Statist Bingo

I spend way too much of my life arguing with the servile, the subjugated, and the lovers of enslavement.  Sometimes in bars, sometimes on Facebook, and sometimes via email.  The only thing that keeps me going at it is a) knowing that I'm right, and b) that it eventually shuts down my opponents, and c) knowing that I'll never, ever convert these boot-lickers, but that I've converted TONS of bystanders to the discussion. 

I saw this thing on Reddit, and had to laugh.  I can't wait to use it.  Save this link.  If I could change something on this card, the "Free" space would read "You just want to ______"  (turn back the clock, put black people in chains, see children die, give lots of free stuff to rich people, or any of the other stuff Obama is currently doing.) 

My new goal is to get an Obamaphile to score 5 in a row.  Hey, it's not really a game if you don't keep score. 

More pictures of our ESPN set for the Super Bowl in Indianapolis

Several days ago, I posted some pics of the ESPN set that my employer built for today's Super Bowl in Indianapolis. 
It is AWESOME. 

Here are a few more shots of the completed product. 

(That's the "Mike And Mike In The Morning" group on the far right.) 

This isn't a working fireplace, but it plays one on TV.  Those are clear acrylic cubes with lighting beneath. 
Once again, totally awesome. 

Here's a pic that I found on another site.  I think that's Jon Gruden on the far left, Steve Young in the middle, Jerry Rice second from the right (?), Michael Strahan on the far right,  and I'm not sure about everyone else. 

If you need to dress up your retail store, your shopping mall kiosk, or your broadcast stage for the greatest athletic event in the world, call Infiniti Decor in Godley, Texas. 1-800-810-9971


Go Giants.  Go Eli Manning.  Defeat the forces of evil.  (Preferably in digits ending with 3 for the Giants and 0 for the Pats.  Long story.) 

Al Gore, Gaming For Good, and a game suggestion for Climategate fans

From some random radio station's website:

Former Presidential candidate Al Gore is known for everything from inventing the Internet to alerting the world to the harsh realities (sic) of global warming. Now he’s collaborating with the creatives of PSFK on "Gaming For Good", challenging companies to create new games that address the same issues facing his Climate Reality Project – and also being fun to play.

After receiving 60 game proposals from around the world, the entries have been narrowed down to the 10 top finalists, which was then whittled down to four by Gore himself. Among the finalists are Greensquare, “a gaming platform that gives you and your friends a new, greener way to explore local retail stores, restaurants and businesses”. Gore was particularly taken with REALiTREE, “a digital representation of our local environment and the role we are playing in sustaining its wellbeing.”

You can go here to see some screen shots from a few of the games, most of which make me want to purchase and drive a new gas-guzzling Ford F-350 for the sole purpose of driving it from Fort Worth to Dallas to purchase a cheeseburger made from Polar Bear flesh.  Lord have mercy, what a bunch of sanctimonious crap. 

This one - Reality Drop - got my attention.  It was developed by an outfit called Arnold Worldwide. 

Climate change deniers show up anywhere. Finding them and fighting them requires easy access to complex arguments. This site makes it simple to spread science and destroy doubt. Climate news is prioritized by ‘heat:’ hostility, reach, sentiment and timeliness. Players can earn points by grabbing related scientific articles, videos, and data points, and pasting them into hot articles to blast climate denial into oblivion.

That sounds boring as hell.  I have a few twists to make the Reality Drop game more interesting. 

Make it into a board game like the one shown above. 

Then add some more media.  Here goes....

Someone named Tom Nelson has been slogging through the latest batch of ClimateGate emails (the treasure trove of embarrassing correspondence between the East Anglia University scientists who are doing their best to prove that the planet is warming and that it is all your fault.) 

Mr. Nelson has provided us with links to 250 of the most interesting, horrible, criminal, fraudulent, and in a few cases, pretty damn funny of the bunch.  Let's tie these in to Mr. Gore's game.

Here are the improved rules for "Reality Drop" the game for the whole family !!!!

The goal of "Reality Drop" is to move your token from "Gullible" to "Dumbass" to "Sheep" to "Victim" before any of the other players. 

Hit one of Tom Nelson's links below and read a Climategate email to all the other players. 

Any player who can still claim that Anthropogenic Global Warming is not a con job gets to move his token one step closer to the goal of "Victim". 

Younger children may need help with the concepts of "Lying", "Subsidies", "Grants", "Bullshit" and "Fraud". 

Here are the emails that will give you and your family hours and hours of Climate Change enjoyment !!!!  Have fun, gang !!!

