Month: November 2009

So it Wasn’t Government-hatin’ Inbred Redneck Gun-clinging Bible-Thumping

KevinLeave a comment

So it Wasn‘t Government-hatin,’ Inbred, Redneck, Gun-clinging Bible-Thumping Meth-heads?

Investigators: Ky. census worker committed suicide

FRANKFORT, Ky. — Authorities are saying a Kentucky census worker found hanging from a tree with “fed” scrawled on his chest committed suicide and staged his death to look like a homicide.

A news release from Kentucky State Police said Tuesday that Bill Sparkman died at the same location where his body was found Sept. 12 near a cemetery in a heavily wooded area of southeastern Kentucky.

A man who found the body in the Daniel Boone National Forest said the 51-year-old was bound with duct tape, gagged and had an identification badge taped to his neck.

Investigators say Sparkman acted alone in manipulating the scene to conceal the suicide.

The news release says Sparkman had recently taken out two life insurance policies that would not pay out for suicide.

Damn, the Lefties must be so disappointed.

My condolences to his family, though. Losing a loved one sucks. To find out that he committed suicide in an effort to try to leave them something must hurt worse.

Congressional Legerdemain

KevinLeave a comment

Congressional Legerdemain

Michael Barone points out an article in the New York Post by Jefferey H. Anderson that illustrates just how much the Senate’s proposed Health Care bill will really cost, as opposed to what they’re trying to sell us.

It’s like they think the Great Unwashed can’t understand mortgages with variable interest rates and balloon payments, or something.

They tell us that the first ten years of this wonderful plan will cost only (only!) $849 billion over the first ten years.

Nazzo fast, Guido.

Here’s a chart that shows how they get that number (click to embiggen):


Anderson says in his piece:

As the CBO analysis indicates, the bill’s real 10-year costs would start in 2014. And in its true first decade (2014 to 2023), the CBO projects the bill’s costs to be $1.8 trillion — double the price Reid is advertising.

And that’s even though the CBO optimistically assumes the government-run “public option” wouldn’t cost a cent.

Over this same 10-year span, the bill would hike taxes and fines by $892 billion — more than the alleged price of the bill.

On top of this, Anderson expands:

Just as problematic are the bill’s effects on entitlement spending and deficits. Medicare is already teetering on the edge of insolvency. This year’s Medicare Trustees Report (signed by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius) warns that the Medicare Hospital Trust Fund — the main funding channel for the largest part of Medicare — will become insolvent in 2017.

Worse, nearly four people are now paying into Medicare for every beneficiary. But with the baby boomers’ retirement fast approaching, that number will drop over the next 20 years to about 2½. Fewer and fewer people will be paying higher and higher costs.

Yet, as the CBO notes, in its real first decade, the bill would siphon $802 billion from Medicare to spend elsewhere. With its financial outlook already beyond bleak, Medicare is the last place to look to for “free” money.

Among the $802 billion that Reid would divert from Medicare is $431 billion in cuts in doctors’ pay (far more than the misleading figure for 2010-19). The bill says it would cut payments to doctors for services to Medicare patients by 23 percent in 2011 — and never raise them back up, ever.

No one who’s been in Washington for more than five minutes actually expects this reduction to occur — and if it doesn’t, then the Senate health bill would increase our deficits by $286 billion in its true first decade, according to CBO projections.

Read the whole thing.

In comments yesterday, Markadelphia asked:

(W)hy does the government want to get into health care? Several answers suggest themselves. With Medicare, Medicaid, S-Chip and state run health care, they already are fairly involved. But what is their motivation for this current push for historic legislation?

“Historic.” Yeah, there’s an appropriate adjective. “Little Boy” was an historic bomb in the same way this legislation is “historic.” I want to attribute good intentions to our elected overseers, I really do. But if you wanted to destroy the American health care system and the American economy, I find it difficult to believe that you wouldn’t see this bill as a means to that end. Same for Cap and Trade.

