‘Trust Us, We’re Experts!’

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Another triumph of expertise:

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.
Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.
The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.
And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

(Via Memeorandum.) The big headline at Little Green Footballs? “Overnight Open Thread.” Lot of crickets chirping overnight, it seems.

Evolution, Anthropogenic Global Warming and Other Non-Falsifiable Theories

Attention, Ugly Women: You Do Not
Have the Right to a Job as a Stripper

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You might not need to be told this. Obviously, being a stripper is one of those jobs — like NASCAR driver — where good looks are very important. Most ugly women understand this concept, and therefore seek careers as tenured university professors, a field where looks are inconsequential. However, vocational guidance counselors forgot to explain this to Rianne Theriault-Odom:

VAN NUYS – A Tarzana woman was found guilty Thursday of dousing an exotic dancer and single mother with gasoline and setting her on fire last year outside the Tarzana bikini bar Babes N’ Beer.
Rianne Theriault-Odom, 28, who had been rejected as a dancer at the club, faces mandatory life sentences for the guilty verdicts of one count each of aggravated mayhem and torture. The Los Angeles Superior Court jury acquitted her of a third count, attempted murder and the lesser charge of attempted voluntary manslaughter. . . .
During the trial, witnesses said that Theriault-Odom, who had been rejected for a job at Babes N’ Beer, had feuded with Busby and felt disrespected by her.
Theriault-Odom testified that “I felt offended – I felt she was trying to punk me. I had to stand up for myself. That’s the way it is on the streets.”

The victim, Roberta Dos Santos Busby is — or at least prior to this crime was — an attractive woman. Theriault-Odom is ugly. And therefore, when Theriault-Odom didn’t get a stripper job, she blamed Busby.

That may not make sense to you, but I’m sure Robert Reich or Paul Krugman could explain it. As every liberal knows, poor people are poor because rich people have all the money.

Theriault-Odom was just applying Liberal LogicTM to her own situation: Ugly women are ugly because beautiful women are monopolizing all the good looks.

There is legal precedent for Theriault-Odom’s belief. About 30 years ago, during the Carter administration, feminists noticed that airline flight attendants — who were called “stewardesses” back then — tended to be young, attractive and cheerful.

This was clearly unfair, so there was a federal civil-rights lawsuit and now all U.S. airline flight attendants are either ill-tempered, middle-aged, homely women or snarky unhelpful gay men.

However, during the Reagan years, Ed Meese put a stop to such shenanigans before the courts could apply that social-justice principle to the strip-club industry, which is why most strippers don’t look like Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg or Andrew Sullivan.

Yet.

God help us if the Rianne Theriault-Odoms of the world unite for a class-action lawsuit now. There can be no doubt which side of that issue Sonia Sotomayor would be on.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Bloggers Cause Danica Patrick Wreck at Daytona; Bikini Photos Survive Accident

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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — Danica Patrick’s bikini photos were uninjured after a 12-car accident ended this weekend’s Daytona International Speedway NASCAR debut for the pinup hottie known as “The Anna Kournikova of Auto Racing.”

Patrick was in 21st place when she was caught in a four-way Rule 5 blog pileup involving Lance Burri, Donald Douglas, Bob Belvedere and Doug Hagin.

“It was terribly distracting,” Patrick said in the pit area afterwards, as she stripped off her fireproof racing suit to reveal a stunning black bikini. “I was trying to concentrate on achieving yet another mediocre finish when suddenly I started getting all these Google alerts on my iPhone. I was trying to Twitter a message to Donald — I mean, yeah, Troglopundit is totally trying to hog the action — and then, ‘Blam!’ Some guy rams into me and I’m out of the race. Bummer.”

The 300-mile Nationwide Series race was won by veteran NASCAR driver Tony Stewart, who has never posed in a bikini.

Anne Hathaway’s breasts could not be reached for comment.

