See also Progressive Personality Disorder.

Also posted to GM’s Place.

Many have wondered what he did, during his short reign, to earn this honor.

That’s the wrong way to look at it; the real issue is what the Nobel Committee expects of him… and that’s really scary.

The record of prior nominees shows what to expect:

• 2007 – Al Gore – For attempting to destroy the US economy on behalf of a the new Church of the Holy Earth.  Obama is an eager acolyte of the same religion.
• 2005 – IAEA’s ElBaredei - For failing to report the obvious: that Iran was making steady progress towards acquiring nuclear weapons (and missing entirely the A.Q. Khan nukes-for-bucks program). Since Obama seems not to care, he can be expected to continue this illustrious pattern.
• 2002 – Jimmy Carter - For attempting to lose the cold war, and for denigrating the US throughout the world while embracing dictators. Obama is already close to surpassing Jimmy. The committee chose well.
• 2001 – Kofi Annan – For looting the world’s treasuries in the memorial Saddam Hussein corruption contest. Obama’s tax-evading staff indicates similar trends.
• 1994 – Yasser Arafat – for killing Israeli civilians, and planning to kill more, which he did by starting the 2000 second Indifada. Obama has a different approach with a more ambitious goal: sell out Israeli security until Iran nukes them into oblivion.
• 1990 – Mikhail Gorbachev - For surpassing Jimmy Carter by actually losing the cold war and wrecking hisi country. Obama is right on track here, although he needs to do a little backing-off on Afghanistan to be fully successful, but we have confidence.
• 1981 – Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees – For keeping Palestinians in refugee camps for three generations (now four).  Obama’s policies are likely to put the few surviving Israeli’s into refugee camps.

The Nobel Committee has shown their wisdom. Obama is unlikely to disappoint them.

One incident says volumes about modern American culture. At the end of Ramadan, 2002, the guards considered sacrificing a goat for their detainees.

Ultimately they decided not to,  for fear of objections by animal rights activists.

Only in today’s America…

From the Washington Post (not exactly a right wing outlet):

I can recall no other major American speech in which the narcissism of a leader has been quite so pronounced. It might be compared to Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s “I shall return” — which made it sound like MacArthur intended to reconquer the Philippines single-handedly. But MacArthur, at least, imagined himself as embodying his country, not transcending it

This personality characteristic is exaggerated in many politicians, but rarely do we see a president so self-absorbed as Obama.  Next time you read or hear a speech of his, notice how many times the word “I” is used.

In Obama’s case, this is more than a quirk: it’s a dangerous personality disorder. Powerful people this obsessed with their own glory don’t know their own limits, and react irrationally when their self image is threatened.

Obama is a psychological time bomb.

OBAMA KILLS MISSILE DEFENSE FOR POLAND, CZECH…

And

NUKE AGENCY SAYS IRAN CAN MAKE BOMB…

Both from Drudge.

Unfortunately, as with many good things, the leftists have ruined it in areas of controversy, by aggressively editing articles, and persistently fighting to keep their own viewpoint dominant.

I was reminded of this today when reading the article on the so-called “Winter Soldier Investigation” – a 1971 propaganda travesty orchestrated by Jane Fonda, John Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The purpose of this staged event was to record “testimony” of “Vietnam Veterans” who had seen and/or participated in atrocities. The intent was to invalidate the entire war effort. The organizing group (including John Kerry) had ties to North Vietnamese operatives and were clearly trying to damage the US war effort. A side effect of this effort was to badly damage the image of Vietnam Veterans, leading many to believe we were all baby killers or emotionally damaged.

And yet, today, the Wikipedia “authoritative” looking article on the subject, fodder for innocent history students, paints the entire event as completely legitimate and truthful. Not one reference (other than the ones I added today that will probably be removed by one leftist or another before you read this)  exists to books and articles which debunk the veracity of the testimony, and the one brave participant who was courageous enough to publicly admit his lies (in an emotional speech to a 2004 rally organized by Vietnam Veterans for Truth, of which I was the Webmaster) is mentioned only to attempt to destroy his credibility.

This is happeniing on many pages on Wikipedia, and is part of the left’s quite successful campaign to re-write history, to make America look bad. Conservatives need to get active on Wikipedia and fight back.

