BigCityLib Strikes Back

Random Sunday Notes

2009-11-22T16:41:00.005-05:00

1) Its November 22 and I'm wearing sandals. Thank you El Nino. Pity about all those droughts in Australia.

2) Longos has the best samples of any major grocery store. When my wife and I shop there on Sunday's we call it going out for lunch. You can usually get two or three helpings before they recognize you and start asking questions. Then you just switch to a fake foreign accent. For example:

Q: Have you ever been to Yale?
A: I have. I yust got out.

Today's special was Spanish Blue Cheese, in which they employ a totally different species of fungus from the lame Gorgonzola shit! Awesome!

3) Wimmun: you can't live with 'em, you can't kill 'em. Although who can really blame her? I do disagree with all the stuff about Dion being more competent. But yes indeed Iggy has sucked the past couple of months. No hiding the fact. But why trumpet it? Given the timing of the post, I wonder if alcohol wasn't involved. Don't get drunk and go Facebooking, crazy lady!

Warman Takes Aim

2009-11-22T06:31:00.001-05:00

...at CanWest and Walker Morrow, after a story in a local paper went CanWest wide. You can read the details at Walker's place, but here's the apology Cowichan Valley Citizen eventually published:

On October 9th, 2009 the Cowichan Valley Citizen published a column titled "Questionable conduct of CHRC". In this column, it was alleged that investigations were begun, not only by the RCMP, but by the Privacy Commissioner as well, and a Parliamentary Review of the CHRC's activities was conducted.

In publishing the column it was not made clear that these statements referred to the CHRC and not Mr. Warman. Further, that the criminal investigation had concluded without charges being laid and that the Privacy Commissioner determined that no breach of the Privacy Act occurred and that the privacy complaint was "not well-founded".

The column also referred to a "conflict of interest" and"corruption". It was not the intent of the Cowichan Valley Citizen that these statements be regarded as factual or refer to Richard Warman. The Cowichan Valley Citizen has no evidence that Richard Warman was in a conflict of interest, corrupt or subject to a criminal investigation or an investigation by the Privacy Commission.

The Cowichan Valley Citizen hereby wholly and unreservedly apologizes to Mr. Warman and regrets any embarrassment this column may have caused Mr. Warman.

Given the howlers in the origonal article (which I won't link to), you have to think that the Citizen is publishing just anything that's put in front of them.

Tells you about the state of CanWest papers these days.

Speechies are offering moral support in the comments, but little in the way of cash for legal fees, and at the moment Walker seems intent on going down fighting in the name of Freedom.

MP Maurice Vellacott: Saskatoon Doctors Should Be Commended For Reducing The Availability of Abortion Services

2009-11-21T08:40:00.001-05:00

“The bottom line is that the decline in the availability of abortion services is directly linked to a growing commitment to the medical evidence of what abortion does and how abortion negatively impacts the lives of women. Saskatoon’s doctors should be commended for the leadership they are showing by reducing the availability of abortion in our city...."

From a news release posted to his website last evening. I guess this begs the question: are Saskatoon Doctors inappropriately imposing their moral values on their patients? Both the original Star Phoenix article and Vellacott's congratulatory press release suggest that this is the case.

And another nice quote:

Pro-life feminists have also come to see abortion as part of a male agenda to have women more sexually available.

Just three points off a majority, folks.

The First In A Series?

2009-11-21T07:28:00.002-05:00

Wildrose Alliance "strategist" Stephen Carter on Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach's Ukranian accent:

"Just saw da premier making a speech. Dat was quite a speech. Dem media better report it right."

...a tweet for which he has since apologized.

Ms. Smith can come off looking and sounding more or less normal, but when you get to the lower echelons, when The Wildrose Alliance start wheeling out nominees, they will, mark my words, have problems with teh crazy. Chandler and the separatists and the wall builders are still out there, waiting for their time to howwwl!

Liberal Propaganda...

2009-11-20T16:07:00.000-05:00

...but true enough. Tim Hudak will complain about the HST, but should he win office, will do nothing to reverse it. The NDP own this issue, provincially and federally, as I've argued previously.

