UPI reports that the cops in Oklahoma City received an interesting offer.

Authorities in Oklahoma said a man who crashed into a parking lot walked into a jail and offered a stick he called the “last tree in the universe” as payment.

Oklahoma County sheriff’s deputies said Rondell Bailey walked into the downtown Oklahoma City jail with a stick and told deputies he wanted to offer the object, which he called the “last tree in the universe,” in exchange for dropping any possible charges against him, KOCO-TV, Oklahoma City, reported Wednesday.

The deputies said Bailey left after being told the stick was not an acceptable form of payment and threw a brick through a jail window.

Investigators said they discovered a white powder suspected to be methamphetamine during a search of the suspect’s truck.

——————————————–

Steve Hoefer made a glove which will play Rock, Paper, Scissors against its wearer. The glove was winning in this 1:36 video

Hat tip to Rosa Golian and Karen L. Myers.

——————————————–

Satire of typical news report (Warning: lots of off-color language). 2:02 video.

From Vanderleun via Karen L. Myers.

——————————————–

“Just buy me a sun dress and put me in a Prius!” Hitler declares angrily on learning that Jerry Brown is again running for governor of California in the latest “Der Untergang” take-off.

3:49 video.

Hat tip to Kenneth Grubbs.

Doug Ross mocks Time Magazine’s recent efforts to associate Snowmaggedon with AGW.

“There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm.” And there’s also evidence that eating five bags of pork rinds a day could cause you to lose weight, but I can’t quite prove that yet. …

No mention of ClimateGate. No mention of missing weather stations. No mention of corrupted or intentionally destroyed data. No mention of the glaciers that were supposed to melt next week.

Just the Democrat-Statist talking points, recited to an audience that’s disappearing faster than a gallon of ice cream in front of Michael Moore’s pie hole.

Time Magazine thinks its readers are really, really dumb. Perhaps the few that remain are truly stupid. But I kinda doubt it. They’d be working for Time if they were that dumb.

Mona Charen, too, admires the double-standard at work in establishment media weather event reporting.

True to their mission as the organs of the liberal establishment, Time magazine and the New York Times ran stories in the midst of the great snowmageddon warning us against drawing any politically incorrect conclusions. “Skeptics of global warming,” cautioned the Times, “are using the record-setting snows to mock those who warn of dangerous human-driven climate change — this looks more like global cooling, they taunt. Most climate scientists respond that the ferocious storms are consistent with forecasts that a heating planet will produce more frequent and more intense weather events.” Time agrees: “There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm.”

Note how the Times contrasts “skeptics of global warming” with “climate scientists.” Bill Nye the Science Guy, appearing on MSNBC, used the same tactic, accusing skeptics about manmade global warming of “denying science.”

Those who now protest that any particular weather pattern should not be confused with global climate have short memories. Only yesterday, they were attributing every forest fire, drought, hurricane, and toad disease to global warming.

Read the whole thing.

Aram Bakshian Jr, reviewing Andrew Young’s political memoir The Politician, a personal account of the author’s disillusionment in the course of serving as a staffer for former North Carolina Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards.

Young hitched his wagon to what he perceived as rising democrat party star, who was “going to be president one day.” And in 2008 when the National Enquirer and certain bloggers broke the story of Edwards having a mistress, Mr. Young was persuaded
to “take the bullet” for his boss by coming forward and claiming to be the father of the damsel’s illegitimate child.

Bakshian concludes by excerpting an inadvertently revealing quotation from the recently departed senior senator from Massachusetts.

In a conversation with Mr. Young, Kennedy waxed sentimental about Washington in the early 1960s: “It used to be civilized. The media was on our side. We’d get our work done by one o’clock and by two we were at the White House chasing women. We got the job done, and the reporters focused on the issues. . . . It was civilized.” We now know that Mr. Edwards’s idea of civilization was much the same as Kennedy’s.

CABLE NEWS RACE
TUES. JAN. 19, 2010
ELECTION NIGHT

FOXNEWS HANNITY 6,809,000
FOXNEWS GRETA 6,399,000
FOXNEWS O’REILLY 5,228,000
FOXNEWS BECK 3,446,000
FOXNEWS BAIER 3,338,000
FOXNEWS SHEP 3,241,000
CNN KING 1,681,000
CNN COOPER 1,508,000
CNN BROWN 1,308,000
MSNBC OLBERMANN 1,274,000
MSNBC MADDOW 1,236,000
CNN BLITZER 1,135,000
CNNHN BEHAR 845,000
MSNBC HARDBALL 798,000

John 8:12 Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.