• Climate Depot’s full list of postings on Climategate 2.0
• Environmental Defense Fund aids Mann in rebutting McKitrick / McIntyre
• BBC apologizes to Phil Jones for going with a story Jones disapproved of
• Another peek inside the settled science sausage factory: Tom Wigley on when the glaciers and small ice caps will melt: “the next step would be to try to get some realism here, but I really have no idea what would be realistic”
• Unsettled science: Warmist Tom Wigley doesn’t like a Sarah Raper slideshow subtitled “Is the climate sensitivity dead”?
• In case you missed it, on CRU’s source code: “In fact, all data between 1930 and 1994 are subject to “correction.”"
• In case you missed it: All in one place, all ClimateGate I and II files, along with source code files, HARRY_READ_ME files, email attachments, documents, etc
• Email 4141, a glimpse into the climate science Mad Hatter Tea Party: “I think the notion of telling the public to prepare for both global warming and an ice age at the same creates a real public relations problem for us”
• Why did trees allegedly stop functioning as thermometers last century? Let me count the explanations (three in this ClimateGate email alone)
• Email 1267: In 2007, Revkin coaxes Phil Jones to share his views that we must act now
• 2009 ClimateGate email from Anthony Footitt of UEA: “I do hope all these emails are just staying within UEA because it really makes us (UEA as a whole) look like a bunch of amateurs”
• Michael Mann on keeping up with the scientific literature: “I don’t read E&E, gives me indigestion”
• Teamwork: Tight little group of warmists write letters to support Michael Mann’s drive to make Phil Jones an AGU fellow
• Phil Jones, 2007: “I’m working on a paper on urbanization. I can show China is hardly affected”
• Warmist Mike Hulme agrees that “the debate around climate change is fundamentally about power and politics rather than the environment…There are not that many “facts” about (the meaning of) climate change which science can unequivocally reveal”
• Sept 2009: Phil Jones: “GHCN doesn’t have this sort of information. They don’t keep a track either of where each bit of data, or each station, comes from!”; UEA’s Dave Palmer: “I fear we could end up with a headline blazing ‘CRU has no idea where it’s data comes from!”
• I scratched your back, you scratch mine: After helping Phil Jones become an AGU fellow, Mike Mann asks Jones if he’s interested in “returning the favor”
• Don’t miss this devastating criticism of the IPCC from a guy who contributed to all five IPCC Assessment Reports: “I feel rather unconfortable about using not only unpublished but also un reviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions)…I feel that at this point there are very little rules and almost anything goes”
• Ed Cook: “It certainly looks pretty spooky to me with strong “Medieval Warm Period” and “Little Ice Age” signals in it”
• Dendrochronologists get spanked by guy with expertise in tree physiology and wood anatomy
• Phil Jones admits hiding behind technicality to avoid given data to McIntyre
• Climatologist considers faking sick rather than debating
• How hockey team member Keith Briffa asked for a fair-and-balanced review: “Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting”
• A tip from Michael Mann on how to handle scientific debate: Set up your email server so that it automatically rejects email from people who disagree with you
• More settled science: Keith Briffa, 2006: “Between you and I , I believe there may be problems with the analysis of the Bristlecone data. We can talk by phone about this”
• 2007: Phil Jones says it’s important “not to cling to outdated concepts of the past such as the MWP and LIA” [Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age]
• Warmist Ed Cook seemed to doubt that trees can ever really function as reliable thermometers?
• Email 3017: Warmist Phil Jones attempts to explain why 2008 was cooler than 1998
• ClimateGate email: Warmist Tom Wigley proposes fudging temperature data by .15 degrees C
• Email 4419: Ed Cook to Briffa: “there is no evidence for a decline or loss of temperature response in your data in the post-1950s (I assume that you didn’t apply a bodge here). This fully contradicts their claims”
• Warmist Mike MacCracken on the prospect of getting rid of some 1940s warmth?: This could result in “not having to search out all sorts of exotic feedbacks to show how a small solar change could have a disproportionately large effect”
• For Michael Mann, oh, what a tangled web: In a 2003 ClimateGate email, he claims that “the proxy reconstructions show the post-1980 warming”
• Email 3499: Michael Mann provides some code, cautions “don’t pass it along where it may get into the hands of the wrong people”; admits something “a bit odd” that “increases the amplitude of the reconstruction everywhere by the factor 1.29″
• Phil Jones again mentions his “gut feeling” a couple of times, also says “What the temperature was or wasn’t over the millennium doesn’t influence politicians” and “No natural archives ensure an accurate reconstruction”
• 2005 email from dendro guy Rob Wilson: “between you and me, I don’t think our new NH recon really adds anything new expect perhaps the fact that we should not put too much confidence in these recons prior to 1100 or so…I think the whole methodology is up in the air as well”
• Email 3757: Roger Harrabin and Joe Smith write to UEA warmist Mike Hulme, ask: “What should the BBC be doing this time in terms of news, current affairs, drama, documentaries, game shows, music etc?”
• Warmist Ben Santer on McIntyre: “He has no interest in rational scientific debate. His intent is purely destructive”; he suggests that McIntyre’s blogging is “the 21st century equivalent of a public hanging”
• 2004 email: Phil Jones on why he thought the last 20 years was warmer than the Medieval Warm Period: “This is all gut feeling, no science”; warmist Tom Wigley also calls the hockey stick “a very sloppy piece of work”
• Phil Jones “…this assumes we fully understand the climate system, and I don’t think we do – in the sense that if we do something, we know what the effect will be”
• Warmist Barrie Pittock chastises warmist Mike Hulme for not being alarmist enough in providing material for a WWF leaflet
• 1998 ClimateGate email: Briffa fears a “backlash” as modellers “undertake simple assessments of the palaeo-series and conclude that they are all of very little use”
• Email 3272: From the ultimate insiders, very serious misgivings about the data at the very center of the greatest scientific fraud in human history; Mann says that Folland “definitely overstates any singular confidence I have in my own (Mann et al) series”
• Email 3906: “greed loses you the prize”; UEA internally discusses increasing daily consulting rates for Jones (£750) and others by another 25%; does the money go to the school. or do the individuals pocket it?
• In case you missed it: Hockey stick co-author: “it may be that Mann et al simply don’t have the long-term trend right”; “I hedge my bets on whether there were any periods in Medieval times that might have been “warm”, to the irritation of my co-authors!”
• In case you missed it: Hockey stick co-author claims that after 1850, critical trees lost their alleged ability to record temperature
• In case you missed it: Phil Jones evidently admits that “The original data for sites for which we made appropriate adjustments in the temperature data in the 1980s” is lost
• 2007 email to Phil Jones: “I’ve just come accross something interesting in my data – it looks like the land T and dewpoint T data is recorded only to whole numbers prior to 1982 too”
• Email 1102: Bianca Jagger launches Green Party climate campaign; UEA prof claims that “The climate of the future is what we make it”
• Email 939: Monbiot, Lynas, and Gelbspan allegedly approved of a letter claiming that by 2050, because of CO2, “more than the total amount the world produces that year could be destroyed and life as we know it could collapse”
