"Of the Wikileaks cache of diplomatic cables, one of the most potentially salacious is about the entertainment at a party thrown by DynCorp, a U.S. contractor training Afghan police, in April 2009. A 17-year-old boy was hired to dance.
In Afghanistan, hiring "dancing boys" is a long-held practice in which Afghan men hire young men and boys to dress like girls and dance at weddings and other parties. They don't hire girls, because in Afghan society men and women don't mix socially. . . .
. . . according to both the State Department, which investigated the incident, and DynCorp, no such sexual abuse occurred.
We did not find anything that there was any kind of misconduct of that kind at all," Susan Pittman, a spokeswoman for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, told TPM. "It was just inappropriate."
DynCorp says one manager present stopped the dancing halfway through after "recognizing that the situation was culturally insensitive." At the State Department's request, DynCorp fired several managers involved and flew "senior leadership" to Afghanistan to do face-to-face ethics training.
"They responded responsibly," the State spokeswoman said.
Wikileaks doesn't go after any targets. People leak stuff which wikileaks then publishes. If they haven't published anything sensitive enough for you, then that means that people haven't leaked that information to them, not that they "go after soft targets".
They don't go after soft target, eh?
. . . . In fact, WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals.
Last year, for example, WikiLeaks published the “secret ritual” of a college women’s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau. Now Alpha Sigma Tau (like several other sororities “exposed” by WikiLeaks) is not known to have engaged in any form of misconduct, and WikiLeaks does not allege that it has. Rather, WikiLeaks chose to publish the group’s confidential ritual just because it could. This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism. It is a kind of information vandalism.
In fact, WikiLeaks routinely tramples on the privacy of non-governmental, non-corporate groups for no valid public policy reason. It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members. Most or all of these groups are defenseless against WikiLeaks’ intrusions. The only weapon they have is public contempt for WikiLeaks’ ruthless violation of their freedom of association, and even that has mostly been swept away in a wave of uncritical and even adulatory reporting about the brave “open government,” “whistleblower” site.
On occasion, WikiLeaks has engaged in overtly unethical behavior. Last year, without permission, it published the full text of the highly regarded 2009 book about corruption in Kenya called “It’s Our Turn to Eat” by investigative reporter Michela Wrong (as first reported by Chris McGreal in The Guardian on April 9). By posting a pirated version of the book and making it freely available, WikiLeaks almost certainly disrupted sales of the book and made it harder for Ms. Wrong and other anti-corruption reporters to perform their important work and to get it published. Repeated protests and pleas from the author were required before WikiLeaks (to its credit) finally took the book offline.
“Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), “Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most–power without accountability–is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” . . . --- Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review
That is quite chilling. I'll add to the pot. (A tip of the hat to you, sir.)
. . . In recent years, I have spent many hours interviewing refugees from North Korea, including some who escaped from re-education camps. Their accounts of prison life accord with a recent assessment by the U.S. State Department. Conditions are brutal and life threatening, according to the February report. "Torture occurred," the report notes matter-of-factly. Refugees have spoken to me of newborns separated from their mothers and left to die.
North Koreans can end up in re-education camps for such crimes as listening to foreign radio broadcasts, secretly practicing a religion, or crossing the border to China in search of food. Inmates are subjected to forced labor and are required to memorize political tracts. They receive little food, no medical care and sometimes serve multiyear terms wearing the clothes in which they arrived at camp. I interviewed a woman who had been wearing high heels when she was arrested and had to bind her feet in rags when those wore out. Many prisoners die of abuse or malnutrition.
Political prisoners are held under even harsher conditions in kwan li so penal camps. The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates the number of political prisoners at 200,000; the State Department puts it at between 150,000 and 200,000. Political offenses include such crimes as sitting on a newspaper that contains a picture of dictator Kim Jong Il. Punishment is often collective and can extend to three generations of the offender's entire family.