Mikey Weinstein, vengeful secularist crusader against expressions of Christianity by the US Military and founder and proprietor of his own advocacy group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, really knows how to write the kinds of press releases the liberal MSM cannot resist.

This time, Mikey, having noticed that the Trijicon gunsight company makes a practice of placing Bible verse references to light and vision as a kind of corporate logo on its hardware, alerted ABC News, informing its shocked and gaping journalists that the use of aftermarker equipment featuring such expressions by the manufacturer is wrong and illegal and unconstitutional, too.

It’s wrong, it violates the Constitution, it violates a number of federal laws,” said Michael “Mikey” Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy group that seeks to preserve the separation of church and state in the military.

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

What Mr. Weinstein is insisting upon is the complete eradication of Christian religious expression, even to the point of banning references and allusions.

Presumably, someone serving in the US Military could not be permitted to wear a Yale t shirt or class ring either, since they would bear the Hebrew Urim and Thummim of Yale’s motto Lux et Veritas, another Biblical light allusion. And the CIA would need to give up its motto, inscribed on the floor of its Langley Headquarters, John 8:32 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. The Department of Defense would have to uproot all the crosses in military cemeteries. Every single cultural allusion or reference to Christianity in history or to the Bible or religious expression in literature or music would have to be banned.

In reality, it is Mr. Weinstein, operating on the basis of a vindictive and malevolent hostility to a religious tradition different from his own, who is attempting to manipulate the media into assisting him in bullying public officials into enforcing his own irrational and extremist preferences, amounting to the illegal and unconstitutional suppression of Christian religious expression.

Frankly, there are a lot of Americans out there who think that if Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists out there complain they are being shot by “Jesus rifles,” that’s fine by us.

1977 Time Magazine cover

Back in 1974, Time warned:

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.

Scientists have found other indications of global cooling.

——————————————-

The following year, Newsweek warned of a New Ice Age:

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

——————————————-

The Daily Mail takes us back three and a half decades.

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.

The scientists’ predictions also undermine the standard climate computer models, which assert that the warming of the Earth since 1900 has been driven solely by man-made greenhouse gas emissions and will continue as long as carbon dioxide levels rise.

They say that their research shows that much of the warming was caused by oceanic cycles when they were in a ‘warm mode’ as opposed to the present ‘cold mode’.

This challenge to the widespread view that the planet is on the brink of an irreversible catastrophe is all the greater because the scientists could never be described as global warming ‘deniers’ or sceptics.

However, both main British political parties continue to insist that the world is facing imminent disaster without drastic cuts in CO2.

ConservativeCavalry took some of the supposed effects of Global Warming reported in the media in recent years from the Warmlist compilation and turned them into a 9:35 video with appropriate musical accompaniment.

NYM gets an appearance at (roughly) 1:07, for a post linking this New York Times editorial.

D Kolstad posted:

Quick Search “Climategate”

Google: 13,400,000
Fox News: 650
CBS News: 0 Search Results
ABC News: No Results

Eloquent, isn’t it?

Ed Driscoll describes how we are experiencing another major attempt by the liberal mainstream media to resist covering a story harmful to the political agenda of the left.

Seeing as they each impact key pillars of what today passes for liberalism, there seems to be more than a few connections between the recent ACORN stings by Giles, O’Keefe and Breitbart, and the recent hacking of the emails of the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, or “Global WarmingGate”, as Charlie Martin dubs it elsewhere at Pajamas. Not the least is that they each sent the legacy media into full gatekeeper mode, hoping to prevent exciting, important news of current events from ever reaching their readers. Or perhaps, like the scandal last year involving John Edwards, sitting on the stories for so long, while making claims that they have to endlessly research them to verify their authenticity — Keep rockin’! — that when the legacy media decides to go “public” with news that everyone already knows, they can dramatically dilute the ultimate impact of these stories.

———————————

Michael Goldfarb, in the Weekly Standard, quotes the New York Times, which has suddenly discovered standards of disclosure preventing them from publishing secret documents contrary to the wishes of their authors.

With the release of hundreds of emails by scientists advocates of global warming showing obvious and entirely inappropriate collusion by the authors — including attempts to suppress dissent, to punish journals that publish peer-reviewed studies casting doubt on global warming, and to manipulate data to bolster their own arguments — even the New York Times is forced to concede that “the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.” But apparently the paper’s environmental blog, Dot Earth, is taking a pass on publishing any of the documents and emails that are now circulating. Andrew Revkin, the author of that blog, writes,

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

This is the position of the New York Times when given the chance to publish sensitive information that might hinder the liberal agenda. Of course, when the choice is between publishing classified information that might endanger the lives of U.S. troops in the field or intelligence programs vital to national security, that information is published without hesitation by the nation’s paper of record. But in this case — the documents were “never intended for the public eye,” so the New York Times will take a pass. I guess that policy wasn’t in place when Neil Sheehan was working at the paper.