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

An Interesting Speech

KevinLeave a comment

S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, a distinguished research professor at George Mason University, and president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, gave a speech at Hillsdale College in August of 2007. Printed in their periodical Imprimus (with some rather irritating misplaced hypens in the on-line version), I strongly recommend it to you. It’s on the topic of Anthropogenic Global Warming, or the lack thereof, and entitled Global Warming: Man-Made or Natural? Excerpt:

What about the fact—as cited by, among others, those who produced the IPCC report—that every major greenhouse computer model (there are two dozen or so) shows a large temperature increase due to human burning of fossil fuels? Fortunately, there is a scientific way of testing these models to see whether current warming is due to a man-made greenhouse effect. It involves comparing the actual or observed pattern of warming with the warming pattern predicted by or calculated from the models. Essentially, we try to see if the “fingerprints” match—”fingerprints” meaning the rates of warming at different latitudes and altitudes.

For instance, theoretically, greenhouse warming in the tropics should register at increasingly high rates as one moves from the surface of the earth up into the atmosphere, peaking at about six miles above the earth’s surface. At that point, the level should be greater than at the surface by about a factor of three and quite pronounced, according to all the computer models. In reality, however, there is no increase at all. In fact, the data from balloon-borne radiosondes show the very opposite: a slight decrease in warming over the equator.

The fact that the observed and predicted patterns of warming don’t match indicates that the man-made greenhouse contribution to current temperature change is insignificant. This fact emerges from data and graphs collected in the Climate Change Science Program Re-port 1.1, published by the federal government in April 2006 (see www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/default.htm). It is remarkable and puzzling that few have noticed this disparity between observed and predicted patterns of warming and drawn the obvious scientific conclusion.

And this:

You will note that this has been a rational discussion. We asked the important question of whether there is appreciable man-made warming today. We presented evidence that indicates there is not, thereby suggesting that attempts by governments to control green-house-gas emissions are pointless and unwise. Nevertheless, we have state governors calling for CO2 emissions limits on cars; we have city mayors calling for mandatory CO2 controls; we have the Supreme Court declaring CO2 a pollutant that may have to be regulated; we have every industrialized nation (with the exception of the U.S. and Australia) signed on to the Kyoto Protocol; and we have ongoing international demands for even more stringent controls when Kyoto expires in 2012. What’s going on here?

What, indeed?

Read the whole thing, and the piece where I found the link in comments.

Wait, What? (Redux)

KevinLeave a comment

Wait, What? (Redux)

Warming’s impacts sped up, worsened since Kyoto

Since the 1997 international accord to fight global warming, climate change has worsened and accelerated — beyond some of the grimmest of warnings made back then.

As the world has talked for a dozen years about what to do next, new ship passages opened through the once frozen summer sea ice of the Arctic. In Greenland and Antarctica, ice sheets have lost trillions of tons of ice. Mountain glaciers in Europe, South America, Asia and Africa are shrinking faster than before.

And it’s not just the frozen parts of the world that have felt the heat in the dozen years leading up to next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen:

_The world’s oceans have risen by about an inch and a half.

_Droughts and wildfires have turned more severe worldwide, from the U.S. West to Australia to the Sahel desert of North Africa.

_Species now in trouble because of changing climate include, not just the lumbering polar bear which has become a symbol of global warming, but also fragile butterflies, colorful frogs and entire stands of North American pine forests.

_Temperatures over the past 12 years are 0.4 of a degree warmer than the dozen years leading up to 1997.

Even the gloomiest climate models back in the 1990s didn’t forecast results quite this bad so fast.

However, just last week:

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

—

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

And from the emails and files hacked from the Warmistas, they acknowledge the lack of warming over the last decade and one despairs: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

So Seth Borenstein of the AP cranks up the OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! rhetoric? I think you’re seeing the beginnings of media pushback against the release of that 100+MB of hacked data. So long as the majority of the population never hears about the “how do we hide the data” emails, they’ll keep believing in the AGW story.

MIchael Crichton’s Last Novel

KevinLeave a comment

Michael Crichton’s Last Novel

Like most, I was shocked when the news broke that author Michael Crichton had died of cancer just over a year ago. I’ve read all of his novels and quite a bit of his other writing (essays, speeches, etc.) I was glad to hear that there would be one more novel published after his death, and it is out now: Pirate Latitudes.

My current “to read” stack is a teetering tower, but I think I’m going to have to add that one to it.

