Ivory Dome

USA Consistently Dominates Olympics

A local blogger posted a cartoon from a newspaper that effectively calls American’s fat lazy slobs.  The comparison was made by showing a Canadian Curler and an American hyper-obese couch potato eating cheese curls.  The blogger was probably projecting, but I have been following the medal count and the USA is dominating with the total number of medals.

This also got me thinking, how many medals have been won by the USA across all of the Olympic games?  The results my come as shock to America haters, but the USA consistently dominates the Olympic games, by a relatively wide margin, too.

Here is an interactive table of the various medal counts.

Read it ad weep, liberals.  America produces the best athletes the world has ever known.

Posted in Local, National, Showcases of Liberal Dishonesty, Unhinged Liberals | 1 Comment »

The Scott Heard Round the World

“With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy’s seat, it’s not the Democrats’ seat, it’s the people’s seat.”

Two months short of my third birthday, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as a freshman Senator from the State of Massachusetts.  After serving for nearly eight years, he vacated the seat to serve as President.  A caretaker by the name of Benjamin A. Smith kept the seat warm for a couple of years until Kennedy’s youngest brother was old enough to inherit the seat.  Edward M. Kennedy then proceeded to fill the “Kennedy seat” for another 47 years.

When our Founding Fathers declared their independence from England, they held  to be self-evident the truth that “all men are created equal.”  In England, there were (and still are) commoners, noblemen, and royalty.  Commoners were not equal to the nobility, and no one was equal to the royalty. 

To this day, the United Kingdom recognizes so-called “hereditary peers” - people who have inherited their title as a birthright.  Until 1999, these privileged individuals were entitled to a seat in the House of Lords based not for what they themselves had done but on the family they were born into. 

Our country was founded on the principle that no one is “more equal” than anyone else in the eyes of the law.  In theory at least, there are not separate sets of rules for different classes of people.  This is why slavery and segregation were ultimately doomed - because both systems were diametrically opposed to the the principle that all men are created equal.

Yet despite this, a political class developed in this country.  Starting with the Adams family (John and John Quincy, not Gomez and Morticia! ), there have been clans that seemed to have special rights when it came to elected office.  If your name was Roosevelt, Gore, Bush, Dodd or Kennedy, you were a member of the ruling aristocracy in this country regardless of your intelligence or moral character.  But as Scott Brown so eloquently stated, elected offices don’t belong to any family, or even any political party, but to the people.  Tonight, the people have spoken.

I find it fitting that this break in the American aristocracy took place in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.

When I was 10 years old, I visited the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts and read the famous verse by Ralph Waldo Emerson that memorialized the first battle of the revolution:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flags to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

Tonight, those who oppose the tyranny of a ruling class and one-party rule elected the “Scott” heard round the world.

Posted in Political | No Comments »

A scientist who didn’t “hide the decline”

On September 28, 1928, a scientist in the laboratory of St. Mary’s Hospital in London noticed that someone had left the lid off of a petri dish containing  Staphylococcus plate culture.  As a result of someone’s mistake, a  blue mould “contaminated” the petri dish, inhibiting the growth of the bacteria.

Had this scientist worked at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where the ClimateGate emails and documents were recently hacked, he might have performed a “trick” (i.e. thrown away the petri dish) in order to “hide the decline” of Staphylococcus bacteria.  Fortunately for the human race, this scientist chose instead to investigate why this anomaly occurred, even though it didn’t fit into his preconceived understanding of microbiology.

The scientist was  Alexander Fleming.  The blue mould, Penicillium, was later developed into penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic.

But that’s not the end of the story.  By 1931, Fleming was convinced that penicillin couldn’t last in the human body long enough to kill pathogenic bacteria, and he stopped studying it.  Fortunately, two other scientists (Boris Chain and Walter Florey) continued to work on developing penicillin.

Did Fleming threaten the editors of the journals that published Chain and Florey’s work or try to “re-define what the peer-review literature is” (like CRU Director Phil Jones and others did to those whose research contradicted theirs)?  On the contrary, Fleming not only allowed the research of Chain and Florey to proceed, he was eventually won over by their findings and himself began working on penicillin again in 1934.  In the end, Fleming, Chain and Florey all won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945.

