Mark Steyn, writing in the Australian, remarks:

One day, the world will marvel at the environmental hysteria of our time, and the deeply damaging corruption of science in the cause of an alarmist cult. The best thing this week’s conference could do is inculcate a certain modesty, not least in Senator Ian Campbell, about an issue that is almost entirely speculative. We don’t know how or why climate changes. We do know it’s changed dramatically throughout the planet’s history, including the so-called “little Ice Age” beginning in 600, when I was still driving a Ford Oxcart, and that, by comparison, the industrial age has been a time of relative climate stability. But, of course, as with that “hockey stick”, it depends how you draw the graph.

Question: Why do most global warming advocates begin their scare statistics with “since 1970”?

As in, “since 1970” there’s been global surface warming of half a degree or so.

Because from 1940 to 1970, temperatures fell.

Greg Richards on American Thinker quotes Winston Churchill, writing in The River War (1899), his account of Kitchener’s campaign against the jihadists of that day, on Islam:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property — either as a child, a wife, or a concubine — must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science — the science against which it had vainly struggled — the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

From: jason@kottke.org
Subject: Powerbook support
Date: January 10, 2006 4:55:31 PM ET
To: Apple Tech Support

Hello,

I purchased a new Powerbook three weeks ago. It was working fine until a few hours ago when you announced the new Intel-powered MacBook Pro at MacWorld and I started to cry. “Four to fives times faster,” I sobbed, “a built-in iSight, and a brighter, wider screen.”

My display, while not as bright or large as the new MacBook Pro display, illuminated my wet cheeks and red, swollen eyes as my tears rained down on the backlit keyboard. An acrid smell rose up from inside the smooth metal machine as my salty tears joined with the electronics, joyfully releasing the electrons from their assigned silicon pathways to freely arc into forbidden areas of the computer and elsewhere, including, somewhat painfully, my hands.

Is this covered under my warranty and if so, can you send me a new MacBook Pro as a replacement, please? Thank you for your time,

-jason

link

Here is the theory of governance advanced by the New York Times reporter James Risen, explaining (to Katie Couric on the Today Show) why the Times’ 12/16 NSA terrorist surveillance story had to be published:

RISEN: Well, I–I think that during a period from about 2000–from 9/11 through the beginning of the Gulf–the war in Iraq, I think what happened was you–we–the checks and balances that normally keep American foreign policy and national security policy towards the center kind of broke down. And you had more of a radicalization of American foreign policy in which the–the–the career professionals were not really given a chance to kind of forge a consensus within the administration. And so you had the–the–the principles (sic)–Rumsfeld, Cheney and Tenet and Rice and many others–who were meeting constantly, setting policy and really never allowed the people who understand–the experts who understand the region to have much of a say.

COURIC: You suggest there were a lot of power-grabbing going on.

Mr. RISEN: Yes.

Mr. Risen clearly subscribes to an idiosyncratic school of Constitutionalism in which real governing authority is based upon “expertise” and “centrism,” and reposes in the hands of career bureaucrats, who are entitled to take drastic measures (even compromising National Security by leaking to the Press, if necessary) to defend their policy-making prerogative against usurpation by mere temporarily elected amateurs. Michael Barone also had some sarcastic things to say about this on Monday.

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The Times was not inhibited from proceeding with this story, either by a request to refrain from publishing information injurious to National Security in time of war by the President of the United States, or by consideration of the questionable motives and psychological health of their informant Mr. Tice.

Tice, Risen, the New York Times and its editor and publisher have all committed very serious crimes.

As was already pretty darned clear, Russell Tice today is revealed to be at least one source for the New York Times’ NSA Flap story.

Tice Admits Being a Source for The New York Times

The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times’ reporters. But Tice maintains that his conscience is clear.

“As far as I’m concerned, as long as I don’t say anything that’s classified, I’m not worried,” he said. “We need to clean up the intelligence community. We’ve had abuses, and they need to be addressed.”

The NSA revoked Tice’s security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him. Tice calls that bunk and says that’s the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. Today the NSA said it had “no information to provide.”

ABC video

NSA letter to Tice

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Background on Tice here and here.

Radio Blogger reveals that Joe Biden is more than a little conflicted about Princeton.