RealClimate On CRU Hack

2009-11-20T13:13:00.000-05:00

...more particularly, on Phil Jones' "trick":

No doubt, instances of cherry-picked and poorly-worded “gotcha” phrases will be pulled out of context. One example is worth mentioning quickly. Phil Jones in discussing the presentation of temperature reconstructions stated that “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) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem”–see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.

CRU Hacked

2009-11-20T09:06:00.002-05:00

...secret lives of climate scientists spilled! And they really are as boring as you thought!

The story so far: Russian hackers have recently broken into the computers at University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) and posted files containing private emails between any number of well-known climate researchers. The usual suspects are claiming that the emails show massive malfeasance! the scientific fraud of the millennium! a Marxist conspiracy! and so on and so forth. I have looked a some of the material (from a honking big 62 meg .zip file) but won't link to it here because it has been obtained illegally and I'm not quite sure what the legality of a link would be. From the random sample I've read (there are literally thousands of emails and hundreds of .doc and other files), you find climate scientists to-ing and fro-ing over various issues, being a bit bitchy, and saying mean things about folks like McIntyre. Very thin gruel for a massive conspiracy theory, just because there's so much good stuff they've missed. For example, there is no .txt file of the daily prayer to Gore the Fat, no emails re the meeting I personally arranged between prominent alarmists and the leaders of the Homo Sexual Agenda (now that was a weird night!), and none of the interminable discussions that have taken place concerning the difficulty these days of finding a virgin to sacrifice to Gaia.

Probably the worst bit, from an optics point of view (certainly its the thing being waved around by the denialist crowd) is a 10 year old email from Phil Jones:

From: Phil Jones
To: ray xbxxxey ,mann@[snipped], mxxes@[snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.bxxxfa@[snipped],t.xxxrn@[snipped]

Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. 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 [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers, Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit

The denialists are keying on the term "trick" and the phrase "to hide the decline". It turns out that in the email Jones is discussing methods of "splicing" (if thats the correct term) instrumental data to proxy records. He explains as follows:

"No, that’s completely wrong. In the sense that they’re talking about two different things here. They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered – but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years."

Jones told TGIF he had no idea what me meant by using the words "hide the decline".

"That was an email from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?"

So there you have it.

Your Daily Nazi: Tories And Nazis

2009-11-19T10:45:00.001-05:00

Kinsella gives a half-dozen good reasons that the Harper Conservatives should eschew the "anti-Semitism" card. Here's another more recent one: Edmonton MP James Rajotte making all nicey with white nationalist Glenn Bahr.

Guy's Got A Point

2009-11-19T09:10:00.002-05:00

Charlie Angus, after calling for a ban on twitter in the HOC, defends himself against the media blowback on Facebook:

Kady O’Malley calls me draconian. The National Post says I’m a luddite. It’s all over my comments that MP twitter posts lie between the banal and the inane. Have no fear national media — your ability to read what Carolyn Bennett eats for breakfast will not be shut down. I only wish I could have gotten this national uproar over the crisis being faced by children in Attawapiskat who are sleeping in tents tonight.

My two cents: I hate twitter but am enjoying the rank chaos it has engendered in the HOC.

Will B'nai Brith ReFeed Teh Crazy?

2009-11-19T06:45:00.001-05:00

Well, they say they're going to.

Canadians welcome anti-radical Islam ad, B’nai Brith vows more to come

One hopes this is just butt-covering bluster designed to facilitate a retreat from this travesty of demagoguery and sub-standard graphic design. If BB does decide to run further inflammatory adverts, one can only hope they make them less like the kind of thing a teenage punk-band might produce with glue-sticks, scissors, and a cheap photocopier.

Talk to them about that, Harry Abrams.

The Ballad Of Dean del Mastro

2009-11-18T16:01:00.000-05:00

...by the best band you've never heard of.

Toronto Sun Staff Exit The Propertied Class

2009-11-18T08:39:00.001-05:00

...become renters. Will their coverage lurch left?

