There have been no hurricanes in the Atlantic this year. We are constantly told that as the oceans warm we will see more hurricanes of greater intensity, and Al Gore said the weather guys were thinking about adding "Category 6" to the classification to deal with the super-storms which would result unless we curtail our civilization etc. Except the oceans aren't warming and the hurricanes aren't forming.
But it is never because of anything the sun is doing. Forget the data we have on solar activity because burning coal is what ended the Little Ice Age. It's not because of the end of the Maunder Minimum or anything.
Vox Day calls it "the collapsing charade". Something from his blockquote:
...global warming has ‘paused’ since the beginning of 1997 – an event that the computer models used by climate experts failed to predict.But that's impossible! I mean, the climatologists tested their models, and they worked! How can this be?
Easy: "garbage in, garbage out."
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Monty brings the DOOM! and as usual it's a worthwhile read.
96% of the new jobs this year are part-time jobs. But you won't hear leftoids talking about "low-quality" jobs being created in 2013 the way you did in 2005, because Democrat.
Karl Denninger discusses the recent "drop" in the unemployment rate.
Nearly half of hospital births in US are paid for by Medicaid. This is not a good thing.
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Victor Davis Hanson says the Syria "charlie-foxtrot" was inevitable. If it had not been over Syria it would have been something else, Obama being a perfect example of the "Peter Principle" in action.
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US is ready to be the world's primary supplier of natural gas. It occurs to me that we get helium from the process that extracts natural gas from reserviors in the ground; is that also true of fracking? Are we also getting tons of helium from the fracking wells?
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Short shrift today on the commentary because I'm not firing on all cylinders yet. I don't know what, exactly, happened to me yesterday but I spent most of the day virtually inert. I know it's because I didn't sleep well the previous night, but there ought to be a limit to how tired someone can be.
I got perhaps two hours of sleep before church, after which I stayed up until I had seen Mrs. Fungus off. I slept for a couple hours, until hydraulic pressure forced me to get up; while I was trying to wake up enough to hit the store for green peppers (I was intending to make stuffed green peppers for dinner) Mrs. Fungus sent me an e-mail telling me to go back to bed and we'd have something else for dinner. I took her advice and slept another three hours.
But I wasn't really well-rested, and today I'm barely doing better...and I've got stuff to do.
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Oh, this is interesting.
John F-ing Kerry said--half-seriously--that the US would find it acceptable if Syria were to relinquish control of its chemical weapons to an international task force. He didn't expect Syria to accept the offer; now that they have, it puts Obama's fuzzy ass into an even tighter crack than it previously occupied. As Denninger points out:
Now here's the problem. Obama can't take the deal. If he does when (not if) there is another chemical attack he's proved to have been lying about who used the chems the last time and his entire administration's credibility on the foreign policy stage is irretrievably demolished.Emphasis removed, as usual.
And Rice now says that only "regime change" will do -- in other words we're now trying to reserve the right to veto foreign heads of state.
All this makes us look even more stupid, weak, and ineffectual than we did when Barry-O was merely flopping about like a gutted lungfish. Now that his flopping has been channeled onto a specific--however ill-advised--vector, it's actually worse.
When was the last time we had a Democrat President who was any damned good at foreign policy? Do we have to go back to FDR or Truman? We certainly have not done very well in my lifetime, which includes Lyndon "Vietnam Micromanager" Johnson; before that, how was JFK's foreign policy? It's hard to tell around all the hagiography that surrounds him. (Cuba, anyone?)
I suppose I could spend more time on this nonsense, but I'm rapidly running out of patience. The hypocrisy on display by the left is stunning; you would think that by now I was used to it, but apparently I am not. Every time they sink to a new low I am actually surprised by it.
All the people who are gunning for war in Syria--all of them--are on record as being anti-war, anti-intervention, anti-foreign-adventure. They're on record as opposing the use of the US military even when a vital national interest is at stake. Yet suddenly, when one of their favored ones goes off-script and steps on his weenie, then they begin to beat the drums of war and insist that military strikes are the only way we can possibly deal with the problem.
And they freak right the fuck out when one of them half-seriously suggests an alternative to war and the other side takes them up on it because they don't want smart bombs and cruise missiles falling on them.
The only thing more stunning than the hypocrisy is the incompetence.
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I guess I had the energy for some commentary after all....