Untold millions of lives have been saved from infections that would have previously been fatal, all because a British scientist dared to put pettiness, ego, and politics aside and follow the scientific evidence to where it ultimately led.

Posted in Global Warming | 4 Comments »

Could this man hold the answer to global warming?

His name is Ian “Harry” Harris, and he’s a research staffer involved with dendroclimatology, climate scenario development, data manipulation and visualisation, programming at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom.  The CRU is one of the leading institutes in the world advocating Anthropogenic [i.e. man-made] Global Warming (AGW).  The recent leaking of about 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents from the CRU has raised serious questions about the credibility of this institution’s research.

Much has been made about the emails sent among leading AGW scientists, many of which imply that there have been “tricks” played with the data to “hide the decline” of global temperatures, as well as a hickjacking of the entire peer review process to shut out all opposing theories.  Many of these emails have been explained away by claiming that they have either been taken out of context or the somewhat cryptic use of words like “trick” have a much less sinister meaning than what global warming skeptics.

But there are two things that are far less open to broad interpretation:  the raw data and the software used to “prove” that global warming exists and is man-made.  If either the data or the software are less than 100% objective, the entire premise of AGW is called into question.

Enter Harry Harris.  One of the most revealing CRU documents, which is only now gaining widespread attention, is harry_read_me.txt

Harry_read_me.txt is a 3-year commentary (2006-2009) by a programmer named “Harry” (most likely Ian “Harry” Harris) documenting his frustrations in trying to make the software do what it’s supposed to.  I’m no computer geek, but programmers who don’t have an axe to grind in the AGW debate are saying that  the software is hopelessly flawed.

In one of the best articles to date on this subject, Congress May Probe Leaked Global Warming E-Mails, CBS News blogger Declan McCullagh recounts some additional clues regarding serious flaws in the CRU software:

Programmer-written comments inserted into CRU’s Fortran code have drawn fire as well. The file briffa_sep98_d.pro says: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” and “APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION.” Another, quantify_tsdcal.pro, says: “Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!” 

On April 5, 2007, in a post entitled “Global Warming’ or “Climate Change”?, I wrote, “Some day, we may look back on this debate with as much nostalgia as the epicircles [sic] of the geocentric universe theory.” (Actually, the term of art is “epicycles.”)

Back in the days when everyone thought that the Earth was the center of the universe, as the data became clearer and clearer that this couldn’t be the case, epicycles were geometric models that were used to explain away the variations in speed, direction and motion of the Sun, Moon and planets. Apparently, the code used to model global warming is the 21st Century equivalent of “epicycles,” which is basically what I predicted more than two and a half years ago. But never in my wildest dreams did I ever expect it to be exposed so soon.

I firmly believe that once someone with sufficient expertise in computer programming thoroughly interrogates “Harry,” the computer code is going to be the smoking gun of this whole fraud. Snarky emails can be explained away, the significance of “hiding” the data through various “tricks” depends on what the meaning of the words “hide” and “trick” are, but if the tool they used to reach their conclusions was hopelessly flawed, then all bets are off.

My statistics professor had a name for this kind of cooking of the books: “strangling the data until it confesses.” If I understand this correctly, what we’re witnessing here is the cyber-version of water boarding.

Posted in Global Warming | 4 Comments »

White People Are Evil

That is what a person would almost surely have to think if they agree with Gates in this whole fiasco with him being arrested by Officer Crowley.

Lets speculate for a moment. If no one ever check on Gate’s house after the woman called the police he would probably be just as outraged that the while rouge cop cared so little that he wouldn’t check up on a potential burglary. The police are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

What we have here is just another race hustler. The facts are being completely ignored and no one is discussing the inappropriate comments made by Gates. Even the president, acknowledgeing he doesn’t know the facts, is discgracefully throwing the Cambridge police department under the bus.

All Gates, Obama, and his unwavering followers seem to be are eternal victims. People aren’t buying this load of BS put forth by these race hustlers and that is why Obama is now backpedaling as fast as he can.

