Focusing in on the theft of customer funds at MF Global.
Not surprisingly, this article from the liberal New York Times plays the game of “Name that party!”, conveniently forgetting to mention anywhere that Jon Corzine and all his associates just happen to big-time Democratic Party players. To remind them, and everyone else, here’s a little video illustrating how closely linked the Democrats and Jon Corzine are:
Ain’t democracy a bitch? Virginia residents loudly oppose their local government’s preparations for climate-related sea-level rise, and neither the bureaucrats or this Washington Post journalist like it!
Good news: The Fukushima nuclear reactor has reached the state of cold shutdown.
This means that the reactor core has cooled enough that there is no need to recirculate the water to keep the fuel cool. However, because the reactor continues to leak that water recirculation is still necessary, and will be for years.
As is typical of many modern journalists, the article above is also an unstated editorial both hostile to nuclear energy as well as private enterprise, best shown by the article’s concluding paragraph:
Meanwhile, the Japanese public and many of its politicians remained deeply mistrustful of the situation at Fukushima. In this week’s issue of Nature, two members of the Japanese parliament call for nationalization of the Fukushima Plant, to allow scientists and engineers to investigate exactly what happened inside the reactors, and to reassure the public that the decommissioning will be done with their interests at heart. Regardless of whether you agree with the authors, nationalization seems almost inevitable. The lengthy decommissioning process that will follow this cold shutdown, and the enormous cost involved, make it a job for a government, not a corporation. [emphasis mine]
First, he has no idea what the Japanese public thinks of this situation. Second, there is no evidence that the government could do this job better than the company that runs the reactor. Both conclusions are mere opinion, inserted inappropriately in a news article without any supporting proofs.
Another global warming activist who fakes it: Sir David Attenborough admits to shooting fake polar bear footage for a BBC documentary.
What’s worse is that he sees nothing wrong with what he did!
But wait, there’s more! The BBC, also in the tank for global warming, has also now admitted that a great deal of the footage in its nature documentaries is staged.
In a further blow to wildlife fans, corporation bosses yesterday confessed that staging footage was standard practice in natural history programmes. They insisted such editing tricks were necessary to create the documentaries, and added the programme met the expected editorial standards.
A spokesman said: “While the great majority of footage for Frozen Planet is filmed entirely in the wild, on occasion certain sequences need to be filmed in controlled conditions – otherwise we wouldn’t be able to bring these stories to our audiences. “This type of filming is standard practice across the industry when creating natural history programmes.”
Pravda reborn! Doug Ross notes the fawning lack of any real questions to President Obama during an interview by a CBS journalist.
Kroft apparently had a brief case of amnesia and forgot about a few mildly important issues:
- The increasing calls for Eric Holder’s resignation and/or impeachment for Operation Fast and Furious, etc.
- The newly revealed Obamacare emails that appear to show Elena Kagan lied under oath
- The catastrophic failure of MF Global, headed by none other than one of Obama’s leading fundraisers, John Corzine
- The billions in “green energy” funds that went to Obama’s fundraisers and political cronies, Solyndra being only the most visible example
- The “historic” $4.2+ trillion budget deficits thanks to Obama’s disastrous stimulus debacle and the Democrats’ failure to pass a budget for 1,000+ days
Ross provides links to each of these scandals, none of which are trivial and all of which are true.
Sadly these kinds of pointless how-can-I-make-a-Democratic-President-look-good interviews are the rule from the mainstream almost-exclusively-Democratic press.
Speaking of press release journalism, they just ended a press conference at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) fall meeting led by James Hansen, head of the NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York. Hansen is a devoted global warming scientist, most well known to the public from his testimony to Congress in 1988 outlining the serious threat the world faces from global warming and carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere.
I had very much wanted to ask Hansen (as well as the rest of the panel) this somewhat challenging question:
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The pathetic state of science journalism.
Many survive as a science journalist just by paying attention to press releases and reproducing them, as long as others do the same. A recent BBC analysis of its science coverage in its own news reports revealed that 75% came from press releases, and only a tiny fraction contained views not expressed in those press releases.
This lip service is not good enough, and editors should wise up that science journalism has lost its edge and demand reform. It has also become uncritical and therefore not journalism. Too many who profess to practice journalism are the product of fashionable science communication courses that have sprung up in the past fifteen years. It’s my view that this has resulted in many journalists being supporters of, and not reporters of, science. There is a big difference.
I couldn’t agree more. I sometimes think my rants against “press release journalism” sound like a broken record. I am glad I am not the only one ranting.
Two stories today from the Climategate 2 archives:
The first describes how Andrew Revkin, the Times’ primary environmental reporter, was entirely in the global warming camp, and worked with these corrupt scientists to push their agenda. It also quotes, from the climategate emails, Revkin’s contempt for anyone who expressed skepticism about the IPCC process and global warming.
