The number one single today in 1960:
Today in 1969 the number two single on this side of the Atlantic was the number one single on the other side …
… from the number one album:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Sept. 19
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First, the Prairie du Chien Courier Press reports:
The property tax base in Millville Township is shrinking, landowners’ shares are rising, and there may not be much residents can do about it. That was the message clearly heard by the 20 people attending a listening session with Senator Dale Schultz in Millville’s one-room town hall the morning of Aug. 27.
Recently, the Department of Natural Resources paid appraised value to purchase 146.5 acres from owner Jo Ann Shea, at 14246 Campbell Ridge Rd., Millville. The purchase brings the DNR’s total land ownership in Millville to about 4,200 acres out of 13,000, and the department is seeking another 500 acres, which would put 36 percent of the township’s land in the hands of the DNR.
The amount of land owned by the DNR is creating serious tax burden issues for the township, since the DNR is not subject to the same taxes as local landowners. …
According to the DNR, its state-owned land provides opportunities for public recreation, allows natural resources management, and enhances the natural resources along the riverway.
Despite the DNR’s promises, Millville Town Board members and local landowners who voiced their opinions at last week’s session believe they’re being slighted.
“What are our alternatives when we don’t have enough money to keep maintaining the township?” Millville Town Supervisor Judy Carlson asked Schultz. “It’s a challenge running this small township (on a budget of $105,000 to $110,000). We’ve been lucky that we have good people who help us where they can. But we’re just one piece of broken machinery away from a collapse we can’t recover from.”
“There’s nothing we can do. We have no options,” Supervisor Marlena Ward added.
Schultz was a state representative when the Riverway was created by the Legislature. I wonder how he feels about it today.
Speaking of taxes and land, from the Wisconsin Reporter:
When does a “tax break” not quite feel like a tax break? When the government’s involved.
Just ask property owners in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, the center of a controversial proposed iron-ore mine.
In response to a June 11 attack on workers at a potential mine site in northern Wisconsin, state Senate Republican lawmakers have proposed to cut off public access to 3,500 of the 21,000 acres of forest land leased by Gogebic Taconite, LLC,the company proposing a $1.5 billion iron-ore mine in the area. The bill passed out of committee Thursday.
In return, GTAC would pay the closed Managed Forest Land acreage rate on the acres it shuts down to public use, an estimated $500,000 fee to close off 3,500 acres. …
Woodland owners receive a “tax break” from the state in return for keeping their forests open to the public for hunting, fishing, hiking, sight-seeing, and cross-country skiing. If they remove their land from the program, they have to pay back taxes – even if the land has been open to public use for years.
It’s kind of like canceling a two-year phone contract midway through.
Woodland owners, though, say they’re not getting a tax break at all. Instead, the state in essence strong-arms the woodland owners into putting their property into open Managed Forest Land.
“The tax rate on forest land is anywhere from $20 to $80 an acre, depending on where in the state the forest is. People see the discount (for MFL) and say, ‘Wow, that’s a huge break,’” Richard Wedepohl, chairman of the Wisconsin Woodland Owners Association government affairs committee, told Wisconsin Reporter. “If you look at the cost of services for a municipality, it’s estimated between one to two dollars (an acre). To call it a tax savings, we don’t think is appropriate.”
Wedepohl said the closed MFL rate — where landowners give permission to sportsmen before they can use the woods — is scheduled to go to about $11 an acre, but should be in the $2 range, about where open Managed Forest Land is now.
On top of the property taxes, woodland owners pay a yield tax when they remove timber from their forest.
In the past, property owners for the most part knew who was using their land. Now, anyone with Internet access can look on a state website to see where open land is and venture in for whatever reason, according to Wedepohl.
“Woodland owners who look at the $2 rate just about have to open their land to unlimited public access,” he said. “That’s not our land anymore. We don’t know who’s on it. Hunters drop trash or a few times accidentally shot the property owner’s dog. It’s not something people are very tolerant of anymore.” …
The larger problem is the high tax rate charged to woodland owners. Wedepohl says the rate is so high most landowners who want to run a business growing trees can’t justify the costs to the Internal Revenue Service.
The larger problem is tax dollars going to buy land to take it off the tax rolls so that units of government don’t have the money to pay for government services, which increases property taxes. But every time I bring up the Knowles–Nelson Stewardship Program, I’m accused of being anti-environment or anti-DNR. (Well, that’s half right.)