Well, Now, Mr. Wurzelbacher

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by Smitty (h/t Dan Riehl)

That’s just a bit out of the plumbing aisle, now isn’t it?

Wurzelbacher touched on several different points during his speech, and many of them were surprising. He said he doesn’t support Sarah Palin anymore. Why? Because she’s backing John McCain’s re-election effort. “John McCain is no public servant,” he told the room, calling the 2008 Republican nominee a career politician.

I pointed out he’d just be plain old Sam Wurzelbacher of Ohio — Joe the Plumber wouldn’t exist – without McCain. His response was blunt. “I don’t owe him s—. He really screwed my life up, is how I look at it.”

Wurzelbacher said, “McCain was trying to use me. I happened to be the face of middle Americans. It was a ploy.”

Of course, people will say anything to get quoted in this blog…

‘Random Tragedy’ Not So Random: Socialist Serial Killer Amy Bishop

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“It’s always baffling to me when people try to politicize random tragedies — usually while they’re breaking news stories with little real information.”
— James Joyner, Outside the Beltway

Joyner is (a) from Alabama and (b) has a Ph.D., and I’m sorry if that caused anyone’s head to explode — “An intellectual? From Alabama?” — but he doesn’t seem to be the kill-everybody-in-the-faculty-meeting type of intellectual, so he’s OK with me.

Joyner is correct about the unfortunate tendency toward instant politicization of major news events. We’ve seen Michael Moore blame the 1999 Columbine shootings on Charlton Heston. We’ve seen Robert Kennedy Jr. blame the 2005 New Orleans flood on Haley Barbour and George W. Bush.

Having recently seen liberal bloggers make fools of themselves by hasty conclusions — “Send the Body to Glenn Beck!” — I certainly wasn’t going theorize about Professor Amy Bishop’s murder spree at the University of Alabama-Huntsville in the absence of facts.

Well, the facts are now starting to pile up like the corpses of Amy Bishop’s victims, so let’s go there, shall we?

  • Bishop was an alumna of Harvard University, which is also the alma mater of Ted Kaczynski.
  • As Instapundit noted last night, at least one of her students described Bishop as a “socialist.”
  • The UAH massacre wasn’t Bishop’s first homicide: “The Boston Globe reported at the time that Amy Bishop had accidentally shot her 18-year-old brother, Seth M. Bishop, an accomplished violinist who had won a number of science awards, in Braintree. Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier confirmed today at a news conference that Amy Bishop had shot her brother in 1986. But Frazier offered a different account of the shooting, saying Bishop had shot her brother during an argument and was being booked by police when the chief at the time ordered the booking process stopped and Bishop released to her mother.”
  • Via Dan Riehl and Gateway Pundit, there’s now this news: “Braintree officers who remember the 1986 shooting said that former police Chief John Polio dismissed detectives from the case and ordered the department to release Amy Bishop after a telephone conversation with former district attorney William Delahunt. Delahunt is currently a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts.”
  • Moe Lane is just askin’ questions: “Polio was not forthcoming about why then-DA Delahunt decided not to press charges, or why the documents in the case are apparently not available. Given the circumstances, perhaps the Congressman from MA-10 would like to fill in the blanks, as it were?”

You know who else might want to start asking questions? Republican Joe Malone, who is reportedly considering a challenge to Delahunt in MA-10:

In [the Jan. 19] special election Scott Brown won the 10th Congressional district 59.8% – 39.3% over Martha Coakley . . .
Worth noting is that Brown’s senior team, before they were Romney’s senior team, were Malone’s senior team. Eric Fehrnstrom, Beth Lindstrom, and Priscilla Ruzzo were instrumental in Malone’s runs for Treasurer. The Brown machine is revved up and Joe Malone may reclaim them for his next run.

Polls show Delahunt is in trouble, he’s reported to be considering retirement, and the news that Delahunt was responsible for releasing a Harvard-educated socialist serial killer . . . well, that’s not so good for Bill Delahunt, is it?

