Millions Pray for Global Warming as Cold Spell Grips the Planet
Thursday, January 7, 2010
By Carey Roberts
For global warming protesters, the week was a total downer.
A University of Utah “scream-in” for the failed Copenhagen climate conference had to be iced, thanks to an errant December blizzard. Then faced with historic snowfalls in Europe, bicyclist Thaneite Khandekar cut short his global awareness trek. “There were times when my feet would be frozen,” a dejected Khandekar had to admit.
Meanwhile, newspapers in North America, Europe, and Asia warned readers of the deep freeze that lay ahead. In the United States, over 1,200 new records for cold and snow were set in a single week.
In Europe, the UK Telegraph warned readers of “one of the coldest winters in 100 years.” A jet careened off a snow-covered airport runway in Germany. And avalanches rumbled down the Swiss Alps.
The India Meteorological Department announced, “It could turn out to be the coldest Calcutta winter ever.” Traffic bedlam reined as Seoul, Korea struggled to cope with a foot of snow.
Meanwhile a dwindling number of climate alarmists struggled to keep the faith. “In the context of global warming, extreme atmospheric flows are causing extreme climate incidents to appear more frequently,” explained Mr. Guo, head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, as the Chinese capital dug out from its biggest snow dump since 1951.
While temperatures took a nosedive, the Climategate scandal continued to surge out of control like an El Niño-driven tidal wave.
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Control, reverted to damage-control mode. “It is a well-known fact that powerful vested interests and those opposed to action on climate change are working overtime to see that they can stall action for as long as possible,” he blustered.
And what of pesky rumors that Pachauri stood to take in millions if proposed fossil fuel surcharges took effect? “As for pecuniary benefits from advice that I may be rendering to profit making organisations, these payments are all made directly to my institute, without a single penny being received by me,” Pachauri explained with a straight face.
Former Director of the National Hurricane Center Neil Frank declaimed how Climategate “reveals how predetermined political agendas shaped science.”
Canadian climatologist Tim Ball laid much of the blame for the Climategate fiasco on a “Blind and Biased Mainstream Media.” And in the Canadian arctic, Inuit hunters report the polar bears are doing fine. Harry Flaherty, chairman of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board, says the bear population has become so, well, unbearable, that its numbers need to be trimmed.
No surprise, laws based on the fraudulent climate research came under fire as well.
In the U.S. Senate, President Obama’s signature “cap-and-trade” bill was shunted to the back burner. Six Georgia Congressmen charged the EPA’s emission regulations were based on “questionable and potentially fraudulent data.” In France the Constitutional Council KOed an impending national carbon tax as unconstitutional.
And come to think of it, where is Al Gore these days?
Following a disastrous Copenhagen speech where he predicted a polar melt-down within 5-7 years, the Guru of Global Apocalypse has been keeping a low profile. Nothing on his personal blog: http://blog.algore.com/ And at his ClimateProject.org, eco-speech requests for 2010 have petered off. At $100,000 a pop, corporations hit by a weak economy are having doubts about inviting the high-priced Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Meanwhile back in India, New Delhi remained under the grip of an intense cold wave. In the northern territories, 154 are reported dead from weather-related causes.
But hopefully the cold snap will end by next week.
Beginning January 14, millions of Hindus will congregate for the holy Kumbha Mela, the largest gathering of Hindus in the world. In attendance will be the renowned Naga Sadhus, members of a Hindu sect who parade through the streets unclothed.
Any guesses what the naked men’s mantra will be? Stop Global Warming.
Source:here
An interesting question: where is Al Gore? Nowhere to be found. I've never really bought into these end of the world theories. I remember back in the '80's Christians were saying that the world will end and the antichrist will reign in the '90's. If you consider Clinton to be the antichrist then you are right otherwise it didn't happen. They said that the year 2000 will usher in the second coming of Christ and that is certainly not the case. In the '90's they said the year 2000 will result in computer crashes,money being lost from bank records and that the nuclear missles will fire on their own thus bring an end to the world. Guess what? Y2K was accompanied by a whisper not a thunderbolt because nothing happened. Now they are saying that 2012 the world will end,according to the Mayan calender and the Mayan calander goes up to 2012 and ends. What does that say? Maybe they had no concept of 2013. Is the Mayan calendar in sync with the Georgarian calender that we use? Is the 2012 in the Mayan calender the same as 2012 in the Geogarian calender. Then there is the Hebrew calendar and that too invites discussion. I'm a skeptic but after all that I've heard I have become one. What am I saying? See you on Jan. 1st 2013.
