Oh, No. Not Again.

When Christians think small:

Mass. woman sees image of Jesus on her iron
Associated Press

Metheun, Mass. -- A Massachusetts woman who recently separated from her husband and had her hours cut at work says an image of Jesus Christ she sees on her iron has reassured her that "life is going to be good."

Mary Jo Coady first noticed the image Sunday when she walked into her daughter's room.

The brownish residue on the bottom of the iron looks like the face of a man with long hair.

The 44-year-old Coady was raised Catholic. She and her two college-age daughters agree that the image looks like Jesus and is proof that "he's listening." [link]

First of all, the image is of Janis Joplin, not Jesus.

Second, when the Lord God Almighty reveals himself once again to us the unworthy here on earth, it ain't going to be on the underside of an iron.  It will be like this:

So clean the iron and put it away.  You embarrass us.

Coming To a Hospital Near You

Welcome to ObamaCare:

Hundreds of patients died needlessly at NHS hospital due to appalling care
By Rebecca Smith, Medical Editor, London Telegraph

Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals FoundationTrust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year.

Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third higher than they should have been.

Among the worst failings discovered by the Care Quality Commission were a lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mold in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E [Accident and Emergency] for up to ten hours.

Concerns about death rates at the foundation hospital trust were first raised a year ago, but an internal investigation failed to find anything wrong and managers dismissed the concerns. [link] [emphasis mine]

Ya gotta love those last two paragraphs.  Curtains spattered with blood on wards, mold in vital equipment, and patients being left waiting in the emergency room for up to ten hours?  Nope.  Nothing unusual there.

It's government health care as the British have come to know it.

Obama is taking us down the same path.  Why?

The Global Warmists May Try To Dismiss This ...

... but it's not going away.

The efforts to distort data and crush dissenting points of view in what is now being called Climategate are, to one scientist, acts of treason against science:

Climategate: The Skeptical Scientist’s View
By Frank J. Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University

The now non-secret data prove what many of us had only strongly suspected — that most of the evidence of global warming was simply made up. That is, not only are the global warming computer models unreliable, the experimental data upon which these models are built are also unreliable. As Lord Monckton has emphasized here at Pajamas Media, this deliberate destruction of data and the making up of data out of whole cloth is the real crime — the real story of Climategate.

It is an act of treason against science. It is also an act of treason against humanity, since it has been used to justify an attempt to destroy the world economy.

I’ve doubted the reliability of the global warming data for some time now, so I personally am not surprised by the contents of the emails. What the released data provide is additional proof that the temperature data can’t be trusted and that climate scientists are engaged in a worldwide conspiracy. And like all conspiracies, it was finally exposed. In this case, it was most likely exposed by an honest man inside CRU who believed that the FOIA law should be obeyed. [link]

This kicks the discussion up a notch.  To call it a worldwide conspiracy broadens the debate.  Will the scientific community decide to get its house in order?  Or will it circle the wagons around the accused  hucksters and try to continue to dismiss the sordid saga as something unworthy of further discussion?

You Be The Judge

Peggy Noonan on the amateurs who are in charge of our country:

The Obama bowing pictures are becoming iconic not for those reasons, however, but because they express a growing political perception, and that is that there is something amateurish about this presidency, something too ad hoc and highly personalized about it, something . . . incompetent, at least in its first year.

It is hard to be president, and White Houses under pressure take refuge in thoughts that become mantras. When the previous White House came under mounting criticism from 2005 through '08, they comforted themselves by thinking, They criticized Lincoln, too. You could see their minds whirring: Lincoln was criticized, Lincoln was great, ergo we are great. But of course just because they say you're stupid doesn't mean you're Lincoln.

One senses the Obama people are doing the Lincoln too, and adding to it the consoling thought that this is only the first year, we've got three years to go, we can change perceptions, don't worry.

But they should worry. You can get tagged, typed and pegged your first year. Gerald Ford did, and Ronald Reagan too, more happily. The first year is when indelible impressions are made and iconic photos emerge.

In a different America, one less concerned about offending sensibilities, the photo above would be the stuff of late-night TV comedy routines.  It's that funny.

And yet it isn't.  This is the president of the United States, the leader of the free world, prostrating himself before a foreign monarch.

Our ancestors would cringe at the sight.

The Travesty That Is Climategate

In a nutshell.  In the form of cautionary advice.  From Johna Till Johnson:

Don't make stuff up. The released document HARRY_READ_ME.txt contains examples in which the coder, supremely frustrated with the poor quality of his data, simply creates some. Even if the underlying science is sound, "created" data taints the integrity of the entire process. Don't do it, no matter how tempting.

This released document, along with thousands of others, came out of the Climate Research Unit, the primary source for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's findings that the globe is warming.  Findings, we now know, that were based on "created" data.

If this data is corrupted, all accompanying data must be deemed corrupted.  And the IPCC's assertions are therefore meaningless.

Suppose they realize what they've done to themselves and their movement?

Put Up Or Shut Up

There's only one solution to be secured in the developing Climategate scandal.  Release the data!

Eric S. Raymond:

Open-Sourcing the Global Warming Debate

The email and documents recently netjacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia raise serious questions about the quality of the research being used to underpin major public-policy decisions.

In the open-source software community, we understand about human error and sloppiness and the tendency to get too caught up in a pet theory. We know that the most effective way way to combat these tendencies is transparency of process — letting the code speak for itself, and opening the sources to skeptical peer review by anyone.

There is only one way to cut through all of the conflicting claims and agendas about the CRU’s research: open-source it all. Publish the primary data sets, publish the programs used to interpret them and create graphs like the well-known global-temperature “hockey stick”, publish everything. Let the code and the data speak for itself; let the facts trump speculation and interpretation. [link]

To this point in time, those driving the global warming stampede have guarded zealously the foundational data that gives rise to their apocalyptic theories of doom.  At every turn, they've refused to release that data in part or in whole.  To this very day, much of it remains a secret.

Oddly, the scientific community has been accepting of this unusual circumstance.

Well now, with the release of the emails that have launched Climategate, the integrity of the climate alarmists - and their data - are called into serious question.

The only way to overcome this loss of moral high ground is to be completely open with the data and methodologies.

The forthrightness of those at the center of the firestorm will also be an indicator as to just how aboveboard they really are.

I have my doubts, of course ...

- - -

Mohammad al-Sabban: "“No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science.  We should be the first to demand that it is [sic] unimpeachable, not the last.”