BBC abandons “deformed, rapist Pope” ballet November 28, 2009
No, that’s not a headline from the Onion.
From the TimesOnline, via Fox News, this is how the BBC decides to say “Merry Christmas” to Catholics (emphasis mine):
But it wasn’t until the production premiered at Sadler’s Wells that the BBC discovered that one of the acts, Eternal Damnation To Sancho And Sanchez by Javier de Frutos, centres on a group of “horny” priests and a fictional hunchback Pope, who rapes eunuchs and pregnant nuns. The act prompted boos from the Sadler’s Wells audience and a number of walk-outs.
I applaud the audience for booing and walking out. We aren’t called on to take this. Of course, this is attempted because Rome does not issue fatwas. They wouldn’t even conceive of doing something like this for, say, Mohammed and Islam. Would the BBC dare produce a ballet about a deformed rapist imam? I think not.
What sick mind thought this passed for “art”?
Happy Thanksgiving November 25, 2009
It’s 9:15 in the morning here. I have a hamperful of laundry to do, a floor to scrub, and a carpet to vacuum before I pick up Dave from work. We’re not hosting this year, but I like to have my house clean at the holidays. And Friday is Christmas tree day, so I need to get this place in shape today.
Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays. All the food, the warmth, the lack of presents, and the concept of giving thanks make it really meaningful. I have so much to be thankful for, things that a lot of people seem to take for granted these days, that it’d take a hundred posts to articulate my gratitude.
All I can say is “Thanks be to God” for all the blessings I have in my life.
May you and yours have a blessed Thanksgiving. See you next week!
Climategate spin November 25, 2009
The environmental tyrants on the left are not happy. They are not happy that the veil has been lifted and their crusade to control many aspects of your lives has been based on fraudulent science.
So unhappy in fact, that the spin has begun. Granted, this is a comment from one person, but expect the same sort of defense of these hacked e-mails from the Al Gore sycophants. From the Boston Globe, writes commenter Veritas (scroll through to comment #188) (emphasis mine):
Most of these posts are so delusional. It’s being reported that the “hacked emails” supposedly discrediting the work of East Anglian climatologists were planted by a right-wing conspiracy funded by GOP shadow corporations. Bush, Cheney and their cronies will do anything to discredit global warming so they can all keep getting rich from the irresponsible burning of fossil fuels. True leaders like Presidents Gore and Obama are trying to save the globe from devastation at the hands of solipsistic and unprincipled right-wing extremists who appeal to the lowest common denominator of human intelligence, which is very much on display in these posts.
It’s funny. Until you realize people like Veritas vote…
Another reason to homeschool November 25, 2009
Via RightWingNews (warning: GRAPHIC CONTENT):
Quoting from RightWingNews (warning: GRAPHIC CONTENT, emphasis mine):
In the video below you will see the mother of a Massachusetts public school student, an 11 year old girl. The mother is testifying before the “Joint Education Committee in support of the David Parker Parents Rights Bill (H406 – written by MassResistance) and against the Planned Parenthood compulsory sex-ed / homosexuality / abortion counseling bill (H3434) – both of which would affect children in the public schools.”
The mother describes her daughter coming home from school, being troubled by a homework assignment and discussing it with her. The assignment was to draw an erect, ejaculating penis.
The girl was 11. According to MassResistance, the sole response from the left leaning committee was to ask if the mother was informed of the content.
It’s all about control! November 25, 2009
How many times do I have to say this, people?
Repeat it with me: It’s. All. About. Control. Continue saying this until it sinks in.
What am I talking about, you ask?
Well, the recent news that scientists who supported the theory of antrhopogenic global warming “climate change” were working in collusion with one another to manipulate data, hide from the public, and blacklist skeptics seems to have not reached the ears of our political masters in Washington DC.
First, a recap, from James Delingpole at the Telegraph via Michelle Malkin (emphasis mine):
When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”. These alleged emails – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists pushing AGW theory – suggest:
Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.
One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:
“In an odd way this is cheering news.”
But perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:
Manipulation of evidence:
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….
And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority…
Long and short of it: they lied. They knew they were lying. The world has not been in a warming pattern since the late 1990s or early 2000s. This involves scientists and others both in England and here in the US (including John Holdren) making a coordinated, orchestrated effort to perpetuate the myth that mankind is harming the planet.
