Obama Scandal Bracket - The Road to Impeachment Which scandal will take down the president? You make the call: IRS, Benghazi, Obamcare, or the Wild Card, yet to be named scandal. Bracket is HERE: http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/351/scandalbracket.png

The Diplomad 2.0 has some thoughts about the Left, Democrats, and Liberalism this morning HERE. Not recommended for our lefty readers unless they have taken their blood pressure meds. The truth is hard to deal with some times and elevalted blood pressure can result in heart attacks. Please be cautious.

Steven @ 03:30PM Oops. Stevens intellectual quiver is empty!

In 1907 Lyman Gilmore , an inventor and aviation pioneer established an aircraft design works in Nevada County. Gilmore turned down a $50,000 offer by Charlie Hill, a Carmichael banker, and six other wealthy valley investors, to move his Iowa Hill aircraft development facility to Sacramento and build an airfield. Instead he chose to move his aviation design works to Grass Valley, building the country’s first commercial airport. As an Iowa Hill mine owner, Gilmore had connections to the Grass Valley mining community. Local mine owners offered to finance his aircraft projects. They had visions of flying their gold directly to the San Francisco Mint. Also, Gilmore looked for a location with only few foggy days, which could impact his flying operations. Gilmore also invented the rotary snow plow for rail operations. Union Pacific Railroad can to see the invention, brought there engineers, took some measurements and when home and built their own version, with out any recognition of Gilmore's invention. He certainly deserved the flyover, recognizing his accomplishments. The North Star Museum had a display some of Gilmore's aircraft designs. It has been a while since I have visited, I hope the drawings are still there.

Sorry, the HERE links above are not active. Try this link: http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means/

Steven@07:32AM links to some more junk science this morning. Here are some details on how this "independent" assessment was developed HERE. John Cook, with the help of volunteers from Skeptical Science, recently published a paper seeking to quantify the consensus on global warming. There is much to be said about it, but the most interesting part may be the fact the authors use what is, to put it charitably, novel definitions for words: Each abstract was categorized by two independent, anonymized raters. What would you consider “independent”? Would you consider raters independent if they participate in the same, small forum? How about if they are moderators for the same site? How about if they’ve published papers together in the last six months? Those are all true of “independent” raters in this project. But how about this? What if the raters talked to each other about their ratings? Surely we can’t say people who work together to produce results are independent of each other. Nobody would call that independent. Just look at what Glenn Tamblyn said in the leaked SKS forums: So I think now the Cone of Silence should descend while the ratings are done. Cheer each other on as far as the count is concerned, but don’t discuss ratings at all. If a reviewer finds an abstract to hard to classify, skip it and those ones can be dealt with at a later stage. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is that people would make topics in the SKS forum like: Does this mean what it seems to mean? second opinion?? how to rate: Cool Dudes: The Denial Of Climate Change… That’s right. The “independent” raters talked to each other about how to rate the papers. This must be some new form of independence I’ve never heard of. I’m not the only one thrown off by this. Sarah Green, one of the most active raters, observed the non-independence: But, this is clearly not an independent poll, nor really a statistical exercise. We are just assisting in the effort to apply defined criteria to the abstracts with the goal of classifying them as objectively as possible. Disagreements arise because neither the criteria nor the abstracts can be 100% precise. We have already gone down the path of trying to reach a consensus through the discussions of particular cases. From the start we would never be able to claim that ratings were done by independent, unbiased, or random people anyhow. You can read more about the analysis of this junk science HERE. So, once again Steven has pointed to more unscientific crap!

While we are comparing things: http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/the-panopticon-president “Obama is personally obsessed with leaks, to the extent that his second chief of staff, Bill Daley, took as one of his central mandates a major and ill-fated plumbing expedition. Attorney General Eric Holder, who pressed the leak policy, is a trusted Obama insider.” Sounds familiar.

I would add: 14. Military - Created a politically correct military that was unable to remove a rogue muslim terrorist for their ranks, unable to deal with growing suicide in the ranks, unable to stem the growing sexual abuse in uniform, all by hobbling the creation of true military leadership from the top down.

