Congressional Motors

Read about the design and development of the car at Iowahawk.

Litter Offsets

It's Getting Cold Outside

Let's start the laughing....

First a few facts -- Look, with this AGW religion, it isn't going to be easy to take it down. And with the pending appointment of people like the "population bomb" Holdren to Presidential science adviser, well, all you can do is laugh. Many liberal science hoaxes have gone before, none as over blown as the AGW hoax, it's just that then there wasn't the collaborative Internet to pierce the hot air ballon that was the hoax. Take DDT, with over 35 million African black children dying of malaria, the liberals still say the DDT hoax is real and DDT destroys the environment. Yet none of the so-called facts in the book a Silent Spring, catchy title isn't it, have born up under the test of time, science and real scrutiny. None. Yet it wasn't too long ago that the U.S. Congress wanted to erect a monument in the name of the crackpot author, Rachel Carson. The debunking has been done by many, but here is one such summary take down.

DDT was banned by EPA fiat in 1972. No science needed. The ban was designed to keep people out of nature.

Then there is the ozone hole hoax, did you ever wonder what those green northern lights were? Yep ozone, the same stuff you smell after a thunderstorm has passed. Even the scientists who put forth the HFC destroys ozone hoax have said that when they actually ran the experiments they were shocked to find they were completely wrong in their hypothesis. Asked why they didn't do the ozone-HFC experiments originally, they said we thought there was no need. The sun creates ozone, the sun destroys ozone. Even first year physicists know that.

Oh yeah, now that the sun has turned down the wick, the ozone hole is growing and no one whats to say that out loud. I wonder why.

And now we have the AGW hoax, but this time, there is a weapon that the liberals cannot control, and that is the climate. The sun has decided, as if it is a decider, to turn down the wick starting in 2005. That ended the modern solar maxima with a bang. The effect is real, the results will be cold, ice and snow. Most are now saying it's very possible we are entering a Dalton Minima or worse. We are at the leading edge of the climate change, and it's changed to the cold cycle.

But like good science everywhere, it should not be hard to say we don't know, because we simple don't. Have you seen the original UN-IPCC predictions from the first of the AGW scare in 1988? It is ridiculously laughable at how wrong they have been.

But -- If the current solar trends continue it will soon be cold enough, the glaciers growing alarmingly fast enough, the sea ice extent expanding fast enough, that every one but the dumbest Obama voter will realize Al Gore is a dummy.

The good news is people recognize it's cold.

The most expensive secret you’re not supposed to know is that George W. Bush leaves office with the planet cooler than when he entered. This dangerous trend threatens the multi-billion dollar “global warming” industry, adding new urgency to the ritual shriek of “we must act now!” in the scramble to impose a costly regime of mandates, energy taxes and dare I say it, yes I will RATIONING ENERGY...

source

The very good news is it's getting cold, and everyone can tell.

I will say this in passing, during the 20th century there have been at least four attempts at scare mongering around climate change. In all four of those tries, there has never been correlation with the sun and it's activity. Now we come to the cooling trend of the last 10 years, and this time, there is confirmation, correlation if you will, the sun has turned down the wick to say it's going to get cold outside. For the first time in human history a climate changing event has been recorded by the most advanced instruments and satellites.

And it's going to get cold.

Steve Milloy's site, Junk Science is a good source of real science facts. Why bother with WikiPedia, which is so infested with junk scince as to be totally useless, when you can get the facts.

'2008 The Year Man-made Global Warming Was Disproved'

Today's headline ---

Yes folks it's come down to this -- The AGW hoax has been thoroughly debunked. Not by the experts, the 'consensus of science', but by mostly amateurs. Why does amateurs matter, well there is no grant money involved, no salute the one who feeds you, no bowing to royalty, just the facts.

Admittedly, the hoax took many an unkind shot, before finally falling face first in the snow. But not to despair, there are still and army of worshippers, those who want the taxes to be paid and those that want to spend the taxes collected, so the last whimper is going to take awhile longer yet. Late to the party is Obama, the first to go for the crackpot science with the appointment of an equally crackpot science advisor.

