Britain’s citizens want their guns back.
Britain’s citizens want their guns back.
Year: 2014
Frontpage picks Ted Cruz as their 2013 man of the year.
Frontpage picks Ted Cruz as their 2013 man of the year.
From one end of the country to the other, the voices of the inevitable, Democrats and Republicans, politicians, pollsters and pundits, in ink-stained print, on the sprawling feeds of cable news and the endless whirl of the Internet, boomed their message.
Ted Cruz was wrong. Ted Cruz was doomed. Ted Cruz would destroy the Republican Party. Ted Cruz was a mad fool for taking on ObamaCare in all the wrong ways. But as the old year tips into the new, Cruz is standing tall and ObamaCare is being torn apart by its namesake in a frantic effort to save his popularity.
The truth is the truth. If you stand for it, without fear, you will win. Eventually, the bullies and naysayers will have to back off, simply because the truth will have become self-evident to everyone.
The big solar hotshots of 2013.
The big solar hotshots of 2013.
The article is a nice and visually fascinating overview of the twelve most impressive solar events during the past year. Interestingly, I think #7 is the most significant in that it involved things that didn’t happen.
As small sunspot group NOAA 1838 was falling apart, another active region NOAA 1839 appeared just in time to avoid a spotless day, which would have been the first since 14 August 2011! A spotless day during a solar cycle maximum is not uncommon, but it remains of course a rare event. This absolute low in sunspot number highlighted a period of very low solar activity, with hardly any flares (no C-flares from 7 till 17 September: 11 consecutive days) and no (minor) geomagnetic storms for a full month! Meanwhile, the magnetic field near the solar north pole (finally) completed its reversal, whereas this magnetic flip is still ongoing at the south pole. These reversals testify we’re close to the maximum of solar cycle 24. [emphasis mine]
The phrases in bold clarify where we presently stand with the solar cycle. The southern magnetic field is in the process of reversing, but has not yet completed the flip.
Eleven global warming stories from 2013 you probably never heard of
Eleven global warming stories from 2013 you probably never heard of.
#5 is the most revealing, I think.
A survey of New York businesses cannot find any businesses whose healthcare costs have gone down due to Obamacare.
A survey of New York businesses cannot find any businesses whose healthcare costs have gone down due to Obamacare.
Instead, the survey finds that premiums have gone up, across the board, for everyone.
Once again, who voted for this law? Who has defended it through thick and thin? Who shut the government down to prevent any changes to it?
The bottom of the barrel.
NBC News was once a trusted source for news, a destination millions of Americans turned to in times of national events. It’s now a punchline, a disgrace.
This didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen by accident. There was a conscious decision on behalf of the management team to change, and change it did. You don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel and come up with the type of loathsome, hate-filled bile spewers regularly filling those airwaves by accident. You scrape all the way to the bottom because this is what you want.
It is very important to emphasize the level of hate coming from this so-called outlet of news. It is also very important to emphasize how unaware or glad NBC is that its reporters and anchors express this hate, repeatedly.
U.S. Customs destroys a musician’s 11 flutes, declaring them to be agricultural products.
We’re here to help you: U.S. Customs destroys a musician’s 11 flutes, declaring them to be agricultural products.
A Canadian citizen, based in New York and with a green card employment permit, Bouzemaa was flying home from Marrakech, Morocco, when his baggage was opened by Customs at JFK.
‘I told them I had these instruments for many years and flew with them in and out,’ he said. ‘There were 11 instruments in all. They told me they were agricultural products and they had to be destroyed. There was nothing I could do. The ney flute can be made with bamboo. Is that agricultural?’
Ain’t you glad that the healthcare industry is now in the capable hands of this government?
In the final draft of its new report the IPCC has significantly slashed its predictions for how much the climate will warm in the coming decades.
From the second to the final draft of its newest report the IPCC significantly slashed its predictions for how much the climate will warm in the coming decades.