What’s Next, Expelling Students for Having Guns in the Home

KevinLeave a comment

Check the headline:

Student expelled for having unloaded shotguns in truck

Now check the specifics:

WILLOWS (CA) — The Willows Unified School District board of trustees has expelled a 16-year-old for having unloaded shotguns in his pickup parked just off the Willows High School campus.

(My emphasis.) OFF campus. Not ON campus.

So what’s next? Home inspections and expulsion of students with firearms in their homes?

Quote of the Day – More Equal Edition

KevinLeave a comment

Quote of the Day – “More Equal” Edition

Last week, the body of Chicago school board president Michael Scott was found in the Chicago River with a single bullet wound in his head. The big story was that this powerful, well-connected public official had, according to the county medical examiner, committed suicide. The less-noticed story was that he did it with an illegal weapon.

—

Unlike most Chicagoans, Scott could have been a legal handgun owner. Because he had it before the ban was enacted, he was allowed to register and keep it. But the police department says he never did. By having it in the city, Scott was guilty of an offense that could have gotten him jail time.

Amazingly enough, he was not the first local public official to take the view that firearms restrictions are something for other, ordinary people to observe.

– Steve Chapman, Armed Pols: A Chicago Tradition, RealClearPolitics

Found via Extrano’s Alley.

Do You Know Anyone With Multiple Sclerosis?

KevinLeave a comment


They may find this interesting:

The Liberation Treatment: A whole new approach to MS

Amid the centuries-old castles of the ancient city of Ferrara is a doctor who has come upon an entirely new idea about how to treat multiple sclerosis, one that may profoundly change the lives of patients.

Dr. Paolo Zamboni, a former vascular surgeon and professor at the University of Ferrara in northern Italy, began asking questions about the debilitating condition a decade ago, when his wife Elena, now 51, was diagnosed with MS.

Watching his wife Elena struggle with the fatigue, muscle weakness and visual problems of MS led Zamboni to begin an intense personal search for the cause of her disease. He found that scientists who had studied the brains of MS patients had noticed higher levels of iron in their brain, not accounted for by age. The iron deposits had a unique pattern, often forming in the core of the brain, clustered around the veins that normally drain blood from the head. No one had ever fully explained this phenomenon, considering the excess iron a toxic byproduct of the MS itself.

Dr. Zamboni wondered if the iron came from blood improperly collecting in the brain. Using Doppler ultrasound, he began examining the necks of MS patients and made an extraordinary finding. Almost 100 per cent of the patients had a narrowing, twisting or outright blockage of the veins that are supposed to flush blood from the brain. He then checked these veins in healthy people, and found none of these malformations. Nor did he find these blockages in those with other neurological conditions.

“In my mind, this was unbelievable evidence that further study was necessary to understand the link between venous function and iron deposits on the other,” Zamboni told W5 from his research lab in Ferrara.

What was equally astounding, was that not only was the blood not flowing out of the brain, it was “refluxing” reversing and flowing back upwards. Zamboni believes that as the blood moves into the brain, pressure builds in the veins, forcing blood into the brain’s grey matter where it sets off a host of reactions, possibly explaining the symptoms of MS.

“For me, it was really unbelievable to understand that iron deposits in MS were exactly around the veins. So probably, it is a dysfunction of drainage of the veins,” Zamboni said.

“This is very important, because iron is very dangerous, because it produces free radicals, and free radicals are killers for cells. So we need to eliminate iron accumulation.”

Zamboni dubbed the vein disorder he discovered CCSVI, or Chronic Cerebrospinal Venous Insufficiency, and began publishing his preliminary research in neurology journals.

He soon found that the severity of the vein blockages were located corresponded to the severity of the patient’s symptoms. Patients with only one vein blocked usually had milder forms of the disease; those with two or more damaged veins had more severe illness.

Zamboni found blockages not only in the veins in the neck directly beneath the brain — the jugular veins –but in a central drainage vein, the azygos vein, which flushes blood down from the brain along the spine. Blockages here, he found were associated with the most severe form of MS, primary progressive, in which patients rapidly deteriorate. For this form of MS, there currently is no effective treatment.

Read the whole thing, there’s much more. There’s video, too.

Found at AR15.com.