The liberals like to point to scandals like those of Representative Mark Foley and Senator Larry Craig — both caught falling short of the moral conduct they espouse politically — and ask if this is going to destroy the Republican Party. Perhaps the conservatives should find and expose a few liberal politicians whose moral values are clearly more Judeo-Christian than those they espouse politically, and then ask if this is going to destroy the Democrat Party. Both are instances of hypocritical behavior. In both cases one set of morals is being espoused politically and another set is being practiced personally.

I think it’s hilarious to hear members of Congress calling one another hypocrites — or challenging one another’s morals. How many politicians do you know who practice what they preach? Almost all of them say one thing publicly and do pretty much the opposite privately. It’s quite clear that they think most of us are stupid or just don’t care; sadly, they might be right.

Take the case of the US Attorney firings that the Democrats are so worked up about. The Bush Administration fired eight or nine Attorneys and the Democrats want Bush’s head on a platter (they already have Alberto Gonzales’ head). Never mind that the Clinton Administration fired about 90 US Attorneys. They apparently think that most of us don’t remember that or don’t care. They obviously don’t subscribe to the old maxim, “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Here’s a message for most all of you politicians: I’m really not that impressed with you. I believe you to be one of the world’s biggest collections of pompous dipshits. I’m painfully aware that the future of our country is in your incompetent hands. But I also believe that we, the voters, will get rid of you before you can do irreparable harm. In the meantime I will continue to laugh at your phony displays of indignation over the missteps of the opposition.

Unstable Crane Causes Evacuation in Stamford
It’s best to play it safe when threatened by a very large demented bird.

Dropping the Chicken
…and running from the crazy crane.

It’s Bird Eat Bird in a Cluttered Sky
From the crazy crane, a muttered cry.
From the dropped chicken, a sputtered why?

Smuggled Turtle Eggs Seized in Mexico
Were they hidden in a turtle?

Priced Out of Rome
Consider living in Nome.

Ten Things to Do Before this Article is Finished
One of them should be to come up with a better headline.

Op-Chart: An Update on the State of New Orleans
It now contains the city of Louisiana.

Assigning Blame for the Mess in Iraq (5 Letters)
Don’t look at me; my name has six letters.

A few days ago I questioned the accuracy of the climate models being used as the basis for most of the alarm about global warming. Today I found a letter to the editor of the local paper that very closely echos my point of view. The writer appears to have a similar background to mine, but if our paths have ever crossed I don’t remember it. I’m taking the liberty of republishing his letter here because I couldn’t find a link to it at NWFDailyNews.com:

During the past 20 years, computer models have improved short-term weather forecasting in many ways. However, weather and climate models have also been misused by people who do not fully understand how computer models work.

As a developer and user of scientific computer models, I was always aware that my modeling results were limited in validity and accuracy by the detail, accuracy and validity of the modeling software and the input data I used. Realistically, I could have obtained almost any result I desired if I made appropriate assumptions in my modeling program design and/or my input data.

Examples of misuses of weather/climate computer models are the annual forecasts of numbers and severity of hurricanes, and the ongoing issue of global climate change.

Critical weather and climate factors such as the unpredictable dynamic physics of cloud formation, variations in atmospheric gases and variations of ocean currents are not well documented or understood. Such natural phenomena are important determinants of weather and climate. This should be recognized as a serious problem with these long-term forecast models.

Even when well-known statistical techniques are used to increase the level of confidence in any modeling, the end results are still impacted by the validity and accuracy of the programming science and assumptions, parametric data accuracy, and any data omissions.

How accruate are long-term climate forecasts when models such as those just described are used? Accurate enough to believe widely accepted disaster scenarios derived from some global-warming modeling forecasts? I don’t think so. Also, don’t bother with those annual hurricane forecasts for the same reasons.

JOE COBB
Valparaiso FL

In a column on Townhall.com Debra Saunders discusses a survey that found that liberals read more books than conservatives. “The poll found that among people polled who read at least one book in the last year, liberals read nine books and conservatives read eight.” Some moonbat and former Democrat congresswoman named Pat Schroeder crowed that this proves that liberals are smarter than conservatives. However, the pollster said that the one-book difference “is within the margin of error, it’s not a statistically significant difference.”

Saunders also mentions that George Bush and Karl Rove compete to see which one can read the most books. Last year the score was: Rove, 110 books; Bush, 94. I’m not real comfortable with the fact that the leader of the free world and one of his (former) top advisers is each spending his time reading about a hundred books a year. That seems a bit like a surgeon reviewing the latest medical journals while performing critical surgery.

