The federal Liberals’ chief organizer in Quebec recently resigned after Michael Ignatieff overruled his decision about a particular nomination battle. Denis Coderre, who is still sitting as the Liberal MP for the Montreal riding of Bourassa, made clear that his decision to resign was propelled by his anger about the Toronto-centric nature of Ignatieff’s inner circle, which Coderre referred to as the “Toronto palace guard.”

“The message delivered by these recent events is as follows: ‘If you want to have your way in Quebec, you just have to bypass the Quebec officials in the party, going instead to the inner circle from Toronto.’ “

Torontonian Susan Delacourt, writing in The Toronto Star, suggests – cue the tiny violins – that Toronto is being singled out in a way no other city would be, and that a federal leader with an inner circle comprised of people almost exclusively from, oh, say, Calgary, would not face such criticism:

“It is hard to imagine anyone taking to a podium to denounce the preponderance of Montrealers working in politicians’ offices – a fact of life stretching back decades in Ottawa – or Calgarians, for that matter.”

Actually, what’s hard to imagine is the possibility that there would ever be a preponderance of Albertans in any federal leader’s inner circle; it’s easy to imagine the widespread denunciations that would surely follow. Here’s a – non-imaginary – statement from Michael Ignatieff himself:

“(Stephen Harper) is a politician formed and shaped in the radical conservative ideological world of Calgary and Calgary think tanks.”

Take special note of his use of the word “and,” through which he makes clear that he is referring not just to “Calgary think tanks” but also to the the city – the people – of Calgary. Fortunately for Ignatieff he can get away with it, because he and his inner circle are not formed or shaped by any particular regional ideology or viewpoint. Yes, make no doubt, my friend, that as Michael Ignatieff spelunks further and further into the political catacombs of the downtown GTA – where the CBC bunker also happens to be located – he will find not a regional ideology, but rather this great country we call Canada.
(*cough cough*)

Some lighter fare of the inanity of American labor markets.
Out of curiosity, is the Canadian labor market as inane?

What’s Obama to do about Afstan? And what about the Afghans?

On September 10th a now-famous video was released showing an Acorn official explaining to a couple posing as a pimp and prostitute how to submit fake tax forms and how best to procure illegal benefits for some “very young” girls they wished to bring in from another country to work as prostitutes. Within hours the story was all over the blogosphere and Fox News; the following day a flood of news outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC News online and even MSNBC began covering the story, and over the next several days the Boston Globe and others weighed in.
The uber-Democrat New York Times, though, remained silent as the days passed; even when the US Senate voted to cut off all federal funding to Acorn they didn’t see fit to mention it. Finally, six days late, the NYT published an article headlined “ Conservatives Draw Blood From Acorn.” The piece fairly screamed between the lines of resentment at having to publish a story so unhelpful to the Obama Administration, and began not with the gist of the story but with editorial context meant to mitigate the damaging information they were about to reluctantly provide:

“For months during last year’s presidential race, conservatives sought to tar the Obama campaign with accusations of voter fraud and other transgressions by the national community organizing group ACORN, which had done some work for the campaign…”

This tone continued: “Conservative advocates and broadcasters were gleeful”; the Acorn tape was “the latest scalp claimed by those on the right who have made no secret of their hope to weaken the Obama administration..” “Conservatives believe that they have hit upon a winning formula for such attacks: mobilizing people to dig up dirt, trumpeting it on talk radio”; a quoted member of a liberal think tank said conservatives were using “McCarthyite” tactics and “harping on minor failings and distorting records.” “This is dangerous stuff,” he added.
Several days ago, after prolonged criticism of the NYT, Public Editor Clark Hoyt finally gave the reason for the NYT’s blackout: turns out they simply hadn’t been watching the news:

“Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was ‘slow off the mark,’ and blamed ‘insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.’ She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media.”

Ah, that explains it: the Senate’s decision to cut off funding to Acorn was actually just an assertion made by members of the “opinion media“, and the statements coming out of the mouths of Acorn officials on that tape were merely the opinions of conservatives.

