CharlieInCO's Comments

Big Hollywood : The Wrap: Cameron Claims Anti-American 'Avatar' Isn't

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:00:07 +0000

You know what, John? Screw you. I'm not a leftist, I just listened to the damn dialogue. You went in with your review already in your head.

Shambhala SunSpace : Karen Maezen Miller's "The Laundry Line" -- On Faith

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:42:31 +0000

What is this "faith" of which you speak, Karen? My Pajamas Media piece is one of the ones Ross linked (I'm linked right next to Robert Thurman whoohoo!) and ... I guess i'm puzzled because one of the things that appealed to me about Buddhism when I first caught it, 40-odd years ago, was that it didn't require "faith". You read the Four Great Truths, they make sense. You learn to sit, things get easier. Practice the Precepts, drama cuts down. Watch for it, and karma/vipaka shows up all over the place (in fact, one of my commenters made a lovely example of it.) So I'm unclear what the "faith" point is about, unless you're simply using it in place of "religion". But it doesn't seem to me dharma need faith; it's just there, to be seen when pointed out.

Big Hollywood : Joe Klein on 'Avatar': 'Americans Are the Bad Guys'

Thu, 7 Jan 2010 22:27:47 +0000

So: Joe Klein figures that bloodthirsty mercenaries stealing from the natives must be Americans. You guys see bloodthirsty mercenaries stealing from the natives, and ALSO figure they must be Americans. And you say this like it was a good thing?

Shambhala SunSpace : Brit Hume-and-Buddhism update(s): New WTOP interview; Daily Show #2

Wed, 6 Jan 2010 02:52:25 +0000

Of course not, silly person. But then you wouldn't have been urging him to convert, would you?

Big Hollywood : Easterbrook: 'Avatar' Trashes America and the Marines

Wed, 6 Jan 2010 01:53:43 +0000

At the beginning of the movie, as Jake is rolling across the tarmac on Pandora, the voiceover says something very close to "but these were real Marines, just hired guns, here to make big money." Somehow that, the Colonel saying he "used to be" 1MEF, the lack of military insignias, the way these folks are referring to the Corporation, and so on never quite connects for a lot of people primed to go in and see it as Evil Lefties. As far as the US Military never committing atrocities against indigenous populations, well, I'm a Choctaw with Cherokee blood as well. Tell it to my ancestors.

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 22:58:57 +0000

Which is, of course, why "refrain from sexual misconduct" is one of the Precepts.

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 22:01:45 +0000

I'm pretty happy with Singapore in general. Mostly actually pretty libertarian in important ways, pretty, good food. Little tough on chewing gum.

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 21:29:44 +0000

Somehow I just knew that was going to be too subtle.

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 21:14:25 +0000

Look, obviously Brit would be a far better, calmer, more compassionate, more peaceful person if he just converted to Buddhism. Christianity just doesn't offer the sort of calm equanimity and detached loving-kindness that Buddhists have.

Shambhala SunSpace : Tiger Woods: Should he ditch Buddhism for Christianity? FOX's Brit Hume thinks so. (With video.)

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 03:18:51 +0000

This guy is apparently googling for this conversation and dropping this link. I've run into it three times this evening.

Shambhala SunSpace : NEW video/update: Brit Hume addresses Christianity-versus-Buddhism flap on The O'Reilly Factor; O'Re

Tue, 5 Jan 2010 03:15:04 +0000

I think it's clear Brit would be a more compassionate, happier, more peaceful person if he just converted to Buddhism.

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 17:19:57 +0000

wg, what you're demonstrating is that you (underneath the sneers) agree with me: the project you link is reconstructing the GISS code in a verifiable and replicable fashion. Why? because, quote, "If the software is not clearly correct, decision-making will be obscured by debates about it." Once that's done, one hopes they'll be able to reconstruct the "homogenization" process that adds the mysterious corrects — GISS is an already-homogenized database. Then we can look into the selection process, since it's clear that the outcomes of the processing are strongly dependent on which temperature records are included or excluded, as in the Darwin Zero, central Alaska, and Siberian data sets. When that's done, and the results made public in proper fashion; when other forcings are properly considered, from land use patterns to CFC photochemistry; when Kevin Trenberth's energy books are balanced; then we'll know what the science really is.

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 15:55:28 +0000

You're fundamentally not being serious about the intellectual exercise here. The satellite datasets are necessarily secondary — Hell, I remember when the first satellites were launched, that's clearly not a long baseline — and you don't address the point about there only being on overall global temp dataset necessarily. The rest of your argument consists of declaring things piffle. In the mean time, you've avoided the real issues — perversion of peer review, opaque and mysterious "corrections" that happen to account almost completely for the reported signal, massive conflicts of interest, and flat-out apparent criminality. Three of those four are legal or political in nature — even peer review and the associated processes of publication is just something ad hoc that grew up over the last half a millenium. The scientific core is the fact that, after repeated challenges, an interested outsider cannot replicate the processing steps needed to take the raw data and reconstruct the anthropogenic, CO2-driven, climate-change results.

