Weird Weather

Not that I'm I really complaining, but the cool weather this summer is taking some getting used to even though I've been up here in Wisconsin for awhile now.

Granted, it isn't terribly surprising given the lack of solar activity lately. But even taking that into account it is very unusual to see the local meteorologists so far off on their temperature forecasts. There have been multiple days when a 48 hour forecast has been 15+ degrees or more wrong. Most of the times they are saying it will be a lot warmer than it actually turns out to be, although they got it wrong in the other direction as well. We had a day in April which the 24 hour forecast said would be 72 degrees; it got to 98. (Now that was a freaky day, with steady 40 mps winds out of the south.)

48 hours ago the forecast said today was supposed to be 93 degrees. We are maxing out at around 75. Hell, last night we had to break out the comforters. We had the windows open and it got down to 57 in the bedroom. (I refuse to close up the house in July because of cold!)

And if you think the 48 hour forecasts are having it rough, the five day forecast are completely useless. I think someone will need to tweak the computer models they are relying on.

Baaaad Science Writing

A few days ago I blogged about a story I read in USA Today about sheep getting smaller on an Scottish island. I began by asking "Really, how stupid are the reporters at USA Today?" The answer is: Really, really stupid.

Call it the case of the shrinking sheep. On the remote Scottish island of Hirta, sheep have been getting smaller, shrinking an average of 5% over the last 24 years. Don't blame evolution, though. Researchers say climate change is the real culprit.
The Hirta sheep belong to a breed known as Soay, after the remote Scottish island where they arose. One of the most primitive forms of domestic sheep, Soays first came to Hirta in 1932. Because Hirta is a remote island, its sheep have remained genetically isolated, and no other sheep have been brought in for breeding. That's made Hirta's Soays ideal subjects for scientific study.

In 2007, scientists first reported that the sheep were smaller than they had been in the past. This prompted biologist Arpat Ozgul of Imperial College London and colleagues to analyze body weight data going back 24 years. The researchers confirmed that the Soays had indeed been getting smaller. And, as they report online today in Science, the reason appears to be climate change.

In the past, Hirta's sheep gorged on grass during their first summer, the team notes, piling on the weight in order to make it through the island's typically harsh winters. But over the past quarter-century, Hirta has had unusually short and mild winters. As a result, Ozgul and colleagues propose, grass has become available for more months of the year, meaning the Soay sheep do not have to bulk up as much. In addition, Hirta's harsh winters used to kill small ewes born to young mothers. But now these small ewes survive--and because of their low birth weight, they never get as big as normal sheep. That drives down the average size of the entire population, the team reports. Further mathematical modeling allowed the researchers to propose that natural selection has played little--if any--role in the shrinkage of the Hirta sheep.

Malcolm Gordon, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, praises the study. But he says that other mechanisms may be at work. "Changing [environmental] conditions on the island ... [may] have led to changes in the chemical composition and nutritional value of the plant foods the sheep eat," he says, and that may have shrunk the sheep. Though at the end of the day, he says, climate change could still be the root cause.

This account from ScienceNow, although even it has some problems in its reporting, is light years better than that given by USA Today. When I coupled this with a small story from this week's Economist I actually got a pretty good overview of the research. As I suspected the trouble with the USA Today story had more to do with their stupidity rather than the researchers.

For starters, the researcher did in fact check for other factors affecting weather in the region, including the North Atlantic Oscillation. USA Today probably didn't know what the NAO was so they left that out. Furthermore, the researchers did not, as USA Today claimed, use computer modelling to blame climate change for shrinking sheep sizes, but in fact only used it to rule out the effects of natural selection (which makes sense given we are only talking about 25 years here.)

Furthermore, the Economist made it clear that these were wild reproducing sheep (which even ScienceNow missed as being important), which is important as it limits the potential impact of human beings on the sheep.

USA Today, which is probably the most political of the Anthropogenic Global Warming crowd, has ceased to be a news source for me. They blatantly either misrepresented this research or they were too stupid to understand it. Either way they do not deserve to be read. I will be removing them from my Bloglines lineup, and I suggest you avoid them from now on as well.

I guess this proves not all reading is a good thing.

From Someone Who Obviously Hasn't Been Paying Attention

From Slate:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and President Barack Obama make for strange bedfellows,

Yeah. One is a self-styled socialist who is slowly destroying his country with disastrous economic policies, while the other is President of Venezuela.