Posted in My Opinion, National, Political | 1 Comment »

Creeping Fascism From the Left

Here are some quotes that are relevant to the topic:

Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don’t need guns, as their having guns doesn’t serve the State.  -  Heinrich Himmler

 

“Nobody should be selling weapons of war in the streets of our country. It’ll be a tough vote, but it’s the right policy,” Kerry said. “I’m a hunter, I believe in the Second Amendment, and I don’t foresee any efforts to curtail anybody’s rights. But assault weapons? If people want to use them, join the military.”   - John Kerry, 2009.

 

I know John “I was in Vietnam” Kerry isn’t exactly Himmler, but he is a prominent democrat.

Posted in Political, Unhinged Liberals | No Comments »

How Filthy the Left Really Is

Remeber back during the ‘04 and ‘06 elections the liberals would always throw around some ghastly number about how many people had died in Iraq.  Well, it turns out that the guy who came up with those number is a fraud.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A prominent group of polling researchers has accused the lead author of a 2006 study suggesting massive civilian deaths in Iraq of violating the polling profession’s codes and ethics. 

The Executive Council of the American Association for Public Opinion Research said Dr. Gilbert Burnham, a Johns Hopkins University professor, had repeatedly refused to cooperate with an eight-month investigation into his research on the Iraqi death toll that made headlines in October 2006 when it was published by The Lancet, a British medical journal. 

The widely publicized study headed by Burnham contended that nearly 655,000 Iraqis had died because of the U.S.-led invasion and war in Iraq. 

“When asked to provide several basic facts about this research, Burnham refused,” the council said in a statement. It noted that the group’s Code of Professional Ethics and Practices calls for researchers to disclose their methodology when survey findings are made public so they can be independently evaluated and verified. 

“Dr. Burnham provided only partial information and explicitly refused to provide complete information about the basic elements of his research,” said Mary Losch, chair of the association’s Standards Committee. 

The group made no judgment on whether Burnham’s findings were accurate but said his refusal to fully cooperate with the probe “violates the fundamental standards of science, seriously undermines open public debate on critical issues and undermines the credibility of all survey and public opinion research.” 

Burnham is the co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He could not be reached for comment. 

Tim Parsons, a spokesman for the school said: “We are disappointed AAPOR has chosen to find Dr. Burnham in violation of the organization’s ethics code. However, neither Dr. Burnham nor the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are members of AAPOR.” 

Burnham’s research was based on interviews of households and not a body count. It found that about 600,000 Iraqis had died from violence, mostly gunfire. It also found a small increase in deaths from other causes such as heart disease and cancer. 

He contended that as of the date of his study, deaths were occurring in Iraq at a rate more than three times higher than before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. 

Burnham’s research, released just weeks before congressional midterm elections, was immediately questioned by some experts who said the figures appeared too high. An accurate count of Iraqi deaths has been difficult to obtain, but one respected group put its rough estimate at the time of Burnham’s study closer to 50,000. 

Burnham said at the time that his estimate was much higher than others because it was derived from a house-to-house survey rather than approaches that depend on body counts or media reports. 

The Association for Public Opinion Research said it began investigating Burnham’s findings in March 2008 after one of its members complained. It said it had several times formally requested basic information about the survey, including the wording of questions asked and instructions and explanations given to respondents. It said Burnham refused to provide the information. 

Burnham is not a member of the group, which says it has nearly 2,200 members from government agencies, colleges and universities, nonprofit organizations, media corporations and commercial polling firms.

Seems liars like this are almost always elevated to lofty positions and hardly every questioned.  If they are questioned they lie, deny, and obstruct.  What a wonderful 4 years we have coming up!

Posted in National, Showcases of Liberal Dishonesty, Unhinged Liberals | 1 Comment »

The Barack Obama Presidency

First, cogratulations to Barack Obama.

I have read a lot of stuff since the election has eneded and I have come to a few conclusions.

1.  Barack Obama will fail as president.  Not because anything he will do, although it is possible, but it will be because Mr Hussein is not black.  He is half black.

Now that, in the eyes of a majority of Americans, a Black man has been elected president, black people cannot be victims any longer, at least until Barry fails to deliver on his promises.  Look at Obama’s history.  He never had a father, was raised by his grandparents, moved around a great deal; his upbringing seems like a stereotypical black community upbringing, at least from this typical white person’s point of view.

