Victory is never final. Defeat is never fatal. It is courage that counts.

— Winston Churchill

I may lose my PC later today, and have to work on a laptop.

It’s awful moving, but at least I don’t have to pay attention to the election results right now.

Upload a photo of at least 100 x 100 pixels, register (pshaw!), and this program will tell you which celebrity you resemble. I got Topher Grace (who’s he?), Brendan Fraser, and Christopher Walken as results.

Greg Palast assures us.

You see, we nefarious Republicans will prevent dead and non-existent democrats (particularly those of color) from voting, and we are again going to go right ahead and fail to count all spoiled ballots as democrat votes.

Officials call it “spoilage.” I call it, “inaugurating Republicans.” Why? According to statisticians working with the US Civil Rights Commission, the chance your vote will “spoil” this way is 900% higher for Black folk and 500% higher for Hispanics than for white voters. When we do the arithmetic, we find that well over half of all votes spoiled or “blank” are cast by voters of color. On balance, this spoilage game produces a million-vote edge for the GOP.

All this just makes me think they’ve got some pretty racist statisticians working at that Civil Rights Commission.

A classic leftie blog post, this one is so ill-documented, irrational, and based on an extravagant series of self-indulgent assumptions that you wonder that they can be so stupid. But it is good for a laugh.

Hat tip to Memeorandum.

Mark Steyn discusses John Kerry and his party.

what (Kerry) said fits what too many upscale Dems believe: that America’s soldiers are only there because they’re too poor and too ill-educated to know any better. That’s what they mean when they say “we support our troops.” They support them as victims, as children, as potential welfare recipients, but they don’t support them as warriors and they don’t support the mission.

So their “support” is objectively worthless. The indignant protest that “of course” “we support our troops” isn’t support, it’s a straddle, and one that emphasizes the Democrats’ frivolousness in the post-9/11 world. A serious party would have seen the jihad as a profound foreign-policy challenge they needed to address credibly. They could have found a Tony Blair — a big mushy-leftie pantywaist on health and education and all the other sissy stuff, but a man at ease with the projection of military force in the national interest. But we saw in Connecticut what happens to Democrats who run as Blairites: You get bounced from the ticket. In the 2004 election, instead of coming to terms with it as a national security question, the Democrats looked at the war on terror merely as a Bush wedge issue they needed to neutralize. And so they signed up with the weirdly incoherent narrative of John Kerry — a celebrated anti-war activist suddenly “reporting for duty” as a war hero and claiming that, even though the war was a mistake and his comrades were murderers and rapists, his four months in the Mekong rank as the most epic chapter in the annals of the Republic.

Read the whole thing.

John Podhoretz notes the inscrutability of the will of the American electorate as this hotly contested electoral battle draws to a close:

November 7, 2006 — THE screenwriter William Goldman changed history in Hollywood with three simple words: “Nobody knows anything.”

He was giving a simple and profound explanation for why some movies succeed and others fail. His answer: Nobody knows anything until the audience decides.

In the world of political punditry, it’s time to invoke the Goldman rule. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of high-profile blabbermouths out there (me included) trying to tell you which way the electorate is going to go. Chances are, if you’re reading these words, you are the sort of person who pays attention to our blabber-mouthery.

And guess what? Nobody knows anything.

If you’d spent the year avoiding all the paid political prognostication and theorizing, you’d be as enlightened right now as if you had read every single word pundits have written this year.

Last week, everybody in the business was certain a huge Democratic wave was going to wash over America.

Then, over the weekend, three major national polls purported to show a Republican rally, and suddenly the certitude was gone. Maybe there’d be no wave. Maybe there never was one. Maybe there was, but John Kerry’s offensive remarks about being “stuck in Iraq” crashed the wave onto the rocks.

You could see them on the news channels, sweating, worried that they’d gone out too far on a limb predicting the Democratic triumph, wondering if perhaps they could just pull it back a little . . . .

Because guess what? Nobody knows anything.

Read the whole thing.

The New York Times reports:

Separating anatomy from what it means to be a man or a woman, New York City is moving forward with a plan to let people alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery.