Baaaad Science

Really, how stupid are the reporters at USA Today?

Like the wool sweater that emerges from the dryer a size too small, global warming seems to be shrinking sheep.

On average, wild Soay sheep on Scotland's island Hirta are 5% smaller today than they were in 1985, according to a team of researchers led by Tim Coulson of Imperial College London.

"The decrease in body size was due to a reduction in growth rates caused, in part, by the changing climate," Coulson said in an interview via e-mail.

Evolution favors the development of large sheep, which can more easily survive harsh winters, Coulson explained. So the researchers became curious about the overall decline in size of the animals on Hirta.

They discovered that as the climate has grown milder, small lambs that would not have survived previous winters were now living to grow up and reproduce.

Since size is inherited, the survival and reproduction of these smaller animals lowered the average size of the herd.

Oh my God. There is so much wrong with the "logic" behind this it is difficult to know how to begin.

For starters, no attempt seems to have been made to look at other factors. Were the size of the flocks constant? We don't know. Why should that matter? Well, if you have more sheep on the same limited land mass, like, oh I don't know, say an island, then the sheep could be smaller because each is getting a little less food. The article states, wrongly, that size is only determined by inherited factors. If the reporter believes this he is an idiot. The supply of food is the primary factor accounting for the size of individual animals.

Could warmer weather also have an effect? Of course, but ti would be only one factor among many, AND you would have to get look at all of the said factors. (Real science is a bitch that way.) For example, what are the ocean currents like in the area? Have they shifted over the last 30 years. Oops, no one seems to have checked that. How does this compare to other eras when weather changed? Oops, no data on that.

So why is this interesting? We already know in human populations, when weather is harsher crop yields will be diminished and, as a result, people will more likely be malnourished. (Do any of these idiots remember the famines in Africa? Were they really that long ago?)

Of course, with any domesticated animal there is another potential factor. Human beings. All domesticated creatures have features that have been selected by their handlers. Sometimes, these features have been selected for a purpose, sometimes they were a bit of an accident. (For example, the selection of German Shepherds with a specific crouched look has also made them susceptible to hip problems - the look was intended, the related health problems were not.) Was any attempt made to see how the shepherds on the island may have been influencing the sheep? Doesn't sound like it.

Actually, the fact this "study" was conducted in a remote area should raise red flags. Last time I checked, we have been told that warming was a global phenomena. Why wouldn't sheep everywhere been showing the same traits? Why do we need to traipse off to some remote corner of the world to find this "result"? Could it be they wanted to limit the ability for other researcher to verify the findings, or maybe find other solutions? Seems likely given the sheer number of sheep one can still find in rural England.

In general, if one wanted to show something like what the researchers claim they are looking for, one should look for it in wild producing populations and not in domesticated animals at all.

But, then again, that would make sense, and the AGW "debate" isn't about making sense it's about bureaucrats gaining power.

"Sometimes, the whole world prefers a lie to the truth."

Just in case you need confirmation concerning Obama's immoral stand against the Honduran people: A 'coup' in Honduras? Nonsense.

The White House, the United Nations, the Organization of American States, and much of the media have condemned the ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya this past weekend as a coup d'état.

That is nonsense.

In fact, what happened here is nothing short of the triumph of the rule of law.

To understand recent events, you have to know a bit about Honduras's constitutional history. In 1982, my country adopted a new Constitution that enabled our orderly return to democracy after years of military rule. After more than a dozen previous constitutions, the current Constitution, at 27 years old, has endured the longest.

It has endured because it responds and adapts to changing political conditions: Of its original 379 articles, seven have been completely or partially repealed, 18 have been interpreted, and 121 have been reformed.

It also includes seven articles that cannot be repealed or amended because they address issues that are critical for us. Those unchangeable articles include the form of government; the extent of our borders; the number of years of the presidential term; two prohibitions – one with respect to reelection of presidents, the other concerning eligibility for the presidency; and one article that penalizes the abrogation of the Constitution....

Under our Constitution, what happened in Honduras this past Sunday? Soldiers arrested and sent out of the country a Honduran citizen who, the day before, through his own actions had stripped himself of the presidency.

These are the facts: On June 26, President Zelaya issued a decree ordering all government employees to take part in the "Public Opinion Poll to convene a National Constitutional Assembly." In doing so, Zelaya triggered a constitutional provision that automatically removed him from office.