Looks like the sale of 333 King St. is nearing completion. Going forward, The Sun will lease back a portion of the building from its new owners. Six floors of newspaper will be crammed onto one. Staff will lose free parking, their cafeteria, and their printing presses. They are being advised to keep warm in winter by "running around in circles". They will be sharing the building with other commercial entities, including a laundromat and a paint-ball facility. No word on the purchaser, but the phrase "Sharia finance" comes up in the official sales docs on several occasions. Will traditional head-gear become a union issue when the next contract rolls around?

Your Daily Nazi: Aryan Guard Behind Calgary Vandalism?

2009-11-18T06:59:00.000-05:00

ARC has some suggestive (though not conclusive) evidence that they might be. Meanwhile, stills from a video-tape of the incident have been released here.

Tory Stimulus Becomes Weirdly Self-Referential

2009-11-18T06:38:00.000-05:00

Kinsella finds Canadian Action Plan signage announcing "installation of interior/exterior signage". So stimulus money is apparently being spent on erecting signs announcing the spending of stimulus money. How strange to be a Canadian, these days.

Dykstra UnRepentant

2009-11-17T14:10:00.003-05:00

...re the now infamous picture of him on his blackberry during Remembrance Day Ceremonies:

The picture is fine, actually. It shows me on my BlackBerry, looking serious and intent. What they didn't tell you though, is what I was actually typing. As some of you know, I live-blog events and happenings to my website. That's what I was doing here.

The purpose of writing about these events is to give folks who aren't able to attend the chance to get a feeling for what transpired. It also gives people a chance to see what is transpiring through my eyes as the MP.

[...]

I'm going to keep using the picture, though. I think it's kind of neat actually, me looking contemplative and serious while writing a tribute to our veterans and the municipal politicians who succeeded in their effort to honour them.

Well, since the picture and post didn't appear until 2:53 PM that day anyhow, I don't see why Mr. Dykstra couldn't have waited until after the ceremony to write it up. Would you live-blog your own wedding, for example, or a funeral (unless it was Michael Jackson's, in which case you might)?

But I do agree he looks quite wonderful in the picture. Dark glasses really work on him. They make him look like a rock star. Maybe middle-period Van Morrison.

Make Sense Of That

2009-11-17T09:28:00.000-05:00

From No Apologies, where you get no apologies and not much in the way of logic either.

The APS Petition: Portrait Of The Denier As An Old Man

2009-11-17T06:43:00.001-05:00

John Mashey's career in computer science/programming-- especially his work on early operating systems for Bell Labs in the 1980s--is storied enough to warrant several brief wikipedia entries . However, his more recent efforts at tracing the sociological underpinnings of the climate change denialist movement have received far less attention.

Mashey's Science Bypass is a close analysis of the demographics and interlocking social networks of the men (and occasional woman) behind the APS (American Physical Society) petition, a recent attempt by a tiny sub-set of APS Members to have the Society revise its official policy statement on climate change to suggest that the basic science behind AGW is still in question. In examining the machinations behind this one effort, Mashey uncovers several interesting truths re the denialist movement in general.

Here are some of the highlights from his report.

The APS document serves as a fairly typical example of an anti-AGW petition. Usually, these originate in a free-market "think tank" like The Cato Institute (or in this case most likely The Heartland Institute) and serve a political rather than scientific purpose; specifically, serve to

...create impressive lists of names to help maintain an illusion of serious scientific disagreement for the public.

The chart below provides a quick history of the various petitions, events, and miscellaneous actions used to challenge arguments for (and more importantly, prevent action on) climate change. The red diamonds count as well-known, often long running petitions; the red squares are events like the Heartland Conference in NYC:

What becomes obvious from this chart is that these kinds of petitions, and other forms of denialist activity, tend to spike "whenever the US Government might actually do something meaningful" on the issue. So the first petitions (Leipzig Declaration, OISM) appear between the founding of the IPCC and the signing of the Kyoto accord, and within the past year or so there has been a frenzy of activity, designed to score political points in the lead-up to Copenhagen and in advance of action on Waxman-Markey in the U.S. House and Senate.

