Some Boston cop, Officer Justin Barrett, thought it would be a smashingly good idea to comment on Professor Gates’ behavior and make an insightful commentary on race by sending around a mass e-mail describing Gates’ actions in racist terminology. Let’s leave aside the fact that he is a non-profit spammer – spamming being something I have long wanted to see made a capital offense.

Once again in this case we see the all-important and nonexistent distinction between direct name-calling, which is infantile, and indirect name-calling which is somehow not, apparently. Barrett did not call Gates a banana-eating jungle monkey. He said: “if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey…” (emphasis mine). A little grammar trick can not make a racist comment smell like roses. And I hope they pointed out to Officer Genius that a “banana-eating jungle monkey” can not verbally assault anyone due to its lack of verbal ability and its mouth full of bananas. All they can do is vocalize in a mumbly, mouth-full-of-bananas kind of way so the simile is not just racist, it qualifies as dumbassery as well. But the real dumbassery in this case is Barrett trying to defending a fellow officer who is accused of being a stereotypical example of a racist cop by being a stereotypical example of a racist cop. And the act of assuming that his e-mail would stay anonymous was pretty weak too.

Shouldn’t having basic common sense be a prerequisite for being a police officer? Spammer, racist, dumbass. That’s three strikes, Barrett. Have a banana.

Update (or Addendum or something): Since this post deals with race, leftists and such I thought I might stick this bit of news in at the top of this post. The Black Sphere at www.theblacksphere.net by Kevin Jackson is a site that offers penetrating criticisms of Obama, Democrats and leftist attitudes towards race. Jackson’s humor is also worth the price of admission which is free. Unfortunately his criticisms might have been a little too penetrating for some sensitive Sallies because they launched a denial of service attack on his site which his host is quickly sorting out. So I thought I would add his site to my list of links on behalf of the little darlings who tried to shut him up. Unfortunately I think I might need to wait until his DOS is sorted out unless WordPress is having some problem because currently, a link to The Black Sphere put in this post ends up pointing back at my blog. His site is currently available at his back up site at http://theblacksphere.blogspot.com. Now back to the post.

Well I have watched TV news footage of both sides of the Professor Gates/Officer Crowley issue giving their positions. Professor Gates feels his right to be abusive and slanderous towards a police officer on his own property when the cop is there to make sure he and his property are safe from intruders, was not respected. He proudly tells the interviewer that he took the officer’s alleged non-response to his questions as evidence of racism and asked the officer if this was the case. That does not add much to his credibility to put it mildly.

Speaking of Gates’ credibility, TIME(!) magazine named him one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997. If TIME(!!) thinks your something special your probably something disturbing.

But what really diminishes his credibility is his profession. Now I don’t want to give the impression that all or even most university professors are psychotic, venomous, self-obsessed, self-aggrandizing thugs who get off on bullying people but from my experience that sort of personality seems to be granted an immediate shortcut to tenure. I bet one of Gates’ courses is a mandatory requirement for a degree that no other professor teaches. The psycho profs always seem to position themselves as such gate keepers due to the power it gives them over students.

While typing this, I overheard the newscaster say that Gates was a foremost scholar of race in America. What the Hell is that? Is that history, psychology or does he have a PhD in raceology or something? Whatever it means it seems to fit with Gates’ and Crowley’s recounting of Gates lecturing everyone about “black men in America” (as distinct from black men in Canada and France). Free Harvard course content – just go to his door. I didn’t know Harvard was so cutting edge in their free, open-source education experiments. The issue of black men in America seems to be the central theme of Gates’ career, interactions with police and every waking thought. Personally I like to mix thinks up and spend some of my waking hours think about spicy curie dishes and naked women. And I also saw one of Crowley’s colleagues speak about the case (the video segment was repeatedly introduced as featuring Crowley’s “African-American” partner, probably so that even blind viewers [wait, what?] would know that his word might be worth considering). This other officer was not present for the whole incident but he did hear Gates as he was being brought out of the house complaining that this was “how a black man gets treated in America; a white woman calls the cops and I get taken to jail” (paraphrased from my memory of the news segment). I can’t help but notice that the race of the person making the call matters to him. He seems to feel, with no evidence, that it contributed to the decision to arrest him. Even if Officer Crowley were a big hairy racist who decided to arrest Gates just to teach him who’s boss, nothing about that scenario would require him to be thinking about protecting the white women folk. Attributing motives to people without cause so as to make it easier to hate them is common in cases of paranoid prick professor syndrome. And in certain other political circles. Like all of them. Especially leftists.