Constitutional assemblies are convened to write new constitutions. When Zelaya published that decree to initiate an "opinion poll" about the possibility of convening a national assembly, he contravened the unchangeable articles of the Constitution that deal with the prohibition of reelecting a president and of extending his term. His actions showed intent.

Our Constitution takes such intent seriously. According to Article 239: "No citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch can be President or Vice-President. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform [emphasis added], as well as those that support such violation directly or indirectly, will immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years."
Notice that the article speaks about intent and that it also says "immediately" – as in "instant," as in "no trial required," as in "no impeachment needed."

Once again, this proves the utter dishonesty (or shocking ignorance and stupidity) of President Obama regarding what is and isn't legal in Honduras.

Presidnet Obama should be applauding the Honduran people for standing up for their Constitution, their law, and their democratic way of life. Instead, he wants to offer them up to a Hugo Chavez style dictator.

Whose side is he on I wonder.

Obama's Immoral Choice

In choosing the forces of socialist autocracy in Honduras over the forces of law (the Honduran Supreme Court), order (the Honduran military), and democracy (the Honduran Congress), President Obama has probably shown us all his true colors. His brusque and imperialistic meddling in the affairs of Honduras in support of the attempts of the Castro regime in Cuba and the Chavez regime in Venezuela to destabilize Honduras in pursuit of their "war against the bourgeoisie," clearly shows Mr. Obama is no friend of democracy. Couple this with his practiced silence while Iranian demonstrators were being shot like dogs while clamoring for free and fair elections, and the depth of his antipathy to democracy becomes apparent. And make no mistake, there is no ambiguity to what is going on in Honduras:

Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya's abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court's order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

That Obama can look at these facts and declare there has been a "coup" is nothing short of despicable.

I know for most Americans the troubles of the Honduran people don't amount to much. It's rare for the country to even get a mention in the newspapers far too few Americans read. But this matters. That Obama has taken the side of dictators in support of the creation of another dictator matters.

We have a President who seemingly believes less in the ideals of the United States then he does in the mad ravings of leftist autocrats.

It's wrong.

Obama Is Either In Over His Head Or A Marxist...

...maybe both.

Police and soldiers clashed with thousands of protesters outside Honduras' national palace Monday, leaving at least 15 people injured, as world leaders from Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez [ed. yeah, that's a real wide spectrum. /eye roll] demanded the return of a president ousted in a military coup....

"It would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition rather than democratic elections," he added. "The region has made enormous progress over the last 20 years in establishing democratic traditions. ... We don't want to go back to a dark past."

The Organization of American States called an emergency meeting for Tuesday to consider suspending Honduras under an agreement meant to prevent the sort of coups that for generations made Latin America a tragic spawning ground of military dictatorships.

The new government, however, was defiant. Roberto Micheletti, named by Congress to serve out the final seven months of Zelaya's term, vowed to ignore foreign pressure.

"We respect everybody and we ask only that they respect us and leave us in peace because the country is headed toward free and transparent general elections in November," Micheletti told HRN radio.

He insisted Zelaya's ouster was legal and accused the former president himself of violating the constitution by sponsoring a referendum that was outlawed by the Supreme Court. Many saw the foiled vote as a step toward eliminating barriers to his re-election, as other Latin American leaders have done in recent years.

Despite the protests at the palace, daily life appeared normal in most of the capital, with nearly all businesses open. Some expressed relief at the departure of Zelaya, who alienated the courts, Congress, the military and even his own party in his tumultuous three years in power.

"A coup d'etat is undemocratic and you never want to support it, but in the case of this guy and his government, maybe so," said Roberto Cruz, a 61-year-old metalworker.

It's amazing that a country's attempt to forestall a dictatorship, which required the cooperation of the Honduran Congress, the Honduran Supreme Court and the Honduran military, is labelled by Obama as "moving backwards."

Heaven forbid we don't foster leftist autocrats.

Keep dreaming big Obama baby.

Really, Paul Krugman Is A Moron

Really he is.

Lysenkonism lives!