Should people be allowed to alter the sex on their birth certificate even if they have not had sex-change surgery? Under the rule being considered by the city’s Board of Health, which is likely to be adopted soon, people born in the city would be able to change the documented sex on their birth certificates by providing affidavits from a doctor and a mental health professional laying out why their patients should be considered members of the opposite sex, and asserting that their proposed change would be permanent.

Applicants would have to have changed their name and shown that they had lived in their adopted gender for at least two years, but there would be no explicit medical requirements.

Read the whole thing.

I tried using Just For Men just once to “get the grey out,” and got endless grief from my wife and friends for trying to fight reality.

Mauna Kea Volcano, Hawaii, April 2002

Launched in 2001, the Project for On Board Autonomy (Proba) satellite was designed as a technology testbed with a lifetime of a couple of years. Five years on, it has exceeded all expectations and has been used extensively as an Earth observation satellite, providing crucial pictures to environmental researchers across the world. The size of a small tea chest, Proba has taken more than 10,000 pictures of more than 1,000 places on Earth using a compact high resolution imaging spectrometer. The device, which was part-funded by the British National Space Centre, weighs 14kg and is the smallest of its kind to fly into space. It can see details on the surface of the Earth at a resolution of 17m and has helped scientists monitor landfill operations, track the role of woodland as sources and sinks of carbon dioxide, identify Roman buildings and assess different land use strategies in central Namibia’s savannahs.

13 photo slideshow at the Guardian.

Renowned rod-builder, angler, and bon vivant Hoagy Bix Carmichael (son of the famous songwriter) has fished for salmon on the Grand Cascapedia, perhaps the greatest of North America’s salmon rivers, for decades.

Hoagy is a Cascapedia fanatic, and he felt keenly the absence of a definitive history of the Cascapedia sport fishery, the personalities who fished there, and the great river’s record catches. Hoagy is also a writer of distinction. He personally codified Everett Garrison’s techniques into the definitive manual for building the split cane fly rod, and thereby single-handedly produced a split-cane renaissance. In the midst of his recovery from a dangerous illness a few years ago, Hoagy courageously undertook the formidable task of producing a history of fishing on the Grand Cascapedia, applying to his research the same painstaking perfectionism for which he is renowned. After five years work, the first of what will be two volumes appeared last spring.

Hoagy was interviewed this week for the Living on Earth radio program.

RealAudio interview

The book.

James Q. Wilson identifies precisely where, and by whom, the War on Terrror is being decided.

Once, powerful press owners dictated what their papers would print, sometimes irresponsibly. But that era of partisan and circulation-building distortions was not replaced by a commitment to objective journalism; it was replaced by a deep suspicion of the American government. That suspicion, fueled in part by the Vietnam and Watergate controversies, means that the government, especially if it is a conservative one, is surrounded by journalists who doubt almost all it says. One obvious result is that since World War II there have been few reports of military heroes; indeed, there have been scarcely any reports of military victories.
This change in the media is not a transitory one that will give way to a return to the support of our military when it fights. Journalism, like so much scholarship, now dwells in a postmodern age in which truth is hard to find and statements merely serve someone’s interests.

The mainstream media’s adversarial stance, both here and abroad, means that whenever a foreign enemy challenges us, he will know that his objective will be to win the battle not on some faraway bit of land but among the people who determine what we read and watch. We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan, but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy.

Read the whole thing.

Christopher Moncton starts a series of two articles discussing the fallacies of the UN’s Stern Report on Climate Change.

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that’s scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn’t do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: “With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: ‘We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’ “…

Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they’re there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they’re under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world’s ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn’t) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn’t CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun’s role in today’s warming. Here’s how:

• The UN dated its list of “forcings” (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.

• Every “forcing” produces “climate feedbacks” making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn’t do the same for the base solar forcing.

Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably. But recent solar changes have been big.

Read the whole thing.

Heavy packing day today. Movers arrive to pack books tomorrow. Our plane leaves next Saturday. I’ll be working from a hotel for several days after our arrival, waiting for the moving vans to cross the continent.