Author: NW0.eu

Today, Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) called on Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to resign after revelations of ongoing scientific fraud under Dr. Pachauri’s watch.

“Rising and falling sea levels over relatively short periods do not indicate long-term trends. An assessment of hundreds and thousands of years shows that what seems an irregular phenomenon today is in fact nothing new,” explains Dr. Dorit Sivan, who supervised the research.

“The decade ending in 2009 was the warmest on record, new surface temperature figures released Thursday by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration show…. 2009 was the second warmest year since 1880, when modern temperature measurement began. The warmest year was 2005. The other hottest recorded years have all occurred since 1998, NASA said.”
Global temperatures […]

From Salon:

Last week, I wrote about a revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest which described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists.  As The Washington Times‘ Eli Lake reports, Adm. Dennis Blair was asked about this program at a Congressional hearing yesterday and he acknowledged its existence:

The U.S. intelligence community policy on killing American citizens who have joined al Qaeda requires first obtaining high-level government approval, a senior official disclosed to Congress on Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission. . . .

He also said there are criteria that must be met to authorize the killing…

You can almost predict the oft-repeated explanations the pundits offer up every time the precious metals behave irresponsibly.

• The trouble with being a contrarian is that you can never be quite contrarian enough. We began having doubts about the ‘feds inflate…gold soars’ hypothesis last year. It was too easy…too obvious. And if it were that easy to inflate a nation’s currency, how come the Japanese couldn’t get the hang of it in the ’90s?
• Inflation, yes…but not for a while. And gold? Well, we are in it for the long run. In the short run, anything could happen.
• To clarify our view on gold, The Daily Reckoning is not bearish on the metal. It is not bullish on the metal either. It is buggish. We are gold bugs. In the long run, gold…

Lawrence Lessig writes in the Nation:

Editors’ Note: We encourage readers moved by this essay to sign the Change Congress petition, a drive to enact solutions proposed in this article. Click here to sign. A video commentary by Professor Lessig can be viewed here.

We should remember what it felt like one year ago, as the ability to recall it emotionally will pass and it is an emotional memory as much as anything else. It was a moment rare in a democracy’s history. The feeling was palpable — to supporters and opponents alike — that something important had happened. America had elected, the young candidate promised, a transformational president. And wrapped in a campaign that had produced the biggest influx of new voters and small-dollar contributions in a generation, the claim seemed…

Wow, talk about breathtaking arrogance. Evangelicals from Idaho thought it’d be alright to abduct some Haitian children for Jesus. From the NY Times:

PORT-AU-PRINCE — Members of a Baptist congregation…were charged Thursday with abduction and criminal association, according to prosecutors.

The Americans were arrested as they tried to take 33 Haitian children to what they had said was an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. A Web site for the orphanage said that children there would stay in a “loving Christian environment” and be eligible for adoption.

But several of the 33 children had at least one living parent, and some of those parents said that the Baptists had promised simply to educate the youngsters in the Dominican Republic and said the children would be able to return to Haiti to visit their families.

…

Via Technoccult:

How exactly does forecasting work? What’s the process like?

To begin with, I’d like to just underline that forecasting and prediction are very different. As futurists, we’re not making predictions but, rather, making approximations based on existing trends. I like to think of it as collapsing probability space into the most likely futures.

So having said that, there are many forecasting methodologies but most of them begin with scanning. This is a process of tracking information flows to get signals around your domain. Signals are essentially any event within the domain that you’re researching. So you pay attention to as many data streams as possible to get a feel for the emerging trends, where the money is flowing, social politics, etc… And from this you can start to derive estimates of…

It’s about a minute into the clip on one of the background computers. That’s definitely not a financial spreadsheet : ) Lester Haines writes on the Register:

An employee of Sydney’s Macquarie Bank probably isn’t in line for a fat payrise after he was caught on live TV closely analysing something a bit more scintillating than the Lucky Country’s interest rates:

According to net experts, at least one of the photos in question is Orlando Bloom’s squeeze Miranda Kerr. The Victoria’s Secret Angel is a local lass made good, and is rarely seen dressed in more than her underwear, which makes her the pin-up of choice among Sydney’s hardened bankers.

The National Pandemic Flu Service will be stood down in response to the ‘steady reduction’ in the number of cases of swine flu, it was announced today.

Appearing on The Alex Jones Show, outgoing Chair of the Council of Europe’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg said that his panel’s investigation into the 2009 swine flu outbreak has found that the pandemic was a fake hoax manufactured by pharmaceutical companies in league with the WHO to make vast profits while endangering public health.

Patsies take heed. The U.S. government will kill you. That’s what the Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told a House intelligence committee yesterday.

India has threatened to pull out of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and set up its on climate change body because it “cannot rely” on the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri.

More than two months after the moment that thousands of confidential emails, documents and computer code from the University of East Anglia (UEA) was released online it remains a mystery who was behind the hack.

Battling what it says are broadcasts that incite sectarian violence, Iraq wants to impose new restrictions on the media that critics say could bring back draconian censorship last seen under Saddam Hussein.

The European Court of Justice has told Sweden that it must implement a 2006 measure requiring telecom operators to store information about their customers’ phone calls and emails.

gazetteandherald – Letters that lay undiscovered in national archives for more than 230 years suggest that Silbury Hill, the enigmatic man-made mound that stands between Marlborough and Beckhampton, may have originally be constructed around some sort o…

CATHERINE RAMPELL writes on the NY Times’ Economix:

Following the Supreme Court decision implicitly granting corporations the right to free speech (by determining that political spending is a kind of speech), a corporation has decided to take what it believes to be “democracy’s next step”: It is running for Congress.

With more than a twinge of irony, Murray Hill Incorporated, a liberal public relations firm, recently announced that it planned to run in the Republican primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.

Here is the company’s first “campaign” ad:

lariat – With reports circulating that the Hippodrome is haunted, Brandon Burns, technical director for the Waco Performing Arts Company, agreed last fall to participate in a paranormal investigation conducted by McLennan County Paranormal Investigatio…

Whoops, sounds like somebody broke the first two rules. Personally, I wouldn’t mind taking a crack at some of these overpaid adrenaline junkies.Thanks Bloomberg.

“We get a lot of finance guys,” said Max McGarr, the gym’s program director and a professional fighter. “It’s a good release from their job. If you lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, it’s good to come here and get it out.”

“It’s a great stress reliever,” said Richard Byrne, chief executive officer of Deutsche Bank Securities, who practices jiu-jitsu and sparring at Renzo with Cholish and other professional fighters. “Talk about a great way to get aggression out, and it’s an unbelievable workout.”

Cholish and his roommate, Erik Owings, also a professional fighter, converted the top level of their duplex apartment on the Upper East Side into a gym, where Byrne sometimes brings Wall Street colleagues to work out.

“It’s the dungeon of pain,” said Brian Peganoff, an assistant vice president in corporate cash management at Deutsche Bank. Peganoff, 27, learned tae kwon do as a child and started boxing as a workout while attending Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He began jiu-jitsu about two years ago.

“People on Wall Street are pretty competitive and I think that carries over,” Peganoff said. “That’s the ultimate competition, putting two people in a cage and seeing who is the better guy.”