If you want to see one of your costs as a result of the wackos in Sacramento and Truckee believing in AGW go here: http://wp.me/p2VED5-9P

Steven, According to the UN/IPCC the true signature of water vapor positive feedback would be a “hotspot” in the troposphere above the equatoral region. After 17 year of intense CO2 emissions and troposphere observations the “hotspot” has failed to appear. Why 17 years? Because Ben Santer pleads with everyone that 17 years is really the true time span to measure the global warming trend. See Press Release: https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2011/Nov/NR-11-11-03.html From the C3 Website: http://www.c3headlines.com/natural-negativepositive-feedback/ Per the IPCC's global warming hypothesis, at the very top of the troposphere, above the equator region, is the location (12km, 200hPa @ 20°N - 20°S) that triggers a positive climate feedback, which produces the mythical runaway, tipping point of accelerated, dangerous global warming, which of course is unequivocal and irrefutable, except when it isn't. This location is often referred to as the tropical "hotspot," supposedly an artifact of modern industrial/consumer human CO2 emissions. The high climate sensitivity programmed into the IPCC's climate models is entirely dependent of this hotspot of positive feedback - with the hotspot, climate models predict a scary global warming range that spans from 2°C to 6°C. If there is no tropical upper troposphere hotspot, then there is no positive feedback, and thus, no climate change crisis as predicted by the IPCC. If there is no hotspot, then the IPCC hypothesis of CO2 caused global warming (AGW) is essentially proven false. Based on accepted physics, without the positive feedback triggered by the hotspot, surface global temperatures from a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 will increase by some +0.5° to 1.5°C. That is the range climate models predict (depending on the given climate model) if the "hotspot" does not exist. What can we conclude from all this? Atmospheric CO2 levels over 350ppm do not cause a hotspot to occur and the climate sensitivity to CO2 is lower than expert assumptions. Thus, the IPCC models are wrong, there is no evidence of a positive feedback from increased levels of CO2. And, the AGW hypothesis of climate positive feedback is proven false after 17 years of empirical evidence failed to support it.

Well we have reached 400ppm of CO2 and the environmental wackos have little purple cows running down their legs. We are all going to die! Just another way for Mother Nature to kill us off. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/10/mauna-loa-hits-400-ppm-of-co2-alarmists-wail-and-gnash-teeth-earth-survives/

Gregory@01:26 A link to Judith Curry's web site, research and publication, plus her e-mail address is here: http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/

Another site worth a daily review in Tom Nelson's blog: http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/ Tom's site is an aggregator of all things about global warming, climate change, extreme weather, etc. His blog list has the breaking news on what the environmental wackos are up to minute by minute.

Here is a short video showing the impact of CO2 on plant growth: http://youtu.be/P2qVNK6zFgE

Right here in our back yard some runaway debt: A new study by the California Public Policy Center, “Calculating California’s Total State and Local Government Debt,” estimates state and local government debt is somewhere between $848 billion and $1.126 trillion.

Another point of views on the New York Ads: ANDREW CUOMO ADVERTISING FOR BUSINESS TO COME TO NEW YORK, BUT NOT DOING MUCH TO MAKE THINGS MORE ATTRACTIVE. "Do the job well and you won’t have to spend a penny on publicity. If New York state became a genuine leader in business-friendly reform, headlines everywhere would blare the news out for free. Every sentient business leader in America would know that New York state was open for business again. Sadly, that’s unlikely to happen. New York’s politicians are addicted to a system of crony capitalism, sweetheart deals and a regulatory environment that hurts New York City even as it squeezes the life out of the struggling cities upstate."

This appears to be a valid argument: " As with most lefty causes, the key driver is a craving for moral superiority, usually driven by oikophobia" [ fear of the familiar ]

Some times politics influences a business move. I was the manager of an engineering laboratory in North Highlands. Our lease was up on our office and I wanted to move the lab to Johnson Ranch in Roseville, to reduce our connection to the military at McClellan AFB. We were getting more contracts with Caltrans and Air Force funding was in decline, and consolidation was on the horizon. It was time to change our marketing focus. And, there was a major black world subcontract we could capture of we had a more secure building. My staff developed a plan and we put the move in motion. However, we soon discovered that we could not move our lab to a different congressional district, when high headquarters canceled the move to Roseville. We could move, but it had to be within the current congressional district. I have avoided using any names to protect the guilty.

George, I wrote about a company that left Nevada County for New York in April of 2009. "Daystar which was working on [solar] technology came to Nevada County from Colorado and set up shop here in the early 2000s. Not sure of the exact date. They left for New York when the state promised them 11 million in subsidies. Once the subsidies were spend the Company moved it's headquarter back to California, setting up shop in San Jose, though some manufacturing capacity remained in New York. They did not come back to Nevada County." So, once the money was spent, there was no reason to stay in New York.

The Economist recently found that the countries with a low rate of youth unemployment are those that focus on providing their students with a practical education. Germany, for example, “has a long tradition of high-quality vocational education and apprenticeships, which in recent years have helped it reduce youth unemployment despite only modest growth.”