In the second draft of the Fifth Assessment Report it had broadly agreed with the models that the world will warm by 0.4 to 1.0 Cº from 2016-2035 against 1986-2005. But in the final draft it quietly cut the 30-year projection to 0.3-0.7 Cº, saying the warming is more likely to be at the lower end of the range [equivalent to about 0.4 Cº over 30 years]. If that rate continued till 2100, global warming this century could be as little as 1.3 Cº.
This will bring the IPCC’s predictions more in line with the reality of the past two decades, which has seen a complete pause in any warming.
This is actually very good news, as it suggests that the good scientists in the climate community are beginning to regain control of the science. Rather than bend to the political winds, the IPCC is being forced to bend to the data itself. Nonetheless, no one should be sanguine about the situation. As noted by Christopher Monckton at the link,
Multiple lines of evidence now confirm that the models and consequently the IPCC have overestimated global warming. Yet neither that misconceived organization nor any of its host of unthinking devotees has displayed any remorse. Instead, they persist in maintaining that the warming is temporarily paused, though they cannot really explain why; or they blame particulate aerosols, their get-out-of-jail-free fudge-factor; or they pretend warming is really continuing unabated, saying it has gone into hiding deep in the oceans where, conveniently, we cannot measure it, or that the Earth-atmosphere system has a fever driven by four atom-bombs’-worth of heat content increase every second.
What they are not prepared to countenance, notwithstanding the real-world, measured evidence, is the growing probability that they and their precious models have so badly misunderstood the climate, or so well understood it and so badly misrepresented it, that global warming is simply not going to occur at anything like any of the exaggerated rates that they had until now so confidently over-predicted.
Read the whole thing. Look especially at Figure 9, the last figure, as it shows the data in comparison with the predictions in all the IPCC reports.
A box of 100-year-old negatives from the Antarctica Shackleton expedition have been discovered, processed, and printed.
A box of 100-year-old negatives from the Shackleton expedition, discovered in an abandoned supply hut in Antarctica, have been processed and printed.
The law gives the government the final say on how your doctor treats you.
Obama’s next Obamacare lie: Despite a promise by Obama that Obamacare would not come “between you and your doctor,” the law gives the government the final say on how your doctor treats you.
Section 1311(h)(1)(B) of the health law gives the secretary of Health and Human Services blanket authority to dictate how doctors treat patients. Not just patients in government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, but patients with private plans they pay for themselves. On Dec. 2, 2013, we learned from the Federal Register that the rules are now being written. Starting in 2015, insurance companies will be barred from doing business with doctors who fail to comply. The rules will be offered in the name of ensuring “health-care quality,” which of course could mean anything.
“The powers given to the secretary are so broad, he or she could literally dictate how all physicians nationwide practice medicine,” warns Congressman Phil Gingrey (R. Georgia), himself a physician. Gingrey is sponsoring a bill to repeal Section 1311(h)(1)(B). Otherwise, he says, the HHS secretary — a Washington bureaucrat with no medical training — could, for example, bar doctors from doing routine mammogram screenings until female patients turn 50. In short, the federal government will be calling the shots on what patients get.
It appears that Sarah Palin’s death panels are coming, despite the denials of Obama, the Democrats, and their toadies in the media.
Scientists tell the truth.
I especially like this one: “We assume 50 Ivy League kids represent the general population because actual ‘real people’ can be sketchy and expensive.”
Recently there were two college students with me on a cave trip and they were talking about their lab work and said the exact same kind of thing: Sometimes the parameters of an experiment are chosen not for scientific reasons but for convenience or emotions irrelevant to the experiment.
“Unfortunately, it’s easier for our franchisees to open a restaurant in Siberia than in California.”
“Unfortunately, it’s easier for our franchisees to open a restaurant in Siberia than in California.”
Kind of sums everything up, doesn’t it? And unless the American public starts to vote aggressively for freedom and less government — even if that means their favorite programs or benefits might be cut — it ain’t gonna get better.