The pro-Princeton statements: It’s an honor to be here. It would have even been a greater honor to have gone here. &c. were from February 23, 2004.

The anti-Princeton statements: I didn’t even like Princeton…No, I mean I really didn’t like Princeton. &c. are from yesterday’s Alito hearing.

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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

John Cole‘s commie blogmate Tim F. alerts us to what he calls an excellent commentary on global warming by Stirling Newberry which proves to be (of all places) on Daily Kos. Newberry is basically gloating over the conversion to at least one aspect of the PC position on Global Warming and storm activity by a former skeptic, and he concludes prescriptively:

The response is carbon neutrality – to move away from burning hydrocarbons and coal for energy. Carbon is a rock, most of it should be in the ground.

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Of course, speaking accurately, carbon is really a chemical element, which does make up a large percentage of the composition of a tiny proportion of the chemicallly complex kinds of things we usually speak of as rocks, and which also makes up a large portion of the composition of many other things, including, most conspicuously, all living things on the planet. The left has a talent, often remarked upon, for seeing to it that a great many of a certain kind of carbon-based animate form do wind up in the ground, so I suppose one should view a call for measures limited to one sort of fossil fuel as relatively modest in its ambitions, speaking historically. I am afraid, however, that I do find the prescriptive belief that coal should be left lying in the ground just a trifle superstitious.

Jason Leopold, writing in the leftwing venue “truthout,” claims he has leakers of his own, leaking details of Inspector Javert’s, excuse me, Special Council Fitzgerald’s obsessive and monomanaical quest to apprehend Jean Valjean, excuse me, indict White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove:

Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is said to have spent the past month preparing evidence he will present to a grand jury alleging that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove knowingly made false statements to FBI and Justice Department investigators and lied under oath while he was being questioned about his role in the leak of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity more than two years ago, according to sources knowledgeable about the probe…

According to sources, Fitzgerald had planned to meet with the grand jury several times last month, hoping to wrap up the case specifically as it relates to Rove’s involvement. But the prosecutor, who empanelled a second grand jury in November and whose term expires in 18 months, had his hands full dealing with another high-profile criminal case he is prosecuting involving Lord Conrad Black, owner of several major metropolitan newspapers, who was indicted on charges including racketeering.

Moreover, several members of the grand jury had questions involving Rove’s prior testimony before the previous grand jury on four separate occasions and had requested additional information about the testimony and about the overall case, these sources said, leading to a delay in the proceedings so Fitzgerald could provide that information.

Robert Luskin, Rove’s attorney, said in a brief interview Monday that he has not heard anything about the grand jury requesting additional information about Rove and is unaware that Fitzgerald has been building a case against his client…

But sources knowledgeable about the case against Rove say that he was offered a plea deal in December and that Luskin had twice met with Fitzgerald during that time to discuss Rove’s legal status. Rove turned down the plea deal, which would likely have required him to provide Fitzgerald with information against other officials who were involved in Plame’s outing as well as testifying against those people, the sources said.

Richard Lawrence Cohen offers one of the great I’m so glad I’m not living in New York anymore images.

From letters to the Post:

Sen. Ted Kennedy is attacking Alito on the grounds that his views on women are out of the mainstream.

When Kennedy drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick and killed Mary Jo Kopeckne, did he land in the mainstream?

Bob Tufts
Forest Hills

I used to think this had already happened to my grandparents.

reports Reuters:

COLOGNE, Germany (Hollywood Reporter) – A German cannibal is taking legal action to stop the release of the horror film “Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story,” which he claims is based on his life.

Keri Russell (“Felicity”) stars as a graduate student researching imprisoned cannibal Simon Grobeck (Thomas Kretschmann). Russell is drawn into Grobeck’s world and becomes obsessed with the Internet cannibal community. “Butterfly” is scheduled for a March 9 release in Germany.

But not if Armin Meiwes, who was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for eating a man he met over the Internet, has his way. In a statement Monday, Meiwes’s lawyer, Harald Ermel, said the film is a “slavish re-enactment” of the real-life events and his client did not give permission to producer Atlantic Streamline to fictionalize his story.

“I feel used,” said Meiwes, who filmed the killing and confessed to the crime but denied it was murder since his victim volunteered to be eaten.