Month: January 2010

Steve Mosher (an online friend of mine) has written a book about the unfolding of the ClimateGate Story. From the first discovery of the files to the world wide reactions to the e-mail and data release. Climategate: The Crutape Letters (Volume 1) Here is what Anthony Watts has to say about the book: I’ve read…

Hugo Chavez has just reminded me why I shouldn’t be buying his gas (even though it’s cheaper and therefore tempting). CARACAS (Reuters) – Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez on Sunday accused the United States of using the earthquake in Haiti as a pretext to occupy the devastated Caribbean country and offered to send fuel from his…

H/T Commenter simentt via e-mail who saw it at Karl Denninger’s blog. Karl Says: My only comment: Youtube appears to have taken this down several times, but it keeps reappearing. I found several incantations along with people hosting the raw FLV file. This appears to be created by some rather angry Democrats, and is one…

Via Memeorandum, I learned about a new study by sociologists which sheds new light on a vexing question — why do many college professors lean so predominantly to the left? The answer seems disappointingly simple — liberal want to be professors, while conservatives don’t: The overwhelmingly liberal tilt of university professors has been explained by…

For reasons that are not entirely clear, I feel like writing about guilt today. Perhaps I should feel guilty for daring to write about guilt when we are supposed to be, um, celebrating. It’s a holiday, right? Holidays are for celebrating, right? So what sort of weirdo would feel guilty on the occasion of a…

I very much hope that this indictment of the Tea Party Movement is either exaggerated or untrue: The Nashville linup also would appear to rebut another commonly held argument that the Tea Party Movement’s independence is guaranteed by its fundamentally libertarian character, so incompatible with the GOP’s heavy reliance on cultural conservatives and foreign-policy neocons.…

A piece in the Wall Street Journal has made me feel the need to elaborate on an earlier post I wrote about Haiti. The irony is that according to the Journal, where it came to the recent quake, it paid to be poor: CITE SOLEIL, Haiti — For once, it paid off to be the…

Here is the first sketchy report on Friday night’s nerd night in New York. If you’ve never been to a Nerd Nite before, here’s how it goes down. Take a college PowerPoint seminar on bird migration or muscular dystrophy or nuclear fusion or what have you, and hold it late at night in a hip…

I am delighted to announce that with any luck, we will have another co-blogger here at Classical Values, Sarah Hoyt. I’ll let Sarah speak for herself, but for now I’ll just point out that she is an accomplished, published writer, whose current book is Darkship Thieves. She has graced this blog as a reader and…

While I don’t shy away from writing about politics, crass political advocacy is just not my style. Which is why — despite the fact that I have donated to his campaign twice — I have refrained until now from writing posts about Scott Brown’s candidacy. I find the guy genuinely refreshing, and obviously the Massachusetts…

Yeah, I know. Today seems to be Conspiracy Theory Day at Classical Values… Anyway, I don’t know what to make of this, but our State Department has been playing some sort of head games — literally — with PhotoShopping. As Jos&eacute Guardia demonstrates, they have stolen the hairdo from the head of Spanish Communist Party…

I am no fan of Cass Sunstein, but when I read (via a link from M. Simon) that he advocates a government ban on conspiracy theories, I nearly blew a gasket. After all, the man is often said to be a serious contender for nomination to the Supreme Court. Here is what Sunstein is reported…

Speaking of believers in nutty deities, in a comment to my post about Pat Robertson’s latest idiotarian remarks, Veeshir pointed out a gem from Danny Glover (which Glenn Reynolds linked last night). Says Glover: “When we see what we did at the climate summit in Copenhagen, this is the response, this is what happens, you…

Here is the first segment of the KUSI video with weatherman John Coleman who cofounded The Weather Channel that I mentioned in my post NASA Caught Cooking The Books. Second Segment Third Segment Fourth Segment Fifth Segment You can also see a video by a coauthor of several of Willie Soon’s climate papers, Sallie Baliunas,…

In a post at Watts Up With That a commenter looked at the e-mails found at this link [pdf] and had some interesting things to say. Ira (17:00:53) : The UK CRU version of Climategate centered around whether the 1990’s were warmer than any time in the past 1000 years. The US GISS version could…

Here is some chilling news about the American economy. Retail sales unexpectedly fell in December, leaving 2009 with the biggest yearly drop on record and highlighting the formidable hurdles facing the economy as it struggles to recover from the deepest recession in seven decades. In another disappointing economic report, the number of newly laid-off workers…

Is nothing sacred any more? I guess not. NASA has been caught cooking climate data. Climate researchers have discovered that NASA researchers improperly manipulated data in order to claim 2005 as “THE WARMEST YEAR ON RECORD.” KUSI-TV meteorologist, Weather Channel founder, and iconic weatherman John Coleman will present these findings in a one-hour special airing…

There is nothing fair about natural disasters, nor is it fair the way some people and some countries are afflicted more severely than others when faced by similar disasters. I agree with what Johnathan Pearce said here: richer countries, with superior building standards and better means of rescuing those in danger, tend to fare better…

As every respected blog with which I’m familiar in the libertarian and conservative blogosphere is criticizing Pat Robertson’s attempt to blame an alleged Haitian pact with the devil (and thus today’s Haitians) for the earthquake, it would hardly seem worthy of another post. Except that I’m feeling devilish enough to play Devil’s Advocate, and in…

…and the Met is worried they might end up going to Mohammed. Apparently the “image of Mohammed” controversy is a little too… explosive for some museums. Can’t imagine why. “We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.” That’s the safe play. It’s a temporal version of Pascal’s Wager: terrorism isn’t…