Life has become “awful” for Phil Jones. Just a few months ago, he was a man with an enviable reputation: the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, an expert in his field and the father of an alarming global temperature curve that apparently showed how the Earth was heating up as a result of anthropogenic global warming.

Those days are now gone.

Nowadays, Jones, who is at the center of the “Climategate” affair involving hacked CRU emails, needs medication to fall sleep. He feels a constant tightness in his chest. He takes beta-blockers to help him get through the day. He is gaunt and his skin is pallid. He is 57, but he looks much older. He was at the center of a research scandal that hit him as unexpectedly as a rear-end collision on the highway.

His days are now shaped by investigative commissions at the university and in the British Parliament. He sits on his chair at the hearings, looking miserable, sometimes even trembling. The Internet is full of derisive remarks about him, as well as insults and death threats. “We know where you live,” his detractors taunt.

Jones is finished: emotionally, physically and professionally. He has contemplated suicide several times recently, and he says that one of the only things that have kept him from doing it is the desire to watch his five-year-old granddaughter grow up.

Awwwwwwwwwwwwww, poor guy! And all he wanted to do was save destroy civilization!

Last September, Friend reports, 5,000 Berkeley employees and students rallied in Sproul Plaza, scene of protests that ignited the 1960s and helped make Ronald Reagan governor. Some protesters, says Friend, were “naked except for signs that read ‘BUDGET TRANSPARENCY.’” At an indoor meeting, a “student facilitator” used a projection screen to summarize proposals, which included: “rolling strikes”; “nationalize all universities”; “socialist revolution”; “a tent city in Sacramento”; “create a shadow Board of Regents”; “occupy Wells Fargo Bank in downtown Oakland”; “worker-student control of the university”; “strike in March”; “act now, f— March”; “capitalism is bad.” Toward the end of the seven-hour meeting, participants shouted “General strike! General strike!”

I’d say it sounds like California could stand to have someone invade it, try and hang the leadership, and engage in a little nation building to put things back on the right track, except that I wouldn’t want to rob anyone of the fun of watching its eventual total collapse.

Utterly unsurprising: footage of the People’s Republic of Cambridge masquerading as Copenhagen.

Anybody remember just getting on a bike and fucking going somewhere?

I’ve got a nice Intel Inside-type tag line for all efforts like this: “Powered by Pretension”.

YOU’RE WELCOME.

(via @GreatDismal, whom I – sadly – imagine enthusiastically approves)

Lord Monckton on Climategate at the 2nd International Climate Conference. Given the amount of money these guys want diverted to non-productive uses (“graft”), and the likely impact on people living on the margin in various places, I think being put on trial for crimes against humanity isn’t entirely out of order.

The reason that there is this huge increase in the debt ceiling today is that it gets us past Election Day next year, so you won’t have to have another raise of the limit until after Election Day. … Better to take the political hit now [rather] than later.

But as an index of how serious the debt issue is, economist Irwin Stelzer points out that Moody’s has been issuing ratings since 1917. The United States has had a Triple A since 1917 — [through] world wars, depressions – unchanged, uninterrupted. In eleven months, Obama has driven Moody’s to the point where it has issued a warning that it might have to reduce it to Double A, which is what you get for banana republics or places like Greece.

Nice.

You might have to define the Taliban for what it is—a fascistic sort of murderous religious zealots—and lay out the objectives at hand: freedom for the Afghan people to govern themselves, with a message to radical Islam that never again will they plot the destruction of the US from a safe haven.

I can understand Obama’s reluctance, though. After all, what are the Taliban, really, if not community organizers?

Suggestions for a slideshow of celebrities who didn’t die young enough? Yes, living celebrities qualify.

Or is even expressing disgust too celebrity-obsessed?

If you see any of these pendejos around your kids, I’d recommend sticking it up their asses, and pulling the trigger until it goes click… click… click… Which is to say I’m glad I didn’t see the Coen brothers’ names on that list.

Assuming they’re both guilty of what the rumors say they’ve done, the upside is that they aren’t as stupid as they sound. The downside is that they’re even bigger scumbags than I’ve been assuming they are, if that’s even possible. And if the Clinton campaign’s denials are true, well, that means in addition to being a slimy, disgusting politician, she’s as stupid as she sounds.

One of the high-commanders of the Police force stated a few days ago that in 63% of cases of murder with a female victim, women are killed by a family member and that “the Police cannot intervene in these cases”

I’ve read in more than one Robert Kaplan book that violence and crime are far less of a problem in Arab Muslim states than in similarly “less developed” places like West Africa. Though apparently the streets are safer than the home, for some.

