Category Archives: politics

Mysterious global warming "hiatus" blamed on sudden ocean cooling

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Photo: Steve Ryan/Flickr CC

Scientists don’t want us to get bogged down in the details — the ups-and-downs of global temperatures. The mercury is still rising, they say…

That is, except in large parts of the globe, and during certain decades:

“The suddenness of the drop in Northern Hemisphere ocean temperatures relative to the Southern Hemisphere is difficult to reconcile with the relatively slow buildup of tropospheric aerosols,” Thompson said.“We don’t know why the Northern Hemisphere ocean areas cooled so rapidly around 1970. But the cooling appears to be largest in a climatically important region of the ocean,” Wallace said.

via Sudden Ocean Cooling Likely Aided Mid-20th Century Global Warming Hiatus in Northern Hemisphere.

Scientists: Vaccines provide "herd immunity"

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Naked apes. Photo: Peter O'Connor/Flickr CC

By using “herd,” the scientific community belies its insensitivity, if not its outright contempt, for the rest of humanity.

Dose the kids, protect the “herd.” That’s the language hardhearted epidemiologists are using to describe how vaccinations work to protect human populations:

“An unusual study done in 49 remote Hutterite farming colonies in western Canada has provided the surest proof yet that giving flu shots to schoolchildren protects a whole community from the disease. Although previous studies have demonstrated what scientists call ‘herd immunity,’ none have been so incontrovertible, because they were done in less isolated places with more sources of flu passing through.

Stanhope to English, Irish, herd: "Go to hell."

Credit Canadian conspiracy historian Alan Watt, for noting how scientists use the word, “herd,” in a way that fails to jibe with any citation in popular dictionaries.

The scientists are, however, using the same, precise language of that obnoxious prig, the 4th Earl of Chesterfield,  Philip Dormer Stanhope (click the excerpt below, for the full text):

via NYT: Flu shots in kids provide ‘herd immunity’ – The New York Times- msnbc.com.

40 percent of Californians "jobless"

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Photo: Brett L. Flickr/CC

Excuse me, is this not 40 percent unemployment we’re really talking about?

A report to be released publicly today found that two of five working-age Californians do not have a job, underscoring the challenges in one of the toughest job markets in decades. The last time employment levels among this group were this low was February 1977, according to a study by the California Budget Project, a Sacramento-based nonprofit research group that advocates for lower- and middle-income families.

via Two out of five working-age Californians jobless, study says | rgj.com | Reno Gazette-Journal.

The reason this is not 40 percent unemployment, according to the same article:

…the government’s official jobless rate does not factor in working-age Californians who stay out of the work force by choice, such as stay-at-home parents, or those who have simply given up searching for work.Taking those people into account, she said, translates to a 57.5 percent employment rate for the state, which is slightly less than the 57.6 percent recorded in 1977. The California Budget Project used figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I’ll betcha those stay-at-home parents also gave up, trying to find a job that would get them ahead, after paying for daycare.

No kidding: punks school others to be punks

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152316__bad_lStudy describes the failed interventions that bring bad boys together:

“For boys who had been through the juvenile justice system, compared to boys with similar histories without judicial involvement, the odds of adult judicial interventions increased almost seven-fold,” says study co-author Richard E. Tremblay, a professor of psychology, pediatrics and psychiatry at the Université de Montréal and a researcher at the Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center.

via Delinquent Behavior Among Boys ‘Contagious,’ Study Finds.

Parallelnormal endorses Bob Barr

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Pinky: My Boston Globe headshot.

Also pinky (and bespectacled): My choice for president, Bob Barr. (Note, too, the similarity in name.)

Why? Perhaps because he looks like a Baard.

It’s depressing to realize that your thoughts are not under your control.

Stanford U. scientists now believe a candidate’s looks can make him our choice in the voting booth.

And it’s not about which candidate is better looking, but which one the voter perceives to look most like himself.

That makes sense from that ole evolutionary/natural selection point-of-view.

The Stanford finding might also explain why I am voting for Bob Barr.

Image: Jack Hubbard

I thought I was voting for Barr because he is the Libertarian Party pick. I am in a solidly Democrat state, so my vote is not required to save the country from Sarah Palin. But now I’m thinking it’s the pink face and the glasses that are behind my choice. (The Stanford experiment actually looked at facial features, as indicated by the image, above.)