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The latest in the category of Fun with Maps comes from London’s Daily Mail:
A truly captivating map that shows the ancestry of everyone of the 317 million people who call the melting pot of America home can now be seen on a U.S. Census Bureau map. …
Although the 2010 census left out questions about ethnicity, this map shows how it looked in 2000, according to Upworthy.
You’ll notice that all but three of Wisconsin’s 72 counties (and, for that matter, nearly every county in states around Wisconsin) are depicted as having Germans as their largest ethnic group. One exception is Menominee County, home of the Menominee tribe. The other two are Vernon and Tremepealeau counties, which have more Norwegians than anything else.About us Krauts, the Daily Mail says:
49,206,934 Germans
By far the largest ancestral group, stretching from coast to coast across 21st century America is German, with 49,206,934 people. The peak immigration for Germans was in the mid-19th century as thousands were driven from their homes by unemployment and unrest.
The majority of German–Americans can now be found in the the center of the nation, with the majority living in Maricopa County, Arizona and according to Business Insider, famous German–Americans include, Ben Affleck, Tom Cruise, Walt Disney, Henry J. Heinz and Oscar Mayer.
Indeed, despite having no successful New World colonies, the first significant groups of German immigrants arrived in the United States in the 1670s and settled in New York and Pennsylvania.
Germans were attracted to America for familiar reasons, open tracts of land and religious freedom and their contributions to the nation included establishing the first kindergartens, Christmas trees and hot dogs and hamburgers.
(If Cruise doesn’t sound German to you, Cruise’s real last name is Mapother. Not sure that sounds German either, but …)
As for the smaller-portion ingredients:
35,523,082 Irish
Another group who joined the great story of the United States were the Irish and the great famine of the 1840s sparked mass migration from Ireland.
It is estimated that between 1820 and 1920, 4.5 million Irish moved to the United States and settled in the large cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco.
Currently, almost 12 percent of the total population of the United States claim Irish ancestry – compared with a total population of six and a half million for the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland today.
Irish residents of note include John F. Kennedy, Derek Jeter and Neil Armstrong and 35,523,082 people call themselves Irish. …
26,923,091 English
The next largest grouping of people in the United States by ancestry are those who claim to be English-American.
Predominantly found in the Northwest and West, the number of people directly claiming to be English-American has dropped by 20 million since the 1980 U.S. Census because more citizens have started to identify themselves as American.
They are based predominantly in the northeast of the country in New England and in Utah, where the majority of Mormon immigrants moved in the middle 19th century.
Notable American people with English ancestry are Orson Welles and Bill Gates and 26,923,091 people claim to come from the land of the original Pilgrims. …
9,739,653 Polish
The largest of the Slavic groups to live in the United States, Polish Americans were some of the earliest Eastern European colonists to the New World.
Up to 2.5 million Polies came to the United States between the mid-19th century and World War 1 and flocked to the largest industrial cities of New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Chicago. …
9,136,092 French
Historically, along with the English, the French colonized North America first and successfully in the North East in the border areas alongside Quebec and in the south around New Orleans and Louisiana.
The personal irony here is that even though I am more German than anything else, I am more non-German than German. For our oldest son’s fourth-grade genealogy assignment, my wife and I sat down to figure our genealogy, which means our children’s, of course. It took several hours and dividing down to 42nds to properly (or so we think) divide them — in my own descending order, German, Norwegian (from which comes “Prestegard,” which means, depending on whom you ask, “animal farm” or “priest’s farm”), Polish, British, French, Dutch and Irish. (Some of those are guesses because my maternal grandmother was the original multiethnic in the family. My paternal grandfather, a native of southeastern Minnesota, married a Polish–German girl from north central Minnesota. My maternal grandfather’s last name was Wellner, ja.)
The other irony is that I don’t eat much German food. (Hamburgers are American, not German, invented in Seymour. Sausages may have been invented in Germany, but Austria, Germany, Chicago and St. Louis all dispute the location of the invention of the hot dog.) My favorite ethnic food group is Italian, followed perhaps by wherever barbeque comes from.
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We begin with the National Anthem because of today’s last item:
The number one song today in 1961 may have never been recorded had not Buddy Holly died in a plane crash in 1959; this singer replaced Holly in a concert in Moorhead, Minn.:
Britain’s number one album today in 1971 was The Who’s “Who’s Next”:
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I find Newscastic‘s premise unbelievable, though how they get to it is amusing:
You can recognize a hipster 15 blocks away. The outdated clothes, the ironic mode of transportation, the outdated technology.