NEW CASTLE, Colo. — A tactical law enforcement team broke into Tom Shiflett’s home and took his 11-year-old son to hospital for court-ordered medical treatment for a minor head injury.

Garfield County’s All Hazards Response Team raided the home Friday night, a day after Jon Shiflett fell after grabbing the handle of a moving car. The child was returned to the family at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday, hours after the raid.

The mind, it just fucking boggles.

(via)

BALI, Indonesia – An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to “have the courage to do nothing” in response to UN demands.

[...]

“Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing,” Monckton told participants.

“The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)” Monckton added.

Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the group of skeptical scientists.

“UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference. They have also made several attempts to interfere with our public meetings,” Monckton explained.

“It is a circus here,” agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans.

Lots of great links in the article. Also, a bit on something I’ve been doing some thinking about:

Evans, who believes the UN has heavily politicized science, warned there is going to be a “dangerous time for science” ahead.

“We have a split here. Official science driven by politics, money and power, goes in one direction. Unofficial science, which is more determined by what is actually happening with the [climate] data, has now started to move off in a different direction” away from fears of a man-made climate crisis, Evans explained.

“The two are splitting. This is always a dangerous time for science and a dangerous time for politics. Historically science always wins these battles but there can be a lot of causalities and a lot of time in between,” he concluded.

Given the increasing speed of technological innovation (I don’t want to say “singularity”, as it implies more than I mean here) and its likely impact on our cultures and economies, now is probably not the time for “science” to discredit itself with shameful pseudo-religious craziness.

Also, from an earlier report: New Report Finds Red-faced Errors by IPCC and Gore:

An analysis of the United Nations widely-touted 2007 IPCC Global Warming Summary for Policymakers by UK Lord Viscount Monckton has found 31 errors and exaggerations. [...] Monckton echoed UK Lord Nigel Lawson’s call that the IPCC be disbanded. “It is too politicized and too incompetent to serve any useful purpose,” Monckton said. Monckton’s new analysis also points out significant science errors in Al Gore’s Oscar winning film “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Heh.

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights (CLRCR) issued a statement today criticizing newspapers for dropping cartoons that might offend Muslims while running cartoons that might offend Catholics.

CLRCR was reacting to the news that at least 25 of the 200 or so “Opus” clients planned not to publish the Aug. 26 and Sept. 2 installments of Berkeley Breathed’s Washington Post Writers Group comic. The strips contain a sex joke and Islamic references.

[here's one - dff]

“The Washington Post, and all the other newspapers which refuse to print these cartoons, are simultaneously sporting their cowardice and bigotry,” stated CLRCR President Bill Donohue.

(follow the link to see what sort of cartoons about Catholics are acceptable to print)

Catholics, enough with the crybaby stuff. If you want respect, you’ll have to earn it like everyone else. The typical way to accomplish this is by killing a lot of innocents, but I think in this case you could get by simply by sawing the heads off a few newspaper editors. Extra points for messiness!

Our system for choosing presidents doesn’t work very well. Voters are woefully uninformed on the most basic of issues and many end up voting on whim. I don’t think restricting the franchise is a good solution, however. A better idea is to create procedures that encourage voters to become better informed. Our current institutions for providing information are lousy. Debates, for example, are boring, the politicians don’t answer the questions and most importantly the voters don’t know what a good answer is.

Thus what we need is a way of conveying information to uninformed, unsophisticated voters in a way that is entertaining yet produces information about politicians that is correlated with real skills.

I suggest a game show, So You Think You Can Be President? SYTYCBP would have at least three segments. [...]

This clever idea would tell voters a lot about an aspiring politician, to be sure. But not the most important thing: how much he weighs.

What an asshole:

SUNAPEE, N.H. – Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama said Thursday the United States cannot use its military to solve humanitarian problems and that preventing a potential genocide in Iraq isn’t a good enough reason to keep U.S. forces there.

“Well, look, if that’s the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven’t done,” Obama said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Many leftists love this argument… Since we don’t have the ability to solve all the world’s problems, how dare we try to solve any of them? It ignores the fact that some problems are more important than others, that some are more easily solved than others, that some problems, when solved, create more good than others, etc.

And of course I have yet to hear one leftist politician (well, any leftist, really) apply this objection to the police force (or IRS), which suffers from the similar problem of not being able to prevent all crime (or tax evasion).