The most remarkable accomplishment of the Hillary Campaign is this:
A mere four months ago the idea of Joe Biden as a viable presidential candidate was regarded by Democrats as a joke.
Then Hillary launched.
And now he's their white knight in shining armor.
Great job, Hillary! If Joe says no, they'll be digging up Robert C Byrd and propping him up for the New Hampshire pancake flip.
I have a modest preference for Biden over Clinton in that he is not as personally, ravenously, rapaciously sleazy and corrupt as the Clinta Nostra. So there's that.
~ As you know, the litigious climatologist and self-conferred Nobel Laureate Michael E Mann is currently suing me for calling his global-warming hockey stick "fraudulent". So I was interested to see this breaking news from the world of the climate consensus. Doctors Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt say:
Michael Mann kann man nicht mehr ernst nehmen.
Oh, sorry. You want it in English?
Michael Mann can no longer be taken seriously.
Indeed. You'd be surprised how many scientists say things like this about Dr Mann and his famous global-warming "hockey stick". In fact, I've compiled a brand new book on the subject - although, alas, Doctors Lüning and Vahrenholt's pithy summation is too late to make the cut. Their observation was prompted by a characteristically shifty and dissembling interview Mann gave to ORF - Austria's BBC. Pierre Gosselin provides a helpful translation:
SCIENCE.ORF.AT: In the 2007 IPCC report in addition to your works there was also a dozen other papers from other teams mentioned. The temperature curves of your colleagues however do not always look like hockey sticks.
MANN: True, but there's one thing they all have in common: The ends of all the curves all shoot steeply upwards.
As Lüning and Vahrenholt respond:
Ha ha. Mann here is right. But this is not what the issue is about. The warming after the LIttle Ice Age is recognized by everyone. Mann is being criticized for his depiction of the 1000-1900 A.D. period, which he claims was pretty much flat. Michael Mann today will not find a single one of his colleagues who supports that.
That's true. Very few people dispute that it has not gotten warmer since the world emerged from the Little Ice Age. What people dispute is the basic takeaway from the long flat shaft of Mann's hockey stick: that, climate-wise, nothing whatsoever happened until the 20th century - a moronic proposition that Mann was only able to advance by such settled science as having a lone cedar from the Gaspé peninsula divine the entire temperature of the northern hemisphere for a quarter-century all by itself. And even then he had to include the tree in two separate data-sets.
Most real scientists regard the shaft of the hockey stick as total bollocks. I don't know whether it's strictly true that Mann "will not find a single one of his colleagues" to support it, but he'll have a very hard time finding someone willing to defend it in court. Which may be why he's been obstructing discovery and deposition for the last year and a half. (I responded to his discovery requests at the beginning of 2014).
On the other hand, there's no end of scientists who think, like Doctors Lüning and Vahrenholt, that Mann "can no longer be taken seriously" - and are willing to decalre that he and his work are "a crock of sh*t", "obvious drivel" and "brazen fraud". You can find some of them in Volume One of my exciting new book - which is a great way to help support my end of the upcoming Mann vs Steyn trial of the century, if he ever stops nancying around and agrees to go to court. Don't forget our SteynOnline gift certificates, too.
~#BotLivesMatter? HitchBot the hitchhiking robot was attempting to hitchhike around the world. Having successfully hitched across Europe and Canada, HitchBot then entered the United States where he was beaten to a pulp in Philadelphia - the amusingly named City of Brotherly Love - and left decapitated like an ISIS victim with his limbs strewn around like a Planned Parenthood storewide-clearance sale.
I know what you're thinking but that dentist was nowhere near the scene. Whatever one thinks of trophy-room sport in Zimbabwe, big-game hunting in American cities remains a rougher business.
~Leo Velichkovsky writes to dissent from my view of the diversity hierarchy:
Mark,
Since Steynbashing is the new norm allow me to drop my 5 kopeikas re "Everyone seems to accept that Muslims are atop the diversity totem pole, but the rest of the batting order is still up for grabs".
It is Muslim guys who are up there at the top. Muslim women are near the footing of the pole between white guys and plankton.
Wish you a Great Week
Leo Velichkovsky
~And finally a thought for the day from reader Brian Jackson:
Having just finished reading "Tweet of Clay," I was reminded of the words of St. Anthony the Great—often known as the father of monasticism—who labored in prayer in the deserts of Egypt in the 3rd and 4th century AD. He said, "A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, 'You are mad, you are not like us'."
Indeed. I'll take St Anthony over Hans Christian Andersen. These days any little boy minded to point out the Emperor has no clothes would be be clubbed to a pulp as swiftly as that poor hitchhiking robot.