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 06:37:04 +0000

CA is no Galileo to the "Hockey Team"'s Catholic Church. If making a mistake is a life-long disqualifier, then there's a whole bunch of people in climate science — and the rest of science — who should be in jobs involving french fries. And if being harsh about someone is a disqualifier, then you might as well sign off now, as you've DQd yourself thoroughly. UAH, RSS, and JMA do not use the same data, yet have very similar results. Explain. See, now we're back to proof by assertion. Refer, again, to the RealClimate posts over the last month — they've made the point several times that there's only one data set. Or, alternatively, argue how there can be more than one complete world-wide data set. But go do it at RC, 'cause it's their point, not mine. Similarly, go read the Wegman report again, rather than the deepclimate gloss (your link is broken btw). There is an extensive discussion of the clique effect with analysis, and of the difficulties with independence because of the tight social clique. Besides, if all these folks have been "suppressed", how come, according to a "skeptic", they've churned out hundreds of papers? So let me make sure what you're arguing here. Are you claiming that they haven't been suppressed, as the emails actually extensively document? If so, how do you explain the emails? They have not been repudiated, and Mike Mann and others have been quite explicit that doing what they talked about in those letters was wrong, see eg Mann's op-ed in the WSJ recently. Or are you claiming that those papers, published in journals like Energy and Environment and Climate Research are given as much weight as they would be in, say, Nature? In any case, as with your point about Lindzen, one of the things that is manifest and inescapable in the emails is the collusive effort to prevent certain ideas from being published. Knowing that, arguing from Lindzen's relative few recent publications doesn't have any evidenciary weight to speak of.

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 03:31:59 +0000

Look, go over to RealClimate and do your own damn research. As I noted above, as Gavin et al have described clearly, there's only one base set of worldwide raw climate data for the very good reason that there is only one union of all other climate data sets. There's only one worldwide set of data because there's only one world to take data from. This data hase been "homogenized" by different groups, but in ways that lead to each groups' homogenized data being in agreement. Again, there are several sources for this, but the easiest is the Wegman report, which showed the data sets were something like only 10 percent independent. There is no information content in the agreement: the data was processed to be in agreement to start with.

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 03:23:14 +0000

CA is a bastion of contrarian know-nothings, who exist solely to make McIntyre feel good about himself. There's precious little real science there - just insinuations, smears, slurs and character assassination by McIntyre's cheering section. See, that's what I mean. Another ad hominem, or rather two, since you indulge in both the circumstantial and the abusive. No actual argument, and your use of the fallacy is so glaring as to be laughable rather than convincing. It's like watching Wile E Coyote open another box from Acme. how CRU managed to come up with the nearly-same analysis as many other groups. If they were relentlessly twisting the science, why do Spencer and the UAH folks come up with the same numbers? Well, there are a couple of reasons. One of them is that the underlying data is the same, and the "corrections" are made in ways that are cross-checked to agree. A second is that one of the things we have learned from the emails is that if you wanted to be published, you'd better agree with the small clique Wegman identified, or else your peer reviewers would be carefully drilled on the "right" refutations, the editors would be threatened, and if you persisted, attempts would be made illicitly to attack your academic credentials and dark fantasies about physical beatings would be circulated. None of these things mean the climate data is necessarily wrong, and if you look through what I've written you won't find any case where I said it was. What it does mean is that it achieved its current dominance through apparent scientific misconduct, and has not yet been subject to the usual scientific processes by which it would be tested. The contrarian blogosphere hasn't done the science - why is that? because you don't read the right parts? In any case, it's not the "contrarian blogosphere" that's at issue. Roger Pielke Sr, Hans von Storch, Patrick Michaels, Richard Lindzen, and many others, serious scientists all, have been making counter-arguments for years. Those counter-arguments, as the CG file emails clearly document, have been illicitly and unscientifically suppressed.

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 03:09:44 +0000

Ah, that's was the straw man. Somewhat more deft than your use of the a.h.c. See, I didn't insist the observational data was wrong. I pointed out that the data set used by the various sources aren't independent.

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 01:54:33 +0000

As I said above, I get paid for writing about this stuff at length. But on the "only one data set" point, I'd refer you to RealClimate, where they have several postings making this point. That they both make this point and the point about the independence of their studies strikes me as dd, but I didn't do it.

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 01:52:56 +0000

wg, you spend to much time at RealClimate. Turns out I was one of the first people to write on the CG files in the regular press. Go have a look at the Climategate pages at Pajamas Media, including my interviews with Pielke Sr, my direct examination of the codes released, and our ongoing investigation of the financials. And look up the ad hominem circumstantial. You're really not very good at it, and I think a little study would improve your skills significantly.

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Mon, 4 Jan 2010 01:41:35 +0000

Okay, so then it's appropriate to comment on Pachauri's major financial interest in carbon trading, and on the large amounts of funding "Big Oil" send to the Hockey Team. One or the other, you can't have both.

CharlieInCO's Comments

Big Hollywood : The Wrap: Cameron Claims Anti-American 'Avatar' Isn't

Shambhala SunSpace : Karen Maezen Miller's "The Laundry Line" -- On Faith

Big Hollywood : Joe Klein on 'Avatar': 'Americans Are the Bad Guys'

Shambhala SunSpace : Brit Hume-and-Buddhism update(s): New WTOP interview; Daily Show #2

Big Hollywood : Easterbrook: 'Avatar' Trashes America and the Marines

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Shambhala SunSpace : Tiger Woods: Should he ditch Buddhism for Christianity? FOX's Brit Hume thinks so. (With video.)

Shambhala SunSpace : NEW video/update: Brit Hume addresses Christianity-versus-Buddhism flap on The O'Reilly Factor; O'Re

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Daily Camera.com: : Bob Greenlee: Climate crisis, anyone? - Boulder Daily Camera

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume

Big Hollywood : Secularismâs Drones âStingâ Brit Hume