Tuesday Open Thread
It’s Tuesday and you should all be back into your regular routine again, right? It’s time for your open thread, time to chat about whatever you want.
Are you cold? Blame the Arctic Oscillation. The NYT environment blog DotEarth has the story. Look at this graph:
A big driver of the outbreaks of record cold and snow in many spots around the Northern Hemisphere is the little blue dot at the lower right-hand corner of the graph above, just above the year 2010. The chart shows the state of the Arctic Oscillation, a pattern of atmospheric pressure that has two phases, positive and negative (somewhat like the more familiar cycle of El Niño and La Niña in the Pacific). A strong negative or positive condition can powerfully influence weather around the northern half of the globe and the behavior of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean.
The blue dot shows an extraordinary negative plunge of the index in December, taking it below any such reading since at least 1950. (I ran a preliminary version of the chart in a recent post on sea ice trends, but now it’s been updated with the full month’s readings of atmospheric pressures.)
The religious right’s role in the draconian Ugandan anti-homosexuality laws is starting to get noticed by the mainstream press. From the New York Times:
Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks.
…
For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”
Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.
One month after the conference, a previously unknown Ugandan politician, who boasts of having evangelical friends in the American government, introduced the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which threatens to hang homosexuals, and, as a result, has put Uganda on a collision course with Western nations.
Gee, these guys didn’t really want you to kill gay people, they just wanted to blame them for all the world’s problems. They are so shocked that people believed them?
“I feel duped,” Mr. Schmierer said, arguing that he had been invited to speak on “parenting skills” for families with gay children. He acknowledged telling audiences how homosexuals could be converted into heterosexuals, but he said he had no idea some Ugandans were contemplating the death penalty for homosexuality.
“That’s horrible, absolutely horrible,” he said. “Some of the nicest people I have ever met are gay people.”
Tags: Open Thread
Hockey stick Mann’s New Year’s Surprise
American Thinker ^ | January 04, 2010 | Clarice Feldman
The Telegraph reports that Michael Mann of climategate’s Hockey Stick fame, received a surprise today, a notice to all his colleagues that there’s an effort to collect data on misuse of federal funds in his operation in an effort to mount a Federal False Claims Act suit:
Michael Mann – creator of the incredible Hockey Stick curve and one of the scientists most heavily implicated in the Climategate scandal – is about to get a very nasty shock. When he turns up to work on Monday, he’ll find that all 27 of his colleagues at the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University have received a rather tempting email inviting them to blow the whistle on anyone they know who may have been fraudulently misusing federal grant funds for climate research.
Under US law, regardless of whether or not a prosecution results, the whistleblower stands to make very large sums of money: it is based on a percentage of the total government funds which have been misused, in this case perhaps as much as $50 million. (Hat tip: John O’Sullivan of the wonderful new campaigning site http://www.climategate.com)
Ha, lizard. It’s not the Telegraph reports it’s a freaking blog on the Telegraph and a right-wing blog at that.
Please come with facts.
BTW, in general, The Telegraph is not known for its accurate scientific reporting.
Can we take a vote?
How many people here think lizard’s linkless cut and pasting (notice how he’s able to link when he wants to) is spam?
This is awesome, Pee-Wee’s back in his playhouse.
aye, Pandora… but i DO enjoy making fun of it… although my pledge to not respond to right wing psychos only lasted about 16 hours… 8 of which i was sleeping. but yes. lizard is a big old can of expired seasoned ham.
so i guess Paul Rubens is out of jail for the kid porn charges
The lack of links are less of an issue for me than the fact that RICO posts just plain wrong stuff. We debunk it routinely and he still comes back with more of that brain-dead wingnut crap. You’d think that he would get the clue that the only one here who gets anything from that idiocy is him. You’d think he would get the clue that there are blogs out there who would be delighted to share in his delusions. And as often as we embarrass this whack job, he comes back for more.
And I don’t think Reubens did time on the kid porn charges — I thought they dropped the felony charges. He did do time on the indecent exposure thing in FL, I think.
maybe he likes the abuse
thats right. he turned an XXX theater into his pee-wee’s playhouse.
Though I’m not going to search for pee-wee and kiddie porn here at work, my recollection was that the charges were dropped.
Also, I don’t think he served time for his public display of self-affection.
Though not a fan of using Wikipedia as a resource, here is the info on Paul Reubens’ 2002 arrest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Reubens#Pornography_arrest:_2002
haha. I forgot that Principal Rooney was also involved in that…. Beuler….Beuler…
New bits o’rug from the Carpet Mart. Hope Delaware’s economy doesn’t depend on my disposable income.
Actually, just reporting what one thinks is a misuse of Federal funds does not entitle the “whistleblower” to a reward. There has to be proof that leads to prosecution, otherwise, I’d be a very, very rich retired Federal employee by now.
I’m sure the deniers are ready with thousands of nuisance lawsuits.
Don’t know why I’m wearing the Santa hat again in my avatar. Oh well, Merry Christmas to all.
I don’t see it, but maybe it’s Eastern Orthodox Santa Nemski?
Forgot to add – there also has to be a recovery of funds for any reward to a whistleblower. I think the Gecko would have better odds at playing Powerball.
Really Joe Wilson? Rep. Joe “You Lie” Wilson is hiking with an intern. No joke.
Write your own joke here.
John Atkins proposing “chemical castration.”
ROTFL. An intern who is still giving her high-school credits. lol