So what was some of the fallout?

Everyone knows that Obama resorted to a kind of indirect name-calling. The police’s actions were called stupid not the police themselves. Just like how I might say that I would not call Democrats liars but merely note that they can’t stop lying. Indirect name calling is the kind of leadership you can’t by in stores. You need a Harvard degree for that.

Daily Kos just put up a post that Google News thinks is news which asks: How long will the racist right keep the Gates “issue” alive? Classy. And well played of Daily Kross to step on the point by posting about the “issue”. Ordinarily I would link to a site even if I disagree with it but it’s not like I would ever actually read the article and I figure that little hate site gets more than enough traffic from their media skank friends.

Reverend Jesse Jackson shocked the Hell out of me by actually saying something relatively diplomatic (if morally agnostic) about the issue. He must be mellowing in his age. Fortunately Reverend Al Sharpton stayed true to form. I wish to God someone would ask Rev. Wright for his opinion on all this. I think everyone could use a chuckle.

And the last bit of fallout will be that a dedicated police officer who has been working to improve the understanding of racial issues within the police force, who presents himself with decorum and professionalism has been slandered and, knowing Democrats and their “grassroots” will at the very least not be teaching racial profiling issues. While an elitist Harvard professor who conducts himself like a bombastic twit will hang the threat of a lawsuit over Crowley’s head and probably do the talk show circuit. And the message to young law enforcement officers coming into the field is that black owned homes are no-go areas.  I hope non-Harvard-professor black citizens, people who might actually want police services, have made other arrangements for their law enforcement needs. Maybe ACORN will lend some of their electoral monitors, the ones with billy clubs, to provide community policing.

The web site Islam in Europe is a fascinating blog. The author seems to make a real attempt to be unbiased and provides news links and translations that are both favorable and unfavorable to European Islamic communities. Some of the interesting items recently strike me as kind of ironic. Not surprising as such but ironic, especially given what both many critics of Islam and self-proclaimed spokesmen for Islam claim.

The Dutch Labor Party has been warned that they are too involved in religious issues and too quick to take the side of highly religious Muslims over secular society. Who was doing the warning? Was it a white supremacist group or a fundamentalist Christian sect? No, actually it was three councilmen of Moroccan origin. So immigrants are telling multicultural leftists that they are ethnocentric and too religiously conservative.

In Switzerland, a group is trying to discriminate against Muslim foreign workers for a particular job. That group is the Muslim community. It seems they want local members of their community trained as Imams because those being brought in from other countries are insensitive to the realities of European society.

Not enough English being spoken in mosques. This is according to certain Scottish Islamophobics who happen to be Scottish Muslims. It seems that sermons spoken in Arabic don’t seem all that interesting to the younger generation of Muslims who don’t speak Arabic. But this presents a problem because so many Muslim clerics don’t speak English (or understand the Western culture that young Muslims are living in). I am willing to bet that for every young zealot you see interviewed on the news by pro-shariah leftist media, there are large numbers of C and E Muslims (to borrow a Christian term) but that’s just my suspicion.

The Germans are trying to coerce the children of Turkish immigrants to learn a language that many of them are not keen on learning. A Nazi neo-con conspiracy to forcibly assimilate Turkish immigrants into German culture? Not exactly. The German government is trying to get these second and third generation immigrants to retain some Turkish language skills but the young Turks don’t see the point of it. Probably interested in frivolous things like making money and stuff. Kids today!

And finally, a group of Iranian immigrants are getting politically active. Well when you let too many Islamic immigrants into the country they start making demands; even using modern technology to further their aims. Only the demands are for human rights in Iran.

I know that there are also lots of stories out of the European Islamic community about honor killings and riots and zealotry of all kinds and they are important and should be given far more media attention than the paternalistic “journalists” of the day are comfortable with. But there is always more to a story than the obvious narratives on either side present. Only change is constant.