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Proofreading: the thing to do
And now a public service anouncement:
Proofreading is your friend
Proofreading is your friend
Embrace it.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Sharpton says something wrong;O'Reilly pissed
I was watching The O'Reilly Factor the other day and he had a quote from Al Sharpton that put O'Reilly and his show in a bad light. O'Reilly was pissed because of the inaccuracy of Sharpton's comment. O'Reilly said that only honest guests are allowed on his show and Sharpton has been on the factor a lot. O'Reilly is not the brightest bulb in the world and I think he sees the real Al Sharpton: the black racist that has it in for anyone not black and Sharpton himself is not the brightest bulb in the pack either or he is a liar. He doesn't stick up for nonblacks and just totally ignores them. He is an instigator that the world is better off without. Maybe O'Reilly sees the real Sharpton for once.
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Misquote
Irish student hoaxes world's media with fake quote
Irish student hoaxes world's media with florid but phony quote from dead French composer
Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press Writer
On Monday May 11, 2009, 12:07 pm EDT
Buzz up! Print DUBLIN (AP) -- When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version -- or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."
Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources -- none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.
If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source -- and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.
"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
"It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done, and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so," she wrote.
Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.
And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.
"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."
Guardian article on controversy, http://tinyurl.com/djqd8w
Soundtrack Geek blog on Jarre, http://tinyurl.com/d527zh
Wikipedia site criticizing itself, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism--of--Wikipedia
Source:here
This is a good example of why I don't trust wikipedia as anyone can add or subtract anything they want.
Irish student hoaxes world's media with florid but phony quote from dead French composer
Shawn Pogatchnik, Associated Press Writer
On Monday May 11, 2009, 12:07 pm EDT
Buzz up! Print DUBLIN (AP) -- When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.
His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.
The sociology major's obituary-friendly quote -- which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 -- flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India. They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia twice caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it.
A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud. So Fitzgerald told several media outlets they'd swallowed his baloney whole.
"I was really shocked at the results from the experiment," Fitzgerald, 22, said Monday in an interview a week after one newspaper at fault, The Guardian of Britain, became the first to admit its obituarist lifted material straight from Wikipedia.
"I am 100 percent convinced that if I hadn't come forward, that quote would have gone down in history as something Maurice Jarre said, instead of something I made up," he said. "It would have become another example where, once anything is printed enough times in the media without challenge, it becomes fact."
So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version -- or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.
"One could say my life itself has been one long soundtrack," Fitzgerald's fake Jarre quote read. "Music was my life, music brought me to life, and music is how I will be remembered long after I leave this life. When I die there will be a final waltz playing in my head that only I can hear."
Fitzgerald said one of his University College Dublin classes was exploring how quickly information was transmitted around the globe. His private concern was that, under pressure to produce news instantly, media outlets were increasingly relying on Internet sources -- none more ubiquitous than the publicly edited Wikipedia.
When he saw British 24-hour news channels reporting the death of the triple Oscar-winning composer, Fitzgerald sensed what he called "a golden opportunity" for an experiment on media use of Wikipedia.
He said it took him less than 15 minutes to fabricate and place a quote calculated to appeal to obituary writers without distorting Jarre's actual life experiences. He noted that the Wikipedia listing on Jarre did not have any other strong quotes.
If anything, Fitzgerald said, he expected newspapers to avoid his quote because it had no link to a source -- and even might trigger alarms as "too good to be true." But many blogs and several newspapers used the quotes at the start or finish of their obituaries.
He said the Guardian was the only publication to respond to him in detail and with remorse at its own editorial failing. Others, he said, treated him as a vandal who was solely to blame for their cut-and-paste content.
"The moral of this story is not that journalists should avoid Wikipedia, but that they shouldn't use information they find there if it can't be traced back to a reliable primary source," said the readers' editor at the Guardian, Siobhain Butterworth, in the May 4 column that revealed Fitzgerald as the quote author.
"It's worrying that the misinformation only came to light because the perpetrator of the deception emailed publishers to let them know what he'd done, and it's regrettable that he took nearly a month to do so," she wrote.
Fitzgerald said he had waited in part to test whether news organizations or the public would smoke out the quote's lack of provenance. He said he was troubled that none did.
And he warned that a truly malicious hoaxer could have evaded Wikipedia's own informal policing by getting a newspaper to pick up a false piece of information -- as happened when his quote made its first of three appearances -- and then use those newspaper reports as a credible footnote for the bogus quote.
"I didn't want to be devious," he said. "I just wanted to show how the 24-hour, minute-by-minute media were now taking material straight from Wikipedia because of the deadline pressure they're under."