Shin Dong-Hyok may be the only person to have escaped from a kwan li so camp. Mr. Shin, now in his mid-20s and living in Seoul, was born and spent the first 22 years of his life in Camp No. 14, a so-called total control facility. In an interview at The Wall Street Journal's headquarters in New York last year, Mr. Shin spoke of growing up. His formal education was limited to the rudiments of reading and writing. Because political prisoners are usually incarcerated for life, the camps don't bother with political re-education; Mr. Shin said he didn't even know who Kim Jong Il was until after his escape. Nor did he understand the concept of money until, after his escape, he walked through a market and noticed bits of colored paper being exchanged for food.
At 12 or 13 -- he is unsure of the year in which he was born -- he was forced to watch the executions of his mother, who was hanged, and his brother, who was shot. They had attempted to escape. Hoping to pry information out of him -- Mr. Shin had none -- camp officials bound the boy's hands and feet, embedded a hook in his groin and dangled him over a fire. In the Journal's conference room, Mr. Shin pulled up a leg of his trousers to show me the scars. . . . -- Inside North Korea's Gulag
It isn't a question of wealth. It is a question of being ruled by cruel, sadistic despot with nearly unlimited power and a cult of personality - the very thing that seems to be a regular outcome of Communist governments.
The fact that it also covers up government wrong-doing, like spying on American citizens
It is hard to understand why the government would ever engage in surveillance of American citizens, isn't it? You've got to wonder, what are they thinking? Are they stepping over the line?
Denver: Man Arrested for Providing Material Support to a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization
Jamshid Muhtorov was arrested by members of the FBI’s Denver and Chicago Joint Terrorism Task Forces on a charge of providing and attempting to provide material support to the Islamic Jihad Union, a Pakistan-based designated foreign terrorist organization. Full Story
Baltimore: Man Pleads Guilty to Attempted Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction in Plot to Attack Armed Forces Recruiting Center
U.S. citizen Antonio Martinez, aka Muhammad Hussain, pled guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against federal property in connection with a scheme to attack an armed forces recruiting station in Catonsville, Maryland. Full Story
Washington Field: Man Pleads Guilty to Shootings at Pentagon, Other Military Buildings
Yonathan Melaku, of Alexandria, Virginia, pled guilty to damaging property and to firearms violations involving five separate shootings at military installations in northern Virginia between October and November 2010, and to attempting to damage veterans’ memorials at Arlington National Cemetery. Full Story
1.Tampa: Florida Resident Charged with Plotting to Bomb Locations in Tampa
A 25-year-old resident of Pinellas Park, Florida was charged in connection with an alleged plot to attack locations in Tampa with a vehicle bomb, assault rifle, and other explosives. Full Story
2.Baltimore: Former Army Solider Charged with Attempting to Provide Material Support to al Shabaab
A man who secretly converted to Islam days before he separated from the Army was charged with attempting to provide material support to al Shabaab, a foreign terrorist organization, and was arrested upon his return to Maryland after traveling to Africa. Full Story
You mean the ones that acted as the catalyst for the Arab Spring?
We keep hearing that from fans and boosters of Wikileaks, but it simply isn't true. Do you really think that the Arabs living under bad governments needed someone to tell them that they had badly run corrupt governments when it was a fact that assulted them nearly every day of their lives? Do you not know that many of those countries had been simmering under revolution or revolt for years? I guess the "White Man's Burden" is still with us in the form of "Wikileaks".
A Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi is generally credited with starting the Arab Spring after he set himself on fire when the police confiscated his fruit stand in December 2010. Less than a month after his self-immolation – he eventually died – President Zine al Abdedine Ben Ali fled Tunisia after 23 years in office. Several other self-immolations quickly follow Bouazizi’s, particularly in Egypt where that revolution would start a little more than a month later. -- Moroccan Protesters the Latest to Set Themselves on Fire
The facts are that on 17 December last year, Mohamed, a market trader whose father had died when he was three and who had been helping to support his family financially since the age of 10, set himself on fire after a dispute with a government official over where he could sell his fruit and vegetables. At the time, it was widely reported that the municipal inspector, a woman named Fedia Hamdi with a reputation for strictness, had slapped Mohamed across the face – the ultimate insult in such a patriarchal Arab community. The confrontation seemed to pit an ordinary man, struggling to make a living, against the uniformed symbol of a corrupt regime. Bouazizi's suicide at the age of 26 was seen by many as an act borne of his intense frustration with authoritarian rule. It became the domino that fell and triggered a chain of revolutions across the Arab world. -- The slap that sparked a revolution
Yes, I think that sums it up, you're "just saying", not really offering any evidence or insight here. Practically speaking the politicians and party apparatus could be totally innocent and uninvolved and it looks the same. There are plenty of other ways this could have happened. Of course your speculations won't run in those directions.
Of course if you read the story you know that they have tracked down the account used to make the calls.
Allow me to interject some cruel reality to your political revenge fantasies:
There is no evidence that Harper’s campaign or any of the other candidates were involved in the calls. , ,,
Using telephone billing records and Racknine server logs, Elections Canada investigators identified the Racknine account holder who sent out the calls. . . .
Meier and his company are co-operating fully with the probe, he said. . . .
He said he knows whose account was used for the calls, but could not reveal the owner, because of client confidentiality and concerns about interfering with the investigation. He said it was someone “down East” — meaning Ontario or Quebec.
. . . But what stood out most for me was extensive evidence of the hijacking of the "peer review" process to enforce global warming dogma. Peer review is the practice of subjecting scientific papers to review by other scientists with relevant expertise before they can be published in professional journals. The idea is to weed out research with obvious flaws or weak arguments, but there is a clear danger that such a process will simply reinforce groupthink. If it is corrupted, peer review can be a mechanism for an entrenched establishment to exclude legitimate challenges by simply refusing to give critics a hearing.
And that is precisely what we find.
In response to an article challenging global warming that was published in the journal Climate Research, CRU head Phil Jones complains that the journal needs to "rid themselves of this troublesome editor"-hopefully not through the same means used by Henry II's knights. Michael Mann replies:
I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.
Note the circular logic employed here. Skepticism about global warming is wrong because it is not supported by scientific articles in "legitimate peer-reviewed journals." But if a journal actually publishes such an article, then it is by definition not "legitimate."
You can also see from these e-mails the scientists' panic at any dissent appearing in the scientific literature. When another article by a skeptic was published in Geophysical Research Letters, Michael Mann complains, "It's one thing to lose Climate Research. We can't afford to lose GRL." Another CRU scientist, Tom Wigley, suggests that they target another troublesome editor: "If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted." That's exactly what they did, and a later e-mail boasts that "The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/new editorial leadership there."
Not content to block out all dissent from scientific journals, the CRU scientists also conspired to secure friendly reviewers who could be counted on to rubber-stamp their own work. Phil Jones suggests such a list to Kevin Trenberth, with the assurance that "All of them know the sorts of things to say...without any prompting."
So it's no surprise when another e-mail refers to an attempt to keep inconvenient scientific findings out of a UN report: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Think of all of this the next time you hear someone invoke the authority of peer review-or of the UN's IPCC reports-as backing for claims about global warming. -- ClimateGate: The Fix is In
As I write this, the moderation on the parent post should probably be understood as people helping to build "consensus" on global warming by suppressing any contrary views. That is just the way things are done in regard to disputes about AGW.
Once consensus is declared, no dissent is acceptable.
From the link: "The well over 1,000 dissenting scientists are almost 20 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers."
Oh wow!!! LOL!
You can tell that the guy who wrote this was a producer for Rush Limbaugh's show.
How sad, what riches awaited you in the next paragraph. If only you could have made the jump of a blank line....but I guess you can only expect so much of people. But still, it is odd that you chose to stop there. It is almost as if you didn't want people to read the next paragraph at the link. I wonder why?