I have always thought that Obama’s slogan, “Yes We Can” was a ripoff of Bob the Builder. Now his new acquisition, the Crisis Motors corporation, is using what looks to me like a variation on the other half of Bob the Builder’s cheer and features a gaudy colour scheme like those comic book style campaign ads of Obama’s. It is running in Australia, so it might be just the Chrysler marketing trying to capitalize on what they thought was a “cool” and inspiring movement. Or it could be a coincidence. Or it could be that Obama is softening up Australia via subliminal advertising for an imperial expansion. Or it could be that everyone remotely connected with Obama has been watching the same teleprompter and they are all showing Bob the Builder.

It’s just a shame that if he was going to take a slogan from someone in the construction industry he couldn’t have taken Mike Homes’:

Make It Right

Mike Holmes for President (of the world)

Photo via Bydio.

I once again need to take issue with something that has issued forth from the latest issue of Scientific American. Boy that was a lot of issues. I think I need a tissue for my issues.

The article in their “Climate” section of their “News Scan” hypersection (or is that the “Climate” subsection of the “News Scan” section?) is titled Stumbling Over Data and subtitled: Do minor errors erode public support on climate issues? and it is written by David Appell, a freelance science writer with a background in math and physics.

The article proposes that the publication of climate data in real-time is is eroding trust in the theory that human activity is driving an increase in the average global temperature and resulting in dangerous climate change. Such real-time data contains errors which are termed “minor” and would eventually be caught by real scientists but those skeptics of climate apocalypse theory like (raise eyebrow) bloggers (tilt head disapprovingly), pounce on these errors. The problem is that the common public do not understand the preliminary nature of the data. The fact that science writers for non-peer reviewed publications continuously use such preliminary data to justify headlines about the hottest Decemberween in the history of the universe is not what undermines our trust in climate video game simulations, it’s those wretched bloggers frisking the bad data. If they would just let the *real* scientists analyze the data they would sort it all out in time. And the sensational headlines would get retracted, if maybe not with the exact level of fanfare with which they were published.

Interestingly, the one skeptic (and blogger!) he criticizes by name in the SciAm article for making too much of a little bad data (or a lot of it) is Anthony Watt, a meteorologist and author of Watts Up with That? The reason this is interesting is that Appell criticizes Watt on Appell’s personal blog for criticizing certain data at all. So is he saying the data is too preliminary to criticize but people are wrong not to trust it? He further questions why climate apocalypse skeptics would attack temperature data that was higher than normal but not that which is lower. I would think it is because it makes a lot more sense for a thermometer located near an airport tarmac to give false high data than false low. Sun-baked pavement is not currently known to cause a refrigeration effect.

He goes on to misinterpret an opinion pole of “earth scientists”. The pole was conducted by e-mailing over 10,000 such scientists and inviting them to partake in a survey. Now I would wonder if this might screen out a segment who are dispassionate on the issue or undecided and just generally too busy to participate but what do I know about opinion poles? So lets assume that they had close to 100% participation or that the people who declined represent the same ratio of views as those who participated. Appell only tells us about the 3000 or so respondents who are climate scientists because the petroleum geologists and meteorologists supposedly don’t know as much about the climate of the earth as those who make computer models of it do. Never mind that the geologists make specific predictions that actually come true. And while we all laugh at the accuracy of the weather forecasts, we also don’t make plans without consulting the predictions of meteorologists because they actually do tend to come true. And even with the biased selection method, and selecting out the group of respondents he considers knowledgeable one can still see 3% of the group who are not on board with the global warming theory. I wonder what the level would be if there had been a fair selection process or if most climate scientists were not trained and hired by universities to prove the effects of human driven global warming.

The closest thing climatologists have come to a prediction recently, beyond “we’re all going to drown and die of thirst and hunger and pestilence”, is that the climate will cool for the next couple of decades so don’t whine about the absence of human generated global warming until then because it is hiding behind natural effects. That “prediction” seems to come well after this cooling has begun. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they tweaked their models to show this “temporary” cooling rather than just pulling the prediction out of their backsides to justify the recent cooling in the face of increasing CO2 levels. But tweaking them to be more representative of past data does not mean they were made more accurate in predicting future climate trends.

The article ends by lamenting how the poor climate researchers need to be concerned about how the ignorant public might respond to their bad data before releasing it (I paraphrased a bit). I can feel a tear on behalf of the climate scientists issuing from my left eye.

