It’s a sad day in science when Jeopardy has more credibility than the NOAA:

Let me say it first: THIS IS JUST WRONG.
If they know the error, how can they possibly justify keeping the new maximum records? You can’t get away with this sort of thing in the world of professional sports records, Olympic records, or even the cheesy Guinness Book of Records. Heck they even fix mistakes made on the TV quiz show Jeopardy and dock the contestant’s winnings!
Surely NOAA has more scruples than a TV game show?
If the record can’t be verified because the equipment is faulty, how does that make it a valid record? They can’t, it’s FUBAR!

More evidence that my theory isn’t a theory, but a law (here’s the link for reference). Scroll down a bit to read their CV’s.
ht to Ian Vaughan

… by the numbers:

A former official in the George H.W. Bush White House estimates that the bloated public and private debt in the US works out to $250,000 for every man, woman and child in the country.
David Walker, the former US Comptroller General, says that the federal debt level is approaching $55 trillion and if you add in the what is owed on the state and local levels — plus personal household debt — it adds up to $75 trillion in obligations.
Walker, who now heads the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, named for the co-founder of the Blackstone Group, warned that without fiscal restraint, Uncle Sam may be guaranteeing that our future is not as prosperous as our past.
At the $75 trillion deficit level a family of four owes $1 million, he said.
Earlier this year Walker wrote on Politico.com: “Social Security and Medicare alone are already underfunded by about $44 trillion, or $146,000 per American, in today’s dollars, and this number is growing on auto pilot every year by about $2 trillion, or $6,600 per American.”

Source
… commenters who are so inclined, may want to compare how the above numbers stack up against Canada … or other countries.

Regina Leader-Post,

Draude said the right decision was made, even though using caucus funds to pay Lingenfelter wouldn’t have crossed any rules. “I’m really pleased that Dwain Lingenfelter has decided that he shouldn’t take the money, the way that he had suggested that (Hermanson) shouldn’t take it in 1998,” Draude said.

“It’s too bad that we always have to bring it up to his attention before he finally does the right thing.”

Cheers,
lance

….I will mess with you in some unspecified way until I am done — and make no doubt, my friend, that it will continue to remain indeterminate what being “done” would entail in this instance, inasmuch as I am using the past participle of “do” without actually giving any — non-Delphic — indication of what specific actions I would necessarily have had to have completed in order to….
Stephen Harper, on today’s meeting with Michael Ignatieff to discuss possible E.I. reforms:

“It is very difficult to respond to an ultimatum that contains no ultimatum…Usually you say ‘do X, or else.’ You don’t just say ‘or else.'”

A neato little chart to see where your American cousins will suffer the most and the longest.

Alas, I will not get my Obama financed unicorn until 2012.

Jennifer Lynch, the Chief Commissioner of the CHRC, gave a speech yesterday in which she said the “cacophony of protest” over the complaint against Macleans had “moved to one of discrediting Commissions’ processes, professionalism and staff” — as if the latter was some unreasonable and out-of-bounds development not congruent with the first. In each instance where she noted criticisms of the HRCs’ mandate and processes she dismissed the legitimacy of those concerns without addressing their substance. To the insular, bureaucratically-cloistered Lynch, it’s self-evident that reasonable people understand that such criticisms are ridiculous and need not be addressed.
Lynch complains in her speech that the HRCs have in effect been a victim of an “unbalanced” debate. After saying “Much of what was written was inaccurate, unfair, and at times scary”, she provides examples of such outrages:

Articles described human rights commissions and their employees in this way:

• “Gestapo”

• “human rights racket”

• “welcome to the whacky world of Canadian human rights

• “a secret and decadent institution”

Apparently it’s a self-evident outrage for Canadians to comment in their own terms on the behavior of the HRCs and their employees. Watch in this next bit how she creates a false “threat” by comprehensively and mindfully eliding the actual context:

One human rights expert who wrote a letter to a major daily paper faced an accusation in a response letter by a journalist the next day asking, ‘is (name of person) a drunken pedophile?’

Here’s the actual passage in question, from a letter written by Mark Steyn in response to a published letter by human rights lawyer Pearl Eliadis:

Let me take just one sentence: ‘Are Levant and Steyn hatemongerers? Maybe not. But no one has decided that.’

Overlooking her curious belief that ‘hatemongerers’ is a word, whatever happened to the presumption of innocence? Eliadis stands on its head the bedrock principle of English justice and airily declares that my status as a ‘hatemongerer’ is unknown until ‘decided’ by the apparatchiks of the HRC.

Can anyone play this game? ‘Is Pearl Eliadis a drunken pedophile? Maybe not. But no one has decided that.’ In her justification of the HRC process, Eliadis only confirms what’s wrong with it.

Despite Jennifer Lynch’s repeated spin that she welcomes and wishes to encourage a broad and reasonable debate, she in effect portrays the HRCs as being victimized by the existence of any debate that isn’t undertaken on the HRC-types’ own chosen terms. One needn’t look deeply between the lines to see that, in her view, a reasonable and fair debate about free speech can only begin when the opposing side finally acknowledges the legitimacy of the HRCs and their mandate, and stops being so mean.
If you haven’t already done so, please read Lynch’s speech before commenting.

*

If we had a truly impartial press, common knowledge would be that The Big O was the “bozo” … not Palin.
Hanson delivers what is perhaps his best ever:

In the first six months of the Obama administration, we have witnessed an assault on the truth of a magnitude not seen since the Nixon Watergate years. The prevarication is ironic given the Obama campaign’s accusations that the Bush years were not transparent and that Hillary Clinton, like her husband, was a chronic fabricator. Remember Obama’s own assertions that he was a “student of history” and that “words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up.”
Yet Obama’s war against veracity is multifaceted.
[…]
Obama talks more than almost any prior president, weighing in on issues from Stephen Colbert’s haircut, to Sean Hannity’s hostility, to the need to wash our hands. In Obama’s way of thinking, his receptive youthful audiences are proof of his righteousness and wisdom — and empower him to pontificate on matters he knows nothing about.

Keep Reading.
cross-posted