I'm looking forward to being in Copenhagen later this year, so I've been keeping an eye on the local scene - and I see that, following a close election, the "right-wing, anti-immigration Danish People's Party" is now the second largest in Parliament. The largest party is Helle Thorning-Schmidt's Social Democratic Party, but, in the larger scheme of things, her center-left coalition has lost to a center-right coalition. So Ms Thorning-Schmidt has resigned as party leader.
I shall miss the tasty leftie blondie, not so much for her all too predictably feeble and evasive words after the jihadist murders in Copenhagen, but because she prompted me to describe Obama and Cameron at the fiasco that was Mandela's funeral as "doing selfies with the Danish pastry" - a phrase I shall probably never have cause to write again, alas. Anyway, from my funereal obsequies, here's the moment when the leaders of the free world got a little freer than they should have:
Speaking of enjoying themselves, back in the VIP seats President Obama, Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, and British prime minister David Cameron carried on like Harry, Hermione, and Ron snogging in the back row during the Hogwarts Quidditch Cup presentation. As the three leaders demonstrated their hands-on approach, Michelle Obama glowered straight ahead, as stony and merciless as the 15-foot statue of apartheid architect Dr. Hendrik Verwoerd that once stood guard outside the government offices of the Orange Free State. Eventually, weary of the trilateral smooching, the first lady switched seats and inserted herself between Barack and the vivacious Helle. How poignant that, on a day to celebrate the post-racial South Africa, the handsome young black man should have to be forcibly segregated from the cool Aryan blonde. For all the progress, as Obama himself pointed out, "our work is not yet done."
That is one unmelancholy Dane.
~In his splendid essay on the climate wars and our briskly selling tome Climate Change: The Facts, Matt Ridley quotes the motto of the Royal Society, the oldest learned society on earth: Nullius in verba.
Take nobody's word for it.
Not anymore. These days the pitch of climate mullahs like Michael E Mann is: Trust me, I'm a scientist. It's all argument from authority, even before they enlisted His Holiness (the Pope, that is, not Mann).
It's fascinating to hear the court eunuchs explain that you can't criticize Big Climate because you're not a scientist. So then a Will Happer or a Freeman Dyson speaks up, and they say, ah, yes, but he's not a climate scientist, he's just a physicist or a biologist or some rinky-dink carney-barker like that, so he doesn't count (see Greg Mann-Laden's dismissal of physicist Jonathan Jones today, for example -"an area of physics that has absolutely nothing to do with climate change", so pay him no heed). And woe betide any climatologist who doesn't work at a government institution or a university dependent on government funding: no room anymore for independent "gentleman scientists" like, er, Charles Darwin.
Even so, I was surprised to see this from Jo Nova. As you know, the Keepers of the Temperatures in America and elsewhere are busy "adjusting" their records. The guy who checked the thermometer back in 1915 may have thought it was 73.2 degrees but, with the benefit of hindsight, his successors have decided it was 73.1. As I said at Heartland's climate conference the other day, NOAA's just come out with the most dramatically adjusted figures since Caitlyn Jenner. On what basis do the experts perform these mystical adjustments? Let's ask Australia's Bureau of Meteorology:
The Forum noted that the extent to which the development of the ACORN-SAT dataset from the raw data could be automated was likely to be limited, and that the process might better be described as a supervised process in which the roles of metadata and other information required some level of expertise and operator intervention. The Forum investigated the nature of the operator intervention required and the bases on which such decisions are made and concluded that very detailed instructions from the Bureau are likely to be necessary for an end-user who wishes to reproduce the ACORN-SAT findings. Some such details are provided in Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR) technical reports (e.g. use of 40 best correlated sites for adjustments, thresholds for adjustment, and so on); however, the Forum concluded that it is likely to remain the case that several choices within the adjustment process remain a matter of expert judgment and appropriate disciplinary knowledge.
Jo Nova translates:
Finally there is the black and white admission that the BOM "adjusted" dataset cannot be replicated independently, has not been replicated by any other group, and even more so, that the BOM will not provide enough information for anyone who wants to try.
As she says:
If it can't be replicated, it isn't science.
~Last Wednesday night, nine people were gunned down in a church in Charleston. On the following afternoon's Hugh Hewitt Show, Lanhee Chen asked me about the murders. Arthur Smith writes that he did not care for my response:
Well, okay. Hilary politicizes everything, but is that not exactly what you did? A few passing, prefunctory remarks on the killings in a Church, (and purposely bring in Pakistan here to show it isn't just America, right?) and then immediatley off to criticize Obama and Clinton, but with a neat little divisio just to not make it boring.
No mention by you that these were black people killed by a white guy; two facts probably key to understanding the event. (You know, just how Obama dishonoured those Christians murdered by Islamohwhatyoumaycallums in Kenya by not mentioning that they were Christians purposely murdered because they were Christians by Muslim motherfuckers. What's the difference between you and Obama here Mark?)
And here's the thing: "Gun control" means controlling who gets guns. Obviously, people who are not lucky enough to live in the all-white enclave where you live have a problem with this issue. Why don't you transcend your parochialism and tell them how to actually address it? The problem, Mark, is that this white kid, full of hate, got from gee, I don't know, also got guns to express it. How are you going to address that? I look forward to reading "Guns control: the Facts."
And don't dismiss me because I am inelegant and semi-literate. Address the real question I am asking. And not like the obverse of Obama and Clinton. Can you actually do that?