Oops, Bush’s man at the UN goes off on global warming: “It’s an emergency”

This guy was basically selected by Bush because he seemed to be a do-nothing Bushie. Woops.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has become the first chief of the United Nations to visit the continent of Antarctica.

Ban flew to Antarctica from southern Chile Saturday in preparation for a climate conference in Indonesia next month aimed at replacing the Kyoto accord, the BBC reported.

The U.N. chief wanted to see for himself the effects of climate change on the world’s largest wilderness.

Ban told reporters what he had seen flying over the melting glaciers was both “extraordinarily beautiful” and “disturbing.”

He visited a research station set up by his home country of South Korea and was briefed by experts about the impact of global warming on the frozen continent.

“This is an emergency and for emergency situations we need emergency action,” the U.N. chief said.

Time for regime change, eh, George?

Dianne Feinstein: Bush’s new best pal

I wrote a letter to Sen. Feinstein yesterday, asking her to justify her support of torture and Judge Mukasey. Today, Glenn Greenwald rips into Feinstein for representing not her constituents, but rather looking out for her husband’s financial interests, and being Bush’s best pal in the Senate recently. She is starting to make Steny Hoyer look like Jesse Jackson.

Sen. Feinstein has a lot of explaining to do.

2007 Smokey Award Nominations: keep those cards and letters coming

Yes, you can tell by all the junk catalogs in your mailbox that it’s time once again for the selection of our Smokey Award winners for this year. Just think back over the year for the most outrageous “over the line” stories and characters, and give us your opinions on the very best and worst. We try to confine the list of nominees to those who have appeared in Over the Line, Smokey! postings, but are willing to consider those who have escaped our withering glance. Details and past winners can be found here.

Don’t worry about the categories; OTLS! has a committee of talented monkeys who can toss the papers down the stairs to sort them.

Thanks in advance for your participation. Winners will be announced in January.

Global warming deny-ers and Limbaugh punked by hoax

A hilarious fake report caused the deny-er/Exxon-fed crazies (including the redoubtable Dr. Roy Spencer) to post madness all over the internet, call Rush Limbaugh, and finally eat their words. Here is some of the gibberish from the “report”, supposedly from the (non-existent) Journal of Geoclimatic Studies by (non-existent) researchers from the University of Arizona and the University of Goteborg in Sweden :

It is now well-established that rising global temperatures are largely the result of increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The “consensus” position attributes the increase in atmospheric CO₂ to the combustion of fossil fuels by industrial processes. This is the mechanism which underpins the theory of manmade global warming.

Our data demonstrate that those who subscribe to the consensus theory have overlooked the primary source of carbon dioxide emissions. While a small part of the rise in emissions is attributable to industrial activity, it is greatly outweighed (by >300 times) by rising volumes of CO₂ produced by saprotrophic eubacteria living in the sediments of the continental shelves fringing the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Moreover, the bacterial emissions, unlike industrial CO₂, precisely match the fluctuations in global temperature over the past 140 years.

Here’s the “methods” section of the paper; I think it must spell out some hilarious secret message, but I haven’t discovered the code yet:

Using the data on benthic bacterial populations produced by Parker (2003) and Parker and Birch (2005), we calculated the mean mass of bacteria per square metre of continental shelf between 61°S and 67°N (the primary zones of bacterial activity). Using the Bonner Index of oceanographic dimension (Katsu, 1986) we were then able to employ the LOYDENT4M three-dimensional modelling equation to produce a global estimate of benthic eubacterial mass. This is defined as:

Q³uct + 3Ψ = XFº x Δjy {(∑y,ct79 + θtq-1)- λjc +2}

Δ³-¾Φ²,Ω13b

Where Q is raw mass, u is area, c is osmotic conductivity, Ψ is the vertical (neo-Falkian) benthic discontinuity, X is concretised diachronic invariance (P-series), F is trans-dimensional flow structure and jy is the non-rectilineal harmonic regressivity of the constant Δ.

The control run was defined as:

Q³uct, jyΦ = ∑cy³11

using the relative standard error:

∑Ψ λΔ23=θ2c

This gives an outing variable of less than the value of θ14Ω, which is corrected by the antedenoidal deterministic yield factor j.

