A Day Late and a Dollar Short for Fort Hood, but...

For all the times that the Americans drop the ball and fail to prevent things, occasionally they get the payback thing right.

Just a few days ago, the pen pal of Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter that killed 14 and wounded dozens more, scoffed at the effectiveness of American intelligence and military power.  The US delivered its own message to Anwar al-Awlaki (also spelled Aulaqi by some sources) in its raids on an al-Qaeda leadership meeting that left 30 dead, including the cleric that some believe played an operational role in 9/11:

Gotta love those airstrikes.  From a technical standpoint I'm curious what they hit this meeting with that had the punch to kill 30 of the bastards.  The Hellfire missle is the standard tool of the Predator and is ideal for taking out vehicles and even bunkers, as it was designed to kill tanks.  Given the part of the world the Yanks have lots of airbases and carriers within range, so this was likely an actual bomb.  Not too many problems of this sort that can't be solved with a 2000lb JDAM.

Awlaki claims that Hasan initiated the e-mail correspondence with a message on Dec. 17, 2008. “He was asking about killing U.S. soldiers and officers,” says Awlaki. “His question was is it legitimate [under Islamic law].”
The Al Jazeera questioner asks for confirmation that Hasan forwarded this query nearly a year before the shooting.
“Yes,” responds Awlaki. “I am astonished. Where was American intelligence that claimed once that it can read any car plate number anywhere in the world?”

 You appear to have your answer; not dead, just sleeping a lot.

Britain's no-longer-shocking decline continues apace.

This isn't the first time by a long shot that British courts have done this, but the incredible arrogance never ceases to enrage me.

JERUSALEM — Israel's prime minister on Tuesday called a British arrest warrant against the country's former foreign minister "an absurdity" and warned that attempts to prosecute Israeli officials for war crimes charges over last winter's Gaza offensive could harm relations between the two countries.

Could?  I'd yank my ambassador for something like this, but maybe I'm still cranky about fighting with City Hall over them extorting me on my property taxes.  No "maybe" about that in fact, but it makes this resonate even more:

Netanyahu rejected the notion that leaders and army officers "who defended our civilians bravely and morally against a despicable and brutal enemy could be branded war criminals. We firmly reject this absurdity."

The other side fires rockets from populated areas and YOU are the war criminal for shooting back?  Yes, that's the colour of the sky in a lot of the world these days.  In cases like this, what's important is what works,  and you will notice a lot less rocket attacks from Gaza since the IDF laid the smackdown on Hamas there.  I guess I'm a war criminal too; I'd better stay out of the U.K. in case they arrest me for agreeing with the Israelis.  I wish that sounded as far-fetched to me as it should, but:

Pro-Palestinian lawyers attempted earlier this year to invoke the "universal jurisdiction" law to arrest Gaza war mastermind Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, but his status as a Cabinet minister gave him diplomatic immunity.

In 2005, a retired Israeli general, Doron Almog, returned to Israel immediately after landing in London because he was tipped off that British police planned to arrest him. The warrant against Almog -- who oversaw the 2002 bombing of a Gaza home in which 14 people were killed along with a leading Palestinian militant -- was later cancelled.

Other Israeli leaders, including former military chief Moshe Yaalon and ex-internal security chief Avi Dichter, have also cancelled trips to Britain in recent years for the same reason.

   Hell, offer all the displaced persons in the Palestinian refugee camps British citizenship and send what's left of your martime resources to pick them up; that's where things are headed anyway.   I don't think I'll be renewing my Brit passport; I don't want to go down with the ship.  British history for me now ends at the outside in 1982, the last time a British government showed any backbone at all.  Lady Thatcher, I'm afraid that Britain is now a nation in headlong flight.  As a country these qualities are no longer to be seen:

Today we meet in the aftermath of the Falklands Battle. Our country has won a great victory and we are entitled to be proud. This nation had the resolution to do what it knew had to be done—to do what it knew was right.

The U.K. government really should rein these clowns in; an independant judiciary does not mean that you make a hash of international relations on behalf of narrow special-interest groups.  This is another example of democracies getting the governments they deserve.  I don't see any way out short of revolution, and I can't see THAT happening, despite abundant provocation.