Yet President Obama and our political leaders are determined to pass cap-and-trade and work into some American-soverignity-destroying agreement in Copenhagen. Rush Limbaugh talked about this today (via transcript) (emphasis mine):
The president of the United States, in an internationally televised press conference, says, “We gotta move further and we gotta get closer to Copenhagen with a working agreement. We gotta confront climate change.” …
It’s a hoax! It’s a fraud! There is no climate change. There is no global warming. There never has been any manmade global warming. How else can it be said? And now he continued another portion of his opening remarks at the presser today…
OBAMA: To that end, Prime Minister Singh and I made important progress today. We reaffirmed that an agreement in Copenhagen should be comprehensive and cover all the issues under negotiation. We resolved to take significant national mitigation actions that will strengthen the world’s ability to combat climate change. We agreed to stand by these commitments with full transparency through appropriate processes as to their implementation. All this builds on the progress that we made in Beijing and it takes us one step closer to a successful outcome in Copenhagen.
Copenhagen seeks to develop an international treaty on climate change. One that will soak America for millions of tax dollars to redistribute to the rest of the world. One that will hamper our quality of life to combat a problem that does NOT exist!
Cap-and-trade will, in Obama’s own words, cause electricity rates to “skyrocket.” Two, three, four, five times what you’re paying now. Not only to power and heat your home, but to fuel your car, but to buy things like clothing and food because there are manufacturing/shipping costs associated with the production of material goods. All of that will go up exponentially under cap-and-trade. If you’re fortunate enough to have a job in the aftermath, will your salary go up two, three, four, five times what it is today to cover the difference in costs? And don’t even get me started on the 199% increase in health insurance premiums we face under Obamacare.
In short, it should be glaringly obvious to anyone with a brain that Obama does not care about science, or economics, or the well-being of the American people.
His agenda, and his administration, are oriented to one goal and one goal alone: to implement socialism in the United States via fiat.
To tax and price the middle income bracket of our nation into poverty, thus forcing a majority of Americans to rely on government benevolence for everything from medical care to food to housing to utilities and other basic necessities. He’s laying the groundwork for this massive socialistic overhaul of the United States as we speak.
He’s the man who’s Chief of Staff – Rham Emmanuel – has said to never let a good crisis go to waste. What is a better crisis than telling people the world will be destroyed unless we start living our lives like it’s the 18th century? What better way to exercise control over people’s bodies and lives by enacting legislation that gives the government – in the interest of the “common good” the ability to control what you eat, how you exercise, how many children you can have, where and how you can travel, and how you heat/cool or build your home.
Wake up. Please.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. The evidence lefties relied on and pointe to for years in their hysterical pursuit of environmental legislation has been debunked. We have the proof in our hands that global warming climate change data was falsified and intentionally so in order to push a clearly partisan political agenda. An agenda that gives governments massive amounts of control over the lives of its citizens.
Did you know Britain was considering annual carbon allowances for its citizens?
Did you know that environmental hardliners advocate forced abortions, mass sterilizations, and mandatory contraception to control populations? And this guy works in the Obama administration.
Did you know the Copenhagen agreement is really a backdoor way to distribute American wealth to other nations, as a sort of atonement for our success? That we’ll lose American sovereignty (good bye, Constitution!) to nations hostile to our laws and way of life?
The stuff they based all these tyrannical policies on has been shown to be a lie. A big, fat lie. BUT THEY DO NOT CARE.
Copenhagen should be canceled. John Holdren should be fired. Cap and tax should be buried as legislation. But they’re all alive and kicking and hellbent on destroying our lives.
And people voted for Obama because they believed him to be some gracious centrist. They were stupid. Obama fooled them. And now we’re all going to pay the price.
Don’t pretend this is “justice” or “equality” or somehow noble and good. It is a disaster.
On the bright side, people realize what a total disaster Obama is:
And only 38% of people approve of Obamacare.
Still, this doesn’t seem enough to convince Obama he’s not our benevolent dictator, but elected to carry out the promises he made last year and an obligation to listen to the American people when they decide they don’t like legislation that will impact us for years, decades, to come.
Is doing that above Obama’s paygrade?
Global Warming an orchestrated hoax? November 23, 2009
So it seems. What are the odds this won’t stop Obama from trying to pass cap-n-tax, thus causing utility rates to “skyrocket”?