But the die has been cast, the final eulogy is all that is left.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

And so it goes, none dares mention it's name, so I guess it's up to me to make the connection -- Has anyone thought it just might be the sun is responsible for driving Earth's climate? Just maybe?

Here is the entertaining article at the source of this short missive.

Al Gore Is Coming To Town

Our man Flint.

The Year Of The Spotless Sun

The 'Law of Logical Argument' as used by Al Gore: "Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about". Not sure who did this quote first, but it sure makes sense, doesn't it.

Astronomers who count sunspots have announced that 2008 is now the "blankest year" of the Space Age.

"Sunspot counts are at a 50-year low," says solar physicist David Hathaway of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. "We're experiencing a deep minimum of the solar cycle."

When talking about sunspot number, the data reliability is all over the map. Generally though, good data is available back to 1700, the quality of the data is considered as poor during 1700 - 1748, questionable during 1749 - 1817, good during 1818 - 1847, and reliable since 1848. So we have reliable data for the last 160 years out of our planets estimated 4.5-4.6 billion years of existence. Not what you would want if you were trying to make 'guaranteed' predictions - LOL.


Sunspot counting is an arcane art:

Here is how it's done --- Sum total of spotless days since the first day without spots, which is designated as month January 2004. We weren't talking spotless days in a row. The issue is cumulative spotless days in the transition to SC24, not consecutive spotless days -- Notice there is no time associated with the spotless day count. For reference, we are currently in the beginning phases of sunspot cycle 24(SSC24) and the ending phase of sunspot cycle 23(SSC23) -- "The Transition". For purposes of record keeping and analysis, the first spotless day was defined as month January 2004 for the transition from SSC23 to SSC24, which is ongoing. The first day a SSC24 sunspot showed was officially on January 4, 2008, for record keeping purposes, it was designated January 2008 as the month SSC24 started.

Bringing the data current with my manual analysis -- We had 446 spotless days as of the end of September, there were 20 spotless days in October and 16 in November, bringing us up to 482 as of the end of November. It is now December 25th, we added 22 more spotless days for December, so far, so we are up to 504. Breaking the 500 spotless day barrier before 2009 begins. Here is where you get the current 30 day count from. We have passed 1912 for total calendar year spotlessness as of December 25th with 260 spotless days in 2008 versus 253 in 1912. I am hoping that we don't repeat the 1912-1913 pattern since 1913 was the record year for spotlessness with 311.

UPDATE: It's all over -- The year that is, 2008 will bring the total number of sunspotless days this month to 28 and for the year to 266, clearly enough to make 2008, the second least active solar year since 1900. The count since the beginning of solar min now stands at 510 sunspotless days -- and counting. --- END UPDATE

We have to use the sun's calendar:

But, and it's a very big but -- You have to realize that the sun does not follow the Earth's calendar, so a better way to look at sunspots might be this method where the start months are synchronized and then graphs are made for analysis from those start points. Sunspot transition 14-15 was the most recent long minimum, where reliable data is available, so the closest in behavior we have to go by. If you do this type of sliding scale analysis, you find we have already passed the minimum number of spotless days in any 365 continuous day count, during several periods in 2008. So you could say we have already broken the record set in the 1912-1913 transition. So are we now going up, or is it we are now still going down. But -- Its all a very big if.


What the heck am I talking about:


Left: A photo of the sun taken Sept. 27, 2008. The face of the sun is "blank," i.e., completely unmarked by spots.

Right: The sun on Sept. 27, 2001. The sun's face is peppered with colossal sunspots, all crackling with solar flares.

Credit: ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)
Larger image of sun in 2008
Larger image of sun in 2001

It is a very quiet time on our sun. If you extrapolate the total spotless days of the current minimum transition, we are likely to see a century's old transition record broken early next year for spotless days of a sunspot cycle transition. Remember, we only have reliable data since 1848.