UPDATE:

My point here was simple, and in all of its particulars complete (or as complete as it needs to be when dealing with a boob and ideological hack like Krugman). However, that doesn't mean that other were not more prolix on the matter. Take Stephen Barr at First Thoughts:

...this morning, I read the statement of that noted physicist Paul Krugman proclaiming that to doubt the global warming peril is “treason against the planet.” One can hear the rumbling of the tumbrels, the crash of the guillotine, and the roar of the crowd in the background. Treason Against the Planet! Set up a Committee of Planetary Safety! What the hell, if I may ask, does Krugman know about it? Is he calling [MIT climatology Prof. Richard] Lindzen, [Harvard physicist Will] Happer, and [Institute for Advanced Study Freeman] Dyson traitors against the planet? Yes, in effect, he is. And that is truly disgusting.

Unfortunately for Krugman he brought his jack-booted ideology to a science fight.

Obama: Dictator In The Making?

Well, based upon Obama's open and enthusiastic support for Honduran dictator-in-the-making Manuel Zelaya, it is difficult to say Obama has much respect for the rule of law.

Zelaya was violating his country’s constitution with his referendum that would have, Chavez-style, repealed term limits on the presidency. The Honduras Supreme Court ruled the referendum illegal, and the military refused to distribute the ballots. Instead of backing down, Zelaya fired the head of the military, which precipitated the ouster.

Clearly, democracies cannot abide armed overthrow of elected governments, but that presumes that the government acts within the rule of law. Zelaya had no intention of doing so, and his flagrant violations and attempt to accrue personal power made that crystal clear. Zelaya had begun seizing dictatorial powers, and the military responded by arresting him. The military then handed power back to the legislature rather than keeping it for themselves, which makes this less of a coup and more of a military impeachment.

Obama's attempt to interfere in the domestic politics of Honduras is, of course, the exact opposite of the position he espoused on the campaign trail, and the fact he attempted to interfere to allow for the taking of dictatorial powers by Zelaya should worry all of us. Basically Obama is saying if you are a leftist president everything is permitted and the law should be no hindrance.

That is a scary, scary position for an American president to hold.

Add this to the Democratic penchant to support communist rebels in Columbia instead of the democratically elected government, and you have to ask: What is wrong with these people? Are they stupid or something?

Thanks For Your Peculiar Understanding Of "The Law" Justice Ginsburg...

...but no thanks.

Basically she claims the following:

White people, who work harder and are more accomplished then their co-workers by any objective measure, should not believe they deserve promotions or pay raises or any other perk, while there is a minority around who can receive said promotion or pay raise. In fact, white workers deserve nothing, and the reson they deserve nothing is that they are white.

She, rather laughably, finds this notion completely in keeping with the Constitution. Maybe her copy has a reverse 3/5th provision in it.

Beware: Anti-Liquor Fascists On The March

I hate these people. They are evil and should be resisted by any and all means. Alcohol link to one in 25 deaths

One in 25 deaths across the world are linked to alcohol consumption, Canadian experts have suggested.

Writing in the Lancet, the team from the University of Toronto added that the level of disease linked to drinking affects poorest people the most....

The paper says that, although there have been some benefits of moderate drinking in relation to cardiovascular disease, these are far outweighed by the detrimental effects of alcohol on disease and injury.

In addition to diseases directly caused by drinking, such as liver disorders, a wide range of other conditions such as mouth and throat cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, depression and stroke are linked to drinking.

Drinking patterns do vary around the world, and the researchers point out that most of the adult population - 45% of men and 66% of women - abstain from drinking alcohol for most of them for their life.

Across the Americas, average consumption is 17 units per week, while the Middle East was the lowest at 1.3 units per week.

Not only is this all the basis for evil bullshit, it is also a lie. The numbers do not lie. Let's compare life expectancy for the top five European alcohol consumers with those with the top five Middle East nations in life expectancy (where alcohol is generally banned.)

Germany: 77 years
Ireland: 76 years
Spain: 78 years
Denmark: 76 years
United Kingdom: 77 years

vs.

Israel: 78 years (alcohol legal)
Kuwait: 77 years (alcohol recently legalized)
U.A.E.: 75 years (alcohol mostly legal)
Oman: 73 years (alcohol illegal)
Saudi Arabia: 72 years (alcohol illegal)

In fact a full 30% of countries in the Middle East have rates under 70 years (12% are still in the 50's), while not a single Western European country is below 70.

But facts never stop a fascists drive for power, and this is expressly what this is about.

Professor Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians and chair of the Alcohol Health Alliance UK, said: "This study is a global wake-up call.

"We need an international framework convention for alcohol control, similar to that on tobacco, as soon as possible, to put into practice the evidence-based measures needed to reduce alcohol-related harm.