• Email 4826: Two UEA professors (?) identify themselves as Norwich Green Party members, compare Lindzen to a flat-earther, warn about “severe regional cooling to Britain, whilst the tropics would start to fry”
• UEA’s Pallister on a chance to see “4 local politicians facing a grilling about Science”; two of the four politicians were also UEA “scientists”, and a third, a “climate change campaigner”, had worked at UEA for 32 years?
• Email 124: UEA’s Rob Tinch asks a cannabis activist how much cash to request for a renewable energy company to sponsor “our” climate change page
• http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2011/12/email-4953-rob-tinch-of-uea-sends-email.html
• Email 2334: Check out these ideas to mark the opening of the Tyndall Global Warming Hoax Centre
• Warmist Overpeck writes to Jones/Trenberth/Mann/Solomon/Santer about the “get rid of the warm medieval period” email; he’s worried that Deming may be “taking the quote out of context”
• Email 679: Michael Mann says that he knows Henry Waxman’s staffers well; Phil Jones declines an offer to be interviewed for “The Great Global Warming Swindle”
• Email 4194: Tyndall Centre salivating over the prospect of getting a piece of £27m in Carbon Trust climate hoax money
• Email 2426: CRU draft mission statement
• ClimateGate email 5252: UEA chancellor sounds excited about UEA partnering with the “Carbon Trust” to gain money and publicity
• Email 986: US Department of Energy asks some questions relating to DOE funding for Phil Jones
• 2008 email from Phil Jones: Is he suggesting here that it is the “job” of the skeptics to find errors in climate science?
• Phil Jones: “For much of the SH between 40 and 60S the normals are mostly made up as there is very little ship data there”
• Warmist Ray Bradley: “I am as guilty as the rest–I made up something from a corner of my brain on p.33 of my paleoclimatology book!”
• In case you missed it: Phil Jones on Kilimanjaro glaciers: “Lonnie [Thompson] thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation”
• 1998 ClimateGate email: “The problem of different Markers having different 1990 emissions values (and the fact that 1990s C emissions diverge from those observed) is more serious”
• Email 5286, von Storch: “We should explain why we don’t think the information robust yet. Climate research has become a postnormal science, with the intrusion of political demands and significant influence by activists driven by ideological (well meant) concerns.”
• Email 4927: Michael Mann and Phil Jones conspiring to get a Nature paper in advance?
• Warmist Ed Cook: “This all reinforces my determination to leave this NH/global temperature reconstruction junk behind me once I get this paper submitted. It’s not worth the aggravation”
• Email 3288: Mike Salmon: CRU temperature data page “now has the final year removed if incomplete. Batten hatches and prepare for Skeptix!”; Phil Jones: “Good. I doubt if any of them will notice”
• Uh oh: Phil Jones on major IPCC model: “We can’t just blindly take HadCM3 as a future scenario. We need some justification”
• Email 3556: From the inside, another glimpse at “consensus” (and the alleged lack of natural variation before 1850)
• Phil Jones on NRC/NAS report on the IPCC and global warming: “I also hope that Europeans don’t read it”
• Consensus?: Keith Briffa on some alarmist work by James Hansen: “At very quick glance I am dubious”
• Great quote by UEA warmist Mike Hulme: “I am increasingly unconvinced by the majority of climate impact studies – including some of those I am involved in”
• Michael Mann’s hockey stick co-author Hughes: “all existing reconstructions of hemisphere-scale temperatures 1000 years ago (or even for all the first half of the second millennium AD) should be viewed as very preliminary”
• Email 856, Phil Jones: “FOI is causing us a lot of problems in CRU….It would be good if UEA went along with any other Universities who might be lobbying to remove academic research activities from FOI”
• 2003: Michael Mann on questions from McIntyre and McKitrick: A “highly organized industry PR firm…is behind this effort”
• Year 2000: Communications director at Sustainability Northwest tells UEA’s Mike Hulme that Hulme needs to hire someone with “an awareness of the more mercurial side of PR which is face-to-face, lobbying, influencing etc”
• Revealing ClimateGate email 4060: Warmist Ed Cook argues that a “double-blind” approach shouldn’t be used in the proxy reconstruction game
• Quiet, apolitical scientists at work: Met Office and UEA on “final version of the PR ready for pushing out”; attributing a Met Office quote to Phil Jones, etc
• 2004 ClimateGate email: Antarctic meteorologist lists a litany of problems in collecting Antarctic temperature data, including sites that “suffer from snow accumulation” and “one of the coldest spots” not being considered
• 2006: British Council to fully fund 14 young climate hoax researchers’ travel to DC and expenses for “intensive, hands-on media training”
• DeSmogBlog climate hoax promoter Richard Littlemore to Michael Mann, 2007: “I am out of my depth (as I am sure you have noticed: we’re all about PR here, not much about science)”
• Check out this 1998 email from UEA’s Mike Hulme on using climate propaganda to mobilize opinion and maybe get WWF funding
• 2009: An email called “Australia’s Skeptic Problem” makes its way to Phil Jones; why does Jones’ own graph show temperatures for the last 15 years stayed the same or fallen when CO2 levels have risen?
• In case you missed it: In 1999, UEA’s David Viner forwards an email to cru.all; the email contains sentences like: “What do you think would be the most effective way to radicalise the UN agenda and protect the climate from our current economic and political systems?”
• Settled science?: In a 2006 email, Met Office’s Simon Tett admits to being “a bit nervous” about this key claim: “The rate and scale of 20th century warming has probably been unprecedented for at least the last 1,000 years”
• 1997: UEA warmist Mike Hulme muses on how to use junk climate science to gain political power
• 2000: Warmist Phil Jones goes to “solar variability and climate” conference in Tenerife; finds that “Many in the solar terrestrial physics community seem totally convinced that solar output changes can explain most of the observed changes we are seeing”; laments that THEY are “so set in their ways”
• 2003: Michael Mann on what “the community” should do to punish a journal that dared to print dissenting views on the climate hoax
• 2001: Before excusing himself to shovel snow, Michael Mann writes: “My own perception is that the climate community, modelers as well as observationalists, simply don’t take seriously anymore the idea that the history of climate change over the past 1000 years is part of an internal oscillation”
• In case you missed it, damning ClimateGate emails from Tim Osborne: They didn’t commit fraud, they just “applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data”
• Warmist Jonathan Overpeck: It would be nice to give “paleoclimate studies more of an unified feel, as if it were a real discipline rather than a bunch of people doing their own time-period thing”
• The contextual collection of ClimateGate 2.0 quotes | Watts Up With That?
• January ’07: Warmist Steven Schneider credits Katrina and the “Gore movie” for a building “social tipping phemenona [sic]“
• 2007: UEA’s Alan Bond takes UEA scientists to task for not behaving as if they actually believe in the global warming hoax
• 2005: Warmist Jonathan Overpeck on “not wanting to run afoul of the skeptics and their growing and powerful disinformation and harassment machine in the US”: “I apologize if I’m getting too paranoid”
• Someone get this man a thesaurus: As his global warming scam crumbled in Sept ’09, overwrought warmist Michael Mann used the word “attack” three times in one hysterical sentence
• Warmist Richard Alley on whether recent temperatures have emerged from the band of natural variability over the last millennium or two: “Despite assurances from Ed and Keith, I must admit that I still don’t get it”