Paul Baard. Photo: Chris Taggart

Barr also looks a bit like my father, Fordham University Associate Professor Paul Baard (right).

In a paper slated to be published in the December issue of Public Opinion Quarterly, Jeremy Bailenson, an assistant professor of communication, and Shanto Iyengar, the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor in Communication, say that people are subconsciously swayed by candidates who share their facial features.

via Voters Swayed By Candidates Who Share Their Looks, Researchers Say

Aye, Paddy pays-out on Obama bets

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Irish gambling site sees the Illinois senator as a lock for the White House

Obama Payout!

Perhaps it was the fluffing of the economic crisis, but for whatever reason, the race to be Next US President is slipping away from John McCain. We’re certain Senator Obama will become President Obama so we’re paying out over €1,000,000 on him to win the election. Applies to bets placed before Thursday 3.30am. We’re still offering odds on the US election. If you’re convinced he will win, why not give our Handicap Betting your vote?

Paddy Power | Online Betting incl X Factor Betting

Kenya government detains political-journo-hack

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Jerome Corsi in Nairobi, Kenya / AP, via LA Times

Blowhard. Photo: Jerome Corsi in Nairobi, Kenya / AP, via LA Times

The L.A. Times goes easy on the racist, conservative (not that there is anything wrong with that) and thoroughly discredited writer Jerome Corsi, who was in Kenya this week promoting his latest hatchet job against a Democratic presidential candidate.

Corsi is also the author of the “Swift Boat” book that damaged John Kerry’s presidential campaign, which established Corsi’s reputation in the MSM, at least, as a complete buffoon.

Jerome Corsi, the author of a controversial book attacking Barack Obama, has been detained in Kenya and is expected to be deported, The Times’ Nairobi bureau chief, Edmund Sanders, reports.

Corsi is the author of “The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” a best-selling book whose assertions — that Obama was raised a Muslim and is secretly seething with “black rage” — have been widely dismissed as false and based on little more than the author’s desire to derail the Democrat’s presidential candidacy.

Anti-Barack Obama author detained while promoting his book in Kenya | Top of the Ticket | Los Angeles Times.

Sat images tell the story: Iraq "surge" a failure

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In case you missed it

Sunnis out, Shias in

Sunnis out, Shias in

It is a cornerstone of Republican John MCain’s presidential campaign: The troop surge is working in Iraq.

Now it appears that McCain is telling a lie (albeit not his own invention), again.

The truth: It is ethnic cleansing, not additional U.S. troops, which have caused a decrease in violence in Sunni neighborhoods, according to a UCLA professor.

Satellite images analyzed by UCLA georgraphy professor John Agnew show that the lights are out in neigborhoods that–had they been saved by U.S. troops–would be on.

“Essentially, our interpretation is that violence has declined in Baghdad because of intercommunal violence that reached a climax as the surge was beginning,” said lead author John Agnew, a UCLA professor of geography and authority on ethnic conflict. “By the launch of the surge, many of the targets of conflict had either been killed or fled the country, and they turned off the lights when they left.”

UCLA study of satellite imagery casts doubt on surge’s success in Baghdad.

That's rich: Lady de Rothschild calls Obama "elitist"

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It’s the strongest signal yet from the global elite about who they want in the White House.

Former Hillary Clinton backer Lynn Forester de Rothschild (right) threw her support behind Republican U.S. presidential candidate John McCain today, after calling Democratic candidate Barack Obama an “elitist.”

That’s got to be a first for a Rothschild, unless there is a “down-to-earth” member of the family I haven’t heard about.

From her Lady de Rothschild’s bio, at the Financial Access Initiative, where she is an advisor: (de Rothschild) is a member of the Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Policy Association, and she served as a member of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Committee and as the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board under President Clinton.

Forester was a major donor for Clinton earning her the title as a Hillraiser for helping to raise at least $100,000 for the New York Democratic senator’s failed presidential bid.

In an interview with CNN this summer, Forester did not hide her distaste for eventual Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

“This is a hard decision for me personally because frankly I don’t like him,” she said of Obama in an interview with CNN’s Joe Johns. “I feel like he is an elitist. I feel like he has not given me reason to trust him.”

CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive – Prominent Clinton backer and DNC member to endorse McCain « – Blogs from CNN.com.