Today's sun -- Is the current image for when you click the link. Daily sunspot number historical records can be downloaded here.

Solar Minimum history in the making:

"This gives us a chance to study the sun without the complications of sunspots," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center. "Right now we have the best instrumentation in history looking at the sun. There is a whole fleet of spacecraft devoted to solar physics--SOHO, Hinode, ACE, STEREO and others. We're bound to learn new things during this long solar minimum."

Did You See Thia Fellow Last Night?

Dean Martin sings White Christmas

About half the USA is snow covered this Christmas.

Merry Christmas

Brrrr, it's cold outside.

Jingle Cats

From Wikipedia -- Jingle Cats is a series of Christmas novelty music

Jingle Cats began their recording career in December 1991, when a precocious kitten named "Cheesepuff" crawled into a Hollywood studio recording booth and began meowing along with the song Jingle Bells, which was being recorded in a session at the time. The studio engineeer, Mike Spalla, recorded the meows and adjusted the timing to the music to make the first cat singing in recorded history. The song was sent to Kiss-FM in Los Angeles and POWER-106 where it was played on the air the next day, Christmas Day. The following year, the "JINGLE CATS" cassette was presented at the KLOS Classic Rock Expo in Los Angeles. 1,000 cassettes were distributed by City Hall Records in San Rafael, California. KNBC (Channel 4 News) in Los Angeles broke the story on Dec. 10, 1992 and the Jingle Cats sold out in about one hour. The following year, Meowy Christmas, by the Jingle Cats, was released on CD and cassette (1993). It featured holiday classics such as "O Christmas Tree", "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen", and "Deck The Halls". 1994's follow up, Here Comes Santa Claws, co-released by BMG, capitalized on the success of Meowy Christmas to present an assortment of 20th century Christmas compositions including "The Christmas Song", "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer", and naturally, "Here Comes Santa Claus". Here Comes Santa Claws also notably contained an original composition, "A Kitten's Story". In 2002, Rhythm and Mews was released. The album abandons the Christmas music focus of previous releases, and presents a musical program of 'year-round' favorites as disparate as "Over The Rainbow", "Dueling Banjos", "The Star Spangled Banner", and "Happy Birthday to You". In 2008, Jingle Cats Music www.jinglecats.com released the Jingle Cats Christmas DVD, a collection of Jingle Cats animation, and a new album by the Jingle Dogs entitled "Puppy Holidays."

1937 FDR humor

It would appear that the failures of FDR and his new old Raw Deal for America were well understood back in 1937.

Constitution for the New Deal

by H. L. Mencken

THIS SATIRICAL PIECE FIRST APPEARED IN The American Mercury,, 41 (June 1937), 129-36, and was reprinted in condensed form by The Reader's Digest, 31 (July 1937), 27-29. In order to indicate what reached the widest audience, the condensed version appears here.

The principal cause of the uproar in Washington is a conflict between the swift- moving idealism of the New Deal and the unyielding hunkerousness of the Constitution of 1788. What is needed, obviously, is a wholly new Constitution, drawn up with enough boldness and imagination to cover the whole program of the More Abundant Life, now and hereafter.

That is what I presume to offer here. The Constitution that follows is not my invention, and in more than. one detail I have unhappy doubts of its wisdom. But I believe that it sets forth with reasonable accuracy the plan of government that the More Abundant Life wizards have sought to substitute for the plan of the Fathers. They have themselves argued at one time or another, by word or deed, for everything contained herein:

PREAMBLE

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish social justice, draw the fangs of privilege, effect the redistribution of property, remove the burden of liberty from ourselves and our posterity, and insure the continuance of the New Deal, do ordain and establish this Constitution.

ARTICLE I

The Executive

All governmental power of whatever sort shall be vested in a President of the United States. He shall hold office during a series of terms of four years each, and shall take the following oath: "I do solemnly swear that I will (in so far as I deem it feasible and convenient) faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will (to the best of my recollection and in the light of experiment and second thought) carry out the pledges made by me during my campaign for election (or such of them as I may select)."