But all that also describes most journalists. In fact, journalists are the original hipsters.
We interrupt this blog to bring you this definition of “hipster” from the Urban Dictionary:
Hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20s and 30s that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter. … Although “hipsterism” is really a state of mind, it is also often intertwined with distinct fashion sensibilities. Hipsters reject the culturally-ignorant attitudes of mainstream consumers, and are often be seen wearing vintage and thrift store inspired fashions, tight-fitting jeans, old-school sneakers, and sometimes thick rimmed glasses. Both hipster men and women sport similar androgynous hair styles that include combinations of messy shag cuts and asymmetric side-swept bangs. Such styles are often associated with the work of creative stylists at urban salons, and are usually too “edgy” for the culturally-sheltered mainstream consumer. The “effortless cool” urban bohemian look of a hipster is exemplified in Urban Outfitters and American Apparel ads which cater towards the hipster demographic. Despite misconceptions based on their aesthetic tastes, hipsters tend to be well educated and often have liberal arts degrees, or degrees in maths and sciences, which also require certain creative analytical thinking abilities.Now back to our regularly scheduled blog:
Journalists have been wearing thick-rimmed glasses since the ’50s.
via http://www.mv.com
Hipsters’ use of outdated technology can’t even compare to journalists’ use of outdated technology.Look around, journalists still use rolodexes, landlines, and even phonebooks! …
Hipsters pride themselves on not being impressed. Journalist get paid to do that.
Hipsters use film cameras because they think it makes them look retro. Journalists use film cameras because they don’t trust digital.
via http://www.journalism.co.uk
Like Hipsters, Journalists want to travel abroad. But instead of a European vacation, journalists become war correspondents.
nycstreetbystreet.blogspot.com
Hipsters ride bikes because it’s green. Journalists ride bikes because they can’t afford gas. …Like Hipsters, Journalists have an affinity for typewriters.
If there’s a bearded man taking notes at a public meeting it could be a Hipster or a Journalist.
Journalists read news you haven’t even heard about yet.
That’s because journalists know more than you do.
However: I find the comparison bogus, though amusing. (More “progressive politics” is exactly what the media does not need, as Recallarama and its petitions taught us.) Most of these descriptions could include anyone who makes insufficient money in his or her line of work to afford such things as modern-styled glasses and regular haircuts. (Back in my daily newspaper days a fellow reporter had more beard than I’ve ever had, and I’ve had facial hair for more than 20 years. He’s now a lawyer, and quite establishment-looking. He’s probably quit smoking too.) On the other hand, anyone who does his own laundry would be an idiot to wear a suit and tie to, for instance, an antique tractor show in the middle of a cornfield. (Last week.)
As for film vs. digital: No one I know in this line of work distrusts digital. Try to get film of any kind developed somewhere, let alone Kodachrome slide film, formerly the gold standard for color print photography. (Photographers are the only people who still know how to develop color film.) The idea of journalists’ fearing modern technology is ridiculous. It’s just that you can’t really lay out a page of a print publication on a tablet. (Whether or not a journalist can afford the latest iteration of tech without having his or her employer supply it is another subject, although print-quality photos can be shot on any cellphone that can shoot to at least 200 dots per inch. An iPod can shoot YouTube-quality video.)
When I first read this, I thought Newscastic was trying to argue that journalists are hip, as in cool. If that’s their argument, they’re ridiculously, totally wrong. Journalists are not cool, have never been cool, and will never be cool. (And will never be accurately portrayed as cool either.) Politicians look at journalists as something foul they’ve stepped in on the bottom of their shoes. (Journalists should reciprocate, though too many don’t.) Journalists are friendless outsiders, cynical about everyone and everything, or they should be. Journalists who want friends should get cats. (Journalists work too much and are therefore away from the shacks they live in too often to get dogs.)
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Joseph A. Scotchie reviews Forrest McDonald’s The American Presidency:
Twice, in The American Presidency, Professor Forrest McDonald states that the executive office of our government “has been responsible for less harm and more good … than perhaps any other secular institution in history.” In the same sentence, he also notes that “the caliber of the people who have served as chief executive has declined erratically but persistently from the day George Washington left office.” And elsewhere, McDonald acknowledges that he is “not sanguine about its [the presidency’s] future and [does] not feel how anyone who lived through the 1992 presidential election could be.” The decline of the presidency follows the transformation of a nation. When the dreaded bureaucracy first arose, only a handful of men toiled for the state. By the 1920s, the bureaucratic machinery had exploded in size-over 120 federal units running the country and the worst was yet to come.