The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grew louder in 2010 as the Climategate scandal -- which involved the upper echelon of UN IPCC scientists -- detonated upon on the international climate movement. "I view Climategate as science fraud, pure and simple," said noted Princeton Physicist Dr. Robert Austin shortly after the scandal broke. Climategate prompted UN IPCC scientists to turn on each other. UN IPCC scientist Eduardo Zorita publicly declared that his Climategate colleagues Michael Mann and Phil Jones "should be barred from the IPCC process...They are not credible anymore." Zorita also noted how insular the IPCC science had become. "By writing these lines I will just probably achieve that a few of my future studies will, again, not see the light of publication," Zorita wrote. A UN lead author Richard Tol grew disillusioned with the IPCC and lamented that it had been "captured" and demanded that "the Chair of IPCC and the Chairs of the IPCC Working Groups should be removed." Tol also publicly called for the "suspension" of IPCC Process in 2010 after being invited by the UN to participate as lead author again in the next IPCC Report. [Note: Zorita and Tol are not included in the count of dissenting scientists in this report.]
True global warming "believers" don't believe, they looked at the available evidence and weighed the opinions of experts and came to a conclusion based on facts and consensus.
I'm afraid your wrong on a number of counts.
First, most global warming believers probably hold that belief because that is what teacher said, or that is what they read in the paper, or on the web, and not through an independent review of data, papers, and reports. Although scientists and engineers may find the hard data more approachable, I expect that most of them are still at a casual level of familiarity with the material, not truly informed, let alone expert.
Second, there is something approaching consensus among scientists that the earth has gotten warmer in some measure. That doesn't mean that the data is not without disputes and controversies, including but not limited to data normalization techniques, sources, and transparency.
Third, it is trivially proven that there is no genuine consensus among scientists that the warming is caused by humanity, or what to do about it. There is at best a preponderance of opinion among scientists that it is caused by humanity. It isn't necessarily clear how strongly those views are held.
Now, this is before we consider the troubling revelations of Climategate.
Last week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world's top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first "climategate" leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.
Analysis There was always an element of tragedy in the first “Climategate” emails, as scientists were under pressure to tell a story that the physical evidence couldn’t support – and that the scientists were reluctant to acknowledge in public. The new email archive, already dubbed “Climategate 2.0”, is much larger than the first, and provides an abundance of context for those earlier changes.
“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story,” a civil servant wrote to Phil Jones in 2009. “They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”
Having elevated global warming to the most dramatic, urgent and over-riding issue of the day, bureaucrats, NGOs, politicians and funding agencies demanded that the scientists must keep the whole bandwagon rolling. I
I should also add that I will be conducting my own experiments in my basement with a neutrino cannon, flashlight and stop watch. If I see anything interesting, I'll post the results here.
Ha! Unlikely! I don't see duct tape on your list. How do you expect to be taken seriously if you aren't using the miracle tool of the modern age? What next, cold fusion without a salad shooter? Pshaw!
Pittsburg has banned fracking outright and PA Republicans were trying to pass a State law to nullify local regulations. When that was deemed a politically untenable idea, they switched to a straight-jacket of State level regulations.
It isn't that uncommon for states to have to step in to clarify government policy in a state either by law or regulation. City governments are small enough that they can easily go extremist. (See: San Francisco) Besides, do you really believe that a city government will have more resources to make sound environmental policy than a state government that commonly has both a department of natural resources and an environmental agency (not to mention being able to call upon the state university system for expertise)? Sometimes the defiance of policy or court decisions grows so extreme that tough measures are needed:
After Bush managed to get U.S. into two major military operations within two years, I dare say that Rs lead on "pro-war".
That is quite tedious rubbish. Even if you want to quibble about Iraq, Al Qeda attacked the US on 9/11 in an act consistent with Bin Laden's declaration of war on the United States made several years prior. As far as wars go, they weren't very impressive in the resource commitments.
By your standards, President Roosevelt must be the all time champion of American presidents: 3 wars against major world powers in about a week requiring a massive mobilization and enormous resource commitment lasting years. The US Army alone was more than 10x its current size.