The President shall be commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy, and of the militia, Boy Scouts, C.I.O., People's Front, and other armed forces of the nation.

The President shall have the power: To lay and collect taxes, and to expend the income of the United States in such manner as he may deem to be to their or his advantage;

To borrow money on the credit of the United States, and to provide for its repayment on such terms as he may fix;

To regulate all commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and within them; to license all persons engaged or proposing to engage in business; to regulate their affairs; to limit their profits by proclamation from time to time; and to fix wages, prices and hours of work;

To coin money, regulate the content and value thereof, and of foreign coin, and to amend or repudiate any contract requiring the payment by the United States, or by any private person, of coin of a given weight or fineness;

To repeal or amend, in his discretion, any so-called natural law, including Gresham's law, the law of diminishing returns, and the law of gravitation.

The President shall be assisted by a Cabinet of eight or more persons, whose duties shall be to make speeches whenever so instructed and to expend the public funds in such manner as to guarantee the President's continuance in office.

The President may establish such executive agencies as he deems necessary, and clothe them with such powers as he sees fit. No person shall be a member to any such bureau who has had any practical experience of the matters he is appointed to deal with.

One of the members of the Cabinet shall be an Attorney General. It shall be his duty to provide legal opinions certifying to the constitutionality of all measures undertaken by the President, and to gather evidence of the senility of judges.

ARTICLE II

The Legislature

The legislature of the United States shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives. Every bill shall be prepared under the direction of the President, and transmitted to the two Houses at his order by their presiding officers. No member shall propose any amendment to a bill without permission in writing from the President or one of his authorized agents. In case any member shall doubt the wisdom of a bill he may apply to the President for light upon it, and thereafter he shall be counted as voting aye. In all cases a majority of members shall be counted as voting aye.

Both Houses may appoint special committees to investigate the business practices, political views, and private lives of any persons known to be inimical to the President; and such committees shall publish at public cost any evidence discovered that appears to be damaging to the persons investigated.

Members of both Houses shall be agents of the President in the distribution of public offices, federal appropriations, and other gratuities in their several states, and shall be rewarded in ratio to their fidelity to his ideals and commands.

ARTICLE III

The Judiciary

The judges of the Supreme Court and of all inferior courts shall be appointed by the President, and shall hold their offices until he determines by proclamation that they have become senile. The number of judges appointed to the Supreme Court shall be prescribed by the President, and may be changed at his discretion. All decisions of the Supreme Court shall be unanimous.

The jurisdiction and powers of all courts shall he determined by the President. No act that he has approved shall be declared unconstitutional by any court.

ARTICLE IV

Bill of Rights

There shall be complete freedom of speech and of the press – subject to such regulations as the President or his agents may from time to time promulgate.

The freedom of communication by radio shall not be abridged; but the President and such persons as he may designate shall have the first call on the time of all stations.

In disputes between capital and labor, all the arbitrators shall be representatives of labor.

Every person whose annual income fans below a minimum to be fixed by the President shall receive from the public funds an amount sufficient to bring it up to that minimum.

No labor union shall be incorporated and no officer or member thereof shall be accountable for loss of life or damage to person or property during a strike.

All powers not delegated herein to the President are reserved to him, to be used at his discretion.

Original here.

Real Science vs The Obama Psuedo-Science Crackpots

It's not going to matter what the freaks say, the pseudo-science crackpots in the Obama administration, or for that matter what the jive talking Obama says.

The modern solar maximum ended in Oct 2005 with a bang, and no, no one on the planet knows why it did so. But it did. Mankind has never before witnessed such an event, since man hadn't the measurement capability beforehand. We have no way of knowing whether the 'Ap bang' ending had happened before or was a new thing with the sun. The only record of any consequence that man has is sunspot counts, a hard to correlate measurement if there ever was one, and may not be that accurate.