The author of histories on both the Washington and the Jefferson eras, McDonald devotes two chapters to the administrations of those two leaders. Again, Washington shines through as the indispensable man; the triumphant general who, unlike a Caesar or a Cromwell, did not use his military victories as a springboard for dictatorial rule. Instead, he resigned his post as commanding general of the Continental Army as soon as the Revolutionary War ended. This and other acts of self-denial convinced the Founding Fathers that Washington could be trusted with the new office, one that avoided the trappings of a monarchy, but also one that would project an image of strength and authority. Washington’s genius was that he understood the “dual nature” of the office: a president who was not only a competent executive, but also a man who performed equally important ceremonial duties. Washington guided the former colonies through the transformation from a monarchy to a republic by “serving as the symbol of nationhood …. [H]e behaved as if [his] every move was being closely scrutinized.” This recalls one of Washington’s favorite dicta, that a man must be a gentleman, as well as always give the appearance of a gentleman. This dual role worked splendidly for Washington; as such, the image of the presidency began taking shape.
Then came Thomas Jefferson, who inaugurated an activist presidency. The word “activist” has obviously changed in meaning over the years. Jefferson, of course, did not propose a welfare state, but he did pursue a forceful foreign policy. Jefferson further defined the office. He “humanized” the office both by being a “man of the people,” and by being part of a “natural aristocracy,” or what Richard Weaver would call an aristocracy of achievement. For Jefferson, being the symbol of a nation wasn’t enough. A president needed to set and control the political agenda. He needed to steer his own legislation through Congress and act decisively in foreign engagements. Thus Jefferson created the image of the president as the nation’s maximum political leader.
The idea of a strong president who can handle Congress remains popular in the public mind. Signs of weakness in the Oval Office or an inability to get legislation through Congress is often a prescription for political disaster.
The legacies of Washington and Jefferson left great burdens on their successors. Few presidents could approach Washington’s ability to combine executive competence and a strong, reassuring image. Jefferson left behind a more powerful (and jealous) Congress that would stymie future presidents. …
Throughout much of the book, McDonald details a history conservatives know all too well: government became larger and less efficient; more laws were passed, less order was found in towns and neighborhoods. Concerning alcohol, drugs and crime, Congress and various presidents felt something should be done. But the legislation passed through the decades did nothing to stop a trend towards disorder. Increasingly the job of the president became an enormous physical burden on its occupants. In the pre-Civil War era the average president’s life was a full 73 years. But in the post-Civil War era, with technology increasing life expectancies, the average presidential age is only 63 years. The social upheavals caused by the industrial and technological revolutions contributed considerably to a president’s burden, but there were other, more fool-hardy factors involved.
For years, conservatives have been told that it was Abraham Lincoln with the Civil War, the suspension of habeas corpus, the imprisonment of political rivals, the shutting down of opposition newspapers, and other dubious acts- who was responsible for the imperial presidency. McDonald acknowledges Lincoln’s extraordinary behavior, but from this book it appears that a corner was turned during the administration of Woodrow Wilson. The size of government kept expanding, but here, too, also was a president who saw himself as the “leader of the free world” on a mission to spread democracy everywhere. Wilson’s bequests were America’s entry into World War 1, the failed League of Nations and a messianic quest to remake the world in America’s image. From then on, administrations which had little success with Congress concerning domestic affairs often turned to foreign policy to conduct grand strategies (New World Order, “nation-building”), and to embark on empire-building and gain political victories through military action that increase poll ratings.
Wilson’s messianic visions have been shared, more or less, by most succeeding presidents-Harding and Eisenhower come to mind as exceptions. Something had changed with the office. Now the image of a president as a mighty commander-in-chief and as the “most powerful man in the world” was born. In an era when foreign affairs dominated the agenda, there was plenty of eccentric thinking from both the Left and Right. Liberals, for instance, liked the idea of a strong presidency when Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy were in power, but soon complained about an “imperial presidency” when Richard Nixon came to office. Similarly, Robert Taft conservatives sought to disengage the country from overseas commitments (opposition to NATO, foreign aid programs), but during the Reagan Administration many conservatives complained about “535 Secretaries of State” micro-managing foreign policy, when in fact, this sphere was the domain of the commander-in-chief.