It does seem that if you want to see the diametric opposite of what WILL be done by stupid, scared governments in the West, this blog continues to be a good resource.  That's all I can do for those who still care about making things work again.

Circling the drain in the Carbon Sink

The USA is finished, and the countdown to final collapse began Dec 7 2009 with the EPA ruling that CO2 is a pollutant meaning that it will have the power to regulate it.  The link I chose for that sentence is one from what is left of the U.S. industrial belt.  This will beat down their remaining industry with regulations, while jacking up energy costs in a country (like many others) that still gets much of it's power (49% or so in 2006) from coal plants.

So, to take this new announcement to it's logical conclusion, we have to eliminate everything that emits CO2, or regulate it.  How do you regulate forests?  Cut them down?  Crops?  Volcanoes?  In fact, this is bundled with some other gases, one being methane.  This covers all of our personal gaseous byproducts, and the cracks that are currently circulating are along the lines of "tax the air you breathe".

That's not far off, though for the time being they wouldn't try to impose personal exhalation limits.  I'm not sure it matters too much as the cost of EVERYTHING is tied to energy costs.  It will amount to a huge tax, and Obama has stated in the recent past that he intends to bankrupt anyone who wants to use coal.  Even now I'm not certain what all of these people think the end result of their plans to hobble Western industry will be.  It 's not like we can live on the beach all year; we need technology to support our large populations in sub-optimal climatic zones. Wrecking our industrial base will cripple our economy further, and there goes the financial surplus that feeds innovation.

The anarchists et al are crowing about the failure of Capitalism which brought much of the world (and especially the USA) to the current Great Recession.  They'll jump on any bandwagon that will crash the current political and economic systems, and they form the most radical wedge of the "green" movement.  In fact it was not a failure of capitalism that brought things here, but an excess of regulation and individual capitalists behaving badly.

Capitalism needs regulation for sure, but a light hand (safe labour practices, sensible environmental rules, not much else) gets the best results.  Making it more difficult to do business in North America will simply drive what is left of our wealth-producing (e.g. manufacturing) businesses overseas.   We need ideas that can work, and money to be spent to make them work.  Space-based solar power is inching closer to reality, and that is the direction things need to go.  This all takes money, and people need to remember that governments don't make any of it themselves.

While this is happening, the environmental intelligencia are in Copenhagen trying to reach agreements on how to rape the taxpayers of developed countries more with climate legislation.  The only sign of hope on that front is that they seem to be squabbling.  In this case doing nothing is the best possible thing, so the more of that that goes on the better for us.

Climategate and the true colours of the mainstream media.

I won't rehash in excruciating detail the leaked data from the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit, but the short version is that it gives convincing evidence of collusion and manipulation of data there to produce certain kinds of results. WUWT is the best source (though far from the only one) on this sort of thing so I'll direct you there for far more detail than I can process fully, let alone relate.

No, my real axe to grind here is with CTV and CBC. They are not alone, but they are local and the latter is supported by my tax dollars so I'll work them over first. It is only today (1 Dec 2009) that CBC is admitting that this information even exists and at that it is spinning like mad to discredit it. CTV has yet to touch it at all and they've heard from me about that already, much good may it do.

The basics of the whole thing are as follows: a couple of weeks ago persons unknown hacked into the CRU server and liberated a LOT of data. [Update: evidence is convincing that this was a leak, not a hack] Gobs of code from projects that have been run and most devastating, (as it's easier to understand by most people, myself included) hundreds of internal emails between the CRU researchers and affiliates showing them to be manipulating data and suppressing the truth about their sources.

They hid behind “freedom of information” laws (now THAT’s irony!), fabricated data and made models that didn’t fit the historical record, let alone accurately predict the present (then future). This article from the Telegraph says it all quite nicely:

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

So back to my point. The UK media can't avoid it completely as it happened in their back yard, but the North American media are doing their damnedest to ignore or suppress it. One has to wonder why. I can see these researchers and hangers-on who are stakeholders in the AGW machine, but the media has what exactly to gain by sitting on this? With the Copenhagen meetings on how to fleece Western societies and de-industrialize us completely about to take place there is room for a BIG media storm. That's the kind of climate change I'd like to see.