What happened with the sun in a nutshell is this -- Basically, the magnetic index(Ap) dropped suddenly and has continued to go down further since then. In addition, sunspots have all but vanished since that time, in spite of the fact that sunspot cycle 24 was supposed to begin a while back. Technically it has begun, but has been exceedingly weak. You can read about it here.

One thing we do know, is the 20th century sunspot record shows that none of the previous 20th century hoaxes regarding climate, and there were at least four, were ever correlated with the sunspot behavior. This is a first. What it means in the extreme, we will have to just wait it out. What it means in the near term, it's going to get cold.

One thing to keep in mind, and is mostly ignored by the hoaxers, is that correlation does not equal causation. The earth's climate is so complex, having maybe 35 variables, that mankind is simply not advanced enough to understand how it works. I like to explain it as such -- What we know about how the earth's climate, you could write a book, and plenty do. But what we don't know, you could fill a library. True scientists recognize this fact, we do not know how earth's climate works, but it's not likely that CO2, the stuff of all photosynthesis on earth has any but a minor effect on it.

Case in point, the CO2 is still rising, while the temperature is going down.

But -- If the current solar trend continues, it will soon be so cold, the glaciers will be growing so fast, the sea ice expanding at such a rate, that even the dumbest Obama voter will know Al Gore is a kook. Count on it.

Only the ignorant, or the easily fooled Obama voter, can believe the sun does not control the earth's climate.

Here is a link to how the original scare prediction turned out. Remember the hoax started in 1988, so we now have 20 years of data that should have followed the computer models. Computer models are not science.

ACE is the place

Now that the NHC has taken to naming every thunderstorm as a tropical storm, a new index of hurricane intensity has emerged. It's called Accumulated cyclone energy , or ACE for short. ACE is a measure used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to express the activity of individual tropical cyclones and entire tropical cyclone seasons, particularly the Atlantic hurricane seasons. It uses an approximation of the energy used by a tropical system over its lifetime and is calculated every six-hour period. The ACE of a season is the sum of the ACEs for each storm and takes into account the number, strength, and duration of all the tropical storms in the season.

ACE was a dud for the 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons in the US which is why you see these headlines --- Global warming causing more tropical storms: NASA, Which are just outright lies. Now every wiggle on the radar gets a name as soon as it widdles.

I point you to the history of hurricane spotting for comparison purposes. The largest USA hurricane disaster was the 1900 Galveston hurricane which made landfall at the city of Galveston, Texas on September 9 , 1900. It had estimated winds of 135 mph (215 km/h) at landfall, making it a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. The first warnings to the beach goers on Galveston beach came just hours before landfall.

Similar no warning hurricanes made landfall in the USA up until about the 1960s when radio observations from ships became more reliable. Another big jump in hurricane tracking came in
October 16, 1975, when the first satellite under the GOES program was launched from Cape Canaveral, FL.

Remember this -- When you talk about hurricane number and intensity tracking, you are talking about observations during the last 60 or so years of the planets 4.5 billion years existence. Anyone will tell you, that is not a very valid statical sample of anything.

Bobby Darin Sings "Beyond the Sea"

Friday interlude ... From the movie "Beyond the Sea"

Crackpot John Holdren Will Become Obama's Science Adviser

Crackpot President hires crackpot science advisor. Who would have ever thought that would be the case. Maybe they believe the whole of the country is not educated enough to realize a crackpot when they see one. John Hoilden is his name and he claims to be a scientist -- Do you want to know what is his specialization? Well, look at his publication list at scholar.google.com. Yep, that's him, a big deciple of the "Paul Ehrlich population bomb" and it's effect on the poor poor helpless planet.

A real crackpot, not a scientist. Luboš Motl at the blog The Reference Frame had this to say about Holden.

There is absolutely no valuable content in anything that Holdren has ever produced. It's just plain bullshit sold in such a way that gullible people happily eat it and smack their lips.