To do so,  you need to learn the rules and play by the rules. One silliness of Wikipedia is that anything you can make a reference to counts as important, but personal knowledge is worthless. This gives a natural bias towards the left, since they write most newspaper articles and most books and academic papers in areas of dispute.

But please, get out there and participate. Fight for the truth!

Now, Obama, the new boss, seems to be making the same mistakes as the last Democrat war-time old boss – Lyndon Johnson.

Johnson almost certainly caused the loss of the Vietnam War, spending the lives of 58,000 of my fellow comrades in arms to do so. He did this by crippling the US war-fighting apparatus by applying stupid rules.

Now we see Obama starting to do the same thing in his Vietnam: Afghanistan.  The latest stupidity: battlefield detainees have to  be turned over the Afghanis within 96 hours. This in a conflict with difficult logistics.

So we’re going to see helicopters rushing detainees to US bases for interrogation so they can get a little time before turning them over to the incompetent Afghanis- when those choppers could be moving wounded soldiers or much needed supplies.

Meanwhile, our intelligence arms are crippled. Interrogation of intelligence sources has been removed from the CIA and handed over to the FBI – a domestic, not international security organization.

Stay tuned for more idiocies from our empty suited new boss.

Civil rights class action lawsuits should be filed against the Service Employees International Union chapters involved. We should demand fines, the creation of a Center for Freedom funded by union dues, and court enforced sensitivity training for these thugs. There should be sit-ins at union headquarters until these demands are met.

Let the left see what their own tactics, honed over the last 50 years, fell like.

The poor often buy clunkers for their transportation. These vehicles are traded in for newer cars by the non-poor.

But the cash for clunkers program requires that the clunkers be destroyed, reducing the supply (and thus increasing the price) of older used cars.

Get it? It’s- a government program to improve our economy by destroying useful things. Brilliant, these guys!

And the poor – you know, those folks the left cares so much about – once again get the short end of the stick!

There is no better example of this than Barack Obama. Here we have a man, praised by everyone (morseo because praising a black is the “right” thing to do). He is a child of privilege, attending only those Ivy League schools which instruct their students on how special they are, further inflating their narcissistic tendencies.

He has all the answers. He’s so full of himself he wrote two autobiographies before the age 45!

Now he is the president. He knows everyone else is beneath him in their goodness and their intelligence  – after all, they elevated him above them

And we are seeing the expected result: wildly ambitious plans to shape the world to his image (or his wishes). Top down, driven by one man – Narcissus Obama.

And, like Narcissus, he has fallen in love with his his image reflected off the fawning press and the worshipping left.

And like Narcissus, he (or his dreams) will perish in this hall of mirrors. The ground will fall from beneath it, as his ill conceived economic plans destroy the nations foundations.

His subjects will rise up – not willing to be told how to live their lives by this beautiful, flawed figure. They and the inexorable forces of reality will thwart his plans.

His image will shatter on the rocks of this failure.

What happens to Narcissus Obama then?.

Nope – a smart grid is yet one more way for the lefty government to reduce your freedoms – by letting them remotely control your power usage. If the grid needs a bit more power (say, to run the high speed rail while the wind is low), you don’t really mind having the grid cut your air conditioner, do you? Complaining would be, well, like, so un-American.

And, off course, the demands are caused by the use of low quality power sources like solar and wind – low quality because they are unreliable.

While the civil liberties absolutists are (or were) freaking out about NSA monitoring of international phone calls (under the press invented Orwellian term “domestic surveillance”), a real threat to our freedom is emerging in the name of green-ness. What a shock!

The sad part is that this whole thing has been obvious for many years. Who really believed that India and China would cut their emissions when they are rapidly growing countries, highly dependent on affordable (i.e. fossil) fuel? Who really believes that the US populace will, for very long, cling to policies that hurt more and more as time goes on?

Only the same folks who believe the “scientific consensus” of the AGW alarmists. The ones who call any doubter a “denialist”; the ones who think that having a paper peer reviewed makes it right; the ones who think science is about consensus; the ones who think only oil company funding can cause biased results in science, while ignoring the suppression of younger skeptical scientists in academia; the ones who know the science is settled, when in reality the models are very rough and operating in an untested domain, and are not accurate physical models to being with due to chaos, the tremendous uncertainty about accurate parameterization, and the grossly undersampled spatial and temporal domains.