Here some examples of cultural competency training in New York, that looks like liberalism gone wild. School Girls Forced to Ask Classmates for ‘Lesbian Kiss’ During Anti-Bullying Presentation Imagine 13 and 14-year-old girls being instructed to ask one another for a lesbian kiss in a class exercise. The girls had no choice. The parents were NOT informed. But hey, if it falls under “anti-bullying,” than who are you to question it, right? A recent anti-bullying presentation at a middle school in New York that focused on homosexuality and gender identity has angered parents after their daughters have come home to tell them they were forced to ask another girl for a kiss. According to reports, the session occurred last week at Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, New York, near Poughkeepsie. A group of students from Bard College led two workshops for the youth, separated by gender. ooo According to reports, during the workshop for the adolescent boys, the students were counseled to keep a condom in their pocket at all times, and were taught how to identify a woman who is a “slut.” Yea, this is what the 13 and 14 year olds need to know about the culture in Red Hook, New York. No worry if they can read, write and calculate only with if they are up on the latest liberal sexual practices.

George@08:46 As we watched the news I kept telling Ellen that these two looked more like delivery boys to me, rather than your hard core terrorist. It was just an impression and the more I learned about them the more they looked like not very bright delivery boys to me.

Most interesting if proven to be true: The FBI was last night hunting a 12-strong terrorist “sleeper cell” linked to the Boston marathon bomb brothers. Police believe Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were specially trained to carry out the devastating attack. More than 1,000 FBI agents were last night working to track down the cell and arrested a man and two women 60 miles from Boston in the hours before Dzhokhar’s dramatic capture after a bloody shootout on Friday. A source close to the investigation said: “We have no doubt the brothers were not acting alone. The devices used to detonate the two bombs were highly sophisticated and not the kind of thing people learn from Google. “They were too advanced. Someone gave the brothers the skills and it is now our job to find out just who they were. Agents think the sleeper cell has up to a dozen members and has been waiting several years for their day to come.” More HERE: Mirror.co.uk http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/boston-bombers-fbi-hunting-12-strong-1844844#ixzz2R425U9g5

The Diplomad has some thoughts on the Boston terror fall out. I find myself in agreement with his views on Islam. They have yet to demonstrate they are a religion of peace. “ . . . When are we going to learn that we get nothing good by allowing thousands upon thousands of Muslim immigrants into the US, immigrants imbued with a political ideology that espouses hatred for us? We need to treat Islam today as we treated Communism and Nazism in the past, to wit, as a hostile ideology that advocates the overthrow of our government and destruction of our way of life.. . . . . . Islam is a deranged way of viewing the world. It detests intellectual inquiry; sees women as no better than cows; and advocates violence, yes, violence. It is not a religion of peace. . . . If Muslims object to this characterization then THEY must do something about it. Not just the perfunctory statements after these events to the effect that "Islam is about peace." No. The Muslim communities in London, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Detroit, etc, must stand up and unequivocally denounce the preachers of hate, turn in those who practice it, and make clear that they have no place in those communities. The advocates of terror must be denounced, arrested, jailed, deported, shunned, etc. Until Muslims in the West do that, then we must treat them with suspicion and as potential enemies of the nation just as we did Communists and Nazis. In Boston we have more evidence that immigrant Muslims are more than willing to kill American without any remorse. Have the leaders of the global Islamic community stepped up and denounce this act of violence against the men, women and children of Boston? Yes, Muslim leaders in Boston and Detroit have distanced themselves from the Marathon bombing in feared reprisals against their communities. Not because is was wrong, but because they feared reprisals. Else where in the middle-east the “religion of peace” celebrated the slaughter in Boston. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah celebrate Boston terror attack by giving out candies on the street after terror bombs exploded and murdered 3 people and injured 100s in Boston. I have serious doubt that the Islamic leaders in these communities denounced the Boston Bombing. If you know of some, please point the way.

A former official with a state law-enforcement agency sent CalWatchDog a contrarian take on the week’s events in Massachusetts: “At the risk of spoiling the high fives on the Boston bombing incident, has anybody asked how this guy was not on the FBI’s radar 5 minutes after the terrorist attack. He openly posted radical ideas and linked to Chechen terrorist videos on the internet and had just traveled back to the epicenter of terrorism, Chechnya and Dagestan????? “We spend billions upon billions to gather intel, surveil the internet and identify potential threats. JTTFs and terror centers and intel fusion hubs are to track and hopefully prevent these guys from acting. At least he should have been on a short list of candidates within 12 hours of the bombing. “Yet the FBI was reduced to posting blurry video photos like any 7-11 robbery 5 days after the attack. really, only the amateur nature of the attackers led to their arrests…not brilliant police work. Didn’t get any value from anti-terror money spent. After 5 days it would seem like someone might have looked at the Chechens photographs, which the FBI presumably had, and a light bulb would have lit up. They lived in the neighborhood! The leader was a wife-beater! Read the rest HERE: http://www.calwatchdog.com/2013/04/20/ex-ca-cop-u-s-law-enforcement-blew-terror-response/