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Best of the Web: The "rules" for Middle East reporting

Gary Hupfer
The Leader-Telegram
Sun, 08 Feb 2009 06:06 UTC
"Israel can do no wrong"

Following are the Twelve Golden And Infallible Truths That The Media Is Obligated To Adopt:
1. In the Middle East, the Arabs always attack first and Israel always defends itself. This defense is called "retaliation."

2. Neither Arabs, Palestinians nor Lebanese have the right to kill civilians. This is "terrorism."

3. Israel has the right to kill civilians. This is called "legitimate defense."

4. When Israel massively kills civilians, the Western powers ask it do it with courtesy or politeness. This is called "reaction of the international community."

5. Neither Palestinians nor Lebanese have the right to capture Israeli soldiers inside military installations with sentry and combat positions. This has to be called "kidnapping of defenseless civilians."
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HAL9000

Best of the Web: Pro-Global Warming Study Receives Worldwide Headlines; Discovery of Error in Study Garners Op-Ed in One Paper

Amy Ridenour
NewsBusters
Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:47 UTC
When University of Washington Professor Eric Steig announced in a news conference and a published paper in the January 22 edition of the journal Nature that he and several colleagues removed one of many thorns in the sides of climate alarmists -- in this case, evidence that Antarctica is cooling -- he received extensive worldwide attention in the mainstream press.

But when a noteworthy error was found in Stieg's research less than two weeks after it's publication, of the mainstream press, only an opinion column in the London Telegraph and a blog associated with the Australian Herald Sun carried the news.

The Stieg paper's release was covered by 27 newspapers, including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle & Los Angeles Times, by CNN, by the Associated Press, by NPR and quite a few others (see reviews of the coverage at the end of this post).

After independent analyst Steve McIntyre discovered a major error in the data, and released his results on his influential blog Climate Audit beginning on February 1, based on a Nexis search I conducted today, none of these outlets chose to inform their readers.

Comment: This is how the propaganda machine works. The release of Steig's paper was truly a grand media event. Everyone in the Manmade Global Warming camp has been waiting for something like this so they could vent and fume and degrade any scientist or media person not in sync with their agenda. Several of the authors of the paper are among the most radical promoters of Manmade Global Warming.

Now here is some perspective on what Steig's paper claims to have found -

The proposed 50 year warming of Western Antarctica is 0.17 degrees Fahrenheit every 10 years.
That is 0.017 degrees each year.
Yes you got it, seventeen one-thousandths of a degree Fahrenheit per year.
Over 5 decades (50 years) this amounts to 0.85 degrees Fahrenheit.
The claim is that this is so significant that it outweighs the Eastern Antarctic cooling.

Let's take a look at how the Anthropogenic Global Warming promoters reacted. In particular let's pay attention to the words they use, the quotes they chose and who they are aimed at.

From the above article:
Ira Flatow in a National Public Radio interview,
called Steig's paper "probably historic."
Seattle Times science reporter Sandi Doughton wrote,
By bringing Antarctica in from the cold, the new study could undermine the small cadre of global-warming skeptics who still argue that the planet is not getting hotter, or that humans are not to blame. Many have used the apparent cooling in Antarctica to attack global climate models and point out perceived weaknesses in the scientific consensus that emissions from automobiles and factories are beginning to change global climate.
New York Times reporter Kenneth Chang, in his piece quoted a scientist saying,
"But the idea of a long-term cooling is pretty clearly debunked."
Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press said,
"Antarctica, the only place that had oddly seemed immune from climate change, is warming after all, according to a new study."