The CGM values are located between 0 and 2.25% to account for inter-annual variability of the asynchronistic (counterbifurcated) non-tardigrade log run.

Palaeodata were drawn from Tibbold (1996) and Tibbold and Rawsthorne (1998), using the living bacterial mass : fossil ratio developed by Hering et al (1977) and refined by Xang (2000), then fed into the same LOYDENT4M three-dimensional modelling equation, using control run:

Q²uct, yΦ³= ∑cy³42

Quantified preparations of Polybacter spp were then cultivated in laboratory conditions at a constant temperature of 6°C and a constant pressure of 41 atmospheres and an oxygen content of 2.3% to simulate averaged conditions in the benthic environment (Ragnsdottir 2003). The carbon dioxide released was collected in a Willetts inverter and passed through a zinc-loaded demi-osmotic membrane before being subject to the standard Smithian analysis using the C33 marker.

Carbon dioxide production from the Polybacter sample was calculated as:

4δ161 x Λ³Жญ5,6,1,8Φ-4 = {(ΣΨ²Њyt3 - 14๖P9) x 49}

2β x ⅜kxgt -§

Where δ is bacterial mass, Λ is substrate volume,ญ is the square root of the constant Ψ and Њyt is the polychromatic “coffeeground” Schumann factor for semi-particulate distribution.

The relative standard error was:

δ²Φ – 3hrtЊ

That’s the substance of the new “report;” in addition, the hoaxer added this, to really hook the “conspiracy-against-us” deny-ers:

These findings place us in a difficult position. We feel an obligation to publish, both in the cause of scientific objectivity and to prevent a terrible mistake – with extremely costly implications – from being made by the world’s governments. But we recognise that in doing so, we lay our careers on the line. As we have found in seeking to broach this issue gently with colleagues, and in attempting to publish these findings in other peer-reviewed journals, the “consensus” on climate change is enforced not by fact but by fear. We have been warned, collectively and individually, that in bringing our findings to public attention we are not only likely to be deprived of all future sources of funding, but that we also jeopardise the funding of the departments for which we work.

We believe that academic intimidation of this kind contradicts the spirit of open enquiry in which scientific investigations should be conducted. We deplore the aggressive responses we encountered before our findings were published, and fear the reaction this paper might provoke. But dangerous as these findings are, we feel we have no choice but to publish.

Okay, Roy Spencer, ‘scientist” actually this bought this shit, and ran screaming to his keyboard, firing off missives to Rush Limbaugh and the entire deny-er community.Apparently Limbaugh made some comments on the air about this “new scientific study”, before it was generally realized that this was a hoax, but I don’t have a transcript.

I guess Rush and his pal Dr. Spencer ought to brush up on their scientific notation.

Our tax dollars: instead of paying for healthcare, we pay to create injured soldiers

link 

Linda Bilmes, an expert in public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, estimates (PDF) disability compensation and medical care costs could reach $700 billion over the lifetime of these soldiers.

…

The scope of the epidemic was highlighted most dramatically in February 2007 when the Washington Post detailed substandard treatment of injured soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. But Walter Reed is now seen as just the tip of an emerging health care crisis. The Congressional Research Services estimates sixty thousand troops have been treated for traumatic brain injuries, while the Congressional Budget Office reports 37 percent of all veterans receiving VA care have been seen for mental health problems. And a U.S. Senate analysis finds the influx of returning veterans has created a backlog (PDF) of 400,000 claims and has increased waiting time for claims processing to nearly six months.

Reforming veterans’ health care isn’t the only long-term challenge the military will face as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan churn on, as this Backgrounder explains. But it may be the most emotional. “Is there really any doubt that the system for funding VA health care is broken?” Joseph A. Violante, legislative director for the Disabled American Veterans, asked lawmakers in October 2007. “In our judgment a change is warranted and long overdue.” But as Retired Army Col. Daniel Smith writes, real change will hinge on politicans’ ability to close the gap between paying for war and caring for those who fight them.