I simply can't stand pompous fools like that. Because of his Harvard affiliation, I may have talked to him during a Society of Fellows dinner and I may have forgotten: it's hard to imagine that I could smile with the knowledge I have today. You may also see Richard Lindzen's essay to learn more about the methods how John Holdren and others have elected themselves to the National Academy of Sciences and similar bodies. It's plain disgusting.

It's very bad that people whose approach to the world is the exact opposite of science - because they prefer irrational phobias, "prestige" of symposia, and visible jobs paid by gullible manipulated folks over rational, humble, careful, and ever more refined scientific arguments and findings - are being linked to science, and it is bad that President-elect Obama is helping to distort the definition of science and its proper role in the society in this way.

Just what the world of science doesn't need, a crackpot polluting and stinking up the world of science with dimwitted crap.

The 12 Days Of Global Warming

A little holiday interlude ...



If the current solar trends continue, it will soon be so cold, the snow piled so high, the glaciers growing so fast, that even the dumbest amongst us will realize Al Gore is a nut case.

Oh yeah, what was the scare of the late 1970s? Why that would be the coming ice age.

Pay attention to the goings on with the global warming hoax and lots of other interesting science and weather stuff at Anthony Watts great site, "wattsupwiththat".

This about sums up the facts ...

THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model of dangerous, human-caused climate change has failed. Independent science relevant to supposed human-caused global warming is clear, and can be summarised in four briefpoints.

First, global temperature warmed slightly in the late 20th century and has been cooling since 2002. Neither the warming nor the cooling were of unusual rate ormagnitude.

Second, humans have an effect on local climate but, despite the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($70 billion) looking for it since 1990, no globally summed human effect has ever been measured. Therefore, any human signal must lie buried in the variability of the natural climate system.

Third, we live on a dynamic planet; change occurs in Earth's geosphere, biosphere, atmosphere and oceans all the time and all over the world. No substantive evidence exists that modern rates of global environmental change (ice volume; sea level) lie outside historic natural bounds.

Last, cutting carbon dioxide emissions, be it in Australia or worldwide, will likely result in no measurable change in future climate, because extra increments of atmospheric CO2 cause diminishing warming for each unit of increase; at most, a few tenths of a degree of extra warming would result from a completion of doubling of CO2 since pre-industrial times.

The Dumbbells

You probably thought this post was about something else, instead it's about gaseous remnants of dying sunlike stars.



Explanation: These two nebulae are cataloged as M27 (left) and M76, popularly known as The Dumbbell and the Little Dumbbell. Not intended to indicate substandard mental prowess, their popular names refer to their similar, dumbbell or hourglass shapes. Both are planetary nebulae, gaseous shrouds cast off by dying sunlike stars, and are similar in physical size, at a light-year or so across. In each panel, the images were made at the same scale, so the apparent size difference is mostly because one is closer. Distance estimates suggest 1,200 light-years for the Dumbbell compared to 3,000 light-years or more for the Little Dumbell. These deep, narrow-band, false-color images show some remarkably complex structures in M27 and M76, highlighting emission from hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms within the cosmic clouds.

APOD:

Keynesian Economics Is Wrong: Bigger Government Is Not Stimulus

Failed President FDR proved this beyond a shadow of doubt.

Government make-work jobs always have the same ending, the unemployment line.

Make-Work

“If all we want are jobs, we can create any number — for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs — jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.” –Milton Friedman

Looks like The One is a little shallow in his thinking.

Borrowed from the Red Planet site. The folks over there have a way of drawing a picture that describes what people are thinking.

Transparency For Thee

But not for "The One"

Chicago scandal could take the shine off the Obama inauguration

In August 2006, when it was publicly known that Governor Rod Blagojevich and his staff were being investigated for corruption, Barack Obama took the microphone at the Illinois State Fair.

“We’ve got a governor in Rod Blagojevich who has delivered consistently on behalf of the people of Illinois,” he declared to the crowd as he endorsed the Illinois Governor for re-election.

Now, with the allegations that Mr Blagojevich tried to hawk Mr Obama’s vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder, the scandal — and the stench of Chicago politics that the President-elect hoped he had put behind him — is raising a slew of uncomfortable questions.