With the Cold War over and with a public less interested in foreign affairs, the presidency, it seems, might make its way back to its original role as custodian of the constitution. But one chapter, “lmages and Elections, Myths and Symbols,” underscores McDonald’s earlier pessimism. It is fine for a president, as George Washington understood, to project a noble image, to be a “living embodiment of the nation.” But in an age of mass media, all this has been taken to extremes. A president is still expected to be demigod who can singlehandedly save the nation. Sound bites, consultants, pollsters, obligations to fund-raisers-it has become impossible for any man to speak with much candor and sincerity about the nation’s problems and win a national election. To be sure, in the primary season some candidates do come forward with straight talk about economic and social decline. But in every instance, such candidates are savaged by the media as either bigots or flakes. Not only that, they run into fierce opposition from their party’s hierarchy, who prefer “experienced” politicos that pose no threat to the status quo. And so, we are left with issues determined by endless polls and “study groups” among ordinary citizens. It takes a clever man to make it to the top and an equally clever administration to keep a president in power for more than four years. Yet all of this has little to do with a declining standard of living and a cultural revolution that is separating the country from its Western heritage. Modern presidents are happy just to survive their terms.
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Today in 1931, RCA Victor began selling record players that would play not just 78s, but 33⅓-rpm albums too.
Today in 1956, the BBC banned Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rockin’ Through the Rye” on the grounds that the Comets’ recording of an 18th-century Scottish folk song went against “traditional British standards”:
(It’s worth noting on Constitution Day that we Americans have a Constitution that includes a Bill of Rights, and we don’t have a national broadcaster to ban music on spurious standards. Britain lacks all of those.)
Today in 1964, the Beatles were paid an unbelievable $150,000 for a concert in Kansas City, the tickets for which were $4.50.
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What more can we conclude after reading James Taranto that Barack Obama has sold out the United States to Russia?
Taranto begins with Vladimir Putin’s New York Times piece …
My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.
… and then from there:
That last line is a fallacy of composition. From the premise that all men are created equal, it does not follow that all countries are. But the rhetorical trick is clever. Putin (or perhaps a ghostwriter at Ketchum PR) rests his disparagement of American exceptionalism on its very basis–on the first of the “truths” that the Founding Fathers held “to be self-evident.”
This is right out of Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals“: “The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more live up to their own rules than the Christian Church can live up to Christianity.” (Putin also appeals to the pope’s authority.)
And the Russian president applies this rule not just to America, but to Obama, whose own ambivalence about American exceptionalism is well known:
It is alarming that military intervention in internal conflicts in foreign countries has become commonplace for the United States. Is it in America’s long-term interest? I doubt it. Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force, cobbling coalitions together under the slogan “you’re either with us or against us.”
Can you think of another world leader who rode similar sentiments into office? Hint: He defeated John McCain and Mitt Romney.
Putin’s piece is aimed at influencing American public opinion for the purpose of undermining the effectiveness of American power. It deviously reinforces both dovish and hawkish arguments against the administration’s Syria policy. It reminds the doves that military action against Syria goes against everything they believe–and that Obama as a candidate claimed to believe. It reminds the hawks that Obama has shown no inclination or capacity to lead a serious military effort.
Washington’s responses have been pitiful. “That’s all irrelevant,” CNN quotes a White House official as saying: “[Putin] put this proposal forward and he’s now invested in it. That’s good. That’s the best possible reaction. He’s fully invested in Syria’s CW disarmament and that’s potentially better than a military strike–which would deter and degrade but wouldn’t get rid of all the chemical weapons. He now owns this. He has fully asserted ownership of it and he needs to deliver.”
In his op-ed, Putin even disputes that the regime used poison gas. “There is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists.” He isn’t committed to disarming the regime but to keeping it in power–a goal that is served by undermining whatever shred of resolve America might have had to act. …
Putin doesn’t take his readers for idiots, he takes Obama for a fool–a bumbling improviser who can be rolled by appealing to his vanity and his short-term political needs, and whose actions have no broader purpose. Even the New York Times editorial page acknowledges that last point: “The [Tuesday] speech lacked any real sense of what Mr. Obama’s long-term or even medium-term strategy might be, other than his repeated promise not to drag a nation fed up with wars into a ‘boots-on-the-ground’ fight.”
