Tag: oppression

“A real Nobel Laureate takes pity on a fake Nobel Laureate.”

4:34 pm

Mark Steyn takes a look a one of Michael Mann’s many false claims and tears it to shreds, while also making Paul Krugman look somewhat foolish at the same time.

Michael Mann, a bad scientist who created the discredited hockey stick graph that supposedly proved global warming, is suing Steyn and others for daring to criticize him. In the process Steyn and others are finding ample material for making a great deal of fun of Mann while also finding more examples of his dishonesty and fraudulent behavior.

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Maliki steps down in Iraq

4:28 pm

Good news: Iraqi prime minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has agreed to step down as per the legal demands of the country’s government.

Maliki was a poor and weak ruler who even tried to engineer a coup when the government decided to legally remove him. He has found that the army wants to support the rule of law (something we might have taught them) and would not back him in his coup attempt. He is now gone, and maybe the new leadership in Iraq, chosen legally, can unify the country in its battle against the Islamic fascists that are attacking them from Syria.

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IRS lets contractors rummage through taxpayer data

2:43 pm

Does this make you feel secure? An inspector general report found that the IRS allowed contractors access to personal taxpayer information without doing the required background checks required by IRS policy.

Contractors who have access to sensitive information, which also includes employee and law enforcement data, must undergo a background check if they’re with the IRS for more than six months.

But the inspector general’s audit found five contracts where contractors had not had any background checks out of the 28 total contracts reviewed. In one of those cases, a contractor working on printing and mailing tax forms was given a disk containing 1.4 million taxpayer names, Social Security numbers and other personal information. A separate contract, for couriers, had given a daily route to an ex-convict who served more than 20 years for arson, the report added. In another 12 cases, IRS staffers had started background checks for contractors, but contractors were allowed to start working before those investigations had concluded.

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“It was the grossest incompetence.”

12:23 pm

The IRS takes more than two years to issue a refund check because of its own stupidity.

This paragraph best sums up the entire idiocy:

Dinesen [representing the citizen] immediately contacted the collection division. He was told they had no record of the return. The identity theft unit was handling it, and the collection division’s computers weren’t capable of interfacing with the identity theft unit’s computers. “I asked if he could just call the identity theft unit to confirm the return had been filed. He said he couldn’t. His explanation for why not boiled down to, ‘We don’t do that,’” Dinesen said.

The agent agreed to suspend collection actions against Boka Gonzalez while Dinesen tried to resolve the case. “He also asked me to give him a call if I got any information from the identity theft unit. It seemed ridiculous to me that one part of the IRS would ask an outside person to keep him informed of what another part of the IRS was doing, but that was the level of dysfunction we were dealing with,” Dinesen said.

Read the whole story. It is horrifying. And remember, this is a case where the IRS was simply incompetent. Imagine the harm they could do if they wanted to do harm, or were ordered to do so by our political leaders. Thank God such things never happen!

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The IRS stonewalls a judge

10:27 am

Working for the Democratic Party: Required by a judge to explain in detail in 30 days the destruction of its emails, the IRS has instead provided nothing more than shallow platitudes.

The author of the article above is very confident that, based on his past history, the judge will come down very hard on the IRS for its stonewalling. I pray that he is right.

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Michael Mann’s court suit under attack

10:17 am

Good news: Groups from across the political spectrum are expressing their opposition to Michael Mann’s court suit against his critics.

On Monday, The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press — along with 26 other groups including The Washington Post, Bloomberg and Fox News — filed an “amici curiae,” or “friend of the court,” brief with the D.C. Court of Appeals. An amici curiae is a brief submitted to a court to raise additional points of view to sway a court’s decision.

“While Mann essentially claims that he can silence critics because he is ‘right,’ the judicial system should not be the arbiter of either scientific truth or correct public policy,” the brief states, adding that “a participant in the ‘rough-and-tumble’ of public debate should not be able to use a lawsuit like this to silence his critics, regardless of whether one agrees with Mann or defendants.”

Just as Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg said it, I will say it also: Michael Mann is a fraud. He has no idea what it means to be a scientist, and should have been fired by his university after his climategate emails were uncovered. Instead, his university’s investigation was a whitewash and as much a fraud as Mann is.

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Another look at why ULA’s CEO stepped down

9:52 am

Why did ULA’s CEO step down, and did SpaceX or the Atlas 5’s dependence on Russian engines play a part?

Very worthwhile reading, as it suggests that not only is the competition from SpaceX a major factor, so was ULA’s effort to monopolize the military launch industry as well as monopolize its access to the Russian engines, denying their use by Orbital Sciences.

And to this I say, thank god for competition. It always shakes things up in a good way.

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Maps showing the territories of the Kurds and the Islamic State

9:05 pm

Since I think it useful to have a rough geographical understanding of the situation, I have been digging around to find some maps that will outline the territories controlled by the both the Kurds and the Islamic State (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS]), including the areas of dispute. This link provides the best selection I’ve found so far.

Based on these maps, I wonder when ISIS will start moving into next door Iran, as its western regions are adjacent to their present holdings.

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NASA headquarters staff votes to unionize.

4:56 pm

NASA’s bureaucracy marches on: The staff at NASA headquarters today voted to unionize.

“This successful vote will allow us to work with management to improve working conditions for NASA support and administrative staff here at NASA headquarters, thereby improving operations, saving money, and retaining an engaged and professional workforce,” said Tifarah Thomas, a program specialist within NASA’s Office of the Chief Health & Medical Officer. Professional support specialists at NASA headquarters include budget analysts, policy analysts, administrative specialists, secretaries, and others.

NHPA currently represents nearly 200 engineers and scientists at NASA in Washington. The combined unit, including the professional support specialists who voted today for IFPTE representation, will now represent more than 500 workers at the headquarters of America’s space agency. IFPTE also represents engineers and scientists at NASA labs and research facilities from coast-to-coast.

Anyone with the slightest objectivity knows that the working conditions for federal employees in Washington is glorious, with pay about double what everyone else in the country makes and benefits far exceeding even the best private packages. In addition, the hours are great and just slightly longer than what my generation would have called bankers’ hours. Moreover, if I can be blunt, these engineers are mostly paper pushers. They are not the one’s designing and building anything that might fly in space. Their only reason to unionize now is because they see a threat to their cushy jobs with the advent of private space and are organizing to secure their unneeded positions.

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