Maybe if global warming proponents want to know why people are losing trust in their theory it might be worth their while to ask them. I used to be relatively okay with the concept until I started noticing that proponents were showing a lot of similarities to Creationist/Intelligent Design activists while psychologically projecting this behavior on to skeptics. The refusal to address the points brought up by the skeptics, the shifting goalposts which shift back when addressing a new audience which has not heard the refutations; it all got me wanting to look a little closer to what was being claimed and by whom and whether these claims were self-consistent and consistent with the evidence. So far, I have not liked what I have seen. It’s not a bunch of bloggers “pouncing” on “minor” errors that has made me question the theory but the words and deeds of the political/media opportunists and assorted wealthy socialists who lead the charge on the issue from personal jet planes and the stages of rock concerts using more electricity than a small city while claiming that all the scientists are behind them… somewhere back there. Except for the ones that don’t count.

Scientific American has an interesting editorial about Obama’s Cap and Trade plot to reduce the temperature of the planet by starving off those who are deemed overly warm. Shockingly, they realize that there is a problem with it. Unsurprisingly, the editors suggest a ridiculous solution which solves nothing but might just help hide the farce of the plan long enough to get it implemented.

They don’t see the central problem of it all being based on a pack of lies called global warming. And please note that, unlike skeptics of this bunk who are ridiculed for being out of touch when they use the term “global warming” instead of anthropogenic climate change, the SciAm editors state in their concluding paragraph:

“Global warming is a reality, not an opinion.”

I am glad that the not-out-of-touch editors cleared that up. Though a criteria of what makes something a reality as opposed to an opinion might have been helpful. Neither good evidence nor successful predictions seem to be involved. The problem they accurately see is that the plan will damage the economy at a time that it really does not need yet another kick in the teeth from the Democratic party’s boot.

So what is their solution? Same cap and trade limitation on fossil energy production but give the money from the auction of these energy production/import rights directly to the consumer/taxpayer/milk cow to offset the increase in energy costs created by having energy companies bid up the prices on energy. No damage to the economy right?

Ignoring the ludicrous idea that government could steal money from one source and give it to another without taking a massive cut or even just saying “the Hell with it” and deciding that the state can spend it much more wisely than Johny Lunchpail; you might have noticed something wrong with this cunning plan. The increase in energy costs will be more than the amount of money raised from auctioning off carbon rights. The limitation on energy will mean that there is less of the stuff than people and companies need. That creates a shortage so consumers who are able to pay more will and those who can’t are SOOL. You are covered by your government energy stamps for the added cost to the producer of buying the right to use carbon but you are not given any extra to make up for the fact that Government Motors can buy energy at a much better price than you can. But you are still being taxed to fund Government Motors as they buy your share of energy.

But don’t worry. The government will see what is happening and will hear your pain. They will step in to fix the price of energy so that everyone can afford it. As the price of everything rises because there is limited energy to produce anything, the value of that fixed rate will decline to the point that there is no point in companies buying the rights to produce energy and production will stop. But again the government will smell your suffering and come to the rescue. They will run the energy production companies – the oil refineries, the power plants and such. All of it will come under state control which will be a remarkable success. It might be worth noting that all of the nations that produce fossil fuels via state owned enterprises have been running their industries into a state of decay because when oil prices are high they have better things to spend the profits on than preventative maintenance and development and when the prices are low they can’t afford such luxuries as preventative maintenance and development.

So the editors of Scientific American just recommended that America turn itself into a failed petro state in order to prevent “global warming”. If the planet hadn’t been cooling for the last decade or so – or if someone’s climate model had actually predicted that that would happen – it might be an easier sell. But let’s not write off the idea too quickly. It seems to me that people have been proving for some time that prosperous and democratic societies with modern technologies and personal liberties are both unwanted and, in the long-term, unstable. Perhaps letting the world degenerate first into North Korea, then into a collection of neo-Assyrian empires, with the associated life of clay pots, wood smoke and the king’s spears through your heart if you blaspheme him is just what we all really want. Granted, it will take a lot of killings to get the population down to a level where that is sustainable but it shouldn’t take long.