Mr Obama’s endorsement of Mr Blagojevich in 2006 was an example of the way that he operated in Chicago. He rarely bucked or challenged the corrupt status quo — in stark contrast to his image as a reformer.

His meteoric rise through Chicago politics was based on making strategic alliances with the city’s entrenched, and often ethically challenged, power brokers — Mr Blagojevich included — then moving on before being tainted by association. Several of these figures he once relied on have since become immersed in corruption scandals.

Mr Obama officially made transparency a central theme of his administration last week, yet he was facing growing calls yesterday to reveal what, if any, contact there had been between his staff and Mr Blagojevich over the efforts of the governor to sell his Senate seat.

I say it's time to have more than a little transparency. It's time to come clean, about that Senate seat for sale -- What did the President Elect know and when did he know it?

Shall we start with this -- Isn't it fascinating how this particular quote has been buried by the mainstream media. But, did Rahm Emanual say this --

"The president-elect can get Blagojevich's wife on paid corporate boards in exchange for naming the president-elect's pick to the Senate."

And furthermore, did you instruct him to say it, or was he just counting on your good graces to followup on the paid appointments to boards in exchange for your pick as Senate candidate. You do realize that is illegal don't you, sir.

Tyranny

The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government -- Thomas Jefferson

As the bailout frenzy continues ... The Chicago mob prepares to take power in Washington ...

Global Warming Is A Hoax

How else can you explain this doublspeak ...

There is no clear evidence that global warming is an imminent danger to the world, says Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But, we need to tax and ration energy just the same

Even so, it would be good for governments to go further with proposed cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions to deal with dire predictions made in a 2007 panel report, he told the Associated Press in an interview on Tuesday.

I think not, the whole AGW hoax is based on the notion that we are all going to die, quick, less than ten years left says Al Gore on the aniversary of the forst ten years left...

After a while these alarmists get boring. I say, show the evidence, or shut up.

Obama Can Get Blagojevich's Wife On Paid Corporate Boards In Exchange For Naming Obama's Pick For Senate Seat

Define "quid pro quo" ..... Here we go

Isn't it fascinating how this particular quote has been buried by the mainstream media?

"The president-elect can get Blagojevich's wife on paid corporate boards in exchange for naming the president-elect's pick to the Senate."

The key words are "paid" and "exchange". Doesn't that warrant a tad bit of investigation by our beloved mainstream media pro-journalist-types?

Yep, it came from the taped phone conversations. Quid pro quo anyone?

Here is the link to the news story "Who will fill Obama's senate seat?" concerning Obama meeting with Blagojevich on November 5 to discuss the now open Senate seat -- Obama never talked to Blagojevich, so goes the story today. I bet a grand jury could figure out who was lying.

Al Gore Watches The Inconvenient News

The cause is here. Who would have thought that the giant nuclear furnace in the sky, the sun, would effect Earth's weather.

Have you noticed, the words have changed. Global Warming is inoperative, it's way too cold, so now the Democrat Socialist have to switch, it's now Global Climate cCange. At least they kept the change, and the lies. Climate always changes, has been doing so for 4.5 billion years.

Temperature Update: November 2008 UAH LT Global +0.25 deg. C Above Normal

Roy Spencer: UAH monthly globally averaged lower atmospheric temperature variations since 1979 as measured by NOAA and NASA satellites. The smooth curve is a 4th order polynomial fit to the data.

Short-Term Sea Level Trend Shrinking Since 2005

The above graphic is from the University of Colorado at Boulder sea level change web page. The blue 60 -day smoothing line is the one of interest, showing a fall or levelling out in the rising sea level trend since 2005.

The University of Colorado web page states:

Since August 1992 the satellite altimeters have been measuring sea level on a global basis with unprecedented accuracy. The TOPEX/POSEIDON (T/P) satellite mission provided observations of sea level change from 1992 until 2005. Jason-1, launched in late 2001 as the successor to T/P, continues this record by providing an estimate of global mean sea level every 10 days with an uncertainty of 3-4 mm.