Only in this particular debate, the actual scientists agree with Unnamed Democrat. That doesn't quite have the symmetry you were going for, though, right?
That really depends on the debate, doesn't it? We keep hearing that there is "Consensus" about man-made global warming being a fact in shrill tones, with accusations of being anti-science, or a "denier" if you disagree or have reservations. But the simple fact is that there has never been a genuine consensus among all scientists, not even all climatologists, that global warming, to the extent that it exists, is man-made. (Indeed, how often do you see tens of thousands of people agree about anything with no dissenting or differing views at all? I don't think that there are even many dictatorships that claim the vote is 100% for the ruling party anymore.) The faux "consensus" is in fact a means of control and a way to provide an opening for punishing dissent by denying publication, tenure, grants, and damaging reputations. The stakes are enormous: billons of dollars in green energy funding, carbon exchanges, direct government and bureaucratic control of much of the economy and daily life with the proffered goal of controlling carbon emissions. Progressives and leftists have always wanted more government power to regulate the economy. No wonder the Communists march about global warming - ironic given the Soviet record on the environment.
Consider an email written by Mr. Mann in August 2007. "I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy." Doug Keenan is a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. Steve McIntyre is the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose flaws in Mr. Mann's "hockey stick" graph of global temperatures.
One can understand Mr. Mann's irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC's 2001 Third Assessment Report, and it brought him near-legendary status in his community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place.
The sensible way to do so is to prove Mr. McIntyre wrong using facts and evidence and improved data. Instead the email reveals Mr. Mann casting about for a way to smear him. If the case for man-made global warming is really as strong as the so-called consensus claims it is, why do the climategate emails show scientists attempting to stamp out dissenting points of view? Why must they manipulate data, such as Mr. Jones's infamous effort (revealed in the first batch of climategate emails) to "hide the decline," deliberately concealing an inconvenient divergence, post-1960, between real-world, observed temperature data and scientists' preferred proxies derived from analyzing tree rings?
This is the real significance of the climategate emails. They show that major scientists who inform the IPCC can't be trusted to stick to the science and avoid political activism. This, in turn, has very worrying implications for the major international policy decisions adopted on the basis of their research.
Slashdot Mirror
The greatest value of bitcoin seems to be in generating headlines.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/08/wikileaks-reveals-that-mi_n_793816.html
Yep, big yawn-o-rama.
Yes, it pretty much is.
State Department Denies Sexual Abuse of ‘Dancing Boy’
Wikileaks doesn't go after any targets. People leak stuff which wikileaks then publishes. If they haven't published anything sensitive enough for you, then that means that people haven't leaked that information to them, not that they "go after soft targets".
They don't go after soft target, eh?
. . . . In fact, WikiLeaks must be counted among the enemies of open society because it does not respect the rule of law nor does it honor the rights of individuals.
Last year, for example, WikiLeaks published the “secret ritual” of a college women’s sorority called Alpha Sigma Tau. Now Alpha Sigma Tau (like several other sororities “exposed” by WikiLeaks) is not known to have engaged in any form of misconduct, and WikiLeaks does not allege that it has. Rather, WikiLeaks chose to publish the group’s confidential ritual just because it could. This is not whistleblowing and it is not journalism. It is a kind of information vandalism.
In fact, WikiLeaks routinely tramples on the privacy of non-governmental, non-corporate groups for no valid public policy reason. It has published private rites of Masons, Mormons and other groups that cultivate confidential relations among their members. Most or all of these groups are defenseless against WikiLeaks’ intrusions. The only weapon they have is public contempt for WikiLeaks’ ruthless violation of their freedom of association, and even that has mostly been swept away in a wave of uncritical and even adulatory reporting about the brave “open government,” “whistleblower” site.