Andrew Malcolm, at the LA Times, sits on the sidelines, marveling at the enormous avalanche of leftwing abuse prompted by the publisher’s release of Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue.

Wow, for somebody who’s supposed to be such a political joke, an Arctic ditz and eminently dismissable as a serious anything except maybe a stay-at-home hockey mom, Sarah Palin is sure drawing an awful lot of attention from Democrats and eager critics.

The launch of her “Going Rogue” interviews Monday on “Oprah,” of her book today, of her on-air chat today with Rush Limbaugh at 10 a.m. Pacific and of her mid-America bus book tour Wednesday ignited a surprisingly large blizzard of derogatory Democrat dis-missives.

Every few minutes another note from Democratic National Committee operatives and others dropped into electronic mailboxes across the media-verse, helpfully passing on even the tiniest tidbit of negative news about Palin.

You know how sometimes a friend tells you how much he/she doesn’t really care about….

…someone else. Really doesn’t! And repeats it a sufficient number of times that you become convinced of precisely the opposite?

So maybe she does matter after all.

Tim Blair describes the mental acrobatics performed by the MSM worldwide in order to avoid identifying Islamic fanaticism as the motive behind Nidal Malik Hasan’s deadly attack.

The ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)’s first significant report on the atrocity, presented at midday on Friday by Washington correspondent Lisa Millar, avoided any mention of the killer’s faith beyond references to his “family background”.

Somehow, Millar kept this up for nearly eight minutes. With those dodging skills, you’d back her to emerge bone dry after walking the entire length of a car wash.

By this stage, we already knew, via US television interviews with the killer’s cousin, that Hasan was “a pious lifelong Muslim”.

This minor point was quickly shoved aside by force of media consensus, which quickly settled on another, apparently more obvious, cause of Hasan’s deadly rage.

“A link to PTSD?” asked the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “Thursday’s deadly rampage raises a red flag over the issue of combat stress.

“The most common disorder linked to combat stress is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can develop after exposure to one or more traumatic events that threatened or caused great physical harm.”

Media worldwide grabbed hold of this helpful non-Islamic excuse with the same gasping desperation as a chain- smoking asthmatic reaching for his Ventolin inhaler.

One small problem: Major Hasan hadn’t spent a single millisecond in combat. Instead, he’d been based for his whole military career in the US, where lately he counselled troops returning from combat. He had no traumatic stress to be post of.

This technicality was dismissed by London’s Guardian newspaper, which invented a malady: post-traumatic stress disorder by proxy.

“Someone listening day after day to troops describing the tension and carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan could end up as damaged as those facing combat at first hand,” the Guardian claimed.

This is an interesting theory, especially considering Hasan had been in that role only since July.

Agence France-Presse signed on to it, too, reporting that Fort Hood was rife with speculation “as to whether the alleged shooter had snapped under the pressure of his job counselling thousands of war-weary troops”.

I don’t buy that for one minute, unless the report refers to certain journalists gathered at Fort Hood. Soldiers tend to be more sensible.

All of this served to minimise, for whatever timid purpose, the possible role of Hasan’s religion. Sadly for trauma theorists, his history of agitated Islamism soon began to seep through the media filter.

According to various accounts, Hasan had been cautioned for promoting Islam while dealing with patients when stationed at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center , some time before he’d begun duties at Fort Hood. A classmate during a public health course in 2007 recalled Hasan’s claim to being “a Muslim first and an American second”.

He complained about being harassed over his religion. He wrote on the internet of his admiration for Islamic suicide bombers. He was upset when someone scratched the “Allah” bumper sticker off his Honda Civic.

Hasan described the war on terror as a war on Islam. He was under investigation for six months following jihad-themed ravings. Last week, he gave his landlord a Spanish-language copy of the Koran.

On the morning of the murders, he fronted up at the local 7-Eleven in full Islamic gear.

Then he yelled “Allahu Akbar!” as he slaughtered 13 people (including pregnant 21-year-old Francheska Velez) and shot dozens of others (including teenager Amber Bahr).

By late Sunday, the media were cautiously exploring the possibility Hasan’s faith may have played a role.

They’d have been speedier about it if the case involved a suspected Christian shooting up an abortion clinic, of course, but all religious motivations aren’t considered equal.

Hat tip to the Barrister.