Sullivan: We traded our soul for bad intelligence

Andrew Sullivan:

A very useful summary by The Week. No reputable or knowledgeable source says it isn’t torture. and there is simply no question that it is illegal  – which is why the Bush administration went to such lengths to get war criminals like AEI’s John Yoo to argue that the president is bound by no laws and no treaties in the war on terror. But its impact in poisoning and distorting vital intelligence is also crucial to understand. Money quote:

When Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, was waterboarded, he revealed valuable details about the operations of al Qaida, the Bush administration says. But CIA agents say Mohammed also “confessed’’ that al Qaida was plotting to kill former presidents Clinton and Carter and Pope John Paul II, making them realize that he was inventing sensational information to satisfy his interrogators. Another al Qaida operative who was waterboarded, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi, blurted out details about the connection between al Qaida and Saddam Hussein, saying that Iraq had trained terrorists in the use of chemical and biological weapons. But al-Libbi later recanted, and the CIA concluded that he “had no knowledge of such training or weapons, and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.”

We traded our soul for bad intelligence. The perpetrators need to be brought to justice.

Which leads me to ask, by the way, where is the religious right on torture? what would Jesus do?

Juan Cole nails the sudden popularity of anarchists like Ron Paul

Link

Government is a set of bargains, a ‘moral economy.’ We let the government take a certain proportion of our money, and we expect it to organize services for us that would otherwise be difficult to arrange. Anyone who has studied any history and economics knows that the market is going to leave some people destitute, and you need government to correct for that imbalance. It is no accident that government was invented by irrigation-based societies like Egypt and Iraq, where if someone did not organize the peasants to do the irrigation work and keep it up, everybody would starve.

Bush has broken the US government. The US military was there to protect us. Bush has used it to fight a fascist-style aggressive war of choice. FEMA is there for emergency aid. Bush did not deploy it effectively for New Orleans. Social security lifted the elderly out of the poverty that had often been their fate before the 1930s. Bush declined to use Clinton’s surplus to fix the system, and has essentially borrowed against the pensions of us all to pay for his wars. Government is there to ensure our security. Bush has used it to spy on us, to prosecute patently innocent persons, to manipulate the media and instill us with lies and propaganda.

If government is to be conducted on Bushist principles, then who would not like to see the damn thing abolished?
I don’t think Ron Paul would have run well in 2000, after Bill Clinton had demonstrated the ways in which government could contribute to our prosperity and well-being. Indeed, it was so important for the Right to destroy Clinton precisely because he did make government relatively effective and popular.

Ron Paul’s popularity does not derive only from his opposition to the Iraq War. It derives from the sanity of the American people, who love liberty and reject Bushism. The opposite of fascism is not democracy but anarchy.

Given how horribly corporations like Walmart treat their employees, denying them the right to unionize and cleverly avoiding paying anything toward their health insurance, I have never understood why Libertarians think corporations would be nicer to us if we could not organize government protections from them. It is the government of the state of Maryland that protected workers from Walmart’s exploitation of them. Libertarian faith in the utopia that comes from the withering of the state strikes me as just as impractical as the similar Marxist theory.

But after 7 years of Bush, I don’t find it at all astonishing that large numbers of internet contributors would give Ron Paul money to campaign on getting rid of the Frankenstein’s Monster of a government that George W. Bush has been constructing in his macabre basement of a mind.

The fake FEMA news conference: way over the line

Here are some pics of this miscarriage of government, with the actors identified.

CBS News has obtained this photo of the now infamous fake FEMA press conference held during the California wildfires. The photo, taken by a FEMA employee, is one of the only known photos of the press gallery of that event.

The gallery is not filled with members of the press but with high-level agency employees.

At the podium on the left is Vice Admiral Harvey Johnson, the second in command at FEMA.

The former director of public affairs at the agency, John “Pat” Philbin told CBS News last week, “I am not aware that he knew what was happening and all of sudden staff were asking questions.”

Identified in the photo are staff members that Johnson works closely with on a daily basis.
….
The agency’s deputy administrator, Harvey Johnson, called on FEMA employees by name during the news conference and knew they weren’t reporters.

Why does Harvey Johnson still have a job? On the positive side, he’s a leading candidate for a Smokey Award.