A Star in the East

Here is a celestial phenomenon that appeared over Norway yesterday. Was is a strange manifestation of the northern lights? Or the test firing of a Russian missile? Or even a sign that the Messiah was coming to Oslo to accept some sort of prize? You decide.

The Newest Huckster

P.T. Barnum would be so proud.

Hide the Decline

Climategate has opened a can of worms insofar as the shenanigans that the "scientists" at East Anglia University went through to push their self-serving conclusions about global warming. Now Steve McIntyre has pulled back the Wizard-of-Oz curtain on the "trick" that these charlatans used to "hide the decline" in global warming after 1960.

Instead of the actual measured global temperature decline (please reference the above chart), this data was thereafter "adjusted" to show a dramatic increase in "Global Warming" (the "hockey stick"). This hoax was then adopted by Al Gore and the UN's IPCC to push their new-world-order agenda. This may well be the biggest scientific scandal since Galileo was crushed by the Catholic Church for his heliocentric view of our solar system. To get the complete story, please reference Steve McIntyre's blog post: Hide the Decline (And I give a tip of the hat to Michelle Malkin for this reference.)

Can we please have vigorous congressional hearings to get to the bottom of this Climategate hoax? And, as I have suggested in previous e-mails to any Kool-Aid drinkers, I think that East Anglia University, Penn State University, the UN's IPCC, Al Gore, The Nobel Peace Prize Committee, Barbara Boxer ("Ma'am"), and Henry Waxmax should be class-action sued for one trillion dollars ... with the proceeds distributed to all those scientists who were squashed for being Global-Warming doubters (sneeringly called "Deniers") and even a few million to the hacker(s) who brought this scientific scandal to light.

Balloon Bubble Head

From the Associated Press: "[The balloon boy's father], Richard Heene was 'obsessed' with trying to land a TV show and become famous. 'Heene believes the world is going to end in 2012.' [attorney, Linda Lee] said. 'Because of that, he wanted to make money quickly, become rich enough to build a bunker or something underground where he can be safe from the sun exploding."

I kind of doubt that any bunker, however deep, will protect this (un)reality-show bubble head from an exploding sun. No wonder his apparently-put-upon son seems to suffer from ongoing dyspepsia.

What if They Are Wrong?

This is an artist's conception of a ship that will travel the Earth spewing water-vapor clouds that would then cool off our planet. This would be just one more (expensive) attempt to counter what is thought by many to be man-made global warming. Add to this, new proposed cap-and-trade legislation and huge government programs (battery technology, solar power, wind power ... but not nuclear power ) to reduce our use of fossil fuels and it is clear that man is pulling out all stops to cool down his planet.

But what if they are wrong? What if man is misreading the science (wouldn't be the first time) and is hastening the advent of our world's next ice age? What then ... would we have any redress against those chicken-littles who did us in? I think not.

Beam Me up Scotty

Having just spent some time in New Mexico, it does not surprise me to read that this state is allocating $198 million to build a spaceport. See: New Mexico Spaceport. I say that it doesn’t surprise me because New Mexico is mostly quite elevated terrain (Santa Fe is at 7,000 feet above sea level) and therefore it is much cheaper to launch and retrieve spacecraft from such higher elevations. Why the United States chose sea-level Cape Canaveral as its primary launch point for manned space flight might have made some sense in the 1960’s (when emergency recovery of aborted flights from other locales was more problematic) but it is clearly very uneconomic today when the same logic does not apply. The second head-scratching reason is that New Mexico has become a more liberal state with Bill Richardson as its governor. And liberals, for reasons that escape me, often have romantic and unrealistic notions about the intersection of science and economics (witness their current global-warming mania).

Thus, that New Mexico is spending any level of public funds, let alone almost $200 million, to support the starry-eyed commercial endeavor of that tow-headed limey megalomaniac, Richard Branson, seems to me as loopy and wasteful. Even if the technology of this Star-Trek-light private-sector pie-in-the-sky effort succeeds, the revenue generated from the few flights a year it would attract cannot possible justify this kind of public-sector outlay. And, (God-forbid) after the first unsuccessful paying-passenger space launch, this facility will, I predict, likely become a ramshackled tumble-weed racetrack.