On occasion, WikiLeaks has engaged in overtly unethical behavior. Last year, without permission, it published the full text of the highly regarded 2009 book about corruption in Kenya called “It’s Our Turn to Eat” by investigative reporter Michela Wrong (as first reported by Chris McGreal in The Guardian on April 9). By posting a pirated version of the book and making it freely available, WikiLeaks almost certainly disrupted sales of the book and made it harder for Ms. Wrong and other anti-corruption reporters to perform their important work and to get it published. Repeated protests and pleas from the author were required before WikiLeaks (to its credit) finally took the book offline.
“Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), “Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most–power without accountability–is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” . . . --- Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review
That is quite chilling. I'll add to the pot. (A tip of the hat to you, sir.)
Decades of history of NK under Jong-un? Interesting.
Did the Party and military apparatus change with him?
In evaluating North Korea one is always left wondering, how did they manage to pack so much evil in such a little can with such a long shelf life?
military coupe
So, does this count as our obligatory car analogy?
Depends - is it de ville, d'etat, or d'oeil?
happy to be living in a rich country...
It isn't a question of wealth. It is a question of being ruled by cruel, sadistic despot with nearly unlimited power and a cult of personality - the very thing that seems to be a regular outcome of Communist governments.
The fact that it also covers up government wrong-doing, like spying on American citizens
It is hard to understand why the government would ever engage in surveillance of American citizens, isn't it? You've got to wonder, what are they thinking? Are they stepping over the line?
And that's not all - at times it's almost like they are guided and operating according to something other than criminal law, almost as if they had a body of law that nobody else knows about that lets them do things like shoot dead large numbers of people, en masse, legally, with neither trial nor warrant. How could that be? Does Congress know about this? Does Congress approve?
The recruiter: Anwar al-Awlaki, portrait of an American jihadist CNN: Al-Awlaki threatens Americans
40 Americans Have Joined Al Qaeda Group
U.S.-educated Misunderstander of Islam pleads guilty to jihad war crimes, turns government witness
FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 27, 2012
FBI’s Top Ten News Stories for the Week Ending January 13, 2012
You mean the ones that acted as the catalyst for the Arab Spring?
We keep hearing that from fans and boosters of Wikileaks, but it simply isn't true. Do you really think that the Arabs living under bad governments needed someone to tell them that they had badly run corrupt governments when it was a fact that assulted them nearly every day of their lives? Do you not know that many of those countries had been simmering under revolution or revolt for years? I guess the "White Man's Burden" is still with us in the form of "Wikileaks".
. . . because the US will never tolerate democracy in the middle east?
Ignoring Iraq and Israel?
Especially without a Klein bottle coffee cup.
If this is true, we will certainly see some action following this revelation.
If we do not, they are not.
I expect that most Canadians would prefer a complete investigation before the (metaphorical) hangings commence.
In other words, there should not be any: ready, fire, aim!
Just saying.
Yes, I think that sums it up, you're "just saying", not really offering any evidence or insight here. Practically speaking the politicians and party apparatus could be totally innocent and uninvolved and it looks the same. There are plenty of other ways this could have happened. Of course your speculations won't run in those directions.
Of course if you read the story you know that they have tracked down the account used to make the calls.
That seems like nonsense since the investigation, as reported, seems to be doing quite nicely with ordinary phone records and server logs.
Allow me to interject some cruel reality to your political revenge fantasies:
As I write this, the moderation on the parent post should probably be understood as people helping to build "consensus" on global warming by suppressing any contrary views. That is just the way things are done in regard to disputes about AGW.
Once consensus is declared, no dissent is acceptable.
.
From the link: "The well over 1,000 dissenting scientists are almost 20 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers."
Oh wow!!! LOL!
You can tell that the guy who wrote this was a producer for Rush Limbaugh's show.
How sad, what riches awaited you in the next paragraph. If only you could have made the jump of a blank line....but I guess you can only expect so much of people. But still, it is odd that you chose to stop there. It is almost as if you didn't want people to read the next paragraph at the link. I wonder why?
True global warming "believers" don't believe, they looked at the available evidence and weighed the opinions of experts and came to a conclusion based on facts and consensus.
I'm afraid your wrong on a number of counts.