Another triumph of the glorious Soviet Union looks like biting the dust (having raised quite a bit):

Kalashnikov Manufacturer Faces Bankruptcy

It produces the most popular automatic rifles in the world but the company that makes the Kalashnikov, or AK-47, is in trouble. It has had to deal with a slump in arms exports and competition from the makers of copycat versions around the world. Now a shady businessman has filed bankruptcy proceedings against the company.

Even in his old age, Mikhail Kalashnikov still worries about the invention that defined his life. At a conference on the 60th anniversary of the weapon that he invented in 1947 — the Avtomatni Kalashnikova (Automatic of Kalashnikov) or AK-47 — the elderly weapons designer, who is still chief designer for the state controlled company that makes the guns, lamented that, “there are counterfeits all around the world now which are plainly not of the same quality as the Russian example.”

The legendary Kalashnikov is a Russian export success story. The guns are used by 60 armies worldwide, account for up to 80 percent of all assault rifles and are known as the weapon of choice for terrorist groups and rebel movements. But the Izhmash Arms factory in the central Russian city of Izhevsk, where Kalashnikovs are manufactured, has long been concerned about forgeries.

According to Izhmash Arms’ parent company, the Rosoboronexport State Corporation — which has a monopoly on supplying Russian arms to the international market — there are about eight countries in which dozens of business are making their own versions of the Kalashnikov. And they are doing this without passing on any licensing fees to the Russians.

And now it appears that the financial difficulties facing the weapons manufacturer have reached crisis point: its very existence is threatened…

Ready for action:

X-posted.

From the Heather Mallick stylebook:

1) Write down a thousand odd words, each on an individual chit of paper. Make sure to include a few that you clearly don’t understand. Like “grandeur”.

2) Mix words in bag. (Cloth please. No plastic.)

3) Overturn bag, allowing contents to fall evenly over floor.

4) Topmost 15 words—as they have fallen—will comprise first line of essay; second 15 from top, second line; third 15 from top, third line; and so forth.

5) Email to editor.

6) Turn TV back on.

NOTE: Words, phrases and “sentences” may be rearranged and/or improved upon at your discretion to ensure that none of the following are omitted:

a) Endless repetitions of what aspire to be—but aren’t quite—progressive platitudes.

b) Obtuse flattery of author, interspersed (on a one sentence per paragraph basis) with the crude substance of an attempt at an actual book review.

c) Basic contradictions. (E.G. In paragraph 15 suggest that mankind continually fails to grasp the obvious message of the author’s oeuvre; in paragraph 18 claim that the author doesn’t, nor has she ever, intended a message.)

d) A comparison—as though it was a compliment—of the author to, say, the mythical personage responsible for unleashing evil on mankind. Remain oblivious to kick-you-in-the-nuts irony of same.

(xposted)

What next … vehicle tire necklaces?

Seconds later the honor student hit the pavement. That’s when witnesses, who are other high school students, say gangbangers began stomping on and punching Albert.

Maybe The One should be spending a bit more time bringing the city that made him into the 21st century instead of using his god status to push for the Olympics. But then, what better way to repay mentors like Valerie Jarrett than to enrich them when the games come to town.
… a new Olympic sport? … the Chicago 2 x 8.

Mark this day down on your calendar, September 27th will forever be the day that the Hockey Stick died, unless incredibly convincing explanations are forthcoming … and it was a Canadian who killed it:

The next graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking.

… and even more details.
Update: Taken from Climate Audit Comments by Ross McKitrick