• Another ClimateGate email exposes the sort of things warmists say when they think we’re not listening: “I am not very convinced by it myself, but it’s the best I can think of”
• Tom Wigley on smearing Soon and Baliunas: “Perhaps we could start referring to them as astrologers (excusable as … ‘oops, just a typo’) “
• Mann claim: “Phil and I weighted the records we used with respect to their decadal correlations with the instrumental gridpoint surface temperature data”; we “weighted them objectively”
• Journalist Anne Jolis asks Mann if he has “rejected and otherwise sought to suppress work that contradicted your work”; Mann says that the question “betrays a deep naivety about how the peer review process in science works” and buys into “rather offensive conspiracy theories”
• Mann: “We actually eliminate records with negative correlations”; Briffa: “I too have expressed my concern to Phil (and Ray) over the logic that you leave all series you want in but just weight them according to some (sometimes low) correlation”
• Mann: “it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”"; Jones: “I would hope that AGU/EOS ‘publicity machine’ will shout the message from rooftops everywhere”
• Since Sonja retired I am a lot more free to push my environmental interests without ongoing critique of my motives and supposed misguidedness – I’ve signed my department up to 10:10 campaign
• 2003 ClimateGate email exchange: Steven Schneider says he has a “dangerous moron for a President”; UEA’s Neil Adger says “So let’s make a difference in what we can do to promote justice and equity”
• Ed Cook: “[the MBH camp has] “a fundamental dislike for the very concept of the MWP”; on being honest and open about evaluating evidence “I have my doubts about the MBH camp”; “They tend to work in their own somewhat agenda-filled ways”
• 2000 ClimateGate email: “there will doubtless be an undercurrent of suspicion that WG II authors are not qualified to make such judgements on climatological matters”; “we could finesse the problem of consistency by NOT including a table at all in the SPM, but rather use some appropriate (weasel?) wording”
• 1997: Briffa points out issues with trying to use trees as thermometers; he also says “There are people in this field whose motives or at least methods I have always regarded with suspicion”
• 2002 review of Brooks/Hulme climate model paper: “It also shows many years in which rainfall approaches zero in the rainy season”; “The model results are extensively “massaged”"; “I have no confidence in any of the conclusions draw from this simulation”
• Briffa, 1999: Many problems afflict all paleodata; “solar variabilty is a potential forcing factor”; “We should all resist the attempts of those who try to push us into the pro or anti greenhouse camps”
• 2003: Hockey Team captain Michael Mann email to the climate hoax inner circle: There is allegedly “not one single scientifically defensible element at all” to the Shaviv/Veizer paper, but he wants someone else to explain why he thinks that
• 2009: Ben “Beat the crap out of Pat Michaels” Santer refers to Steve McIntyre as “Mr. Mc “I’m not entirely there in the head”"
• Phil Jones, 1996: Piers Corbyn is the British equivalent of Pat Michaels/Fred Singer/Bob Balling/Dick Lindzen
• Ed Cook says that Trenberth “is extremely defensive and combative when ever criticized about anything because he figures that he is smarter than everyone else and virtually infallible”
• UEA’s Tim Osborn: “it is becoming increasingly obvious that solar variations are important”
• Damning quote from warmist Fred Pearce in 1996: “in the past five years, climate researchers have growing increasingly aware of how little they really know about the natural variability from which they must pick out the “signal” of human influence.”
• 2008: Jones says that Susan Solomon got “tough” with McIntyre and “threatened to remove him from the reviewer’s list”; Jones also reveals that he and Briffa “work on the sedimentary sequence approach to filing!”
• How “robust debate” evidently works in climate science: Insider presents hypothesis; soon-to-be-outsider tries to disprove hypothesis; insider suggests that outsider be fired
• 2003: IPCC head Pachauri writes to UEA’s Mike Hulme about teaming up to produce a series of yearbooks on climate change
• 2007: UN chief suggests that CO2 might cause sea levels to rise six meters in 10 years
• Year 2000: Mike Hulme of UEA talks with TERI about bidding for the UK Climate Change Centre
• The trouble with Harry: Was the fate of the world’s economies resting on fudged data, “a bloody mess” of computer code, and a programmer with dubious competency and a Green Party affiliation?
• Wigley writes to Hulme and Jones: “must get rid of von Storch too”
• More settled science: Olga Solomina raises questions
• Bummer: NOAA Branch Chief, 2009, on Antarctica: “The graph shows three things, none helpful for your [warmist] purposes, I believe”
• Phil Jones, 2008: “Why can’t people just accept that the IPCC is right!!”
• Stanford’s David Ritson: “the climate field is losing and has lost a great deal of credibility over the years as to whether it is serious science…In the MBH instance virtually all the simple internal consistency checks. one should expect to find, are missing”
• Let them eat homogenized data: UEA’s Communication Manager looks down his nose at the idea of noble CRU scientists debating with unwashed amateurs
• 2005: IPCC reviewer Peter Thorne writes a comment that strikes at the very heart of the worst scientific fraud in history; Phil Jones complains; Met Office’s Chris Folland apologizes
• Oct 2009, warmist Richard Littlemore: We shouldn’t leave the “very fate of the world” in the hands of Steve McIntyre
• Phil Jones, 2008: “Solar forcing hasn’t changed in the last 50 years…We are warming – and at a faster rate than ever before”
• Jean Palutikof [from the IPCC and Met Office] on climate realists, to Phil Jones: “The problem is they are like rottweilers – they never give up”
• 2004: Tom Wigley goes to a meeting in Japan, finds that prominent EU warmist Schellnhuber is “a bit of a laughing stock among these people”
• Briffa, 2000: “southern Greenland and the oceans to the east of it have clearly cooled…If you just plug in all areas with at least 25 years coverage , very large areas of the map cool”
• 1997: UEA’s Ben Matthews sends out an email saying that “Global warming is the most serious threat ever faced by humanity. It is potentially more dangerous than World War 2 or the cold war”
• Chris de Freitas: “the [IPCC] case rests on two main foundations; the past climate has shown little variability and the climate models reflect the internal variability of the climate system. If either or both are shown to be weak or fallacious then the IPCC case is weakened or fails”
• Yipes: As climate hoax insiders struggle to defend the hockey stick, Briffa writes “Much of the detail in Mikes response though is not sensible (sorry Mike)”; Ray Bradley suggests that an “independent group” such as CRU weigh in on Mann’s side
• “an indication that the climate community knew full well about ‘the decline’ in 1997″
• Uh-oh: “…dendro has a real problem”; “I fear that the tree-ring reconstructions really are in bad shape”; “I acknowledge the weakness in the data prior to about 1200″; Cook and Briffa are allegedly the only two people in the world “who can discuss in a totally objective way the hockystick…”
• Overpeck: “ANOTHER THING THAT IS A REAL ISSUE IS SHOWING SOME OF THE TREE-RING DATA FOR THE PERIOD AFTER 1950. BASED ON THE LITERATURE, WE KNOW THESE ARE BIASED – RIGHT?”
• Briffa gives Mann a positive? reference, but includes phrases like “not sufficiently aware of the characteristics of some of the data with which he worked”; “overconfidence in his work which bordered on seeming arrogance”
• MacCracken: “I have for quite a number of years asked people to put their finger over the WWII period and then look at the global record…Basically, now, it will seem much more evident that human activities started earlier”