So what went right?  Here is your seemingly average black guy with a rough childhood, drug use and everything, went to Columbia in New York, was a successful community organizer, went to Harvard where he was editor of the Law Review  and graduated Magnu Cum Laude, and the rest is history.  Barry is truly a guy who pulled himself up out of the slums and is now the most powerful man in the free world.  There was no affirmative action here, he is just a smart guy who made the right decisions in the right places at the right time with the right people.

So what is holding all the other black people back?  With Obama’s example, why do we need affirmative action that aknowledes blacks are inferior and need a leg up? We don’t.   Black people are holding black people back.  

Maybe it is because Barry is half white, and that is why he succeded? 

Look at what alot of blacks are saying in the news.  They beleive the Mr. Hussein is going to fill their gas tanks, pay their mortgages, pay their bills and overall take care of them.  When Barry doesn’t deliver what are they going to say?

The next time a black person tries to be a victim and says “whitey is keeping me down” all we have to do is point a finger at Barry and say, “Umm, no we aren’t, look at Obama.”  We will be able to do this for the rest of America’s recorded history.

Now then, the Black’s victim status isn’t going to go away overnight.  As soon as their victim plea fails they are going to grasp at straws trying to still play the victim.  What is going to redeem them (in their minds at least)?  Obama is half white.

Once Obama fails to deliver on his promises and now that the evil race hustlers Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are out of a job and won’t be able to blame all their problems on white people, they will turn on Barry and decry him for being half white.  That is my perspecitve.

2.  Lets stick a knife in the current Republican Party.

I think Jesus himself could have run as a Republican and lost.  The Republican party moved to the left starting in around 2004 and with this election and the ‘06 election they paid for it.  More people voted against George Bush in this election than they did for Barack Obama.  That was Barry’s campaign theme, not another 4 years of failed republican policies.  When all the opposing party has to do is point out your failures and spends almost no time running on their mertis and wins the election you are doing something terribly wrong.

We have 4 years to fix it.  We have to put true consercatives in place of the filty neo-con rats.  Hopefully we can find some by 2010, because I think a lot of Americans are going to be hungry for change after the Hammer and Cycle are flying above the white house and all they have left in their pockets is change.

3.  Obama supporters are stupid.

In a discussion with one guy I was called a nazi and he couldn’t wait for Obama to take my guns away.  I was stunned and the incongruity of that statement.  Obama supporters aren’t going to happy with what they got.

Posted in 2008 Election, My Opinion, National, Political | 2 Comments »

Prosecutors Seek to Delay Sentencing of Tony Rezko

Federal prosecutors moved Monday to delay indefinitely the sentencing of convicted fundraiser Antoin “Tony” Rezko, sending their strongest hint yet that he is ready to spill his political secrets.

The filing asks for a postponement while prosecutors and defense attorneys “engage in discussions that could affect their sentencing postures.”

Speculation has simmered for weeks that the key fundraiser for Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Sen. Barack Obama was whispering what he knows about corruption in Illinois government to federal prosecutors in hopes of getting a lighter sentence.

Rezko raised more than $1 million for Blagojevich’s campaign fund and was one of the governor’s key advisers. He was frequently by the governor’s side in the early days of his administration and could be in a position to shed considerable light on federal investigations into patronage hiring and a host of other issues involving Blagojevich.

Full story

Here it is, the Dems and the Lib press trying to hide till after the election what might do great damage to Obama.

Funny one of the things the lib congress is doing right now is trying to make Bush look bad in the wake of his firing of all AG’s. The only one close to being anything out of the ordinary involves one AG who would not prosecute a Lib prior to an election in New Mexico.

He wanted to try to keep it quiet till after Kerry Bush. Now they are doing the same thing. Only its working for the libs.

There is so much bs in the life of Obama that should be in public. I just don’t see how even the Lib MSN can refuse to pick it up.

Posted in Political | 4 Comments »

Experience

You know there are lots of things that are stupid in this world. To many to list. But one of the dumbest things I’ve seen lately is when the Libs attacking Palin on experience.

I mean seriously, there are always things a would be prez or vice prez can be hit on. And that’s on both sides. But is it smart, to call the kettle black, when you are a kettle? Shouldn’t you worry about sweeping your own porch first, or at least find a complaint that can’t boomerang?

Posted in Political | 1 Comment »