Seth Borenstein also included a quote from global warming activist scientist and study co-author Michael Mann, saying the study refuted the views of climate "contrarians."
Thomas H. Maugh II of the Los Angeles Times wrote,
Global-warming skeptics have pointed to the presumed cooling of the continent as evidence that researchers' computer projections of climate change are in error, but the new findings reported Thursday appear to refute their criticisms...
The San Francisco Chronicle Science editor David Perlman told his readers,
"the issue [of Antarctic warming] has apparently been resolved."
Damian Carrington of the Guardian tells his readers,
"Research 'kills off' the climate skeptic argument by showing average temperature across the continent has risen over the last 50 years."
Carrington also quotes Steig,
The issue, which had been highlighted by global warming sceptics, was an annoyance, said Steig, despite the science having been reasonably well understood. "But it has now been killed off," he said.
Carrington adds,
The rapid warming now revealed in the west concerns some scientists.
This is how it works. Big media, big money, big promotion.

AS SOTT mentioned in another article, when errors were found in the Steig paper by Steve McIntyre the reaction was far less than scientific.
When Steve McIntyre revealed this on ClimateAudit, Gavin Schmidt closed comments on the RealClimate blog, and the British Antarctic Survey removed the faulty data from their site without explanation.
Remember Stieg himself is a contributor to the ardently pro-alarmist and environmentalist-supported PR blog RealClimate.

Apparently the data errors were so embarrassing that GISS employee Gavin Schmidt claimed the discovery of the data errors himself when reporting them for correction, causing another embarrassing incident.

The saga is ongoing at this moment. Steve McIntyre's site ClimateAudit is attempting to make sense of the errors and the behaviors.

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Stormtrooper

Best of the Web: Snow is consistent with global warming, UK scientists and media on vacation in D'Nile

Richard Alleyne
Telegraph UK
Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:38 UTC
Britain may be in the grip of the coldest winter for 30 years and grappling with up to a foot of snow in some places but the extreme weather is entirely consistent with global warming, claim scientists.
Snowbound Britain 2009
© unknown

Temperatures for December and January were consistently 1.8 F ( 1 C) lower than the average of 41 F (5 C)and 37 F (3C) respectively and more snow fell in London this week than since the 1960s.

But despite this extreme weather, scientists say that the current cold snap does not mean that climate change is going into reverse. In fact, the surprise with which we have greeted the extreme conditions only reinforces how our climate has changed over the years.

A study by the Met Office which went back 350 years shows that such extreme weather now only occurs every 20 years. Back in the pre-industrial days of Charles Dickens, it was a much more regular occurrence - hitting the country on average every five years or so. During that time global temperatures have risen by 1.7 F (0.8 C), studies have shown.


Comment: Pay careful attention here to the total snowjob that this article and these scientists are trying to pull off.

The horrible winter and cold weather does not mean anything other than we have gotten so used to warm balmy winters from all that man made global warming.
"It only reinforces how our climate has changed over the years."
That's quite the scientific analysis is it not? If the public only understood how simple it all is!

Back in the good ole days of Charles Dickens, now that's when things were really rough. Hmmm? Let's see, when did Charles Dickens live? Charles Dickens: February 7, 1812 to June 9, 1870.

Isn't that around the Dalton Minimum?
Maunder and Dalton minimums
© Wikimedia Commons

What a coincidence that they would choose a baseline comparison of a period that was known to be very cold due to low sunspot activity?

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Magnify

Best of the Web: Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation Part XIII

Dave McGowan
Center for an Informed America
Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00 UTC
"No one could recall ever seeing or hearing about Gram being involved in a protest of any sort." Author Ben Fong Torres, who interviewed scores of people close to Gram Parsons while researching Hickory Wind
Timing is a curious thing. When I first started this series in May of 2008, the fact that Jim Morrison's father had served as the commander of the ships involved in the Gulf of Tonkin 'incident' had gone virtually unreported for some four-and-a-half decades. Readers were shocked - shocked, I tell you! - when I began this series by trotting out that revelation. Some even accused me of making it up, or of somehow twisting the facts.