First, most global warming believers probably hold that belief because that is what teacher said, or that is what they read in the paper, or on the web, and not through an independent review of data, papers, and reports. Although scientists and engineers may find the hard data more approachable, I expect that most of them are still at a casual level of familiarity with the material, not truly informed, let alone expert.
Second, there is something approaching consensus among scientists that the earth has gotten warmer in some measure. That doesn't mean that the data is not without disputes and controversies, including but not limited to data normalization techniques, sources, and transparency.
Third, it is trivially proven that there is no genuine consensus among scientists that the warming is caused by humanity, or what to do about it. There is at best a preponderance of opinion among scientists that it is caused by humanity. It isn't necessarily clear how strongly those views are held.
Now, this is before we consider the troubling revelations of Climategate.
ClimateGate: The Fix is In
Peer Pressure
Peer-Review Thuggery
Scientists Behaving Badly
Without candour, we can't trust climate science
Leaked Emails Raise Questions About NYT’s ClimateGate Coverage
Climategate 2.0
Climategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails
I should also add that I will be conducting my own experiments in my basement with a neutrino cannon, flashlight and stop watch. If I see anything interesting, I'll post the results here.
Ha! Unlikely! I don't see duct tape on your list. How do you expect to be taken seriously if you aren't using the miracle tool of the modern age? What next, cold fusion without a salad shooter? Pshaw!
Ever pull back a Slashdot post you made 10 minutes ago in a google search result? I have. Spooky... and disquieting.
Pittsburg has banned fracking outright and PA Republicans were trying to pass a State law to nullify local regulations. When that was deemed a politically untenable idea, they switched to a straight-jacket of State level regulations.
It isn't that uncommon for states to have to step in to clarify government policy in a state either by law or regulation. City governments are small enough that they can easily go extremist. (See: San Francisco) Besides, do you really believe that a city government will have more resources to make sound environmental policy than a state government that commonly has both a department of natural resources and an environmental agency (not to mention being able to call upon the state university system for expertise)? Sometimes the defiance of policy or court decisions grows so extreme that tough measures are needed:
U.S. Army Troops Enforce Desegregation of Arkansas High School
New state gun law has city commissioners up in arms
That is a fabulous parody, but who will believe it?
After Bush managed to get U.S. into two major military operations within two years, I dare say that Rs lead on "pro-war".
That is quite tedious rubbish. Even if you want to quibble about Iraq, Al Qeda attacked the US on 9/11 in an act consistent with Bin Laden's declaration of war on the United States made several years prior. As far as wars go, they weren't very impressive in the resource commitments.
By your standards, President Roosevelt must be the all time champion of American presidents: 3 wars against major world powers in about a week requiring a massive mobilization and enormous resource commitment lasting years. The US Army alone was more than 10x its current size.
Give it a rest.
Only in this particular debate, the actual scientists agree with Unnamed Democrat. That doesn't quite have the symmetry you were going for, though, right?
That really depends on the debate, doesn't it? We keep hearing that there is "Consensus" about man-made global warming being a fact in shrill tones, with accusations of being anti-science, or a "denier" if you disagree or have reservations. But the simple fact is that there has never been a genuine consensus among all scientists, not even all climatologists, that global warming, to the extent that it exists, is man-made. (Indeed, how often do you see tens of thousands of people agree about anything with no dissenting or differing views at all? I don't think that there are even many dictatorships that claim the vote is 100% for the ruling party anymore.) The faux "consensus" is in fact a means of control and a way to provide an opening for punishing dissent by denying publication, tenure, grants, and damaging reputations. The stakes are enormous: billons of dollars in green energy funding, carbon exchanges, direct government and bureaucratic control of much of the economy and daily life with the proffered goal of controlling carbon emissions. Progressives and leftists have always wanted more government power to regulate the economy. No wonder the Communists march about global warming - ironic given the Soviet record on the environment.
The Climategate emails are quite revealing.
Peer-Review Thuggery
Climategate 2.0