• Phil Jones, 2004: “Most places in Greenland do show some cooling. Most places in the Arctic show little warming in summer as temperatures are constrained to be near zero, when there is snow and ice around,”
• 2007, Phil Jones: “I’d thought I’d also welcome you to the Hockey Team (but you’re all reserves)”
• Phil Jones, 2008: “With 243 stations needing adjustments, and 728 used, I presume the other 485 were considered to be OK without adjustment”
• Phil Jones: For the 1940-1960 period “if the SSTs were adjusted they would look much better”
• 2009, Tom Wigley to Phil Jones: “Keith does seem to have got himself into a mess…the issue of with-holding data is still a hot potato, one that affects both you and Keith”
• Planet-healer Michael Mann to Jones and Briffa et al in 1999, the year after he got his PhD: “I trust that history will give us all proper credit for what we’re doing here.”
• Phil Jones to Mann: “both of us think that you’re on very dodgy ground…What the real world has done over the last 6000 years and what it ought to have done given our understandding of Milankovic forcing are two very different things”
• ClimateGate email: Modeler told “You are in fact out of line to assume that these [scenarios] are in some sense realistic”?
• Priceless ClimateGate email 682: Tom Wigley tells Michael Mann that his son did a tree ring science fair project (using trees behind NCAR) that invalidated the centerpiece of Mann’s work
• 1996, four years after Gore said the science was settled: Big problems with climate models
• Tom Wigley on critical 1990 graph: “what crap. I thought Chris had made it up [from "garbage"]…now it has come back to haunt us”
• Warmist Ben Santer: Email-deleter Phil Jones is not a secretive, “data destroying” character; in fact, Jones and Wigley “deserve medals as big as soup plates”
• Uh-oh: Phil Jones, 2003: “When Keith, Tim and me wanted to do some comparisons with MBH98 a few years ago a few of the series could not be made available”
• 2004: Warmist Phil Jones on alarmist Pentagon report: “[it] makes the skeptics seem reasonable!…The climate scenario is ludicrous”; Tom Wigley: The Day After Tomorrow was “crap”, but “better than the Pentagon report”
• 2008: Colorado State warmist David Thompson learns about “some guy called McIntyre”; then says “The blog stuff is wacky; I’m hoping it will die down pretty soon. I’ve never really bothered to read those things before…maybe I should have”
• ClimateGate scientists on Michael Mann and his work: “probable flaws” and “clearly deficient”, and “crap” and “way too defensive”, oh my!
• Phil Jones, 2009: “Tim, Chris, I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till about 2020″
• Oh, fudge: ClimateGate email–”Tuning may be a way to fudge the physics”
• 2009 ClimateGate email: Warmist MacCracken suggests that Phil Jones start working on a “backup” in case Jones’ prediction of warming is wrong
• 1996: Interesting Briffa/Barnett quotes on natural variability
• Email 2974: Why was journalist Roger Harrabin evidently at a Tyndall Advisory Board meeting, and why was he asking for something more pro-active?
• Wow: One of my favorite all-time ClimateGate quotes is from Gavin Schmidt in 3343: “Frankly, I would simply put the whole CRU database (in an as-impenetrable-as-possible form) up on the web site”
• Phil Jones, 2009: “European instrumental temperatures in summer are going to be revised downwards (by about 0.4 deg C for periods before 1850)”
• Warmist Trenberth: “past experience suggests that the weather signal is dominant at any instant and ENSO related variability far overwhelms any greenhouse signal in any year”
• Email 4795: “true believer” Robert Watson out as IPCC head
• Phil Jones to Revkin, 2007: “The [climate hoax] message isn’t going to change. It’s about time they started doing something as opposed to talking about it.”
• 2007, Revkin to Santer et al: “sorry to take your time up, but really do need a scrub of this singer/christy/etc effort “
• 2006, Briffa on the hockey stick: “I would not have chosen in the original TAR Summary to highlight this one curve – but we should not forget that the considerable uncertainty associated with it was shown”
• Warmist Briffa: “it seems we got the balance between realism and hype about right”
• Fair-and-balanced Revkin: He’s not cherrypicking, he’s just asking Phil Jones for the “best example of trend TO CHOOSE that hints at greenhouse forcing being at play in recent warming”
• Phil Jones says critical 2-degree C limit was “plucked out of thin air”
• Revkin and Phil Jones, sitting in a tree: Revkin volunteers for alarmist damage control
• Revkin wished for Gore win in 2000. Leaked Emails Raise Questions About NYT’s ClimateGate Coverage « Commentary Magazine
• Revkin, 2007: “the only discourse now is among folks who believe human-forced climate change is a huge problem…the ‘hotter’ voices are doing their job well. i’m doing mine.”
• 2004: Guy from Scottish EPA suggests that DEFRA fund a program to send skeptics to UEA to be persuaded “how well researched and serious the issue is”?
• Focusing on the right things: In October 2009, as the CRU scandal erupted, UEA points out a typo in the word “allegedly”; says “opposition always want to dive into the detail…The detail gives them scope for ‘interpretation’ and devilment.”
• Oct ’09: A month before ClimateGate 1.0 broke, Jones writes: “No CRU work is flawed…Climate scientists know it [criticisms?] is all rubbish…Maybe when it all dies down later in the year, UEA/ENV/CRU need to consider what we have learned from the alleged scandal”
• Susan Solomon: “I am worried that they will challenge the vagueness of ‘extreme weather’”
• 2005 email from warmist Overpeck to warmist Briffa: “am worried about the late 20th century “coolness” in the proxy recon that’s not in the instrumental”
• 1997 UEA email “The Drowning Village: (about global climate change negotiations”
• 2009 Phil Jones email: “…I spoke to Susan. We agreed that the only way IPCC can work is the collegiate way it did with AR4…these people read much more into the IPCC procedures”
• 2002 Briffa email mentions Mann’s “diminishing support” and the “questionable nature of much of Mann’s verbiage”; says “Mike could be a lot more open about the real uncertainty of his early temperature estimates”
• Michael “robust debate” Mann: “I never acknowledge emails from people I don’t know, about topics that are in any way sensitive. this is a perfect example of something that goes right to the trash bin”
• John Christy: “This gets to the issue that the “consensus” reports now are just the consensus of those who agree with the consensus. The government-selected authors have become gatekeepers rather than honest brokers of information”
• 1997 ClimateGate email: IPCC’s Rob Swart asks WWF for help in getting scientists to endorse the climate hoax
• von Storch: “The concealment of dissent and uncertainty in favor of a politically good cause takes its toll on credibility, for the public is more intelligent than is usually assumed”
• 2007 email: “That the [SST] data are so unreliable between the 30s and 60s means we don’t know for sure what happened in terms of global-mean temperatures during that period. In fact, if you blank out the data from the 30s to the 60s, you can actually imagine the globe warming weakly but continuously during that period”
• Rob Wilson, 2009: “The palaeo-world has become a much more complex place in the last 10 years…any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently have”
• Briffa: “My concern was motivated by the possibility of expressing an impression of more concensus than might actually exist . I suppose the earlier talk implying that we should not ‘muddy the waters’ by including contradictory evidence worried me “
• 2007, Phil Jones to Ed Cook: “Ed, No worries. There are no data over the high Himalaya for most of the period before 1950. The high-res grids relax to the climatology”
• Hooray!: UEA celebrates their inclusion in a “list of the top 20 most influential environmental organisations over the last 30 years, alongside such august bodies as the RCEP, the IPCC, the Met Office and Greenpeace”