The second describes how the BBC teamed up with these same corrupt scientists to keep any skepticism of global warming from being aired at any time.
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The international development agency Oxfam is screaming disaster..
This year’s food shortages and famine are a sign of what’s to come if the world doesn’t get climate change under control, Oxfam is warning. The international development agency made a call for action the day before the UN kicks off its annual climate change conference in Durban, South Africa. . . .
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An evening pause: Reporter meets turkey. Turkey wins.
The truth about the “automatic budget cuts” that are going to be imposed by the failure of the supercommittee: “They aren’t really cuts; they are a slowdown in the budget increases.”
And journalists should therefore stop calling them “budget cuts.”
More info on the news organization’s attempts to stonewall the story here.
Once again a journalist as well as a science journal are spinning budget numbers to hide the fact that the present Congress is not imposing draconian cuts to science. If anything, they are not cutting enough, considering the dire state of the federal deficit.
First there is the headline, from Science: Senate Panel Cuts NSF Budget by $162 Million. Then there is the article’s text, by Jeffrey Mervis, which not only reaffirms the cuts described in the headline but adds that “the equivalent House of Representatives panel approved a bill that would hold NSF’s budget steady next year at $6.86 billion.” Mervis then underlines how terrible he thinks these budget numbers are by quoting Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland): “We’ve gone beyond frugality and are into austerity.”
This reporting is shameful. Not only is Mikulski full of crap, Mervis’s description of the budget numbers is misleading if not downright wrong. Here are the final budget numbers for the NSF since 2007, in billions of dollars (sources: Science, the American Geological Institute, and The Scientist):
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Updated and bumped: I wrote the following last year on September 11. Sadly, nothing has changed since then. President Obama is still trying to sell the idea that this day should be used as a day of service, something that misses the point so completely as to almost be despicable.
So, I think it is worth repeating what I wrote on September 11, 2010:
The President has asked us to consider today “a national day of service and remembrance”. Though the sentiment seems reasonable, I must respectively disagree.
September 11 should not be turned into a day to celebrate volunteerism or service or American charity. Though these values are profound, important, and an expression of much of what makes our nation great, they are not why we remember September 11.
We remember the evil acts commited on September 11, 2001 in order to remind us that there is evil in the world.
We remember these evil acts so that we will have the strength to fight that evil, with every fiber of our being.
We remember those who died in order to prevent future attacks and further deaths.
We remember so that no one can ever try to make believe these events did not happen.
We remember so that no one can spread the lie that the perpetrators were something other than what they were: Men who had decided to kill in the name of Islam, based on what they believed their religion taught them.
And finally, and most important, we remember the horrible events of September 11, 2001 so that those innocent murdered souls — whose only crime that day was going to work — will not have died in vain.
An evening pause: Why I never get my information from television news.
Citizen journalism and the blogosphere stop a liberal media lie in its tracks.
Time to start making your vacation plans. On August 21, 2017 a total eclipse of the sun is going to traverse the entire length of the continental United States, from Oregon to South Carolina. Kentucky will have the longest view, with totality as long as three minutes.
And astronomers are already thinking of ways to harness the help of the American people in observing this event. In a paper published today on the Los Alamos astro-ph website, a team of astronomers are proposing organizing something they have dubbed the U.S. Eclipse MegaMovie, whereby they gather together as many images of the totality as possible and assemble them into a single film, showing the evolution of the sun’s corona as it crosses the continent.
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About Obama’s clash with a Tea party activist during his bus tour this week: How long do you think it will take for the press to go after that activist to try to destroy him for daring to challenge this Democratic President?
I give it one week.
Video: Who’s the real reporter?
With the recently passed debt ceiling deal, there are going to be a lot of news reports talking about how that deal is going to force cuts and reductions in government spending. Everyone one of these stories will be a lie.
Take for example this story today in Nature, discussing the fate of science research under the deal. Here is how they describe what will happen if the Congressional “super-committee” cannot come up with an agreement and across-the-board “cuts” are triggered:
“Then there will be extraordinary pain,” says Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC. “And it will get worse in 2014.”
The two-stage structure of the debt deal explains both the short-term reprieve and the long-term worry. The first set of agreed cuts, totalling US$917 billion, will be spread over 10 years, but two factors mitigate their effect. First, reductions to defence spending will account for a significant share of the cuts — meaning that other US agencies won’t bear the entire burden. Second, the cuts are heavily loaded forward onto the 2014 fiscal year and beyond, in an apparent effort to shelter the current fragile economy. Only minimal cuts will be implemented in fiscal years 2012 and 2013.
The trouble with this is that it is simply not true. There will be no cuts at all, under any condition, according the debt deal.
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