Pajamas Media has the story. Here are the pertinent graphs:
Late on the night of of November 19, news broke on PJM and elsewhere that a large amount of data had been stolen from one of the major climate research institutions by an unknown hacker and made available on the Internet. The institution is the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, home institution for Dr Phil Jones and one of the world’s centers of research into anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or “climate change.”
The hackers released about 172 megabytes of data, and we can be sure examining it closely will take some time. But after a few days, certain things are beginning to become clear.
- The data appears to be largely, perhaps entirely, authentic.
- The emails are incendiary.
- The implications shake the scientific basis for AGW, and the scientific reputations of some of AGW’s major proponents, to their roots
Let’s look at the files and emails first. (For a running list of the interesting emails, see Bishop Hill’s list.) As I wrote earlier, you have to be really careful with this sort of thing, because it would only require salting a few really inflammatory fakes through a collection of otherwise real emails to make a convincing hoax (think Rathergate.) But since the data first came out, a number of the emails have been corroborated by recipients, and none of them have been refuted. So, at least tentatively, I think we need to accept them as authentic.
If we do accept them as authentic, though, they truly are incendiary. They appear to reveal not one, not two, but three real scandals, of increasing importance.
- The emails suggest the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO2-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists who published skeptical information.
- The emails suggest that the authors manipulated and “massaged” the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO2-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question.
- The emails suggest that the authors co-operated (perhaps the word is “conspired”) to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK.
This is interesting and, if true (and I suspect it is), a damning indictment of how dishonest the Al Gores of the world have been in trying to alter our lives under the guise of “saving the planet.”
Don’t blame me November 23, 2009
If you become addicted to this website.
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/
It’s dedicated to good cakes, and “when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong.”
As a hobbyist cake baker/decorator, this stuff fascinates me. If I’d known about this 10 years ago, I might have gone to pastry school rather than college.
Kennedy barred from Communion November 23, 2009
Good. It’s about time a bishop called pro-abortion politicians on the carpet.
Providence Bishop Thomas J. Tobin has forbidden Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy to receive the Roman Catholic sacrament of Holy Communion because of his advocacy of abortion rights, the Rhode Island Democrat said Friday.
“The bishop instructed me not to take Communion and said that he has instructed the diocesan priests not to give me Communion,” Kennedy said in a telephone interview.
Kennedy said the bishop had explained the penalty by telling him “that I am not a good practicing Catholic because of the positions that I’ve taken as a public official,” particularly on abortion. He declined to say when or how Bishop Tobin told him not to take the sacrament. And he declined to say whether he has obeyed the bishop’s injunction.
I have no sympathy for cafeteria Catholics who are publicly shamed for their views. This is not a matter of simple sin – everyone does that. This is a matter of people, especially high-profile people, calling themselves Catholics, making full use of the Sacraments, while supporting an intrinsically evil act like abortion.
The penalty for such behavior is, ultimately, excommunication. Make that formal, public, affirmed excommunication. People excommunicate themselves when they persist in sining gravely.
Our next recourse November 21, 2009
Well, much like Congress, the Senate is giving the American people the collective finger as it passes Reid’s 2,000-plus nightmare of a “health care” bill.
Gone will be choice (except for abortion, you’ll still get to choose that – and folks like me will have to foot the bill!), competition, cost, and effective treatment of any kind.
So what is our next step?
We could wait until 2010. We could also get the ball rolling on recall petitions. Maybe we won’t get them done in time for the mid-terms. But even getting enough signatures to proceed would send a very clear message: listen to us, and you’re screwed. Obama can’t create special cabinet positions or czarships for all the Dems likely to be booted next November.
I know the odds are against us. No Congressman has ever been recalled in the history of the United States. But, then again, they weren’t so blatantly thwarting the will of the American people.
From HotAir:
The 18 states allowing for recall are as follows: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin.
A website or a phone campaign are good ways to get your petition going. Going door-to-door is also an option although it is more time consuming than the other two. This is important since you only have a set number of days to obtain the correct number of signatures—anywhere from 30 to 180 days.
You will be fighting an uphill battle to recall a U.S. Senator. No member of Congress has ever been recalled in the history of the United States.
Let’s see what we can do.
They won’t listen to us, then we will put them into positions where they don’t have to. No Democrat should ever be elected to an office higher than local dog catcher ever again.