In contrast, official IPCC reports (shown as blue circles) proceed on a schedule relatively unconnected to events in the political landscape.

The next chart, comparing the demographic profile of signatories to the APS petition vs APS members as a whole, reveals the denialist movment's dirtiest little secret.

Of the APS petition signers, 86% were born before 1950, as compare to mere 40% of the APS membership as a whole. I've touched on this point before--and of course it is always possible that good scientific work can be done late in life--but the fact is that the denialist movement is basically filled with old men who have either retired or are at the very end of their careers, and in almost all cases these careers were in fields well distant from anything related to climate science. To suppose that APS signatories have a relevant contribution to make to the AGW debate is akin to imagining that Wayne Gretzky could have hung up his hockey skates circa 1997 and become a successful NFL linebacker. Not impossible, in other words but highly unlikely.

Finally, Mashey was able to track the political donations of 47 of the petition's American signers. His result

...shows a strong skew towards the Republican Party and Republican Presidential candidates (McCain or Bush).

Unfortunately, it was not possible to replicate this table for the small contingent of Canadians on the APS petition. However, given the connections between the Canada-based Friends Of Science (who have their produced their own petitions/open letters and etc.) and the Conservative Party of Canada via, among others, Conservative activist Barry Cooper, one would suspect a similar tilt towards the right side of the political spectrum among Canadian deniers.

And, oh yes, in November of this year the American Physical Society overwhelmingly rejected the petition's proposal to replace the Society's 2007 Statement on Climate Change with a version that raised doubts about global warming.

Words Fail Me

2009-11-16T12:51:00.003-05:00

This is supposed to have been taken in Mumbai,but the gal left is (I am sure) Andrea Martin, so I suspect our Leader hasn't even left Canada, but is at a secret location taping some kind of SCTV reunion special.

Probably The Least Sexxxy Picture Of Harper EVER

2009-11-16T07:24:00.001-05:00

I take it back. No Majority for you, dorky boy.

PS. Now, the two guys with him...they are veritable monsters of sexxxiness.

In Which We Assist Mr. Kramp.

2009-11-15T10:12:00.001-05:00

What Mr. Kramp said the radio said:

What the radio said:

Kramp, as if to highlight the urban-rural divide, issued a statement on his Twitter account, saying he was feeling sorry for himself, since many of his friends are in hunting camps this week, his son-in-law had just bagged a bear, and he was in Ottawa [debating Bill C-391].

You stay classy, Daryl Kramp.

Probably The Sexxxiest Picture Of Stephen Harper That There Is

2009-11-15T06:13:00.000-05:00

...because he's got that supermodel-on-the-cat-walk "I know you want me, I don't want you" look in his eyes.

If he's going to go around looking like this (though frankly he could still afford to lose a few lbs--is that his gut or is he smuggling fertilizer?) I don't know what the point of voting Lib could possibly be. We got nothing policy-wise. If we lose our edge in sexxxiness we're truly fucked.

Can we get a nude shot of Gerard Kennedy here, or Pablo Rodriguez, or at least Ruby Dhalla? I'm losing faith.

The Globe Gets Smaller

2009-11-14T17:18:00.000-05:00

h/t

Just A Reminder Re That Hidden Agenda

2009-11-14T13:13:00.000-05:00

Jim Flaherty at a Defend Marriage rally, probably in 2004 or 2005, bashing the concept of Same Sex Marriage.

Colby ("The Unshaven") Cosh Gone

2009-11-13T13:32:00.006-05:00

I was going to write about Mr. Cosh's desperate need of a shave, but now I would probably feel bad about it. Good luck Mr. Cosh. Sorry for always spelling your name with an "a".

Source.

Discover Canada

2009-11-13T06:50:00.000-05:00

Wow! The terrorists won't know what hit 'em! And all other new immigrants will suddenly want to vote Conservative! But wait! I've read through the history section twice. What about the Beothuk?