The news from NASA today is that Jakobshavn is now advancing, rather than retreating. It's probably a temporary change, but, even so, it's remarkable, considering that the glacier has been retreating for over 150 years: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2852/cold-water-currently-slowing-fastest-greenland-glacier/ [Snip, no links to climate risk denier sites, thanks; N.]

Climate campaigners frequently speculate that anthropogenic warming could cause an increase in the frequency and/or intensity of "extreme weather" events, like hurricanes and tornadoes. However, that has not happened, thus far. Here are some graphs: http://policlimate.com/tropical/frequency_12months.png http://policlimate.com/tropical/global_running_ace.png http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/images/tornado/clim/EF3-EF5.png Climatologist James Hansen predicted that melting ice sheets global warming will keep the oceans cool at extreme latitudes, while the tropics warm due to GHGs, with the result that the "increasing temperature gradient is going to drive stronger storms." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOKBOFLhgqM#t=7m25s However, these days just the opposite is widely acknowledged: "Polar Amplification" is expected to cause temperatures to rise faster at higher latitudes. Some people also know that non-linear negative feedbacks limit warming in the tropics: http://www.sealevel.info/feedbacks.html#tropicalsst Yet I have never heard Dr. Hansen, nor any other climate alarmist, speculate that the reduced temperature gradient might reduce extreme weather.

correction: "AP Style" should be "APA Style." Sorry.

Here are some authorities which, thankfully, disagree with the APA Style guide: "most words that end in an unpronounced "s" form their possessive by adding an apostrophe + s" http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/possessives.htm "The most useful rule — and the most general and the easiest to remember — is simply that you add ’s whenever you actually say an extra /əz/ at the end when forming the possessive, compared with how you say the non-possessive version. Let your own ear be your guide. That’s all there is to it. No fancy rules full of exceptions. Just your own ear (as a native speaker, mind you)." http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/79081/which-singular-names-ending-in-s-form-possessives-with-only-a-bare-apostrophe http://data.grammarbook.com/blog/apostrophes/apostrophes-with-words-ending-in-s/ http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/apostro.asp

The rule for a silent trailing "s" seems exactly backwards. According to the AP Style book, the one time when you don't add a trailing "s" is when you do want to add an "s" sound. Seriously??

Andrew Brod cites a private "study" which claims that U.S. health care is worst of 19 industrial nations. It is nonsense, similar to a 2000 UN study, and similar to the national life expectancy numbers that the Left likes to toss around. As Will Rogers said, "It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you know that isn't so." But, in this case, misinformation about health care has the potential to kill you (by promoting destructive legislation), rather than just hurt you. Two main things drag down American life expectancy: #1 is infant mortality statistics, which are skewed by differences in how stillborn & newborn deaths are counted. #2 is deaths among young people, which usually are unrelated to health care. (A third is lifestyle issues, such as obesity.) W/r/t #1, the reason that infant mortality rates appear lower in other countries is that they don't count some of their dead newborns. In the USA, any baby who draws a breath is given world-class medical care, and if he dies his death is counted as infant morality, no matter how tiny or premature he was. But in most (maybe all?) countries with socialized medicine, if a baby is born sufficiently premature, he is given no special care, and is counted as stillborn, and doesn't count toward the infant mortality rate, even if he lives for hours. The European health care systems save a lot of money that way, but they also break a lot of parents' hearts. Ironically, the fact that American at-risk babies get better, more aggressive care than do European at-risk babies, and have a better chance of survival, is the basis for the liberals' claim that America has worse lifespans and infant mortality rates. This statistical slight-of-hand also serves to artificially inflate foreign average lifespans, making it appear as though they live longer than Americans, which is also untrue. (Including those few-hour lifespans in the average drags down the average a lot.) This false claim, in turn, is often cited by liberal supporters of government-controlled heath care as proof that socialized health care is better than American health care, when, actually, the opposite is true. W/r/t #2, when teens and young adults die in the United States, their health care is rarely to blame. They tend to die from automobile accidents, homicides, etc.. Those deaths greatly affect the average American lifespan, but they are not a reflection on American medical care. Here's a quote from the BBC about real differences in American and European medical care: "The US had the highest five-year survival rates for breast cancer at 83.9% and prostate cancer at 91.9%... The UK had 69.7% survival for breast cancer... and 51.1% for prostate cancer."(Caveat: for technical reasons, it would be more accurate to say that the British death rate from prostate cancer is about twice that of Americans, not 6 times higher, as the BBC statistic seems to indicate.) If you compare the life expectancies of the elderly -- the people whose lifespans are most dependent on quality of medical care -- the USA is best in the world. (But, absurdly enough, the elderly are excluded in the private study that Mr. Brod cited -- probably for no other reason than to bias the results.) Moreover, there is more to quality of medical care than just lifespans. If an 80yo can get an artificial hip in the USA, but would be confined to a wheelchair in Europe or Canada, it might not affect his lifespan, but it would certainly affect his quality of life. Here's an article which touches on some of these issues.

This is totally off-topic, but I couldn't find a contact address for you, and I just wanted to say "thank you" for this excellent page: http://elephantschild.typepad.com/the_elephants_child/2009/04/10-million-christians-killed-in-the-holocaust.html

Katy, I just told a friend to look at your blog because, I said, "Katy's blog has the best coverage of the Wake Convention I've found."

John, what on earth are talking about? Arrowood was chairman of Equality NC PAC, an organization which lobbies for the legalization of same-sex marriage. How on earth can you contend that "he never brought [his sexuality] up until he was asked"? He headed a PAC that was campaigning for legalization of same-sex marriage, which is the very definition of activism. So how can you say to Katy, "you have no evidence of activism?" That's just absurd.