with the veep, they skipped right over his boss and went straight to the top for this picture with Rahm Emanuel, the real top dog in the White House.


Oh, wait...did I say Rahm Emanuel? Sorry. It was apparently some look-alike named Ron Emanuel. My bad.


Michaele's such an important figure, a few good men took time out from their duties to personally welcome her. Or so her Facebook page would have you believe.


Women of real substance and import have to stick together, you know. And a trend emerges...what does the right side of Michaele's face look like?

Later in the evening, Michaele and Joe got cozy.

The story was at first interesting only from a security perspective - how did two uninvited guests manage to crash a state dinner at the White House? - and I'm sure that between this episode and Biden's recent motorcade demolition derby, some folks over at the Secret Service are sweating bullets. But it keeps getting weirder.

Today's reports are that Michaele was being considered for an upcoming reality TV show "Housewives of Washington" on the Bravo channel and was followed around by a film crew all day while preparing for her big night out. I don't know about you, but whenever I hear about someone trying to get on a reality show, my immediate thought is "publicity whore".

As for their motivation for crashing this particular event, there's a clue on their Facebook page:

The America's Polo Cup & the United States Polo Team is looking forward to welcoming India in 2010 in the world championship polo matches on the DC National Mall

The Salahis are active in polo events and their Facebook page lists the Americas Polo Club as one of their employers. Wouldn't hurt to schmooze with some official representatives of India in advance of this event.

And what is wrong with Michaele's right side?

Update: I was looking for an article that gave the ages of these two, because one I saw yesterday (and can't find now) said that Tareq's age is variously given as 39 or 41. Sorry, folks, but I'm turning 50 next month, and there's no way I'm 8 or 10 years older than this guy. But CNN has this piece detailing some of their legal woes.

Too Jive CRU

jive –noun
1. swing music or early jazz.
2. the jargon associated with swing music and early jazz.
3. Slang. deceptive, exaggerated, or meaningless talk: Don't give me any of that jive!

Too Jive CRU...2 Live Crew...see what I did there? Yeah, I know...lame. I doubt anyone even remembers today what 2 Live Crew was. Anyhoo...

When I first heard that someone had hacked into the University of East Anglia (UK) Climate Research Unit (CRU) and posted something north of 60MB worth of files and e-mails, I thought it was no big deal...there'd probably be a bunch of indecipherable climate data files and incomprehensible e-mails talking about the indecipherable climate data. But the e-mails between Phil Jones discussing "tricks" for cooking the books and - worse - conspiring to conceal their methods and data from prying eyes and FOI requests were in plain enough English.

Ace has a great post up today summarizing the chronology to date, but his addendum at the end about climate models, to me, is one of the most damning things I've seen yet on the charlatanism that is climate research. It seems that the models used to predict future climate trends - yes, those models which politicians world wide are citing to tax the living shit out of everyone and reduce us to a hunter-gatherer society - can't even properly predict the past, which, as Ace quips:

...is unfortunately quite knowable, and so we can check their "predictions" against actual records.

They all fail. They all fail.

I'll just quote from the link the same part Ace quoted, because I'm lazy like that:

None of the multiple computer simulations used by a UN climate-change agency for assessments of global warming appears good enough to predict how India’s monsoon will behave, two Indian scientists have said.

The researchers examined 10 simulations of future climate scenarios used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and found none could reproduce correctly the behaviour of even 20th-century rainfall.

Not a single model could simulate realistically key features of the Indian monsoon...

In attempts to assess impacts of global warming, the IPCC considered 17 models of how climate would evolve as carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rose. Some models predict more rainfall over India, but with great uncertainty.

“The models have very serious problems in simulating even 20th century monsoon patterns,” said Madhavan Rajeevan, a senior scientist at the National Atmospheric Research Laboratory, Tirupati, and a co-author of the paper.

“When a model (computer simulation) cannot even show with reasonable accuracy monsoon behaviour in the past, there’s a big question mark over its ability to predict future patterns,” Rajeevan told The Telegraph.

CRU is just too jive to be believed, too jive to get further grant money, too jive to continue operating.

Update: My reply to Charles in the comments about the programmer's remarks in the source code, because I think it's an important point:

Here's the scandal:
The guys writing the software to produce the climate prediction models don't know the structure of the data sets they're dealing with.