The Other McCain: Politicization You Can Believe In!

UPDATE: Professor William Jacobson:

One thing about Bishop’s politics seems likely, however. And that is that she must never have attended a Tea Party or said something nice about Sarah Palin, or we would have heard about it by now.

The BlogProf coins a new term, “Going Professorial.”

Matt Welch: Meh

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by Smitty (h/t Insty)

It’s something of a tangent from Welch’s main point over at Reason, but his characterization of conservatives as unsophisticated is exactly that:

Speaking only for myself, I don’t see libertarianism moving rightward, I see rightward moving libertarian. Which is to be expected, what with the whole not-having-power thing (as Kilgore points out, the Democrats’ wilderness years included such incongruities as Markos Moulitsas penning “libertarian Democrat” manifestos).

I submit that there’s a longer-term trend afoot which is overlooked here. The chief metric is the debt, but there is an increasing realization that the Constitution needn’t mean a government homogeneous from top to bottom; one can argue a libertarian Federal government and free up room for 50 vibrantly different States covering the Red/Blue spectrum.

Common sense hints that the wrong-headedness of Socialism in the Blue states is going to kill those States over time, but shouldn’t them godless Blue State Commies welcome their Darwinian recompense? No. No, they don’t: they just reach for more wallets.

Many libertarians already treat the Tea Party movement (and more than that, Sarah Palin) with 10-foot tongs, and it won’t take many more Joe Farah/Tom Tancredo Tea Party-branded speeches to expose many of the conservative/libertarian cracks that were so evident during the Bushitler years.

So, any tinfoil hat fringe whacko racist goober must be conservative, because libertarians cannot, by definition, be nutcases? To those libertarians I’d say “Thank you sir, may I have another?”

As for welfare and all that, again this is just me talking, but I have never for one second in my life used or thought the phrase “welfare queen” to mean anything besides one of those Evil Corporations my liberal pals are so afraid of. I don’t give one shit about ACORN, wouldn’t vote for Sarah Palin at gunpoint, and don’t look down the rostrum at that nice Center for American Progress colleague fretting about their private thoughts.

And if Governor Palin’s actual platform, when published, veers libertarian, what then? The endorsement of Rand Paul–what does that mean? Nice to know that you’ll vote for Hillary in 2012, just to save yourself from Governor Palin’s atrocious accent. Accents matter, you know.

What I do care about, regardless of who’s president, is human freedom and prosperity. And I strongly and consistently suspect that when the government accumulates more power, I and everyone else (except those wielding it) have less of which I seek. Republicans diss libertarians when they’re in power, and Democrats diss libertarians when they’re in power. Their changing attitudes toward our little (albeit growing) tribe is mildly interesting, but it’s about as newsworthy (and painful) as a dog biting a chew toy.

The truth behind this statement is that Republicans and Democrats are both conferences of the Progressive Political Football League. Kudos to Ron Paul for fighting the good fight, but the simple matter is that Americans of any stripe have been totally asleep at the switch for a century.
Possibly we can focus on a united, Constitutional, strongly libertarian front to set about fixing matters.  Some of your allies may be given to outbursts of religious, super-rational altruism as they set about rejecting the Divine Federal Government.  This does not make them Untouchables.  It’ll be OK, Matt.

Obviously, the Solution to Our Nation’s Most Pressing Problems Is . . .

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. . . more Ann Hathaway boobies. That seems to be the agenda at Classic Liberal, at least, and who are we to argue? Even though Anne’s breasts have ceased to be Catholic, they nevertheless continue to exercise a miraculous influence:

What other problems could be solved by Anne Hathaway’s perky breasts? I’m pretty sure they could have prevented Lawrence O’Donnell from melting down on MSNBC:

We expect VodkaPundit to contend that the demonstrable awesomeness of Anne Hathaway’s sweater puppies is equalled or exceeded by Christina Hendricks’ thoracic magnificence.