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The Department of Energy vs. Ugly Reality





Absolutely fantastic.

The best thing I've read all year.



From the comment section:

...Maybe some of them will have to do some real work. It will come as a shock if they have to work like people in the real world, who have to add value or get fired.
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The Impending Collapse Of The Global Warming Scare


...To the extent that the global warming movement has anything to do with "science," EPA is supposedly where that science is vetted and approved on behalf of the public before being turned into policy. In fact, under Obama, EPA's principal role on the "science" has been to prevent and stifle any debate or challenge to global warming orthodoxy. For example, when a major new Research Report came out back in September claiming to completely invalidate all of the bases on which EPA claims that CO2 is a danger to human health and welfare, and thus to undermine EPA's authority to regulate the gas under the Clean Air Act, EPA simply failed to respond. In the same vein, essentially all prominent global warming alarmists refuse to debate anyone who challenges any aspect of their orthodoxy. Well, that has worked as long as they and their allies have controlled all of the agencies and all of the money. Now, it will suddenly be put up or shut up. And in case you might think that the science on this issue is "settled," so no problem, you might enjoy this recent round-up at Climate Depot from some of the actual top scientists. A couple of excerpts:

Renowned Princeton Physicist Freeman Dyson: 'I’m 100% Democrat and I like Obama. But he took the wrong side on climate issue, and the Republicans took the right side. ' . . .

Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever: ‘Global warming is a non-problem’ – ‘I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong.’​

Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years. Questions like: Why are recorded temperatures, particularly from satellites and weather balloons, so much lower than the alarmist models had predicted? How do you explain an almost-20-year "pause" in increasing temperatures even as CO2 emissions have accelerated? What are the details of the adjustments to the surface temperature record that have somehow reduced recorded temperatures from the 1930s and 40s, and thereby enabled continued claims of "warmest year ever" when raw temperature data show warmer years 70 and 80 years ago? Suddenly, the usual hand-waving ("the science is settled") is not going to be good enough any more. What now?...​




http://manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2016/12/13/some-predictions-for-the-future-in-the-climate-game





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Elf on the Shelf isn’t a real Christmas tradition – it’s a post-truth doll for a post-truth age.​



Now, I know that the Guardian doesn’t have a particularly festive reputation, and I realise that what I’m about to say isn’t exactly going to help this reputation. But hear me out: all I want for Christmas is to stamp on Elf on the Shelf’s throat until it coughs up blood and dies.

I know this is going to sound like hyperbole, given everything that has happened this year, but Elf on the Shelf is easily the most violently dreadful thing to happen in 2016. How I long for the happier days of 2015, when nobody knew what an Elf on the Shelf was, back before it spawned and multiplied like the Zika virus and threatened to monopolise every home in the country. What I’d give to go back in time, Inception myself inside the mind of the Elf on the Shelf creator and scream the word “bastards” at them so loudly that they forgot to ever invent the bloody thing.

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...istmas-tradition-post-truth-doll-intimidation
 
Historic Heston

Reads like one of his TV shows, Looks like sex on a plate, and I'm sure would eat fantastically if I could dedicate a day, or week, to each recipe he has in there.
 


" Lawrence was one of those difficult people who nearly always had to find their own way of doing things, and he turned a deaf ear to any differing opinion, however eminent the source. He would always prefer to fail by doing something his own way than to succeed by doing it somebody else's way: Lawrence never yielded willingly to anybody. Some of the most terrifying episodes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom are those in which Lawrence describes his experiences as a largely self-taught demolitions expert, casually dealing with guncotton and detonators, and using his own rule of thumb to determine how much explosive he needed to destroy a train or demolish a bridge. Typically, Lawrence presents these scenes as comedy, and notes that the bigger the bang, the more the Arabs were impressed. This was no doubt true, but he risked death time after time as rails, rocks, and pieces of locomotive rained down around him...

...Certainly the Ottoman Empire in 1913 was, of all the uneasy places in the world, the one in which fearsome threats, anger, and hatred between the subject races of the empire and their masters, and a terrifying mixture of cynicism, corruption, and brutality at the top, seemed most likely to produce a conflagration. Turkey was balanced at the edge of an abyss, having lost all its possessions in North Africa and Europe; its rulers were determined to hold out for the highest price in the event of war between the great powers rather than risk neutrality and being left out of the spoils of victory, and they were always acutely aware that the majority of Turkey's population consisted of subject races— Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Jews, Christians— who had in common nothing except a desire to get rid of the Turks as overlords and masters. Lawrence, who understood the situation better than most, can hardly be blamed for enjoying himself in his own way for as long as possible...