Yet the Times ends on a hopeful note: “At least Syria has admitted that it has chemical weapons, for the first time ever; Mr. Putin has acknowledged to the world that there must be limits on the blank checks he was writing his client state; and Russia and the United States are working toward a common strategic goal for the first time in a very long time.”
So America has no strategy and is “working” with Russia “toward a common strategic goal”? The only way to reconcile those two assertions is to admit that Putin has capitalized on America’s purposelessness in order to advance his own purposes. As a Times news story puts it: “Suddenly Mr. Putin has eclipsed Mr. Obama as the world leader driving the agenda in the Syria crisis.” …
Because America is so much mightier than Russia, the American presidency is a much stronger position than the Russian presidency. But a strong man in a position of weakness, if he is ruthless about taking advantage of his adversary’s vulnerabilities, can get the better of weak man in a position of strength. Saul Alinsky understood that, and so does Vladimir Putin.
Mark Steyn adds:
Time magazine publishes four global editions: The cover story of the Europe/Africa edition, the Asia edition and the Pacific edition reflect what actually happened this week; the cover story of the US edition is some heartwarming fluff about nothing. The palace guard in the America media are doing a straddle Pravda and Comical Ali never had to attempt – telling the truth to the world while keeping their domestic readership in the dark.
Hence, the cooing coverage of this weekend’s “agreement”. A “deal” that pretends to be about chemical weapons inspections is, in fact, a deal that “the US will not interfere in Syria’s civil war“. Under the absurd plans to send international inspectors into a war-zone is an agreement by Obama and Putin that what happened to a US client in Egypt and a French client in Tunisia and an Anglo-American-French client in Libya will not be permitted to happen to a Russo-Iranian client in Syria.
Whether Obama knows that’s what he’s signed on to is unclear. But, if you don’t think the Middle East and the wider world get that message, you must be reading the US edition of Time.
Longer Steyn:
For generations, eminent New York Times wordsmiths have swooned over foreign strongmen, from Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning paeans to the Stalinist utopia to Thomas L. Friedman’s more recent effusions to the “enlightened” Chinese Politburo. So it was inevitable that the cash-strapped Times would eventually figure it might as well eliminate the middle man and hire the enlightened strongman direct. Hence Vladimir Putin’s impressive debut on the op-ed page this week.
It pains me to have to say that the versatile Vlad makes a much better columnist than I’d be a KGB torturer. His “plea for caution” was an exquisitely masterful parody of liberal bromides far better than most of the Times’ in-house writers can produce these days. He talked up the U.N. and international law, was alarmed by U.S. military intervention, and worried that America was no longer seen as “a model of democracy” but instead as erratic cowboys “cobbling coalitions together under the slogan ‘you’re either with us or against us.’” He warned against chest-thumping about “American exceptionalism,” pointing out that, just like America’s grade-school classrooms, in the international community everyone is exceptional in his own way.
All this the average Times reader would find entirely unexceptional. Indeed, it’s the sort of thing a young Senator Obama would have been writing himself a mere five years ago. Putin even appropriated the 2008 Obama’s core platitude: “We must work together to keep this hope alive.” In the biographical tag at the end, the Times editors informed us: “Vladimir V. Putin is the president of Russia.” But by this stage, one would not have been surprised to see: “Vladimir V. Putin is the author of the new memoir The Audacity of Vlad, which he will be launching at a campaign breakfast in Ames, Iowa, this weekendAs Iowahawk ingeniously summed it up, Putin is “now just basically doing donuts in Obama’s front yard.” …
With this op-ed Tsar Vlad is telling Obama: The world knows you haven’t a clue how to play the Great Game or even what it is, but the only parochial solipsistic dweeby game you do know how to play I can kick your butt all over town on, too.This is what happens when you elect someone because he looks cool standing next to Jay-Z. …
Putin has pulled off something incredible: He’s gotten Washington to anoint him as the international community’s official peacemaker, even as he assists Iran in going nuclear and keeping their blood-soaked Syrian client in his presidential palace. Already, under the “peace process,” Putin and Assad are running rings around the dull-witted Kerry, whose Botoxicated visage embodies all too well the expensively embalmed state of the superpower. …
Nobody, friend or foe, wants to hear about American exceptionalism when the issue is American ineffectualism. On CBS, Bashar Assad called the U.S. government “a social-media administration.” He’s got a better writer than Obama, too. America is in danger of being the first great power to be laughed off the world stage.
