Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it. The CO2-climate hysteria in Germany is propagated by people who are in it for lots of money, attention and power.

When a respected scientist talks against climate change as it’s being marketed by the environmentalist community, it’s always a big deal. He has nothing to gain but scorn from the high priests of global warming. Just ask Judith Curry.

No, there was no smell of napalm in the morning.

But there was the thunderous whump whump of low-flying helicopters, and even the jarring blast of explosions at the abandoned Grand Bay Hotel in Coconut Grove early Tuesday during a military training exercise that jolted many unsuspecting residents from their beds.

“It was quite a shocking experience,” said Jane Muir, who was awakened around 1:45 a.m. by the sound of military choppers that later dropped rappelling soldiers onto the Grand Bay’s rooftop. “It was kind of that bizarre feeling that you were surrounded by wind.”

From her third-floor balcony, Muir then watched the soldiers fire off flares and smoke bombs before searching floor by floor through the darkened hotel, their paths marked by flashlights and the pop-pop-pop of gunshots. “The show of force was so overwhelming,” she said.

The maneuvers were part of a “realistic urban training” exercise for about 100 military personnel, and organized by the U.S. Special Operations Command, said Maj. Michael Burns, a U.S. Army spokesman. The exercise also included three military helicopters, and the use of simulated explosions and gunfire to mimic real-life military scenarios.

“They have to train in a realistic environment,” Burns said. “We didn’t use any real bullets,” he added reassuringly.

Training for whom? The military in order to carry out their missions? Or training civilians to accept the presence of military personnel flying in black helicopters and blowing shit up in residential neighborhoods?

The Pentagon was inundated with so many studies in 2010 that it commissioned a study to determined how much it cost to produce all those studies.

Now the Government’s Accounting Office has reviewed the Pentagon’s study and concluded in a report this week that it’s a flop.

The study of a study of studies began in 2010 when Defense Secretary Robert Gates complained that his department was “awash in taskings for reports and studies.” He wanted to know how much they cost.

Only government is capable of this kind of insanity. An on my fucking dime nonetheless.

In light of the May Day arrests of the Cuyahoga 5, the Occupy Wall Street–affiliated group of men who planned to blow up a bridge in Cleveland, Ohio, I called the Southern Poverty Law Center to find out of they had any plans to start tracking the Occupy movement.

[. . .]

And then he went on a long speech about “anti-abortion extremists” that had very little to do with what I was asking, but no doubt made him feel good. I met this with silence, so he said that, really, the SPLC only tracks those who commit violence or who seek to destroy whole systems in the name of an ideology.

“Isn’t that exactly what happened in Cleveland?” I asked. “These five men, all linked with Occupy Wall Street, attempted to blow up a bridge as an overture to the wholesale destruction of Cleveland, Ohio, and in the name of anarchism. They also looked to blow up the Republican convention.”

[. . .]

He paused. “We’re not really set up to cover the extreme Left.”

[. . .]

He felt the need to keep explaining, so I let him. We only ever cover left-wing groups when they have a right-wing component, he told me. For example, “when anarchist groups are infiltrated by those on the right; Neo-Nazis, that sort of thing.”

I asked whether this was a little like the way the French do masculine and feminine plurals; that if there are a thousand women and one man, it becomes masculine. In other words, that the SPLC covers a group if there is even a minute “right-wing” component. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said.

When the SPLC says they’re “not set up to cover the extreme left”, it should be taken explicitly as “we’re a partisan group that struts about as apolitical, but really we’re just cover for the extreme left.”

Only in left wing bizarro world could a hispanic man be labeled as white while a white woman, due to her being 1/32 Native American, labeled as a minority.

Access to medicinal marijuana for individuals who are ill or enduring difficult and painful therapies is both a medical and a states’ rights issue.

Let me state that I support Pilosi’s position on this issue wholeheartedly. The residents of various states have seen fit to legalize marijuana for medicinal use; the federal government should have no role in what the people individual states decide is right for them and should but the fuck out. It’s the blatant double standard held by those on Team BLUE which holds that the idea states’ rights is nothing more than a dog whistle for racism when used by those with whom they disagree that bothers me.

That noise you hear isn’t one caused by an industrial calamity, but a progressive one which is causing the city of Detroit to sink under its own political weight.

-CS Lewis

Fuck you, Natalia Volkow.