I’m thinking about legally changing my name to Your Name Here. Then if I lose my credit cards the finder will think they are invalid promotional cards and discard them.
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It’s easy to form the impression that athletes and entertainers are more prone to destroying their bright futures by doing something stupid than are others. This might be true but do you really expect to hear about it if the life of some math or science wizard goes off the rails?
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I hadn’t really noticed until now that Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton have essentially the same nickname: Sly Penis. Nixon was called Tricky Dick and Clinton is called Slick Willie. Both tricky and slick can mean sly, and both dick and willie are slang terms for penis.
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Have you noticed how the victims of fatal accidents and crimes are always wonderful people? It kind of makes me want to dirty up my act. I never hear about a really rotten person being killed in an accident or crime.
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To me nothing is more ridiculous than the utterances of radical feminists. They seem to be guided solely by the belief that, no matter what they say, if they speak loudly and rapidly enough they can change ground truth.
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Politicians are missing a great opportunity by not hiring Jimmy Carter to advise them on their campaigns. Think about it. Each of you can probably name at least a half dozen people in your hometown who are more impressive than Jimmy Carter. He seems to never miss an opportunity to demonstrate his ordinariness through his statements and actions. Most political observers think of him as the worst President in recent history. Yet he somehow managed to get himself elected as governor of Georgia and president of the United States. The man has to be a political genius.

I’m in the mood today to solve some of the world’s political problems. Having Israel sitting smack-dab in the middle of Arab country has been a constant problem ever since some genius came up with the idea about 60 years ago. And the accelerating Islamization of Western nations has more recently been seen as building toward a dramatic confrontation between two very different cultures. My solutions to these problems are simple in theory but difficult to implement — which seems to be a prerequisite for world-changing ideas these days (democratize the Middle East, end world hunger, stop the use of illegal drugs, invent a thermostat for the earth). I expect some resistance to my plans, but here goes:

Israel: Move all the Israelis to Wyoming. Let the Arabs fight over what’s left behind for the next hundred years or so. We can stay out of it because we won’t have a dog in the fight (and neither will Michael Vick). We can forget about Iran for several more years because they will be busy developing the capability to deliver their nukes to Wyoming. By then our missile defense system should be able to take them out anyway.

But what about the people now in Wyoming you ask? No problem; there aren’t that many there. They can choose to stay and become Israelis or move to neighboring states and remain Americans. Those cowboys aren’t likely to organize and start lobbing rockets and mortars across the border. Some (most?, all?) of them will resist but they will have to just suck it up and take one for the Gipper.

The Israelis can rename Cheyenne to Jerusalem and Casper to Bethlehem. I think they should leave Chugwater, Ten Sleep, Tie Siding, Bar Nunn, Crowheart, Gas Hills, Lost Cabin, Point of Rocks, Bill and Cora alone. But these names might not sound as colorful in Hebrew.

With Israel located in the heart of the USA it should be a lot easier and less expensive to protect them. And it would take away one of the biggest gripes that the Middle Easterners have with us.

With the implementation of my next plan there will be no Muslims in the USA to bother the Israelis.

Islamization: Turn Europe over to the Muslims. Move all the non-Muslims in Europe to the USA, Canada and Israel* — liberals to Canada, conservatives to the USA, Jews to Israel. Move all the Muslims in the USA and Canada to Europe. Require all Muslims that want to leave their hopeless countries to emigrate to Europe.

Some of the European countries are projected to go majority Muslim within the next few decades anyway. When that happens non-Muslims aren’t going to want to stay there and the Muslims will be glad to see them go. This will give the Muslims an opportunity to establish the Caliphate that they seem to want. They can just pretend that Europe and Asia constitute the world.

Besides heading off a tragic clash of cultures, this can become a gigantic socio-economic experiment. I’ve always wondered, if an Islamic society is so great, why do so many Muslims want to go live amongst the infidels. I’ve come to suspect that it is because an Islamic society is simply not conducive to strong economic development. But then it might be just part of a grand plan to Islamize the world. Anyway, turning Europe over to the Muslims will give us a chance to see what they will do with it. Will they send its economy into the crapper or will they prosper? Some, though, might argue that this won’t be a fair experiment because Europe’s economy is already headed for the crapper.

If you have a better plan, tell me about it.
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*Remember, Israel is now where Wyoming used to be.

The global warming alarmists would have us believe that mathematical climate models can accurately predict global temperatures in the year 2100. The several versions of GCMs (Global Climate Models) are predicting average temperature increases from about 2 to about 5 degrees Centigrade. Based on these predictions they want governments around the world to take drastic actions to decrease the production of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. These drastic actions could have significant negative effects on the world economies. All this because they think the globe might warm by as little as 2 degrees?

