And according to Gallup, only 47% still support Obama himself. (Quinnipiac puts it at 46%.)
And, to add insult to injury, 44% now say they’d prefer to have Bush 43 back as President rather than Obama.
OK, let’s start the pool: At what date do you predict a plurality of voters will say they would prefer Bush back as President rather than Obama? My completely unscientific guess is March 21, 2010.
Or more accurately, notes toward such a proof.
Interesting stuff, though as an agnostic, I don’t technically have a god in this fight…
This is huge news. The indispensable Claudia Rosett has details:
“The plan has entailed issuing new banknotes, lopping off two zeroes, so 1,000 won becomes 10. People were given just one week to swap old money for new, after which the old notes would become worthless. A limit was placed on the amount that could be officially exchanged, effectively confiscating all individual savings worth more than about $40 at informal exchange rates.”
Yeah, I can sort of see how that might piss people off.
I would say that criticizing Kim Jong Il is about as dangerous as a German criticizing Hitler in 1937, but I suspect it’s actually more dangerous than that. For one thing, the concentration camps are a lot further along…
Bonus: So Ronery.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Today’s example of CRU cherry=picking and flat-out changing data that didn’t show man-made global warming comes from Willis Eschenbach at Watts Up With That?. It turns out that what some climate scientists call “homogenizing” data, the rest of us would call “lying.”
One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.
So once again, I’m left with an unsolved mystery. How and why did the GHCN “adjust” Darwin’s historical temperature to show radical warming? Why did they adjust it stepwise? Do Phil Jones and the CRU folks use the “adjusted” or the raw GHCN dataset? My guess is the adjusted one since it shows warming, but of course we still don’t know … because despite all of this, the CRU still hasn’t released the list of data that they actually use, just the station list.
Another odd fact, the GHCN adjusted Station 1 to match Darwin Zero’s strange adjustment, but they left Station 2 (which covers much of the same period, and as per Fig. 5 is in excellent agreement with Station Zero and Station 1) totally untouched. They only homogenized two of the three. Then they averaged them.
That way, you get an average that looks kinda real, I guess, it “hides the decline”.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, care to know the way that GISS deals with this problem? Well, they only use the Darwin data after 1963, a fine way of neatly avoiding the question … and also a fine way to throw away all of the inconveniently colder data prior to 1941. It’s likely a better choice than the GHCN monstrosity, but it’s a hard one to justify.
Now, I want to be clear here. The blatantly bogus GHCN adjustment for this one station does NOT mean that the earth is not warming. It also does NOT mean that the three records (CRU, GISS, and GHCN) are generally wrong either. This may be an isolated incident, we don’t know. But every time the data gets revised and homogenized, the trends keep increasing. Now GISS does their own adjustments. However, as they keep telling us, they get the same answer as GHCN gets … which makes their numbers suspicious as well.
And CRU? Who knows what they use? We’re still waiting on that one, no data yet …
What this does show is that there is at least one temperature station where the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling. In addition, the average raw data for Northern Australia is quite different from the adjusted, so there must be a number of … mmm … let me say “interesting” adjustments in Northern Australia other than just Darwin.
And with the Latin saying “Falsus in unum, falsus in omis” (false in one, false in all) as our guide, until all of the station “adjustments” are examined, adjustments of CRU, GHCN, and GISS alike, we can’t trust anyone using homogenized numbers.
(Hat tip: The Volokh Conspiracy.)
Favorably. In the New York Times, even.
And the moon became as blood…
This story in the Telegraph shows what astonishing lengths the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia went to in order to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period from climate records. In particular, Global Warming proponents have thrown out a vast host of other proxy measurements, and now want to us put vast swathes of our economy under government control based on evidence from a single tree from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia. (As an added irony, they’ve had to ignore all the other trees from that region, because they all show the Medieval Warm Period being much hotter than today.)
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip to Roger Simon).
Lots and lots of people have been going through the CRU material mentioned before.
Here’s a rather extensive analysis by Marc Sheppard over at American Thinker as to why the “nothing to see here” line on the various hacks and tricks mentioned therein don’t hold water. if I’m reading it correctly, and the analysis is correct, then at least half of the 20th century warming trend (and all after about 1998) are the results not of solid science, but of various hacks to skew the data.
By all means, let’s get better data on the climate. But we’d be insane to cripple our economy through meaningless treaties like Kyoto and Copenhagen based on blatantly manipulated data pushed by people with a post-national agenda of higher taxes, bigger government, and control of vast swatches of the world economy by unelected international bureaucratic elites.
Good for her. If she lived in the UK, she’d be on her way to prison right now.
(Hat tip to Fark.)
George Friedman at Stratfor on Obama’s plans for Afghanistan and the parallels with Vietnam. He notes that US/ARVN forces were never defeated by the NVA, but that the NVA won because of their superior intelligence thanks to widespread penetration of ARVN forces by communist sympathizers. He says (and I think he’s correct) that Afghan forces are similarly riddled with Taliban sympathizers, making it impossible for us to win without marshaling similar penetration of the Taliban with intelligence assets.
The problem with this is, the Afghans are already compromised and lack the expertise, while the US doesn’t have the personnel to place intelligence assets with the Taliban. Both of these are also probably true.
His suggestion to fill this gap is to use the Pakistani ISI (the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA or KGB), or at least elements therein. If that is indeed our best hope in Afghanistan, we are totally screwed. He mentions that Taliban has worked closely with the ISI and are already compromised, but that doesn’t go nearly far enough. My understanding is that the Taliban were essentially created by the ISI, or at least Jihadist elements in it, with more than a little help from Saudi money. The degree to which Islamists have been purged from the ISI is open to debate (my gut feeling is very little). They’re not so much a subordinate part of the government as a power player within it, with their own goals and agendas, in an country that not only suffers from ethnic divisions, but is largely an artificial conglomerate created by the post-Independence partition of India in 1947. There’s no reason to believe that Pakistan is any more unified than, say, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union was in 1990.
My guess is that the United States would be better off creating our own Afghan intelligence service from the ground up, possibly starting with old elements of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance, assuming elements of such could be scrounged up, and the Tajik/Pushtan divide bridged.
It was almost certainly a mistake for Obama to pre-announce when US troops would start withdrawing. But there are no good choices or easy victories to be had here.
(Just for the record, I had an article called “The Way to Afghan Peace” published in The World & I way back in 1992, so I actually have a long-running interest in the region. But the players, positions, and motivations of what actually goes on there are frequently murky not only to me, but even to far more experienced experts.)