• Questions for UEA’s Mike Hulme: What was Greenpeace’s “Sceptics Project” for journalists and campaigners, and what were the details of your consultancy fee?
• 9/11/2001, UEA email regarding the appointment of a research director: “Like Brian I would be less nervous if it were someone from the “fraternity”, too, but it would all depend on who it was”
• UEA’s Saffron O’Neill: Not part of a team of warmists trying to foist off political propaganda, just an honest, straight-shooting person planning to “operationalise the polar bear icon”
• Phil Jones, 2005: “the world will not get colder. There won’t be any sort of ice age for the next 50K years”
• Phil Jones, 1996: “We’ll need to put together a statement carefully to explain why it’s so cold this year !”
• 2000 Email: “organized and deeply committed environmental activism has long been an important part of the UNFCCC process through major groups such as NRDC, EDF/ED, WWF and Greenpeace”
• Phil Jones, 2009 on FOI issues with climate hoax data: “IPCC have got lawyers involved from their sponsoring UN organizations (UNEP and WMO)”
• 2007 Mann email to Phil Jones: “I have a top lawyer already representing me…Wei Chyung needs to sue them, or at the least threaten a lawsuit…The threat of a lawsuit alone my prevent them from publishing this paper, so time is of the essence”
• 2005:Mann already lawyered up
• 2003, Mann: “NSF policy in no way legally requires funded scientists to provided their data (let alone computer codes!) for public access”
• 2007, Phil Jones: “I do now wish I’d never sent them the data after their FOIA request!”
• Phil Jones, 2004: “there was some press activity related to this skeptic below, but [I] managed to talk the BBC out of doing anything”
• Phil Jones on not responding to FOI requests: “Once they became aware of the types of people we were dealing with, everyone at UEA (in the registry and in the Environmental Sciences school – the head of school and a few others) became very supportive”
• 2004 email from Richard Somerville: “We don’t understand cloud feedbacks. We don’t understand air-sea interactions. We don’t understand aerosol indirect effects. The list is long”
• 2009: Chummy emails between Mann and Revkin about Steve McIntyre “shutting up” unless he can find a way to get Mann’s gatekeeping friends to publish his analysis
• 2003 Emails: MacCracken suggests that warmists were “trying to keep the scientific literature too pure”; Mann: “While it was easy to make sure that the worst papers….didn’t see the light of the day at J. Climate, it was inevitable that such papers might slip through the cracks at e.g. GRL”
• Priceless quote from Hadley Centre’s Peter Cox: “We knew that we would not get to the scientific issues if we went down every rabbit hole of skepticism.”
• Malcolm Hughes on creeping skepticism in 2003 among colleagues and grad students; “they respond better to the heavily referenced articles by Idso or Soon than to ‘ex cathedra’ statements”
• ClimateGate email: “Stupid, politicized action” and “silly oversellings” by the IPCC; Met Office guy admits “the paleo community cannot do stats!”
• Michael “robust debate” Mann on the opportunity to robustly debate Steve McIntyre: “Phil, I would immediately delete anything you receive from this fraud…I would NOT RESPOND to this guy. As you know, only bad things can come of that”
• 1997 email to UEA’s Mike Hulme: “doing good things for the cause”; “no one is going to check”; “forget the screening”; “delegates we want to influence”; “Greenpeace…and other NGOs can further spread the word”
• Warmist Revkin: “My sense is that Wally B’s notion that the ‘angry beast’ is a creature of colder eras but not of warmer times has some support”
• Phrases about data inside the IPCC sausage factory: “fairly large differences throughout”; “look kinda scary”; “I’m advocating adopting an Ostrich position”; “path of least resistance”; “just ignore any error messages”; “keep running it with a mask we know to be sub-optimal”
• Email 4394: Prominent IPCC junk scientist John Houghton invokes Jesus, God, and a Hollywood movie in an apparent attempt to convince us that we need transfers of wealth to prevent CO2-induced bad weather
• Warmist Mike Hulme admits he hasn’t seen “The Day After Tomorrow”, then calls it “a great film”
• Walking the walk: Warmist Mann to Warmist Jones: “looking forward to seeing you in Tahiti, we can enjoy some nice tropical drinks w/ umbrellas in them”
• Email 1995: Various junk scientists casually mention hoax-related travel to Turkey, Tuscany, Vienna, Hawaii, Toronto, and Finland
• Email 4492: In one email, various junk scientists mention climate hoax meetings in Italy, Hawaii, France, and at Duke
• Phil Jones in 2007 mentions “research malpractice allegations against some climate people in the US and Europe”; “I reckon only a few in the climate field know the full extent of what is going on behind the scenes in climate science”
• Email 5215: Phil Jones wants a Nobel Peace Prize certificate to hang on his wall; Trenberth wonders where the cash will go
• Phil Jones: Non-profit EGU asks Al Gore to speak about saving human civilization from complete CO2-induced collapse; Gore asks for $50,000 cash
• Met Office project manager: “Could we ‘use’ the NY Times Editorial to get an ‘in’ to Al Gore”
• 2001, Mike Hulme on Al Gore and Kyoto: Vanity over pragmatism
• Email 1447, on idiotic global warming hoax film “The Day After Tomorrow”: “The film has been broadly welcomed by scientists as a way to raise awareness about the importance of climate change issues.”
• Warmist Mike Hulme: “Sexing-up evidence is so easy to do, isn’t it?”
• Origin of the term “hockey stick” explained; also Ed Cook: “I do find the dismissal of the Medieval Warm Period as a meaningful global event to be grossly premature and probably wrong”
• Phil Jones: “I won’t be looking at Climate Fraudit…The Nature person knows the [Nature?] blog will be highjacked by the deniers”
• 2005, Tom Wigley on paleo reconstructions: “the differences between them prior to 1850 make me very nervous. If I were on the greenhouse deniers’ side, I would be inclined to focus on the wide range of paleo results and the differences between them as an argument for dismissing them all.”
• Phil Jones, 2008: ‘To almost all in government circles (including the US from Jan 20, 2009), the science is done and dusted. The reporting of climate stories within the media (especially the BBC) is generally one-sided’…Mainstream climate science does not engage with [skeptics]“
• How “consensus” is built: Maybe four warmists can fly to Switzerland and have an “honest” discussion over a few beers to sort out the real issues “of which there are many”
• Amusing letter circulates at CRU, protesting UK coverage of warm weather as good news: ‘The newspapers were similarly awash with bikinis, cheering holidaymakers and news of record grape harvests”
• Phil Jones on inconvenient data: “I realise you’ve taken great care with the selection, but this is a nagging doubt and will be picked up by the few skeptics trying to divide us all”
• 1997: Warmists Mike Hulme et al want warmist Tom Wigley to endorse a climate hoax letter; Tom uses words like “very disturbed”, “reprehensible”, “dishonesty” and “egregious” in his reply
• Poor warmists: In 2007, they were trying to figure out what to do about a critical 1990 IPCC graph that looks nothing like the hockey stick
• 2002 ClimateGate email to Keith Briffa: Another trick, more hiding, and for me, more doubt that we should spend $45 trillion and change our lifestyles based on the notion that trees are reliable thermometers
• Warmist Trenberth: “we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter”
• 20 Juicy ClimateGate 2.0 emails
• Phil Jones: “I wasted a part of a day deleting numerous emails and exchanges with almost all the skeptics. So I have virtually nothing. “
• Michael Mann, 2006: “we certainly don’t know the GLOBAL mean temperature anomaly very well, and nobody has ever claimed we do”
• That was quick: Michael Mann on the just-released 5,000 ClimateGate 2.0 emails: “they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all”
• ClimateGate 2.0