Notice that their models disagree by more than the smallest predicted temperature increase. If the models they used show a spread from 2 to 5, what is the chance that additional models would widen that spread? Perhaps one might even predict a temperature decrease. Based on my own experience with mathematical models I have little confidence in any model’s ability to accurately predict 93 years into the future.

During most of my career I developed and used mathematical models to estimate weapon system performance for the Air Force. The models I worked with did not operate on a global scale but they were quite complex and took hours to run on high-speed computers. Nevertheless I, and my colleagues, never pretended that our models could accurately predict future outcomes. That is, although the models estimated future outcomes, we knew that the outcomes were based completely on the system and environmental data that is input to the model, and we knew that data was never perfect. We understood that there is no way that we could know either the precise environmental conditions at the time the weapon might be used in actual combat or the precise system parameters for the specific weapon fired in actual combat. The models were primarily used to perform system design trade-off studies and to produce probability of success charts to guide the pilots in employing the weapons.

No model of a physical process can reliably predict an outcome very far into the realm of the unknown. Models are constructed based on what we know today about how a physical process works. Models are run using data that we have collected to date — or data that someone makes up for the future. So models essentially only model the past or the present. When their users move beyond the present they are just guessing. The only way the GCMs can be used to predict 93 years into the future is to make up 93 years worth of input data, including the levels of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere. The models then are subject to not only the errors in the physical model itself but also the errors in the input data.

If you are still not convinced that the glowarm alarmists can’t know, with any real confidence, that average global temperatures are going to be 2 to 5 degrees warmer in 2100, consider the five-day weather forecast. Although it’s called a five-day forecast it often changes every day — and I don’t mean by just adding a new fifth day. Today’s fourth day forecast is often different from yesterday’s fifth day forecast despite the fact that they represent the same day. This is because — with the passing of one day — the forecasters have new and better data that allows them to make a more accurate forecast. It will be interesting to see how much the predicted average global temperature for the year 2100 has changed next year and five years from now.

Understand that I’m not arguing that climatologists should not use the GCMs in their global climate research. I’m confident that they understand the limitations of their models better than I do. I’m trying to make an argument against putting too much stock in the crusades of devious egomaniacs like Al Gore, who are prone to misinterpret the model results.

It irritates me that after every disaster the media sing the same tired old refrain: If the government had been more involved and had spent more money this wouldn’t have happened. We’re hearing it now in regard to the Minnesota bridge collapse and the Utah mine cave-in. They seem to believe that no cost should be spared when it comes to public safety. They don’t seem to understand that ’safety at any cost’ is just a slogan. But any reasonably intelligent engineer or bureaucrat knows that safety has to be balanced against cost and functionality. Wouldn’t surface travel be a lot safer if everyone had their own highway? Couldn’t all bridge collapses be avoided if no bridges were ever built?

An AP article discussing the decisions made by authorities on maintenance of the bridge contains this statement:

The inspection strategy was also deemed to be more cost effective, but (senior engineer Gary) Peterson and state bridge engineer Dan Dorgan denied that money played a role.

If money played no role, the inspection strategy could not be deemed the more cost effective approach. ‘Cost effective’ is a fancy term for ‘the most bang for your bucks’ or, more formally, the right balance of cost and effectiveness — where effectiveness includes safety and functionality. That is, if an approach is deemed the more cost effective, cost had to be considered by definition. Peterson and Dorgan were obviously pandering to the media; they have to know that money always plays a role.

Not only bureaucrats, but users of public transportation infrastructure discount the importance of safety every day. Consider this scenario: Bureaucrats inspect a bridge and find it structurally unsound. Instead of closing the bridge they publicly disclose that it is unsafe and that those who continue to cross it do so at their own risk. They post overhead signs advising motorists to exit now to avoid crossing the unsafe bridge.

Here’s what I think will happen: Traffic across the bridge will decline dramatically and increase dramatically along alternative routes in the short term. Then motorists will gradually return to the unsafe bridge to avoid delays along the alternative routes. Traffic across the unsafe bridge will eventually stabilize at a level somewhat lower than before it was found to be unsafe.

People who regularly travel along I-10 in Northwest Florida have experienced a similar scenario since hurricane Ivan washed out the bridge across the bay at Pensacola. The washed out eastbound span was temporarily repaired while a new span was being built. People continued to cross the temporary span although it was clearly not as safe as some alternative routes (some trucks were not allowed to cross and low speed limits were imposed).

People will accept some risk in order to save travel time and money — like they also do in almost every aspect of their lives. And it is absurd to not recognize that bureaucrats must weigh the cost of safety considerations in the construction and maintenance of the nation’s infrastructure.