Guardian article on controversy, http://tinyurl.com/djqd8w
Soundtrack Geek blog on Jarre, http://tinyurl.com/d527zh
Wikipedia site criticizing itself, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism--of--Wikipedia
Source:here
This is a good example of why I don't trust wikipedia as anyone can add or subtract anything they want.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Judicial corruption
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. - For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses.
The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.
In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.
“I’ve never encountered, and I don’t think that we will in our lifetimes, a case where literally thousands of kids’ lives were just tossed aside in order for a couple of judges to make some money,” said Marsha Levick, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, which is representing hundreds of youths sentenced in Wilkes-Barre.
Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. The judges were charged on Jan. 26 and removed from the bench by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court shortly afterward.
No company officials have been charged, but the investigation is still going on.
The high court, meanwhile, is looking into whether hundreds or even thousands of sentences should be overturned and the juveniles’ records expunged.
Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.
Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel.
'I have disgraced my judgeship'
The judges are scheduled to plead guilty to fraud Thursday in federal court. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years behind bars.
Ciavarella, 58, who presided over Luzerne County’s juvenile court for 12 years, acknowledged last week in a letter to his former colleagues, “I have disgraced my judgeship. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame.” Ciavarella, though, has denied he got kickbacks for sending youths to prison.
Conahan, 56, has remained silent about the case.
Many Pennsylvania counties contract with privately run juvenile detention centers, paying them either a fixed overall fee or a certain amount per youth, per day.
In Luzerne County, prosecutors say, Conahan shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002 and helped the two companies secure rich contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, at least some of that dependent on how many juveniles were locked up.
One of the contracts — a 20-year agreement with PA Child Care worth an estimated $58 million — was later canceled by the county as exorbitant.
The judges are accused of taking payoffs between 2003 and 2006.
Allegations of extortion
Robert J. Powell co-owned PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care until June. His attorney, Mark Sheppard, said his client was the victim of an extortion scheme.
“Bob Powell never solicited a nickel from these judges and really was a victim of their demands,” he said. “These judges made it very plain to Mr. Powell that he was going to be required to pay certain monies.”
For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Ciavarella was ridiculously harsh and ran roughshod over youngsters’ constitutional rights. Ciavarella sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a statewide rate of one in 10.
The criminal charges confirmed the advocacy groups’ worst suspicions and have called into question all the sentences he pronounced.
Hillary Transue did not have an attorney, nor was she told of her right to one, when she appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom in 2007 for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal.
Her mother, Laurene Transue, worked for 16 years in the child services department of another county and said she was certain Hillary would get a slap on the wrist. Instead, Ciavarella sentenced her to three months; she got out after a month, with help from a lawyer.
“I felt so disgraced for a while, like, what do people think of me now?” said Hillary, now 17 and a high school senior who plans to become an English teacher.
'I was completely destroyed'
Laurene Transue said Ciavarella “was playing God. And not only was he doing that, he was getting money for it. He was betraying the trust put in him to do what is best for children.”
Kurt Kruger, now 22, had never been in trouble with the law until the day police accused him of acting as a lookout while his friend shoplifted less than $200 worth of DVDs from Wal-Mart. He said he didn’t know his friend was going to steal anything.
Kruger pleaded guilty before Ciavarella and spent three days in a company-run juvenile detention center, plus four months at a youth wilderness camp run by a different operator.
“Never in a million years did I think that I would actually get sent away. I was completely destroyed,” said Kruger, who later dropped out of school. He said he wants to get his record expunged, earn his high school equivalency diploma and go to college.
“I got a raw deal, and yeah, it’s not fair,” he said, “but now it’s 100 times bigger than me.”
Source:here
I just had to include this as it is an grave injustice. These are kids thrown to the wolves so the wolves could prosper. Who knows what these kids were subjected to while in lock up.
The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench.
In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.
“I’ve never encountered, and I don’t think that we will in our lifetimes, a case where literally thousands of kids’ lives were just tossed aside in order for a couple of judges to make some money,” said Marsha Levick, an attorney with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, which is representing hundreds of youths sentenced in Wilkes-Barre.
Prosecutors say Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. The judges were charged on Jan. 26 and removed from the bench by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court shortly afterward.
No company officials have been charged, but the investigation is still going on.
The high court, meanwhile, is looking into whether hundreds or even thousands of sentences should be overturned and the juveniles’ records expunged.
Among the offenders were teenagers who were locked up for months for stealing loose change from cars, writing a prank note and possessing drug paraphernalia. Many had never been in trouble before. Some were imprisoned even after probation officers recommended against it.
Many appeared without lawyers, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1967 ruling that children have a constitutional right to counsel.