Get this, true believers: even if you are right, nobody is going to cause a significant change in the atmospheric CO2 trend as a result of governmental action. IT AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN. It ain’t gonna happen even if everyone believes the models (which would itsel be a bad day). IT SIMPLY WILL NOT HAPPEN.

Which means that all the thrashing around with economy killing measures like the Cap and Trade bill. err tax, err corruption machine – will do nothing but enrich some special interests while hurting the rest of us through raised costs and a damaged economy (remember the tortilla riots in Mexico caused by our deranged corn ethanol porkfest?).

They enticed the voters with a bunch of sweet nothings:

• A pretty package labeled “Stimulus” (bribe payoffs and other pork barrel)
• One tied with a green bow labeled “Climate Change Legislations” (more payoffs, and the fulfillment of long term leftist Luddite desires)
• A gift card saying “More Stimulus for You” (more vote buying)
• Aa gift bag labeled “Medical Reform” (state control and destruction of another 1/6th of the economy)

They got them drunk on a media fueled euphoria.

Now they are rushing legislation through in order to get their satisfaction – before the victim recovers enough to object!

The thread started with a posting by the moderator linking to the BBC’s Great Global Warming Swindle video.

The initial response, posted here with permission from the

anonymous

author, was

There IS a lot of publicity that plate tectonics occurs. Darn that publicity! However, there isn’t a lot of publicity that the earth sits on the back of a turtle. Wonder why?

There IS a shortage of publicity for the “contrarian” view that the moon is really papier-maché. Why? That claim hasn’t gone through the gauntlet that is science, the scientific method and publishing system.

It is the same with the contrarian view regarding global warming: where are the peer-reviewed research projects?

The problem with the material on the contrarian side is that, for the most part, it is self-published, non-journaled, non-peer reviewed. Why are these processes important? They are the gauntlet through which science puts its work to ensure objectivity and accuracy. This gauntlet works surprisingly well; we can name on just a few fingers the times that bad science was published in the last three decades in respected journals – think Fleishman and Pons of “cold fusion” fame and SNUPY, the dog of South Korea cloning fame.

Imagine a doctor about to open you up for surgery saying, “Well, I read about this new procedure on a web site sponsored by bodyparts.com. In fact, I’m inserting into you a part made by Ennox, a multi-billion dollar company. They sponsor the web site…..but keep that part quiet. I just found about about this as I’m really clever.”

“Have the procedure or implant been verified?” you ask?

“No, but this has to be true as it is contrarian and links to several pieces on quite a few op-ed pages.”

You look skeptical. “Is there any original peer-reviewed research on this surgery?”

“Well……uh…..those peer-review folks are all alike. They are wacky. Trust me.”

I think you’d probably get off the operating table.

Imagine boarding a new jet that hasn’t gone through the testing process. Do you think you’d fly when the captain says, “Well, we’ve not really verified anything, but we didn’t agree with the way the old planes were designed and now we’re going to try this plane. Sit down and enjoy the ride.”

Science really IS a rigorous process. Scientists are conservative by nature; they aren’t into making outlandish claims or statements. Most often when their extrapolations err, it is on the conservative side. Add to this inherent careful nature of true scientists, the processes of science, which create even more layers of rigor. There is a difference between peer-reviewed, synthesis-based, journaled work and self-published, non-peer-reviewed material. Sadly, most Americans can’t distinguish the two.

On the other hand, Steve Milloy and his ilk, often secretly funded through fossil fuel “think tanks”, frequently “publish” their work on the internet, write articles and op-ed pieces, and self-publish books. They don’t go through peer review. Wonder why? I think the answer is obvious. It is the same reason the “tobacco-smoking-is-good-for-you” “research” didn’t get peer review. It wasn’t true. It didn’t hold up to rigorous examination.

Here is a review of a recent denier book. The review has some good points to make. Either listen or read. here.

In the 1970s and ‘80, we were warned about the damage to the ozone hole. We changed our actions. Those changes are having a measurable effect now. Lessons? 1) Human actions DO cause changes on a global scale. 2) You can get a lot accomplished when there isn’t a large industry spreading misinformation. (Read here )

Before arguing AGAINST something, it might be nice to know what the something is. You can read the original AR4 Synthsis report at here. Doing so would seem to be logical, unless data don’t matter and one’s mind already is fixed.