But as fate would have it, as December of 2008 rolled around, the mainstream media was suddenly awash with reports of the unusual Morrison family connection. On December 8, for example, the Los Angeles Times carried a report on Admiral George Stephen Morrison, described therein as "a retired Navy rear admiral and the father of the late rock icon Jim Morrison." According to the Times report, "Morrison had a long career that included serving as operations officer aboard the aircraft carrier Midway and commanding the fleet during the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which led to an escalation of American involvement in Vietnam." (emphasis added)

The very next day, on December 9, the New York Times followed suit with a report by William Grimes: "George S. Morrison, who commanded the fleet during the Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to an escalation of the Vietnam War and whose son Jim was the lead singer of the Doors ... Aboard the flagship carrier Bon Homme Richard, Mr. Morrison commanded American naval forces in the gulf when the destroyer Maddox engaged three North Vietnamese torpedo boats on Aug. 2, 1964. A skirmish and confused reports of a second engagement two days later led President Lyndon B. Johnson to order airstrikes against North Vietnam and to request from Congress what became known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, allowing him to carry out further military operations without declaring war." (emphasis again added)

Comment: Continue to part XIV

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Magnify

Best of the Web: Inside The LC: The Strange but Mostly True Story of Laurel Canyon and the Birth of the Hippie Generation Part XII

Dave McGowan
Center for an Informed America
Thu, 27 Nov 2008 22:47 UTC
"I'd have to say that, personally speaking, Crosby was worse for the good feelings of [the local] rock'n'roll [scene] than Manson was." Terry Melcher

"I had been to Terry Melcher's house on Cielo Drive many times." David Crosby
I'm not going to sugarcoat this at all: you people really suck when it comes to picking me out of a photo lineup. And I'm not talking about sucking just a little bit here, folks - no, I'm talking about totally sucking ass. And it wasn't even a particularly difficult task, to be perfectly honest. After all, I provided you with twenty-one composite sketches of what I looked like circa 1966, and yet only one of you - just one! - could correctly identify me. So to give the rest of you a sporting chance, I'm going to narrow it down for you: I'm one of the three wise men - which is to say, the three hairless kids - in the top row.

Anyway, I believe we were discussing the Byrds when class was last convened, so let's now meet a formidable behind-the-scenes player and the band's first producer, Terry Melcher. It is fairly well known that Melcher was the son of 'virginal' actress Doris Day, who was just sixteen when impregnated and seventeen when Terry was born. Melcher's father was trombonist Al Jorden, who reportedly regularly beat Day, and likely Terry as well. Jorden wasn't around for long though; his death, when Melcher was just two or three years old, was naturally ruled a suicide.

After an equally short-lived second marriage, Doris Day married her agent and producer, Marty Melcher, who was universally regarded as one of the biggest assholes in Hollywood - and that's not an easy title to attain, given the fierce competition. Like Jorden, Melcher was well known to be a tyrannically violent and abusive man. He also reportedly embezzled some $20 million from his wife/client. On the bright side though, he did adopt and help raise Terry, who took his name.

Terry Melcher was arguably one of the most important figures lurking about the periphery of the Laurel Canyon saga, by virtue of the fact that he had deep ties to virtually all aspects of the canyon scene, including the Laurel Canyon musicians, the Manson Family, the Vito Paulekas dance troupe, and the group of young Hollywood actors generally referred to as 'The Young Turks.'

Comment: Continue to part XIII

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Family

Best of the Web: Sociologist Says This Month's Family Murder-Suicides Only 'the Tip of the Iceberg'


PhysOrg
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:27 UTC
A family sociologist at the University at Buffalo says this month's murder-suicides involving a family of four in Ohio and a family of five in California may be "just the tip of the iceberg."

Sampson Blair, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at UB, says, "Family murder-suicide is still relatively uncommon, but I expect an increase in such incidents over the next few years because economic strain on families provokes depression and desperation."

