Government snowplow

Documentaries don't have to be factual to win an Oscar

I guess documentaries do not have to be factual to win an Oscar. If you had any doubt as to how politicized the Academy has become, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth winning an Oscar for best documentary feature should put an end to that.

Liberals love leaps of logic when it comes to global warming

In a letter to the editor on Saturday, Patricia Katterhenry, of Wapakoneta, Ohio, takes me to task for criticizing an Ohio State University geologist for his crazy leaps of logic. In case you didn't read the column (found here), geologist Lonnie Thompson basically ignores the scientific method. His data indicate that tropical glaciers in South America are melting faster than they were a few years ago so humans must be causing global warming.

My point in mentioning the geologist is to point out the fallacy of the argument that humans are causing global warming. The only scientific conclusions a rational scientist can possibly make from Thompson's data is that the ice in South America is melting at a faster rate than it has in the very recent past. There is no evidence to support a reason and certainly no evidence that human activity is causing the global temperature to increase and the ice to melt faster. That is a stupendous leap of logic. And, given the vast age of the Earth, Thompson data of a few years are simply meaningless for drawing any conclusions.

Katterhenry also makes claims that the world's scientists are all in lockstep in agreeing that global warming is occuring and that it is caused by human activity. This is far from the truth. The global warming crowd simply spends more time and effort scaring people than they do actually conducting science. Meanwhile, many scientists believe the whole idea that human activity is causing global warming is hogwash and their arguments are much more convincing that some melting ice in South America.

So, Ms. Katterhenry, who would you rather believe: scientists without an agenda or liberal activists and politicians who engage in the politics of scaremongering?

Did you know?

I know I have been less than active on this blog the last two weeks, but sometimes life and work has a way of interferring. Hopefully that will change this week.

In the meantime, here is a video worth watching. It is about six minutes long. I have not taken the time to verify the veracity of all the statements made, but it seems probable and it is very plausible.

If you are having trouble with the above video box, you can view or save the file from http://www.lucente.org/didyouknow.wmv.

Enjoy.

[COLUMN] Melting ice is not a revelation

Those who foolishly believe in human-induced climate change seem incapable of grasping a simple fact: ice melts.

One such person is geologist Lonnie Thompson, an Ohio State University researcher with the university’s Byrd Polar Research Center.

Thompson told The Associated Press for a story last week that he is concerned because the world’s glaciers are melting at an increased pace. Compared to what? Forty years ago? A century ago? The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The data Thompson has collected are all but useless for making any kind of conclusion.

Unfortunately, Thompson has been crying wolf for many years about the melting ice in Peru.

In 2001, he told Popular Science magazine that the ice melting is proof that humans are causing global warming. Of course, the only thing his research proves is that tropical glaciers are melting. Nothing more. Any other claims have no basis in fact, are unprofessional leaps of logic, and have no place in the scientific community.

Of course the glaciers are disappearing. These glaciers have been melting for centuries. When an ice age ends, the glaciers melt. And we just recently, geologically speaking, left an ice age.

Still, climate change activists like to forget the facts that dispute their silly claims.



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Anna Nicole Smith's baby

Ok, I have a confession.

I am the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby.

Just send me her inheritance, please (money order, no checks).

Thought I would jump on the bandwagon. I didn't want to be the only man in America not claiming paternity.

[COLUMN] ID law tramples liberty, privacy

“Papers, please”

When I hear those words, I cannot help but think of all those World War II movies where the hero is in Nazi Germany and a German soldier conducts random checks, asking for everyone’s identification papers.

In 15 months from today, however, those scenes may be coming to a street corner near you, thanks to the Real ID Act of 2005.

Several years ago, the U.S. Congress passed a military spending bill that President Bush signed into law on May 11, 2005. Attached to this bill was a pernicious little proposal called the Real ID Act. The bill was passed and signed into law without a single debate in the U.S. Senate.

For many years, some lawmakers were unsuccessfully pushing for a national identification card. The movement took on new life following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Still, Americans were leery of the idea of a national ID card.

So U.S. Rep. Frank J. Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., knowing his Real ID Act would not stand a chance under even the slightest scrutiny or debate, slipped this anti-American provision into a bill funding our military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, a bill that was guaranteed to pass.



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[COLUMN] More garbage from U.N. climate panel

The United Nations, with help from the U.S. government and herds of squawking liberals, has long perpetrated a major hoax on the people of the world. And on Friday, Groundhog Day, that ludicrous body took the next step in the fraud when it released its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The report claimed that human beings are behind the catastrophic climate change that is sure to beset the planet in the future.

Ironically, we all know that meteorologists cannot predict the weather with any certainty even a week away, yet we suspend all disbelief when they tell us what the average global temperature will be 50 or 100 years from now. Heck, even determining the current global temperature can be somewhat elusive.

Nor is the record amassed by climate scientists very good. Was it not just 25 years ago when the world’s climate scientists were equally convinced that we were heading into a period of global cooling, perhaps even another ice age?



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