'I have disgraced my judgeship'
The judges are scheduled to plead guilty to fraud Thursday in federal court. Their plea agreements call for sentences of more than seven years behind bars.
Ciavarella, 58, who presided over Luzerne County’s juvenile court for 12 years, acknowledged last week in a letter to his former colleagues, “I have disgraced my judgeship. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame.” Ciavarella, though, has denied he got kickbacks for sending youths to prison.
Conahan, 56, has remained silent about the case.
Many Pennsylvania counties contract with privately run juvenile detention centers, paying them either a fixed overall fee or a certain amount per youth, per day.
In Luzerne County, prosecutors say, Conahan shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002 and helped the two companies secure rich contracts worth tens of millions of dollars, at least some of that dependent on how many juveniles were locked up.
One of the contracts — a 20-year agreement with PA Child Care worth an estimated $58 million — was later canceled by the county as exorbitant.
The judges are accused of taking payoffs between 2003 and 2006.
Allegations of extortion
Robert J. Powell co-owned PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care until June. His attorney, Mark Sheppard, said his client was the victim of an extortion scheme.
“Bob Powell never solicited a nickel from these judges and really was a victim of their demands,” he said. “These judges made it very plain to Mr. Powell that he was going to be required to pay certain monies.”
For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Ciavarella was ridiculously harsh and ran roughshod over youngsters’ constitutional rights. Ciavarella sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a statewide rate of one in 10.
The criminal charges confirmed the advocacy groups’ worst suspicions and have called into question all the sentences he pronounced.
Hillary Transue did not have an attorney, nor was she told of her right to one, when she appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom in 2007 for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal.
Her mother, Laurene Transue, worked for 16 years in the child services department of another county and said she was certain Hillary would get a slap on the wrist. Instead, Ciavarella sentenced her to three months; she got out after a month, with help from a lawyer.
“I felt so disgraced for a while, like, what do people think of me now?” said Hillary, now 17 and a high school senior who plans to become an English teacher.
'I was completely destroyed'
Laurene Transue said Ciavarella “was playing God. And not only was he doing that, he was getting money for it. He was betraying the trust put in him to do what is best for children.”
Kurt Kruger, now 22, had never been in trouble with the law until the day police accused him of acting as a lookout while his friend shoplifted less than $200 worth of DVDs from Wal-Mart. He said he didn’t know his friend was going to steal anything.
Kruger pleaded guilty before Ciavarella and spent three days in a company-run juvenile detention center, plus four months at a youth wilderness camp run by a different operator.
“Never in a million years did I think that I would actually get sent away. I was completely destroyed,” said Kruger, who later dropped out of school. He said he wants to get his record expunged, earn his high school equivalency diploma and go to college.
“I got a raw deal, and yeah, it’s not fair,” he said, “but now it’s 100 times bigger than me.”
Source:here
I just had to include this as it is an grave injustice. These are kids thrown to the wolves so the wolves could prosper. Who knows what these kids were subjected to while in lock up.
Old media vs new media
When the internet first came out it was demonized by the old media as "harmful to children" and they did they're best to undermined it and then to have Al Gore demonize the net (yes,the same Al Gore who claimed to have invented the internet) as harmful to children. Now we can see why they feared the net,with printed newspapers losing circulation we see the truth. The internet gave a voice to everyone not just the priveleged elite few who have a stranglehold on the old media of newspapers and TV and cartel the prices to keep ordinary people from voicing their opinions with pictures and only allowing their opinions in the "op-ed" section of the newspaper with lower chances of being seen and subject to an editors discretion and if that editor has an axe to grind and you have the opposing opinion then there is a chance your letter won't get published. It happened to me when I wrote the Los Angeles Times opposing feminism. The old media had a stranglehold; you wanted something visual you put it on TV if it was visual and audio then you also selected radio and one will cost big bucks let alone two. TV and radio,they were your only choice and they both had high prices,truly a sweetheart deal for both and no competition. Now let's introduce the internet giving a voice to the people and letting them know that things are not how the elite paint them to be and people such as myself that are as far from politically correct as you can get as assures us we are not alone in our beliefs. There was also other reasons they feared the internet such as competition as I've said but also the internet holds the old media accountable we can point out watch was inaccurate about what was said on radio and/or TV thus holding them accountable. No wonder they feared the internet. I've heard that politicians are now paying attention to bloggers just as they paid attention to the old media when it was a cartel and that is truly revolutionary. The internet is taking us in an original voyage that is unheard of in the past and I trust take us down a positive path in the future.
Monday, February 2, 2009
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