For players who intend to play this game for the rest of their lives, the ClimateGate search engines are located here and here.


And for more pure, undiluted greatness, you can go here: All in one place, all ClimateGate I and II files, along with source code files, HARRY_READ_ME files, email attachments, documents, etc.

We can only hope that the generous hackers who gave us Climategate I and Climategate II will drop another batch of emails into our laps before the current goldmine of gaming material is exhausted. 

I am the 99%

Ken Jennings, the guy who first won big on "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" (I think) has a new blog. 

Go here. 

Here's a pic from the site:

Do you feel lucky?

About a week ago, I was minding my own business in my favorite bar. A guy came in who looked to be a few years older than me, but with a lot more mileage. He had a Neon Tan, complete with the Bourbon spiderweb/vein marks on his nose. We made some small talk, and then he started harassing one of the ladies at the bar. He eventually asked her if she was a lesbian, which didn’t go over well. She got very angry and gave him a five minute harangue that I’d pay good money to have on tape. It was a brilliant beat-down.

The guy retreated and started talking to me again, and asked if I wanted to shoot some pool. I said “Sure”, mostly because that lady was going to go Postal on him if I didn't get him away from the bar.

I walked over to the pool table and the guy said “How about we play for a pitcher of beer. Loser buys.”

I’m not a great pool player. I can hold my own, but not against a legit shark. However, I knew that I wanted to beat this clown, and I wanted it bad. So I agreed to the bet.

The guy (who I’ll call Morton from now on) watched me rack the balls, and he was getting ready to break. Morton looked over at me and said “You know I’m broke, right? I don’t have any more money on me. Just thought you should know.”

A seasoned pool player or gambler would’ve sat down at that moment, or asked someone else to play. But I wanted to beat Morton so, so, so badly. In public. In front of the lady that he had called a lesbian. I wanted his broke, deceptive, beer-hustling ass to retreat from my tavern owing me a pitcher of Shiner.

I told Morton that if I won we could work something out on his next trip to the bar.

Then we started playing. I spent more time lining up some of those shots than I did filling out my home mortgage paperwork. I made some two-cushion bank shots that I’ve never even attempted before. And I also got lucky. Morton flubbed a few easy shots. Throughout the entire game, I heard Morton’s voice in my head saying “You know I’m broke, right? I don’t have any more money on me. Just thought you should know.”

It came down to the 8-ball. I made it with nothing else left on the table. (Graduates of North Sunflower Academy or Ole Miss won’t be surprised that I heard the marching band fight-song version of “Dixie” playing in my head when I sank the 8-ball. I’ve never made a touchdown in my life, but a marching band plays “Dixie” in my head whenever I win anything, including Tic-Tac-Toe, coin flips, and pool games.) I shook hands with Morton and we both went back to the bar, where I explained to the bartender that Morton didn’t have any money for the pitcher she was about to pour at somebody’s expense.

The bartender was almost as pissed as the lady who wasn't a lesbian. 

The more I talked with Morton about meeting him at the bar some other time for my pitcher of Shiner, the more uncomfortable he became. He left before the lady who wasn't a lesbian got involved in the discussion.

“You know I’m broke, right? I don’t have any more money on me. Just thought you should know.”

I don’t care what Morton does or did with his paycheck. I'd feel sorry for the guy if he hadn’t tried to hustle me. He’s probably an alcoholic. I’ve never come close to having a drinking problem, and I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a thirst strong enough to try a stunt like Morton tried that afternoon. I didn’t think much more about the incident.

Three nights later, Thursday night, Barack Obama gave his Jobs Speech. I didn’t write much about it, mostly because I suspected it would be a re-hash of Porkulus One. And it was.

But certain phrases started reminding me of something, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until today….. And then it hit me.

Barack Obama and the George Bushes and Reagan have spent us into a hole that we’ll probably never get out of. (Clinton was fairly restrained by comparison.)

Obama has already added 4 trillion dollars to the national debt. Obama threw $800 billion in Porkulus at the unions and government employees. He destroyed about 600,000 automobiles to “stimulate” Detroit. Businesses and Doctors are acting like ObamaCare will make Death look like a reasonable alternative. Obama fired up another war in Libya. And now our economy is behaving like we owe $15 trillion dollars to somebody, which we do. Very few people want to take the risk of bringing on more employees. The piper must be paid.

They have blown it all.  Every cent of it. 

So here are some excerpts from the Obama Jobs Speech, the way that I now hear them.

*********

Pass this jobs bill, and we can put people to work rebuilding America. Everyone here knows we have badly decaying roads and bridges all over the country. Our highways are clogged with traffic. Our skies are the most congested in the world. It’s an outrage. “And you know I’m broke, right? I don’t have any more money on me. Just thought you should know.”

*********

There are private construction companies all across America just waiting to get to work. There’s a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America. A public transit project in Houston that will help clear up one of the worst areas of traffic in the country. And there are schools throughout this country that desperately need renovating. How can we expect our kids to do their best in places that are literally falling apart? This is America, and by the way “you know I’m broke, right? I don’t have any more money on me. Just thought you should know.”