Here’s a re-cap of this saga that should make clear the stunning importance of what Steve has found. One point of terminology: a tree ring record from a site is called a chronology, and is made up of tree ring records from individual trees at that site. Multiple tree ring series are combined using standard statistical algorithms that involve detrending and averaging (these methods are not at issue in this thread). A good chronology–good enough for research that is–should have at least 10 trees in it, and typically has much more..
1. In a 1995 Nature paper by Briffa, Schweingruber et al., they reported that 1032 was the coldest year of the millennium – right in the middle of the Medieval Warm Period. But the reconstruction depended on 3 short tree ring cores from the Polar Urals whose dating was very problematic. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=877.
2. In the 1990s, Schweingruber obtained new Polar Urals data with more securely-dated cores for the MWP. Neither Briffa nor Schweingruber published a new Polar Urals chronology using this data. An updated chronology with this data would have yielded a very different picture, namely a warm medieval era and no anomalous 20th century. Rather than using the updated Polar Urals series, Briffa calculated a new chronology from Yamal – one which had an enormous hockey stick shape. After its publication, in virtually every study, Hockey Team members dropped Polar Urals altogether and substituted Briffa’s Yamal series in its place.http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=528. PS: The exception to this pattern was Esper et al (Science) 2002, which used the combined Polar Urals data. But Esper refused to provide his data. Steve got it in 2006 after extensive quasi-litigation with Science (over 30 email requests and demands).
3. Subsequently, countless studies appeared from the Team that not only used the Yamal data in place of the Polar Urals, but where Yamal had a critical impact on the relative ranking of the 20th century versus the medieval era.http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3099
4. Meanwhile Briffa repeatedly refused to release the Yamal measurement data used inhis calculation despite multiple uses of this series at journals that claimed to require data archiving. E.g. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=542
5. Then one day Briffa et al. published a paper in 2008 using the Yamal series, again without archiving it. However they published in a Phil Tran Royal Soc journal which has strict data sharing rules. Steve got on the case. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3266
6. A short time ago, with the help of the journal editors, the data was pried loose and appeared at the CRU web site. http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7142
7. It turns out that the late 20th century in the Yamal series has only 10 tree ring chronologies after 1990 (5 after 1995), making it too thin a sample to use (according to conventional rules). But the real problem wasn’t that there were only 5-10 late 20th century cores- there must have been a lot more. They were only using a subset of 10 cores as of 1990, but there was no reason to use a small subset. (Had these been randomly selected, this would be a thin sample, but perhaps passable. But it appears that they weren’t randomly selected.)http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7142
8. Faced with a sample in the Taymir chronology that likely had 3-4 times as many series as the Yamal chronology, Briffa added in data from other researchers’ samples taken at the Avam site, some 400 km away. He also used data from the Schweingruber sampling program circa 1990, also taken about 400 km from Taymir. Regardless of the merits or otherwise of pooling samples from such disparate locations, this establishes a precedent where Briffa added a Schweingruber site to provide additional samples. This, incidentally, ramped up the hockey-stickness of the (now Avam-) Taymir chronology.http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7158
9. Steve thus looked for data from other samples at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size in the Briffa Yamal chronology. He quickly discovered a large set of 34 Schweingruber samples from living trees. Using these instead of the 12 trees in the Briffa (CRU) group that extend to the present yields Figure 2, showing a complete divergence in the 20th century. Thus the Schweingruber data completely contradicts the CRU series. Bear in mind the close collaboration of Schweingruber and Briffa all this time, and their habit of using one another’s data as needed.
10. Combining the CRU and Schweingruber data yields the green line in the 3rd figure above. While it doesn’t go down at the end, neither does it go up, and it yields a medieval era warmer than the present, on the standard interpretation. Thus the key ingredient in a lot of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series (red line above) depends on the influence of a thin subsample of post-1990 chronologies and the exclusion of the (much larger) collection of readily-available Schweingruber data for the same area.

Apparently less than 50% of American’s abled-bodied youth are working.

Oh, I know there’s a recession on, but I have my own cynical, pessimistic take on it.

Robert Bryce, writing in the WSJ, notes that although conventional energy companies have been charged numerous times for the bird deaths caused by electrocution from power lines, or from contact with crude oil or some other contaminants, the Justice Department doesn’t prosecute the wind companies whose turbines kill an estimated 75,000 to 275,000 birds each year.
One wind farm in particular seems to be a co-venture between Giant Blender Co. and the Grim Reaper:

A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass, Calif., estimated that its turbines kill an average of 80 golden eagles per year. The study, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, also estimated that about 10,000 birds—nearly all protected by the migratory bird act—are being whacked every year at Altamont.

Oh well. I’m sure that over time we’ll all come to love the (thud!) whirring hum of the the (fwack!) eco-friendly wind turbines that will (konk!) help protect the natural world for (fftunng!) future generations.