The Yellow Dog Blog

More meaningless ramblings from another guy you don't know

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Yet more invcontrovertible evidence

Uh oh. Just when you thought it was safe to ridicule the global warming hysteria, along comes this. That's right. It seems the English have had a rather warm January. Yet one more bit of evidence on the ever growing pile that, not only is the world getting warmer, but the reason it's getting warmer is human activity. And not just any human activity, but activity in all of the prosperous, western industrial democracies.

But wait. Let's read the first line of the article.
January 2007 was the warmest on record in Britain since 1921, giving further evidence of a warming climate, forecasters said.
That's right, 2007 was the second warmest January. And the warmest January wasn't in the last 10 or even 20 years. No, the warmest January was in 1921. But wait. I thought global warming didn't really begin until the last 20-30 years. Let's read on, shall we?
The temperature pushes 2007 into the top five warmest Januarys in the region since records began in the seventeenth century. Only 1796, 1834, 1916 and 1921 saw milder January temperatures.
You read that right. While this January in the land of Blake and Bacon was warm, it wasn't as warm as it was in 1796. And we all know how many cars were on the road burning those evil hydrocarbons back then.
Michael Dukes, a forecaster at MeteoGroup UK, said: "It's more evidence - not proof - but more evidence towards a warming climate. It follows on from a very warm December as well."
Ah, there we go. Let's just think about that for a minute. The meteorologist says that because we had a couple of warm months it MUST be because of MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING. Run for your lives!

That's right. A meteorologist. One of the same group of "scientists" who can't accurately predict the temperature two weeks out, tells us that not only is the world definitely heating up now, but it's going to continue to heat up in the future. Maybe for as long as one thousand years.

Now, why don't we all just take a deep breath and try to summon something that's quite clearly in short supply - a little perspective. Anecdotal evidence DOES NOT indicate a verifiable trend. Just because you you're stung by a bee doesn't mean that we're being invaded by Africanized killer bees. What is it that allows people like this to overlook those four previous Januarys that were no less than 86 years ago and as much as 211 years ago? There were, of course, many others before that but they happened before thermometers were invented.

But none of that matters to the GW acolytes. They don't even want to debate the issue. In the old Soviet style, they portray dissent from their view as evidence of either corruption or mental imbalance.

Some are emotionally invested in the theory. Many see it as a way to tax the more productive societies of the world and transfer wealth to third worlders. The self-loathers among us are perpetually guilt-ridden that we're as rich, advanced and successful as we are and see the prescibed "remedies" to global warming as ways to take us down a peg or two.

The entire hysterical global warming culture and their proposals need to be opposed at every turn. They represent a real and present danger to the economic health an sovereignty of the world's industrial democracies.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Oh, well...this changes everything

Now that I know Liz Taylor is endorsing Hillary for President, Hil takes on an entirely new level of gravitas. I'll have to rethink the entire 2008 field.

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

A few puffs from the magic dragon...

...can totally ruin your day.

Looks like Al Qaeda in Somalia took another hit yesterday. This time, rather than feeling the wrath of the Ethiopian armed forces, the blows rained down from a US Air Force C-130, nicknamed Puff the Magic Dragon for its ability to 'breathe fire' and rain prodigious quantities of lead down upon its targets from its twin miniguns (around 1000 rounds per minute) and 105mm Howitzer, among other capabilities.

Our targets appear to have been the Al Quaeda leader in the region as well as some of the perpetrators of the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.

It will be interesting to hear more as details are revealed, but here's to the USAF and special forces on a what certainly seems to be a job well done.

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Better to be funnier in private, than foolish in public

"Conservatives generally tend to be funnier in their private lives," he explains, "because of the hypocrisy factor. I am of course a big fan of hypocrisy, because hypocrites at least know the difference between right and wrong--at any rate, know enough to lie about what they're doing. Liberals are not nearly as hypocritical as conservatives, because they don't know the difference between right and wrong. But anyways the personal lives of conservatives tend to be funnier: They've always got the embarrassing gay daughter, and so on."
P.J. O’Rourke on the relative funniosity of liberals and conservatives.

In public policy, Mr. O'Rourke claims, "liberals are always much more hilarious. Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

Friday, January 05, 2007

Guilty pleasures

When two of the country's scuzziest, most self-absorbed media whores get into a spat as public and vitriolic as this, it's the pop-culture version of the Iran-Iraq war.

May they both fight on for years until neither has anything left. Just hold the chemical weapons, please.

Rule Britannia - bwahahahaha!

Well, of course they're cutting their fleet in half. They're capturing the peace dividend now that there's no Soviet Union or other serious threats...

Oh, wait. Never mind.

So much for the sun never setting on the Union Jack. Well, OK, it's been a good 60 years or so since that was the case, but this is a pretty serious abdication of their duty to defend their own interests.

Looks like the British are moving toward the same stance as the other western social democracies. They're allowing the American taxpayer to provide the majority of their national security and using the savings to finance their bloated socialist welfare spending (i.e. the EU, Japan, South Korea).


Tx, munchkin wrangler