Some handy FAQs are here

This led to numerous replies, which were not forwarded by the list owner (this list is a notification list, not a mailing list).

My response was is the first response on this post. Please feel free to comment.

After much sneaking about, we were able to clone the euphemizing software from Obama’s teleprompter.

Click to Watch Obama’s Euphemizing Telepromter IN ACTION

The following table shows a search of scientific papers about climate change related to various subject, few obviously related to global warming. It shows how powerful this perversion of science has become.

Do you suppose that science is not the driving factor when it comes to “climate change?”

By the way, one must envy the scientists funded to study “brie cheese” and “surfing.”

1. If the media doesn’t do their homework, it is hard to tell who you elected. The MSM was so in the tank for Obama that he wasn’t asked hard questions and wasn’t tested. We are only now finding out who he is.
2. Obama is the most radical president since WW-II, if not longer. So far, he has signed off on or advocated every item that’s been accumulating on the liberal wish list for the last 30 years. For the first time since WW-II, the projected budget will be 30% of GDP – and not just during the recession. That’s up from a post-war average of around 20%.
3. Obama is a liar. Not just an exaggerator, but a liar. He said the “stimulus” bill contained no earmarks (hah!). The regular appropriations bill moving through congress even has earmarks put in by Senator Obama (with his name being scrubbed off as we write). He claims to only raise taxes on the top 2% of the population, but hides $700 billion of carbon offset taxes which will hit everyone in the US, has 1100% increases in cellular phone bandwidth fees, and who knows how many others in that 1400 page bill. He redefines “bipartisanship” to be “my way and only my way” and then crows about it.

Then, there’s the whopper – He claims to not believe in big government!

4. Obama is either weak or totally irresponsible: did he let Reid and Pelosi shove that piece of excrement called the “stimulus bill” down his throat, or did he really agree to all the excesses in there?
5. Obama is more moderate on terrorism. He is basically maintaining the Bush policies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Extraordinary Rendition, coercive interrogation (torture?), and CIA missile attacks in Pakistan.
6. Obama is weak on national defense. He is dramatically cutting the military budget (by folding the emergency war appropriations into the regular DOD appropriations, with the total just the same as the regular appropriations). He is wobbling on whether to stop the missile defense against Iran, soon to be placed in Eastern Europe.
7. Obama is weak on foreign policy. Since his election, he has been blatantly challenged by Russia (Abkazian bases), Iran (satellite launch, critical level of LEU), and North Korea (planned launch). He has rolled over for all of these. He let Hillary beg the Chinese not to disinvest in the US, a sign of weakness and ignorance, since the Chinese in no way can afford to disinvest, anyway.
8. Obama is either utterly incompetent in personnel selection, or completely Chicago-style cynical. His “most ethical” administration has had the greatest number of nominees with scandals in recent history. Just one, Geitner, responsible for collecting our taxes, does not even intend to pay back taxes he owes.
9. He’s clever enough not to let a crisis go to waste – so at least his appointment of Rahm Emmanuel appears to have been smart.

[Originally posted as a comment at The Volokh Conspiracy.]

So why worry?

WRONG!

We’ve already found two of his proposals that hit directly at everyone, especially those who can afford it the least.

The first is the Carbon Cap and Trade rules. Sounds obscure, but it will raise the price of everything while benefiting only speculators. It is a.. are you ready… $645 BILLION dollar tax hike- the largest in history! Right on, Obama! Power to the people… oops!

Then there’s the huge increase in spectrum fees. Even more obscure. Spectrum fees are what you cell phone company pays the government, and Obama plans to raise them by 1100 percent!

Take that, little guy.

Are you starting to get the picture? All hat, no cattle, in Obama’s “I’m for the little guy” talk.

And there’s more….

The budget imposes a number of new taxes and fees on oil and gas companies to help offset the increased spending elsewhere. For example, an excise tax to be imposed on oil and gas companies operating in the Gulf of Mexico would raise more than $2.2 billion. The tax is targeted at companies that do not pay royalties on oil and gas operations due to what’s believed to be an oversight in their contracts. The tax is delayed until 2011, “after the economy has had time to recover,” according to the budget document.

The budget also charges user fees and increases royalties on oil and gas companies operating on federal lands.