A flu patient in Thailand developed meningitis. Just in case you didn’t read my earlier post, the theory I have been harping on lately is that the overreaction by the body to a new viral infection that takes it by surprise results is a large release of cytokines called interferons which have been shown to inhibit viruses but also instruct bacterial fighting cells to stay out of the way, leaving the lungs vulnerable to bacterial infections like pneumonia, meningitis and whooping cough. That is not to say the flu virus itself doesn’t kill anyone but it would explain why second waves of pandemics are more severe than first waves. The larger pool of compromised victims lets more bacterial epidemics sweep through the sick. If it really is the case that a lot of people who die from flu pandemics die because of secondary bacterial infections then I would suspect that larger concentrations of flu victims would provide more fertile ground for pathogenic and opportunistic bacteria to sweep through a population. While the bacteria that causes meningococcal meningitis is widespread as normal flora (even the vaccine only keeps you from getting the meningitis, not from harboring the organism in your nose and throat now and then) it does seem to spread in epidemics of pathogenic cases. Perhaps the bacteria needs to alter its metabolism to be pathogenic and once induced to do so will start causing illnesses whereas it would normally just hang out. So if there are lots of compromised flu patients around and a meningococcus gets angry it starts making trouble along  with other bacterial opportunists like Streptococcus pneumoniae.

New Zealand is experiencing its worst flu season in 12 years. Flu rates are double what they were this time last year and I would assume last year there were three or four strains doing it while H1N1 seems to have largely pushed competing flues to the margins as pandemic strains tend to do.

Australia is seeing record absenteeism. Oh, and they have a flu spike and a whooping cough epidemic going on right on top of one another in Queensland. Whooping cough is caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis in the lungs. It is highly contagious on it’s own but a little extra help from  numerous instances of “mild” swine flu in an area might just have given it a boost, I suspect.

Remember the whole controversy about the poor mutant frogs with extra or missing legs? The undeniable proof that humanity’s evil capitalist ways were causing the collapse of the biosphere?

False alarm. Environmental catastrophes are always much worse when the media’s enemy is in power.

The wife of a Kenyan government minister visiting Algeria felt she was such an important VIP (her husband is the Minister for Culture and Sport for God sakes – in a nation trying to lift itself out of poverty, they have a ministry for culture and sport and she thinks she is a VIP as opposed to, say… a mucous-covered parasitic flatworm), that she does not need to stay isolated even though she is displaying symptoms of H1N1 influenza. Let the entire hotel get sick – let all of Algeria get sick. It’s not like there are lots of people in Africa with preexisting conditions which might make this flu dangerous or anything. Pregnancy, HIV, TB, poverty, urban overcrowding… it’s all rather unheard of in Africa I understand.

Meanwhile, the battle by media and health officials against the mass global panic about the new flu – a panic which has yielded a worldwide death toll approaching 1 (with a margin of error of +/- 1) continues but even some of the devote are beginning to wonder if the “It’s almost always mild” message has been over done.

Researchers are discovering evidence suggesting that the virus can indeed get down into the lungs and even guts of ferrets which are a close animal model for humans (I would have thought rats but maybe I’m prejudice). The gut infections would explain the diarrhea and vomiting in some human cases. But the virus is a little weak in its ability to attach to the relevant human cell receptors. Given the speed that resistance to Tamiflu is popping up around the globe, I don’t think that would be too much of a challenge. The vaccine will be ready sooner or later and even if lots of anti-vaccinationists refuse it, the immunity on the population will help slow it’s progress in the industrialized nations. Since Russia is falling apart at the seems and has yet to even hit its debt crisis, I wouldn’t necessarily keep Russia in the league of “industrialized nations” and mass vaccination campaigns in Central Asia and Africa are hard to imagine being implemented in a timely fashion. Especially when there a so many VIPs and ministries of culture and sport to maintain.

Well it might be news to them.

CNN has no trouble with people claiming that Sarah Palin is a dirty, filthy whore because she is an attractive woman, not a Democrat and does not wear a burka. But it becomes news when she makes a small dig about mule-face Kerry having a long face. Especially when she was responding to a comment by Kerry wishing she had been the governor to “disappear”. Someday, some reporter or interviewer or Democratic politician or Che-worshiping celebrity is going to go after Palin with a kitchen knife. They will get a few days in jail as a first time offence. If I were advising her I would tell her to get her family out of the country with new identities. The hatred being focused on her kids is really disturbing and the sexual nature of the hostility towards her personally is not to be taken lightly.

There are some things I oppose about Palin’s views but a lot I support too. It would be a shame if her career and life were ended because some CNN anchor went off his anti-psychotic meds before having her in the studio. But then, you need to be on meds to go off them.