He adds that family researchers have long pointed to how financial and occupational stressors can negatively impact the quality of family relationships.
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Einstein

Best of the Web: Belief in God 'childish,' Jews not chosen people: Einstein letter


Agence France-Presse
Tue, 13 May 2008 10:09 UTC

Comment: References to the letter Einstein wrote in regards to religion and the Jewish people, though published in the mainstream media during May of last year, appear more pertinent now than ever before, in view of Israel's crimes committed in Gaza.


Albert Einstein
© Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday.

The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.

As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".
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Snowman

Best of the Web: Despite the hot air, the Antarctic is not warming up

Christopher Booker
Telegraph.co.uk
Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:40 UTC
Antarctica
© alaska-in-pictures.comBlue Antarctica Icebergs
A deeply flawed new report will be cited ad nauseam by everyone from the BBC to Al Gore, says Christopher Booker.

The measures being proposed to meet what President Obama last week called the need to "roll back the spectre of a warming planet" threaten to land us with the most colossal bill mankind has ever faced. It might therefore seem peculiarly important that we can trust the science on which all the alarm over global warming is based, But nothing has been more disconcerting in this respect than the methods used by promoters of the warming cause over the years to plug some of the glaring holes in their scientific argument.

Another example last week was the much-publicised claim, contradicting all previous evidence, that Antarctica, the world's coldest continent, is in fact warming up, Antarctica has long been a major embarrassment to the warmists. Al Gore and co may have wanted to scare us that the continent which contains 90 per cent of all the ice on the planet is heating up, because that would be the source of all the meltwater which they claim will raise sea levels by 20 feet.

However, to provide all their pictures of ice-shelves "the size of Texas" calving off into the sea, they have had to draw on one tiny region of the continent, the Antarctic Peninsula - the only part that has been warming. The vast mass of Antarctica, all satellite evidence has shown, has been getting colder over the past 30 years. Last year's sea-ice cover was 30 per cent above average.
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Evil Rays

Best of the Web: A climate change reality check

Glen Meakem
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:02 UTC
global cooling
One year ago, I believed that man-made global warming was true, with temperatures rising dangerously due to increasing levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere.

I also believed that a consensus of the international scientific community supported these conclusions.

I based these beliefs on information from the popular press, television and political leaders.

Then I began some real research on the topic.

I quickly discovered three critical things:
  • First, the Earth has experienced significant warming over the past 18,000 years that has nothing to do with human activity.
  • Second, more recent temperature variations demonstrate that there is little or no correlation between levels of atmospheric CO2 and temperature.
  • And third, there is no "consensus" among scientists on climate change.
To understand the science of climate change, you must first know that very accurate historic temperature data going back thousands of years are available through analysis of dead corals in ocean sediments as well as ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica.

You must also understand what the Earth was like 18,000 years ago. Back then, our planet was at the peak of its most recent major ice age. At 18 degrees Celsius, average ocean surface temperatures were 5 degrees lower than they are today. Half of North America and Eurasia were covered by massive ice sheets thousands of feet thick and sea level was more than 400 feet lower than today. Then, the Earth began a dramatic warming and the ice age ended.
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Cult

Best of the Web: Holocaust Denied: The lying silence of those who know

John Pilger
Information Clearinghouse
Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:36 UTC
Gaza
© Fares Garabet
"When the truth is replaced by silence," the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, "the silence is a lie." It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia's incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.

They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, "Israel's right to exist." They know the opposite to be true: that Palestine's right to exist was canceled 61 years ago and the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel. They know, for example, that the infamous "Plan D" resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Jewish army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as "ethnic cleansing." Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon, "What shall we do with the Arabs?" Ben-Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, "made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said, 'Expel them'. The order to expel an entire population "without attention to age" was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world's most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker. The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapan Party co-leader Meir Ya'ari noted "how easily" Israel's leaders spoke of how it was "possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the roads with them because such is the imperative of strategy ... who remembers who used this means against our people during the [Second World] war ... we are appalled."
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