"These include increasing the price of alcohol, reducing its availability and banning advertising, and the action needs to start now."

See, for fascists like Ian Gilmore, personal choice is never a variable to even be discussed. For such monsters (in the sense of their not having a soul, which seems all too likely) human beings are cattle which the elite have the right, nay duty, to control because said cattle are too stupid to do what the elites want them to do.

These fascists really believe that the common people (i.e. schlubs like you and me) exist not for their own ends, they exist for the well-being of the state. So if you make a decision the fascists don't like they will remove your ability to make that choice. As fascist Don Shenker put it:

Many countries are investigating new ways to cut deaths and disease and reduce the burden on health services by using the price of alcohol to lower consumption.

"As the chief medical officer has identified, putting a stop to the irresponsible sale of low cost alcohol would be an effective step in the right direction.

Hmm...finding any notion of personal autonomy there? Nope. We are all beholden to the state in such a vision. That is their ideology, and that ideology is fascist in intent and execution.

All fascists are evil bastards that deserve to be stopped.

So let's stop them while we still have the democratic processes to do so. God knows they will not allow their anti-alcohol measure to be put to a democratic vote. Once again, sounds pretty fascist doesn't it?

If You Think Paul Krugman Is A Dishonest Idiot...

...but want further confirmation on that fact go here.

If you don't think Krugman is a dishonest idiot then you are wrong.

More Idiots At Work (Law School Division)

You know, its a good rule when you read something like Slate to not believe a word their "experts" put forward. Today gave a classic example. If Frank Ricci Loses, Blame Scalia

Many conservatives have taken up the cause of Frank Ricci, a New Haven, Conn., firefighter who sued the city, claiming that officials discriminated against him when they rejected the results of a promotion exam, on which he did well, because all but one of the top scoring candidates were white. Ricci's claim is now before the Supreme Court. I've written about it once to explain why Ricci's argument is a threat to an important part of modern civil rights law, and I'm writing again now because a lot of people have suggested that Ricci has been treated unusually and unfairly in the courts. In fact, he's been treated just like any other plaintiff suing for employment discrimination. The anger and frustration of the top-scoring firefighters who expected promotions is understandable. But the outrage on the right is also ironic, because the reason that people who sue for employment discrimination—like Frank Ricci—rarely win their cases is that conservative judges have spent decades making sure they usually lose.

A reverse-discrimination lawsuit like Ricci's is, legally speaking, no different from a conventional discrimination lawsuit. The plaintiff bears the burden of proof on every factual issue. This was firmly established by Justice Antonin Scalia's 1993 majority opinion in a case called St. Mary's Honor Center v. Hicks, in which a black correctional officer, Melvin Hicks, sued for race discrimination after he was demoted and later fired from his job at a halfway house. The plaintiff must first establish some basic evidence that makes it plausible that he was a victim of discrimination—he was fired or turned down for promotion, for example, for reasons that weren't obviously due to his own lack of performance or across-the-board staff reductions. Once a plaintiff makes this showing (as Ricci did), then the typical case proceeds by a process of elimination. If the plaintiff can prove that there was no good reason for his firing or nonpromotion, the law will conclude that the decision must have been discriminatory.

But, as Justice Scalia made clear in Hicks, the employer doesn't have to prove that there was a good reason for its decision; it needs only to claim that there was one.

Oh good Lord. What part of "The plaintiff bears the burden of proof on every factual issue" does this author (Stanford Law School prof Richard Ford) not understand? Look, we are dealing with individuals who have been accused of breaking the law. Since when have we thought it was OK to presume guilt? This is exactly what Ford is advocating, and acting as if the Conservatives are off their rocker for upholding the concept of innocent until proven guilty.

Additionally, Ford seems to indicate that as soon as some employer puts forward any reason whatsoever the plaintiffs case is automatically dismissed. This is complete nonsense. All the Court has said is that the original task of a plaintiff (i.e. proving they were discriminated against unlawfully) does not cease and cannot be replaced by the lesser task of poking holes in the defence.

It is worrying that someone teaching at a law school could so blithely embrace the concept of having people prove they are innocent, and thus negate a basic protection of the law. It's even scarier that Prof. Ford doesn't seem to realize he's doing this.

I May Have To Pick Myself Up One Of These

My motto has always been, What would Homer do?



Luckily we can all get the real thing.

Ephemera #1