...Warfare and politics, of course, are a different matter; in both, duplicity is a weapon, and Lawrence used it expertly...

...Lawrence, like an experienced seducer, had a different persona for everyone whose affection or admiration he wished to conquer (toward those whom he did not wish to conquer he could be downright rude), and yet no persona of his was false— they all coexisted within him, and fought for dominance. Hence the confusion of most professional soldiers who had known and admired him during the war, such as Colonel A. P. Wavell (later Field Marshall the Earl Wavell, GCB, GCSI, GCIE, CMG, PC), at the many controversies surrounding Lawrence after the war, and indeed, after his death, as well as the very different portraits of Lawrence drawn in the early biographies of him by authors who knew him well, and to those whose books he contributed. Liddell Hart, Lowell Thomas, and Robert Graves might as well have been writing about three different people, Liddell Hart presenting the reader with a military genius, Thomas presenting a flamboyant and romantic scholar-hero, and Graves presenting a heroic adventurer in the tradition of Burton and Gordon...

...Deciding on Iraq's borders was a more difficult question. The western border with Syria was fixed by a previous agreement with the French, the southern border was an invisible line in the sand between Iraq and the vast empty desert ibn Saud claimed, and the eastern border was that of the old Ottoman Empire with Persia; but to the north was the territory inhabited by the Kurds, Arabic-speaking non-Arabs, supposedly of Indo-European descent, who passionately desired an independent Kurdistan. Unfortunately for them, the grand prize of Iraq from the British point of view was Mosul, right in the middle of the Kurdish homeland, with its rich oil deposits. Accordingly, commercial interests and realpolitik combined to create a country with a Shiite majority, a Sunni king, a disappointed Kurdish minority, and a small but wealthy and cosmopolitan class of Jewish merchants in Baghdad... "
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-Michael Korda
Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia
New York, N.Y. 2010.​

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An extraordinary biography of an extraordinary man by an extraordinary author.

David Lean's film, Lawrence of Arabia, likely forms the sum total of most people's knowledge of T. E. Lawrence. It may be one of the very few commercially successful films that is largely factual.

I was always curious about Lawrence. This book satisfied that curiosity (and then some). I didn't appreciate that just how brilliant he was. He possessed "far end of the curve" intelligence.

I haven't read Seven Pillars of Wisdom because the evaluations I've seen tend to downplay it. I didn't know that Lawrence had controlled its publication, had forgone all profits (assigning them to a trust to benefit veterans and their families) and that a mere 1,000 first editions were all that were originally issued (to subscribers). Today, one of those first editions will command a six figure price. I also did not know that Revolt In The Desert was the abridged version of "Seven Pillars." I possess a 1940 edition of Lawrence's 1932 translation of Homer's Odyssey among several other translations of the work.

Both Korda and his quotations of Lawrence's depictions of war are graphic and sobering. No quarter given; torture and atrocities were routine. With good reason, the Arabs never left any wounded to be captured by the Turks.

If you are interested in Lawrence or the Middle East, you should read this book. Korda has done a magnificent job of research and writing.



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My reason for posting this is probably not the one you're thinking...

"On Bullshit" by Harry Frankfurt

On Bullshit said:
... The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.

This is the crux of the distinction between him and the liar. Both he and the liar represent themselves falsely as endeavoring to communicate the truth. The success of each depends upon deceiving us about that. But the fact about himself that the liar hides is that he is attempting to lead us away from a correct apprehension of reality; we are not to know that he wants us to believe something he supposes to be false. The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides, on the other hand, is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him; what we are not to understand is that his intention is neither to report the truth nor conceal it....
Click to expand...
 


Have A Good Laugh At The Expense Of New York Progressives

April 30, 2017
Francis Menton ("The Manhattan Contrarian")


Probably, you got a good laugh when Barack Obama said, back in 2010, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money." Of course you knew that when he said "you," he meant you, and definitely not him. Or maybe you didn't realize it was a joke until just a couple of months ago in February, when the bidding for his next book went up above $60 million. Or possibly, you still didn't realize it was a joke until it was revealed that he is going to be paid $400,000 by Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald for giving one speech. Or, maybe it's just that he forgot to put a figure on how much money is "enough." Maybe it's now up to around $100 million? Something tells me that it will always be a little more than whatever he has at the moment...


more...
http://manhattancontrarian.com/blog...laugh-at-the-expense-of-new-york-progressives

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