*********

Ask yourselves -- where would we be right now if the people who sat here before us decided not to build our highways, not to build our bridges, our dams, our airports? What would this country be like if we had chosen not to spend money on public high schools, or research universities, or community colleges? Millions of returning heroes, including my grandfather, had the opportunity to go to school because of the G.I. Bill. Where would we be if they hadn’t had that chance? “And you know I’m broke, right? I don’t have any more money on me. Just thought you should know.”

Barack Obama is like an old drunk trying to hustle one more round of drinks for his union and government cronies. He's got a strong need.  He's getting the shakes.  But he's blown it all. 

You know he’s broke, right. He doesn’t have any more money on him.


Just thought you should know.

So do you feel lucky?

Best picture of 2010

Obama Clutch-Phrase Bingo

Here's something handy for anyone wanting to play "Obama Clutch-Phrase Bingo" during the healthcare speech tonight. It's from my Facebook friend Rick Moore:

1. "The time to act is now."
2. "Critics of this plan would have us do nothing."
3. "For too long, we have spent too much money to get too little care."
4. "The current path is unsustainable. Nothing less than a complete overhaul will give Americans the care they deserve."
5. "Under my plan, nothing will change for you and your doctor."
6. "This plan will cover more people, and give better care for everyone."
7. "This plan will spend less money."
8. "This debate has been far too divisive, with proponents losing heart, and opponents losing fingers."

Go to HolyCoast.com to read Rick's complete list.
And let me give some advice to the kids reading this....Do NOT try to turn this list into a drinking game. Alcohol poisoning is a very real possibility.

Caption contest: Poppy, Gipper, W, Ike, TR, Tricky Dicky, Jerry, and another guy

I need a caption for this picture.


Jos Metadi, like the bearded man with his back to the viewer, remains unknown. But he won last week's caption contest.

Picture compliments of The Mother Of The Whited Sepulchre.

Super Bowl Picks

Okay, enough about politics and theology and other deep chin-stroking topics.
We have a football game this weekend.
Super Bowl 43.
The Arizona Cardinals vs The Pittsburgh Steelers.

The line opened with Steelers -6.5, and there was so much money wagered on the Steelers that they've increased the spread to Steelers by 7. Super Bowls are usually blowouts by the home team. The favorite usually wins. But I like the Cardinals to at least cover a 7-point spread.

And now, the fun stuff....

The winning coach usually gets a sideline Gatorade shower. Odds are 3-1 that the Gatorade will be yellow, instead of any other color. Load up on the other color. There's been so much publicity on this bet, I'm predicting some contrarians have stocked the coolers with the Red Fruit Punch flavor.

Here are a few others listed by Fox Sports:

Kurt Warner -23.5 passing yards over Ben Roethlisberger. If the Cardinals are going to at least cover a 7-point spread, it'll be because Warner throws at least 75 yards more than Big Ben. Take Warner.

Will Kurt Warner break Joe Montana's Career Super Bowl Record of 1,142 Passing Yards? Yes: +475 No: -700 (If you don't understand Money Line "Yes/No" bets, click here.) Take the NO, and quickly. Warner would need 364 passing yards to do this, and that ain't going to happen.

Total rushing yards by Willie Parker — Over/Under 75.5 The guys at Fox News don't like the odds of Parker breaking 75.5, and took the under. The guys at Fox News also didn't like the odds of Barack Obama being elected President. Take the over.

Total receiving yards by Larry Fitzgerald — Over/Under 83.5 Larry Fitzgerald is a beast. Larry Fitzgerald is not human. Larry Fitzgerald doesn't just bite, he also chews. Take the over.

Total kickoff returns by both teams — Over/Under 9.5 Remember, you have a kickoff to begin each half. That leaves you with only 8 more touchdowns or field goals needed to break this one. I think we'll have plenty of field goals. I like the over.

Total distance on the first punt of the game — Over/Under 41.5 yards Yeah, your typical NFL punter can boot it a lot further than 41.5 yards. But what if you're kicking from somewhere in no-man's land between midfield and field goal range? Go under.

Pittsburgh + Arizona total points -12.5 over LeBron James total points at Detroit For newcomers to Super Bowl betting insanity, you might need me to break this one down for you. Here's how it works. Add up the total points scored in the Super Bowl. Subtract 12.5 points. (The half point eliminates any chance of a tie.) Is this number higher or lower than the number of points that the NBA's LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers will score against the Detroit Pistons?
LeBron knows about this bet, right? LeBron will want to reward everyone who picked him to cover this, right? LeBron has been averaging 28 points per game, right? LeBron can control his own destiny in this thing easier than the Steelers and Cardinals, right? Take LeBron.

Pittsburgh + Arizona total sacks -0.5 over Ernie Els fourth round birdies (18 holes/Dubai Classic) It's golf, fer heaven's sake. Who cares? Take the sack total anway.

How long will it take Jennifer Hudson to sing the National anthem? — Over/Under 1:54 Just one minute and fifty four seconds? Jennifer Hudson is going to throw in more obligattos, fermatas, trills, shakes and shimmies than Francis Scott Key could have imagined. Yes, I know the music at these things is always pre-recorded. There are people out there who already know the exact length of Sunday's national anthem. But if you're singing at the Super Bowl, you don't sing it like a marching band plays it. Take the over.

What color will (Cardinals owner) Bill Bidwell's bow tie be? Red -600, Any other color +400 Cardinals are red. The team and the bird. Bidwell usually wears red bow ties, except for when he doesn't. He wears red so often that I think this one is fixed, simply because they're willing to take money on it as a competitive wager. I think someone has gotten Bidwell a good luck bow tie in a color other than red. Take the other color.

These picks have been brought to you by The Whited Sepulchre Sports Wagering Ministry.

It's Sad That This Is The Most Publicity We've Received

Credit Derivative Monopoly

Thanks to my online friend Jay at Soob, I've discovered this guy: TDAXP.

TDAXP's posts are good, but what's really interesting is this explanation, buried deep in the comment fields, of a variation of the Monopoly board game called "Credit Derivative Monopoly". Here's an excerpt:

Credit Derivative Monopoly uses financial engineering, however, to create Housing-Backed Securities. Say a player owns Boardwalk and Park Place, but does not have any cash left.



Likewise, another player has no monopolies, but perhaps $400 in extra cash. Credit Derivative Monopoly allows transfer that extra capital in exchange for the asset of, say, half the rental income on those two houses. So if a third player lands on Boardwalk, half goes to the property owner and half goes to the player who purchased those housing-backed securities.



.....In our two games of play, the instruments got increasingly complex. In one, the price for purchasing 8 houses was half the rent, plus forgiveness on all rent owed by the purchasing player to the selling player for the next three landings, plus the rent owed by the purchasing player to a named third-payer player for three landings.

My head hurts just thinking about it.

Mortgage meltdown picture from Ocean.flynn Cool photostream there, BTW.