And:

Long-term mean sea level change is a variable of considerable interest in the studies of global climate change. The measurement of long-term changes in global mean sea level can provide an important corroboration of predictions by climate models of global warming.

Indeed, atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise, but for the moment, at least, temperatures and sea levels aren’t.

Watts Up With That? ‘Satellite derived sea level updated- short term trend has been shrinking since 2005′

When Democrats Control Congress

Pretty instructive summary here.

Bring Back The Musicals

Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend - Marilyn Monroe Songs

Skip the jerky mp thought jump-cut BS films.

Bawney's Fwank Sure Can Sing

New DOI Rule Lifts Ban On Firearms In National Parks

People with CCW licenses will soon be able to carry concealed, loaded guns in most national parks and wildlife refuges. Other citizens without the papers must still go unarmed. This was a particularly bad limitation in Florida, since there were many main roads which traversed National Parks. The Everglades National Park, one of the most remote, was one of these. It is especially bad out in a boat, since there is no cell phone coverage, and VHF radio does not have the range.

The Bush administration said Friday it is overturning a 25-year-old federal rule that severely restricts loaded guns in national parks.

"If you can carry (a gun) on Main Street, you are allowed to carry in a national park," said Chris Paolino. a spokesman for the Interior Department.

The Interior Department rule overturns a Reagan-era regulation that has restricted loaded guns in parks and wildlife refuges. The previous regulation required that firearms be unloaded and placed somewhere that is not easily accessible, such as in a car trunk.

Assistant Interior Secretary Lyle Laverty said the new rule respects a long tradition of states and the federal government working together on natural resource issues.

The regulation allows individuals to carry concealed firearms in federal parks and wildlife refuges to the same extent they can lawfully do so under state law, Laverty said, adding that the approach is in line with rules adopted by the federal Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. Those agencies let visitors carry weapons consistent with applicable federal and state laws

Read About It: WashingtonPost.com

Oh yeah, The office of President elect Obama, isn't that name and title just a hoot, hasn't said whether he will overturn the rule. BTW, has Obama ever said the word freedom? No? Ever wonder why?

Reagan's Timeless Wit

October 27, 1964 (from his nationally televised speech, which he called "A Time for Choosing" but was later simply referred to as "The Speech," in support of candidate Barry Goldwater) Talking about the former Soviet Union.

"If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation." - Ronald Reagan

"It isn't that Liberals are ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so." - Ronald Reagan

Obummber, we may have stepped in it this time.

Fred Talks Economics

Gun Ownership In India

Fascinating read, no mention of duck hunting, lots of inference to enslaving people to the RULE of the government though.

Colonial Roots of Gun-Control

"A system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the bourgeoisie." -- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

This changed towards the mid to late 1980s, when the Government, citing domestic insurgency as the reason, put a complete stop to all small arms imports. The fact that there is no documented evidence of any terrorists ever having used licensed weapons to commit an act of terror on Indian soil seems to be of no consequence to our Government.

The prices of (legal & licensed) imported weapons have been on an upward spiral ever since - beating the share market and gold in terms of pure return on investment. Even the shoddy domestically produced guns suddenly seem to have found a market. Also since the Government now had a near monopoly on (even half-way decent) arms & ammunition for the civilian market, they started turning the screws by pricing their crude public sector products (ammunition, rifles, shotguns & small quantities of handguns) at ridiculously high rates - products that frankly, given a choice no one would ever purchase.

…

“Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.” — Mahatma Gandhi (An Autobiography OR The story of my experiments with truth, by M.K. Gandhi, p.238)

Yep. no duck hunting, just people hunting. The figures are hazy, but somewhere over 100 million people were killed by the Communists of all stripes during the 20th century. Inferior arms for the people, how interesting. You would be wise to keep that in mind as the free pie crowd takes office in Washington.

Newspaper Business in 2008

The graph from Newsosaur




Newspaper sales "The Video"