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London’s Daily Mail reports that global warming is an underperformer:
A leaked copy of the world’s most authoritative climate study reveals scientific forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong.
The Mail on Sunday has obtained the final draft of a report to be published later this month by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the ultimate watchdog whose massive, six-yearly ‘assessments’ are accepted by environmentalists, politicians and experts as the gospel of climate science.
They are cited worldwide to justify swingeing fossil fuel taxes and subsidies for ‘renewable’ energy.
Yet the leaked report makes the extraordinary concession that the world has been warming at only just over half the rate claimed by the IPCC in its last assessment, published in 2007.
Back then, it said that the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade – a figure it claimed was in line with the forecasts made by computer climate models.
But the new report says the true figure since 1951 has been only 0.12C per decade – a rate far below even the lowest computer prediction.
The 31-page ‘summary for policymakers’ is based on a more technical 2,000-page analysis which will be issued at the same time. It also surprisingly reveals: IPCC scientists accept their forecast computers may have exaggerated the effect of increased carbon emissions on world temperatures – and not taken enough notice of natural variability.
- They recognise the global warming ‘pause’ first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real – and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997.
- They admit large parts of the world were as warm as they are now for decades at a time between 950 and 1250 AD – centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and when the population and CO2 levels were both much lower.
- The IPCC admits that while computer models forecast a decline in Antarctic sea ice, it has actually grown to a new record high. Again, the IPCC cannot say why.
- A forecast in the 2007 report that hurricanes would become more intense has simply been dropped, without mention.
This year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons in history and the US is currently enjoying its longest-ever period – almost eight years – without a single hurricane of Category 3 or above making landfall.
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One of the report’s own authors, Professor Myles Allen, the director of Oxford University’s Climate Research Network, last night said this should be the last IPCC assessment – accusing its cumbersome production process of ‘misrepresenting how science works.
Despite the many scientific uncertainties disclosed by the leaked report, it nonetheless draws familiar, apocalyptic conclusions – insisting that the IPCC is more confident than ever that global warming is mainly humans’ fault.
It says the world will continue to warm catastrophically unless there is drastic action to curb greenhouse gases – with big rises in sea level, floods, droughts and the disappearance of the Arctic icecap.
Last night Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the leaked summary showed that ‘the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux’.
She said it therefore made no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in its forecasts and conclusions has increased.
For example, in the new report, the IPCC says it is ‘extremely likely’ – 95 per cent certain – that human influence caused more than half the temperature rises from 1951 to 2010, up from ‘very confident’ – 90 per cent certain – in 2007.
Prof Curry said: ‘This is incomprehensible to me’ – adding that the IPCC projections are ‘overconfident’, especially given the report’s admitted areas of doubt. …
Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, described the leaked report as a ‘staggering concoction of confusion, speculation and sheer ignorance’.
As for the pause, he said ‘it would appear that the IPCC is running out of answers . . . to explain why there is a widening gap between predictions and reality’.
The Mail on Sunday has also seen an earlier draft of the report, dated October last year. There are many striking differences between it and the current, ‘final’ version.
The 2012 draft makes no mention of the pause and, far from admitting that the Middle Ages were unusually warm, it states that today’s temperatures are the highest for at least 1,300 years, as it did in 2007. Prof Allen said the change ‘reflects greater uncertainty about what was happening around the last millennium but one’.
A further change in the new version is the first-ever scaling down of a crucial yardstick, the ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ – the extent to which the world is meant to warm each time CO2 levels double.
As things stand, the atmosphere is expected to have twice as much CO2 as in pre-industrial times by about 2050. In 2007, the IPCC said the ‘likeliest’ figure was 3C, with up to 4.5C still ‘likely’.
Now it does not give a ‘likeliest’ value and admits it is ‘likely’ it may be as little as 1.5C – so giving the world many more decades to work out how to reduce carbon emissions before temperatures rise to dangerous levels.
That part about “misrepresenting how science works” is amusing given that “climate scientists” have misrepresented how science works ever since they predicted the next Ice Age in the 1970s. It should be obvious to anyone that scientists and others who sign on to this manure are motivated by something other than science.
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The number one song today in 1972:
Britain’s number one album today in 1972 was Rod Stewart’s “Never a Dull Moment”:
The title track from the number one album today in 1978:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 